Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Michael Grunwald: Will the Katrina Ruling Prevent Another Disaster?
Ben West and Fred Burton: A Terrorist Trial in New York City: NY Knows What It's Doing
Nicholas D. Kristof: Old accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit health reform
Moshe Dann: Palestinians taking their cues from Israeli leaders, American president
Moshe Elad: US accepts Arab terminology in respect to Jerusalem neighborhoods
Pratap Chatterjee: Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
Friday, November 20, 2009
Charles Krauthammer: Travesty in New York
Source: The Washington Post (11-20-09)
[Charles Krauthammer writes about politics and policy for The Washington Post's op-ed page.]
For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.
And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.
September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.
So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.
Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.
Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the courtroom, making KSM a martyr and turning the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.
That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within 10 days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former attorney general Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered." ..
... Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.
Holder himself told The Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.
Michael Grunwald: Will the Katrina Ruling Prevent Another Disaster?
Source: Time (11-19-09)
There can be something thrilling about accountability, so it was nice to see a federal judge declare the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers directly responsible for the destruction of most of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The blistering ruling validates the rage felt by so many survivors — and may put them in line for some much needed cash. It also provides an always welcome opportunity for those of us who have banged our spoons on our high chairs about the culpability of the Corps again and again and again to say we told you so. And it could help spread a message to millions of Americans who still think the tragedy of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster rather than the government's creation of the disaster.
It's hard to get too excited about the decision, though, for two reasons. First, as great as it was to see a federal judge accuse the Corps of "negligence" and "nonfeasance" and other legally awful behavior, the case actually turned on a technicality of sorts — and may well be overturned on appeal. Believe it or not, the spectacular incompetence of the Corps may ultimately help its defense. And second, even if the Corps does lose on appeal, the resulting embarrassment — and the potential fiscal nightmare for the country — would be unlikely to promote the kinds of changes that would prevent another Corps-made disaster.
But before we dwell on the bad news, let's take a moment to enjoy the deliciously brutal opinion of U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. "The Corps' lassitude and failure to fulfill its duties resulted in a catastrophic loss of human life and property in unprecedented proportions," he wrote. "The Corps' negligence resulted in the wasting of millions of dollars in flood-protection measures and billions of dollars in congressional outlays to help this region recover."
The Corps betrayed New Orleans in a number of ways. Its flood walls played matador defense because they were badly designed and badly engineered, then built in soggy soils in the wrong locations; the commander of the Corps, General Carl Strock, admitted his agency's "catastrophic failure" and submitted his resignation nine months after the storm, long after the nation had stopped paying attention. The Corps also exposed New Orleans to storm surges by manhandling and straitjacketing the Mississippi River over the past 80 years, blocking the flow of silt to southern Louisiana, gradually sinking the Big Easy below sea level and destroying a third of the coastal wetlands and barrier islands that once provided the city's natural hurricane protection...
Christina Davidson: Recession Pressure on Labor Rights
Source: The Atlantic (11-19-09)
[Christina Davidson is a writer, photographer and book editor based in Washington, DC.]
The US 12 Bar and Grill in Wayne, Michigan has an unusually-timed happy hour. Drink specials start at 9 pm, scheduled to attract local auto workers getting off second shift. For $3, the bartender pours me a full rocks glass of Grand Marnier. I appear to be the only female patron in the bar, which perhaps explains why the guys tolerate my incessant questions about how the recession has affected their industry and labor contracts.
Last week, I met Beau Jencks, a labor organizer for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. A friendly chat in the elevator evolved into a long conversation about how the economic downturn has affected workers' rights and contract negotiations.
In Jencks's experience, companies are using the current economic environment to justify excessive concessions from organized labor, effectively squeezing the working man to further enrich the executive class. And because a pervasive fear of layoffs looms over any contract negotiation, unions are agreeing to deeper concessions than they otherwise would. As a result, Jencks said, the recession is essentially handicapping the labor movement and erasing decades of hard-fought progress.
The half-drunk auto workers I hung out with at US 12 would agree with part of what Jencks said, but they take a dimmer view of their own labor representatives at the United Auto Workers. "I think the union is in bed with the company," Frank says bluntly. The brawny smooth-scalped Ford worker, incongruously sipping from a bottle of Bud Light, has enough sense to ask I don't use his real name. The UAW would "blackball" him for speaking out about what he and his co-workers think about their union.
A few weeks ago, Ford workers voted down a contract modification that the UAW had negotiated and urged them to support. Though their contract was not due for re-negotiation until 2011, Ford and the UAW said the concessions--involving vacation time, over-time, health benefits and entry level wages, among other things--were necessary to maintain competitiveness with Chrysler and GM, whose workers voted to accept similar changes earlier this year as their employers were verging on bankruptcy.
The contract modification was roundly defeated across the nation, in a few locations those opposing it reached 90%. Outside analysts have suggested the measure failed because Ford workers believe their company's avoidance of bankruptcy makes the concessions excessive and unnecessary--essentially penalizing the auto maker for its success. However, according to Frank, those voting against the contract modifications at his plant in Rawsonville generally turned on one single issue unrelated to wages or benefits: the right to strike.
Throughout the history of the labor movement, strike action has been the trump card of unions, providing the teeth for collective bargaining. Striking represents a basic philosophical essence of organized labor. The concessions UAW negotiated with Ford included a clause that would have required binding arbitration to resolve any disagreements over wages or benefits at the 2011 contract re-negotiation with Ford. "What's a union without the right to strike?," Frank demands to know. "That's like sending your soldiers off to battle after turning your weapons over to the enemy." ...
Joe Queenan: Stop Picking on Fat People
Source: WSJ (11-19-09)
[Mr. Queenan, a satirist, is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Closing Time" (Viking, 2009).]
The debate regarding the American "obesity plague" has taken on an increasingly rancorous tone. On one side are those who honestly believe that we cannot repair our imperiled health-care system without addressing the enormous strains placed on that system by the seriously overweight. On the other side are those of a Rubenesque stature who are enraged that they are routinely the targets of catcalls, epithets and even job discrimination, and who have had it up to here with the fatty jokes.
Lost in all this is an appreciation of how much the chubby, the plump, the tubby and even the massively overweight have contributed to society down through the ages. Henry VIII, whose rupture with the Catholic Church was a pivotal moment in history, was by no means immune to a case of the munchies. Johann Sebastian Bach, viewed by many as the greatest composer who ever lived, was a charter member of the Clean Plate Society. Queen Victoria, who presided over a golden age such as no nation had experienced since the collapse of the Roman Empire, certainly didn't miss many meals. And anyone who has ever seen a statue of Gautama Buddha realizes that he too knew how to hold up his end of the feedbag.
Those of us who are overweight, have been overweight, or have close friends and relatives who are overweight understand that carrying a few extra pounds does not necessarily make a person any less effective as an employee, a spouse, a parent or a citizen. History bears this out. Where would jazz be without the seminal influence of Louis Armstrong, the greatest trumpeter of them all? And how do we know that it was not those few extra pounds that gave him the pep to belt out such crowd-pleasing numbers as "St. James Infirmary" and "Hello, Dolly"? The same case can be made for Ella Fitzgerald, never the svelte type; for James Levine, the pudgy yet peerless opera conductor; and for Luciano Pavarotti, whose legendary chunkiness did not prevent him from becoming one the most beloved singers ever.
The list of portly geniuses goes on and on. Honoré de Balzac, the most prolific and in many ways the most gifted of the great novelists, literally lived to eat. Alexandre Dumas, whose stubby fingers gave us "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers," never saw a macaron d'Amiens or a plate of petits fours he wouldn't scarf down. Nor was Sir William Gilbert, of "The Mikado" and "The Pirates of Penzance" fame, a stranger to the late-night assault on the pantry.
It's all well and good to say that excess weight puts a strain on the heart, leads to many premature deaths, and dramatically inflates our national health-care bill. But the very same arguments can be applied to workaholics, alcoholics or garden-variety idiots, none of whom violate any specific law by indulging in a lifestyle others deplore. And once a society starts down the slippery slope toward deciding which behaviors are acceptable and which are not, it's time to assemble kindling for the funeral pyre of democracy. First they told people to stop smoking. Then they told them to lay off the hooch. Then they told them to stop eating between meals. And then they told them to stop being neurotic. Pretty soon, no one in New York City could be seen in public anymore. ..
Victor Erofeyev: Russia's Imperial Crutches
Source: NYT (11-19-09)
[Victor Erofeyev is a Russian writer and television host. Translated from the Russian by the International Herald Tribune.]
Once again, Russia has found itself at a crossroads. The reason may not seem all that significant in itself: After the recent restoration of the gaudy Kurskaya station on the Moscow Metro, there appeared for the first time in half a century, in full view of all the passengers, the word “Stalin,” which was implanted in the underground ensemble in a line from the national anthem of his time glorifying the leader of all peoples. Thus did Stalin’s ghost come back to haunt not only the Metro, but all of Russia.
This appeared as a Rubicon. To cross it would be to start anew on the whole glorious path of Soviet imperialism. But President Dmitri Medvedev, in his last two broadcasts over the Internet, tried to blow up the bridges.
First, he declared that Russia is in need of a radical — though not violent — modernization. Bureaucrats froze: A coup? Or powerless rhetoric from a Putin puppet? Then Mr. Medvedev affirmed that human values were more valuable than state values and declared that Stalinist crimes were a bitter truth whose concealment was equivalent to a falsification of history.
All this was done so decisively and definitively that it seemed to be either the desperation of a person who understands that his country is rushing toward the abyss, or an attempt to win Western support for Mr. Medvedev’s own, non-Putin politics, and strengthen his international image.
In any case, I — for all my skepticism about any Kremlin initiative — declare my support for Mr. Medvedev, because, ladies and gentlemen, we have hit bottom. It all began with the Kremlin’s declaration, not long before the financial crisis, that Russia is rising from its knees. But a large body needs help to get up. In this case, the chosen instrument of assistance was imperial crutches. But where were they to be found? All the neighboring countries of the former U.S.S.R. not only declined to serve as crutches, but, like children during a school break, ran away (for the most part toward Europe)...
Ben West and Fred Burton: A Terrorist Trial in New York City: NY Knows What It's Doing
Source: Stratfor Global Intelligence (11-18-09)
[Fred Burton is Stratfor's Vice President for Counterterrorism and Corporate Security, and is "one of the world's foremost experts on security, terrorists and terrorist organizations". Ben West is one of the co-authored of Stratfor's article about Security which they attribute it on their Free Features. ]
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Nov. 13 that the U.S. Justice Department had decided to try five suspected terrorists currently being held at Guantanamo Bay in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, located in lower Manhattan. The five suspects — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi — are all accused of being involved in the 9/11 plot, with Mohammed describing himself as the mastermind in a 2003 confession.
The announcement follows from U.S. President Barack Obama’s first executive order, which he signed on Jan. 22, to close the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and another executive order to suspend the military tribunals set up under the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists. Holder’s decision has generated much debate and highlighted the legal murkiness concerning the status of Guantanamo detainees and how best to bring them to justice.
Beyond this murkiness is the perceived security threat of bringing five suspected terrorists accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to trial in New York City. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he thought holding the trial in New York would put residents at risk. And Andrew McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote in The New Republic that the trial will “create a public-safely nightmare for New York City.” Numerous other observers and media outlets around the world have voiced similar security concerns about the New York trial.
Although there has been much criticism of the decision to hold the trial in New York City, when it comes to prosecuting terror suspects, the Southern District of New York knows what it’s doing. The staff of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York has gained considerable knowledge and expertise prosecuting terror cases over the years, just as the U.S. Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG) has gained much experience providing security for those trials. It was in the Southern District of New York in 1995 that Omar Abdel Rahman, aka the Blind Sheikh, was tried for the so-called Landmarks Plot of 1993 and received a life sentence. In 1996, Abdel Basit (aka Ramzi Yousef) and two co-conspirators were also tried in the Southern District and sentenced to life in prison for their roles in the Bojinka Plot, which also included an indictment for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the staff of the Southern District has been familiar with Mohammed for some time now). The attackers behind the 1998 attacks against the U.S. embassies were also prosecuted in the Southern District of New York and sentenced to life imprisonment. Few other courts have so much experience handling and prosecuting high-profile terrorism cases, so it should have come as no surprise that Holder named the district as the venue for the upcoming trial. On top of all this, the World Trade Center towers were also in the Southern District of New York, putting the deadliest site of the 9/11 attacks under the Southern District’s jurisdiction.
The case will be prosecuted jointly by the offices of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, led by Preet Bharara, and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, led by Neil H. MacBride. The Eastern District of Virginia has also successfully prosecuted several terrorism cases, including those of John Walker Lindh in 2002, the Virginia Jihad Network in 2005 and Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006.
While some believe that trying the so-called “Gitmo Five” in New York City will result in more terrorist attacks in the city, STRATFOR does not anticipate a marked increase in the number of plots or attacks. New York City has long been a popular target for radical Islamists — there have been nine known plots involving targets in New York uncovered since the 9/11 attacks, including two in the past six months. In May 2009, four men were arrested for attempting to detonate explosives outside a synagogue in the Bronx, and in September, Najibullah Zazi was arrested for plotting to detonate backpack explosives on trains in New York City. Other plots have included a 2007 plan to detonate fuel tanks at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a 2006 plot to detonate explosives in the Holland Tunnel and a 2004 plot to attack a subway station near Madison Square Garden.
New York City remains an alluring target for jihadists because of its symbolism. Home to more than 8 million people, it is the largest city in the United States and a global financial and media center. Whatever happens there gets more exposure and publicity than virtually anywhere else in the world. It is also a perceived center of Jewish wealth and culture (New York has the second-largest Jewish population behind Tel Aviv), compounding the threat from Islamist radicals. New York City will remain a terrorist target for many reasons other than the Gitmo Five trial. It is also interesting to note that none of the city’s other high-profile terrorism trials has ever resulted in a retaliatory attack against the city.
In addition to the federal prosecutors who will be involved in the trial having experience dealing with terrorism cases, the New York Police Department has the training, manpower and focus to provide effective physical security. Federal agents, including those of the U.S. Marshals Service SOG, will be primarily responsible for handling the five suspects and providing security inside the federal courthouse. The building is one of the most secure federal courthouses in the country, equipped with anti-vehicle borne explosive device barricades, 24-hour guard posts and high-resolution video cameras. The U.S. Marshals will be augmented by NYPD “Hercules” teams (designed to provide a surge of police presence in an area to prevent or disrupt criminal and terrorist operations) and will likely place sniper teams on nearby rooftops for added security. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic around the courthouse will be severely limited, with nearby streets closed to traffic and nearby subway entrances closed to riders.
During the trial, the five defendants will be held at the Metropolitan Correctional Complex, which is connected to the courthouse via a third-of-a-mile-long underground tunnel. This significantly reduces the threat of terrorist attack or a disruption of the proceedings by allowing security forces to control the geography of the trial venue and spot unusual activity. Another geographic benefit is the fact that Manhattan is an island with limited access points (bridges and tunnels), which makes it easier to seal off the area and control who or what gets in or out. These factors do not necessarily preclude an attack, especially a suicide attack in which the perpetrator is undeterred by the risk of death, but do decrease the options of an attacker and increase the options of law enforcement personnel in dealing with the potential risks.
Because the courthouse will be under such tight security, any attacker able to penetrate the island cordon and slip into the area would likely go after softer targets surrounding the building. The NYPD will be responsible for protecting areas outside the courthouse and will probably create a secure buffer around the complex, the depth of which will depend on the severity of any given threat. Police would have the wherewithal to put whole sections of the city under heavy lockdown and provide a level of physical security designed to thwart terrorist activities that have reached the latter stages (deployment, attack and escape). This buffer would both protect softer targets nearby and make it that much harder for would-be attackers to infiltrate the courthouse. The NYPD also has the intelligence-collecting capabilities (informants, undercover officers, surveillants, analysts, etc.) to keep a close eye on any potential threat in the area leading up to and during the trial. The NYPD developed these capabilities with a vengeance following the 9/11 attacks, and in the years since it has become quite adept at conducting preventative counterterrorism investigations rather than just reactive ones.
In addition to the NYPD, other first-responders in New York — the fire department, emergency medical services and transportation agencies — are experienced and well-trained in dealing with terrorist attacks and can support security efforts surrounding the trial. Given the 9/11 experience, Manhattan residents and workers are also well-versed in emergency action plans and preparations.
Certainly, the fact that such a high-profile trial will be held in New York City will temporarily add to the workload of federal and municipal security and emergency personnel, but in some ways it will be little more than a routine effort. The city is used to high-profile events, regularly hosting such events as the U.N. General Assembly, with its attendant flow of international VIPs. New York City has been and will remain a prime terrorist target, and the people responsible for maintaining security in the city are very good at what they do. Indeed, Manhattan — given its recent history of civic trauma and intense focus on counterterrorism — may very well possess the safest civilian court in the country.
Christina Lamb: Karzai’s Paranoid World
Source: The Daily Beast (11-18-09)
[Christina Lamb is Washington bureau chief of the London Sunday Times and has been covering Afghanistan and Pakistan for 22 years. She has been named Britain's foreign correspondent of the year five times. Her books include Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage through Afghanistan (Harper Collins).]
When Hamid Karzai is re-inaugurated as president today after one of the world’s dodgiest elections, everyone from Washington to Whitehall will be watching for some sign that he will clean up his act. If he doesn’t, many—including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—believe it will be well nigh impossible to defeat the Taliban, however many troops President Obama might ultimately decide to send.
Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has described the Karzai government as a “byword for corruption” and warned he will “forfeit” international support if he doesn’t improve. The Obama administration has given the same message and suggested a list of clean names they would like to see in the cabinet.
Click here to find out more!
But while the international community increasingly sees Karzai as the problem, the Afghan president says he believes he is doing nothing different than he has since they put him there in December 2001 and it is they who are trying to undermine him...
...I’ve known Karzai since 1987, when for two years I lived a few blocks away from him in Peshawar. In those days, he was unknown, the spokesman for the Afghan National Liberation Front, which was the smallest of the seven resistance groups fighting the Russians.
Hardly any journalists went to visit him back then, so he was delighted to talk, particularly as he had gone to school in the old Indian hill-station of Simla and was a real Anglophile. He loved Cadburys chocolate, Somerset Maugham stories, and English movies. He dressed in a battered leather jacket and jeans and had a big belly laugh.
He was also an extremely proud member of the Popalzai tribe, one of the Durrani tribes of Kandahar descended from Afghanistan’s first king. His house was always crowded with tribal elders for whom he was expected to provide vast cauldrons of rice and mutton, as well as lodging and money to get them home again. I was fascinated by their stories, most of which involved feuds and revenge and an honor code that meant protecting guests even if they had committed a crime.
Karzai’s dream was to be a diplomat or maybe foreign minister. He lived in awe of his father, chief of the Popalzai tribe, and it was because of him the tribesmen came to visit.
The only time Karzai went inside Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, I accompanied him. We traveled around Kandahar on motorbikes with a group called the Mullahs Front (who went on to be the Taliban), lived on dry bread and okra, taking part in an ill-advised attack on Kandahar Airport...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Nicholas D. Kristof: Old accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit health reform
Source: NYT (11-18-09)
[Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times since 2001, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who writes op-ed columns that appear twice a week.]
Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”
All dire — but also wrong. Those forecasts date not from this year, but from the battle over Medicare in the early 1960s. I pulled them from newspaper archives and other accounts.
Yet this year those same accusations are being recycled in an attempt to discredit the health reform proposals now before Congress. The heirs of those who opposed Medicare are conjuring the same bogymen — only this time they claim to be protecting Medicare.
Indeed, these same arguments we hear today against health reform were used even earlier, to attack President Franklin Roosevelt’s call for Social Security. It was denounced as a socialist program that would compete with private insurers and add to Americans’ tax burden so as to kill jobs...
... In hindsight, it seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? Social Security passed, and the republic survived.
Similar, ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.
The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A. in 1965, declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate with Medicare would be “complicity in evil.”
The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials in 1965 that Medicare amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction...
Kishore Mahbubani: America's Conflicting Destinies
Source: NYT (11-18-09)
[Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.”]
President Barack Obama’s departure for his first trip to Asia as president was delayed by a day to allow him to attend the memorial service for victims of the Fort Hood massacre. The delay symbolized well the tension between America’s two destinies.
The United States would like to link more closely with the Asia-Pacific century that it has sparked. Yet it is constantly held back by its tragic involvement with the Islamic world.
The biggest strategic mistake America made in the 20th century was to interweave the destiny of 300 million Americans with the fate of 1.3 billion Muslims.
It did this in several ways. First, it created and stoked an army of jihadists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then, after the Cold War ended, thoughtlessly walked away from its creation. Second, it backtracked from a sensitive and balanced policy on the Israel-Palestine dispute — which had paved the way for Camp David (1978), Madrid (1991) and the Oslo Accords (1993) — for an unbalanced, partisan position that angered and humiliated many Muslims.
Of course we can read the tragic and senseless killings at Fort Hood as the deranged act of one man. But it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge that some of the anger he expressed reflects a larger anger in the Islamic world.
Indeed, many of the tragedies that America has experienced in recent decades reflect America’s troubled entanglement with the Islamic world — Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of these troubles were predestined; they are the result of geopolitical hubris and incompetence...
Moshe Dann: Palestinians taking their cues from Israeli leaders, American president
Source: Ynet (11-19-09)
[The author, a former assistant professor of History (CUNY) is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem]
Declarations of virtual Palestinian statehood by asking the UN and international community for diplomatic recognition are a blunt way of avoiding the requirements for statehood. According to the Montevideo Convention this includes: "(a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other state … The primary interest of states is the conservation of peace."
Recent declarations by Arab Palestinian leaders, however, are not new; Palestinian statehood was implied when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. Included in various "peace plans" since 1967 and more recently in the "Road Map," it has become a sacred fetish of the international community.
It was confirmed when Israel withdrew from Areas A and B of Judea and Samaria, and from Gaza. Israeli political leaders gave their tacit approval to such a state when Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton (in 2000) and then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President George W. Bush (in 2007) offered the Palestinians 97% of the West Bank, plus 3% of Israeli territory, most of eastern Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and the "right of return" (to Israel) to a significant number of Arab Palestinians and their descendents currently living in UNRWA refugee camps. Palestinian leaders rejected the offer.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar offer in 2009, breaking a long-standing Likud position and electoral promises.
It wasn't enough, because Arab Palestinian leaders demanded – for starters – all of the territory acquired by Israel in 1967. It wasn't enough because they demanded that the "right of return" be available to all Arabs and their descendents who claim to be displaced "refugees" – a population which now is nearly equal to the number of Jews in Israel.
It wasn't enough because, according to Arabs, the "occupation of Arab land" did not begin in 1967, but in 1948 – the "Nakba" (catastrophe) – when the State of Israel was established. “Palestinian sovereignty” begins but does not end with the 1949 ceasefire (armistice) lines. It is grounded in the elimination of "the Zionist entity" – all of it.
“Palestinian sovereignty," therefore, is the raison d'etre of all Palestinian terrorist groups, including their political representatives...
Robert Naiman: Our Corrupt Occupation of Afghanistan
Source: Truthout (11-18-09)
[Robert Naiman is senior policy analyst at Just Foreign Policy.]
Is it just me, or is the pontification of Western leaders about corruption in Afghanistan growing rather tiresome?
There is something very Captain Renault about it. We're shocked, shocked that the Afghans have sullied our morally immaculate occupation of their country with their dirty corruption. How ungrateful can they be?
But perhaps we should consider the possibility that our occupation of the country is not so morally immaculate - indeed, that the most corrupt racket going in Afghanistan today is the American occupation.
US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts in Afghanistan consists of protection payments to insurgents, Aram Roston reports in The Nation. In southern Afghanistan - where General McChrystal wants to send more troops - security firms can't physically protect convoys of American military supplies. There's no practical way to move the supplies without paying the Taliban. So, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, we're supplying both sides of the war.
Meanwhile, two thirds of the nearly $30 billion in international aid to Afghanistan has been routed through foreign consultants, companies and organizations hired by the US government and its allies, Farah Stockman reports in the Boston Globe. Afghan officials complain that American civilian advisers are often overpaid, underqualified and unfamiliar with the culture of the country. A typical US adviser earns about $500 per day - several times what the average Afghan earns in a month, Stockman notes. That's about $125,000 a year - not a bad chunk of change, even by US standards. It's more than the household income of about 85 percent of American families. The total cost of such an adviser, including security and accommodations (note that most people - in Afghanistan, like the US - have to pay for their own accommodations out of their salaries or wages) is about $500,000 a year.
The Afghan government now has a program to hire its own advisers from friendly Muslim countries like Turkey and the UAE. The US supports this program with a $30 million contribution. But that contribution represents 1.1 percent of the $2.7 billion that the US plans to spend on economic assistance to Afghanistan next year. The vast majority of the funds will be used to hire US contractors. So for every dollar we spend on paying American contractors, we spend a penny on a much cheaper program that allows Afghanistan to hire people who know the culture, speak the language, have more expertise and can move around Afghanistan with less security because they aren't Americans...
Ray McGovern: Afghan Lessons From the Iraq War
Source: Truthout (11-17-09)
[Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS. ]
You don’t have to go back 40 years to the Vietnam War to feel the sting of déjà vu. Returning to the Iraq War just three years ago will suffice.
Last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the administration’s dilemma on Afghanistan in a single question: “How do we signal resolve and at the same time signal to the Afghans and the American people that this is not open-ended?”
It is the same question that policymakers and generals were grappling with three years ago with respect to Iraq. Let’s hope they learned the right lessons from that experience, but it’s doubtful since the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) has been no help in shedding light on what actually happened.
If you remember, President George W. Bush had been voicing lots of optimism about the Iraq War and Vice President Dick Cheney had claimed the enemy was “in its last throes.” But it was becoming increasingly clear by 2006 that sectarian violence was ripping Iraq apart, that the death toll of American troops was rising, and that U.S. defeat was looming.
But Bush and Cheney were hell-bent on preventing defeat from happening, at least on their watch. Nor did they want the neo-con dream of a U.S.-dominated Iraq to die.
However, many in Washington – especially in the military – recognized that the Bush/Cheney war couldn’t be open-ended and that hard decision would have to be made for a gradual withdrawal to begin.
To his credit, Rep, Frank Wolf, R-Virginia, almost singlehandedly got Congress to create the “Iraq Study Group,” a blue-ribbon panel that was to assess the situation in Iraq and determine what the United States could still reasonably accomplish.
The effort was not blessed by Bush and Cheney, who considered the idea of second-guessing their judgments a nuisance or worse. But the panel became more of a threat when high-profile figures — Republican elder statesman James Baker and Democratic fixer Lee Hamilton — were picked to chair it.
Though Baker had been the Bush family’s consigliere for decades, he was considered a possible wild card. As a hard-headed pragmatist, he reflected Establishment thinking, which was coming to believe that the war-hungry neo-cons around Bush had bitten off more than they could chew in Iraq.
A New Course
By fall 2006, the members of the Iraq Study Group were convinced that a new course was needed for Iraq. And almost no sober thinker favored sending more troops.
The senior military, especially CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid and his man on the ground in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, emphasized that sending more U.S. troops to Iraq would signal leading Iraqi politicians that they could relax and continue to take forever to get their act together.
Here, for example, is Gen. Abizaid's answer at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Nov. 15, 2006, to Sen. John McCain, who had long been pressing vigorously for sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq:
”Senator McCain, I met with every divisional commander, General Casey, the corps commander, General Dempsey, we all talked together. And I said, ‘in your professional opinion, if we were to bring in more American troops now, does it add considerably to our ability to achieve success in Iraq?’
“And they all said no. And the reason is because we want the Iraqis to do more. It is easy for the Iraqis to rely upon us do this work. I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future.”...
Moshe Elad: US accepts Arab terminology in respect to Jerusalem neighborhoods
Source: Y Net News (11-18-09)
US Special Envoy Mitchell’s demand that the Israeli government refrain from building in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood is merely the prelude to a process meant to erode the legitimate status of Israel’s Jerusalem neighborhoods.
These neighborhoods (including Gilo, Ramot Alon, French Hill, and Neve Yaakov) were built after the Six-Day War within the jurisdiction of Israel’s capital; now, they are finally being granted American recognition of their traditional Palestinian name: Settlements.
A direct link exists between Obama’s speech in Cairo and the American decision that Gilo and French Hill are just the same as the settlements of Ofra and Elon Moreh. We can therefore conclude that the US Administration has started to speak Arabic. Salam Aleikum, America!
The facts regarding Jerusalem’s unification are clear. About four decades ago, Israeli governments headed by Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir took two significant decisions; they did so boldly and openly. One decision was “territorial,” while the second one was “demographic.”
On June 27, 1967 Eshkol decided to annex an area of roughly 70,000 dunams, only 10% of which was part of the Old City. The rest of the area included the land of 28 villages in the West Bank from the Bethlehem and Ramallah area.
In three different stages of confiscation and construction, by 1970 the State of Israel built the following neighborhoods: Shapira Hill (known as French Hill,) Ramot Eshkol, Maalot Dafna, Neve Yaakov, Ramat Alon, Talpiot East, Gilo, and later on Ramat Shlomo – these neighborhoods were built on 23,500 dunams of the annexed territory.
Meanwhile, in 1973 Golda’s government took a decision that would doubtfully even be considered by anyone today, regarding “maintenance of Jewish demographic superiority in the Jerusalem area.” This followed a report by the Gafni Committee that recommended maintaining a ratio of 73.5% Jews compared to 25.5% Arabs in the capital.
To that end, the government built the new neighborhoods in Jerusalem that were meant to counterbalance the 70,000 Arab Palestinians residing in the region, while also curbing the geographical contiguity of their communities with the capital’s metro area...
Rami G. Khouri: The world tires of the Palestinian cause
Source: The Daily Star (11-18-09)
[[Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star. This article was distributed by Agence Global.]]
The atmosphere in Cairo this week tells us much about the contemporary Arab world’s view of the Palestine cause in relation to domestic issues in every Arab country. Ordinary Arabs and their governments alike seem fed up with the incompetence of the Palestinian leadership, while remaining strongly committed emotionally to the justice and rights of the Palestinian cause. This is emotionally satisfying for Palestinians, but not very promising politically.
The contrast is vividly reflected this week in the national frenzy over the Egyptian soccer team’s World Cup qualifying playoff match against Algeria in Sudan, in contrast with the little attention being paid to the condition of the Palestinians. Years ago, thousands would have marched in the streets of Cairo to express support for the Palestinians against Israel’s occupation and colonization policies. Today, it is a sign of the times that the Egyptian border with southern Gaza remains firmly locked. The Palestinian threat to seek support for an independent state at the United Nations Security Council has received only passing attention, while the authorities are busy organizing an air bridge to send supporters to cheer on their Egyptian national soccer team in Khartoum.
In many ways it is hard to criticize the Egyptians, who broke away from the Arab pack three decades ago and signed their separate peace agreement with Israel. This was followed 15 years later by the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement, after the Palestinians tried to negotiate a permanent peace settlement with Israel via the Oslo accords. That attempt failed for many reasons, the primary ones being the Israeli lack of seriousness about ending the colonization of Palestinian land and Israel’s insistence on annexing much of Jerusalem and refusing to deal with the Palestinian refugees seriously. As for the Palestinians, their use of suicide bombings against Israelis represented a fatal blow to the negotiations.
Many attempts to negotiate comprehensive peace in the last three decades have failed, and each time Israelis and Palestinians have fallen back on the same rhetorical positions: Israel says it is prepared to discuss peace arrangements without preconditions (its colonization and strangulation of Palestinian land and society being set aside, presumably, as a non-reality); while the Palestinians accuse Israel of not being serious about negotiating peace. Because Israel is militarily stronger and in control of daily life arteries for Palestinians – like entry and exit points, water, food, electricity and fuel – it tends to define conditions on the ground. The Palestinian leadership, for its part, appeals to the world’s conscience and respect for international law, but with little impact and even less credibility...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Pratap Chatterjee: Anatomy of an Afghan Culture of Corruption
Source: TomDispatch (website of Tom Engelhardt) (11-17-09)
[Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative journalist and senior editor at CorpWatch. He is the author of Halliburton's Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War (Nation Books, 2009) and Iraq, Inc. (Seven Stories Press, 2004).]
Kabul, Afghanistan -- Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well connected companies -- Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid -- that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country's new vice president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.
Some of the trucks are on their way to two power stations in the northern part of the capital: a recently refurbished, if inefficient, plant that has served Kabul for a little more than a quarter of a century, and a brand new facility scheduled for completion next year and built with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking examples of the multimillion-dollar business conglomerates, financed by American as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political figures, that have, since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, emerged as part of a pervasive culture of corruption here. Nasrullah Stanikzai, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University, says of the companies in the pocket of the vice-president: "Everybody knows who is Ghazanfar. Everybody knows who is Zahid Walid. The [government elite] directly or indirectly have companies, licenses, and sign contracts. But corruption is not confined just to the Afghans. The international community bears a share of this blame."
Indeed, the tale of the "reconstruction" of Kabul's electricity supply is a classic story of how foreign aid has often served to line the pockets of both international contractors from the donor countries and the local political elite. Unfortunately, these aid-financed projects also generally fail -- as the Kabul diesel plants appear destined to -- because of a lack of planning and the hard cash to keep them operating.
The Rise of a Power Broker
Abdul Hasin and his brother, the vice-president, offer a perfect exemplar of the new business elite. The two men are half-brothers, born to the two wives of a well-respected religious cleric from the village of Marz in the Panjshir valley north of Kabul.
In the early 1980s, Fahim, the older brother, joined the mujahedeen forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew in defeat, Fahim was appointed head of intelligence in Afghanistan by the new president Burhanuddin Rabbani in the midst of a fierce and destructive civil war among the victors. When the Taliban took control of the country a few years later, Fahim became the intelligence chief for the Northern Alliance, also led by Massoud, which controlled less than a third of the country. On September 9, 2001, two days before the World Trade Center was attacked, Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda operatives and Fahim took control of the Northern Alliance, which the U.S. would soon finance and support in its "invasion" of Afghanistan.
A number of popular accounts of that invasion, such as Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency directly gave Northern Alliance warlords like Fahim millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to help fight the Taliban in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. "I can take Kabul, I can take Kunduz if you break the [Taliban front] line for me. My guys are ready," Woodward quotes Fahim telling a CIA agent named Gary after pocketing a million dollars in $100 bills.
Once the Taliban was defeated, Fahim was invited to become vice president in the transitional government led by Hamid Karzai, a position he held for two years. It was at this juncture that Fahim's brothers, notably Abdul Hasin, started to build a business empire -- and not long after, good fortune began to rain down on the family in the form of lucrative "reconstruction" contracts.
In January 2002, while Fahim took whirlwind tours of Washington and London, meeting General Tommy Franks, who had commanded U.S. forces during the invasion, and taking the salute from the Coldstream Guards, his younger brother was putting together a business plan. Soon thereafter, Zahid Walid, a company named after Abdul Hasin's older sons, not so surprisingly won a series of lucrative contracts to pour concrete for a NATO base as well as portions of the U.S. embassy being rebuilt in Kabul and that city's airport, which was in a state of disrepair.
On a plot of land in downtown Kabul reportedly "seized" for a song by Fahim, Abdul Hasin also financed the construction of a high-rise building dubbed "Goldpoint," which now houses dozens of jewelry shops. Soon, the company was importing Russian gas, and not long after that, Abdul Hasin set up the Gas Group, a company which ran a plant in the industrial suburb of Tarakhil that marketed bottled gas to households and small businesses.
In the winter of 2006, Zahid Walid won a $12 million dollar contract from the Afghan ministry of energy and water to supply fuel to the old diesel plant in northwest Kabul, according to data published on the website of the government's central procurement agency, Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development Services. In the summer of 2007, the company won another $40 million diesel-supply contract, and last winter it took on a third contract worth $22 million.
On October 19th, I visited Zahid Walid's heavily guarded headquarters in the wealthy Kabul neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, not far from the even more heavily fortified U.S. embassy. There, Ramin Seddiqui, the managing director of the company's diesel-import business, filled me in on another exclusive contract the company had secured from the Afghan government only days before for an additional $17 million. Zahid Walid is now to supply diesel fuel to the new 100 megawatt diesel power plant being built by Black & Veatch, a Kansas construction company, with money from USAID.
Most senior Afghan government officials and political figures are loath to discuss how Zahid Walid has won all these contracts -- at least publicly. On a recent visit to the Ministry of Commerce, I asked Noor Mohammed Wafa, the general director of oil products and liquid gas, about them. He promptly claimed that he had never even heard of the company. He then shot a glance at my Afghan assistant and said in Dari: "That's Marshal Fahim's company, isn't it?" When I asked whether the rules were different for powerful political figures -- as everyone in Kabul knows is the case -- Wafa politely denied any suggestion of favoritism in the awarding of import licenses.
In fact, dozens of people assured me in private on my most recent visit to Kabul that favoritism and corruption are the essence of the Karzai government the U.S. has helped "reconstruct" over the last eight years.
A White Elephant Power Plant in Kabul
While Zahid Walid has won close to $100 million in diesel contracts from the Afghan government in these years, there is hard evidence that the money for this once-needed fuel is now essentially being squandered. Earlier this year, KEC, an Indian company, completed the first of two high voltage power lines from neighboring Central Asian countries that will bring cheap and reliable electricity into the capital.
The initial 220 kilovolt power line from Uzbekistan -- a $35 million project -- follows the same path as Zahid Walid's diesel trucks over the Hindu Kush. The comparison, however, ends there. True, the Indian engineers who constructed it had to survive the brutal snows in the Salang pass, but they are now done. On the other hand, the truckers continue to take the treacherous daily drive through the tunnel that connects northern Afghanistan to the south, bringing Turkmen diesel to Kabul at 22 cents a kilowatt hour. Meanwhile, the Uzbek electricity, traveling effortlessly through KEC's transmission lines, costs the Afghan taxpayer a mere six cents a kilowatt hour.
To add insult to injury, much of the diesel is meant for the USAID power plant at Tarakhil that has become a symbol of the sort of massive and widespread reconstruction waste and abuse that has gone on in this country for years. The plant, built by Black & Veatch, is now projected to cost $300 million, three times the price of similar plants in neighboring Pakistan. In addition, it will only be capable of supplying one-third of the power the Uzbek power line can deliver far less expensively. Nor will the Uzbek line be the only source of cheap electricity. KEC's engineers have broken ground on a second power line -- this one from Tajikistan -- that will supply 300 megawatts of electricity to Kabul, three times what the Tarakhil plant will produce at a bargain basement construction cost of $28 million.
"At full capacity, we burn 600,000 liters a day," Jack Currie, the Scottish manager of the Tarakhil plant told me as I toured it in late October. "And just how much will that cost the Afghan taxpayer?" I asked. "Well," replied Currie, "you can assume a dollar a liter of diesel." I quickly calculated and arrived at an annual total of $219 million per year, not including the plant's maintenance costs (estimated at another $60 million a year). Currie looked astonished when I mentioned the figure.
I took these numbers to Mohammed Khan, a member of the Afghan parliament and chair of its energy committee. "Will you approve the funds for this diesel power plant?" I asked. The soft-spoken Khan, a trained electrical engineer who worked for many years in the Kabul Electricity Department, answered simply: "No. Not unless we have an emergency."
So why build a power plant that, in terms of kilowatt hours made available, costs 26 times as much as the Indian-built power line? Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, Afghan's former finance minister, recalls the process. The idea, he says, originally came from then-U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald Neumann, who dreamed it up in April 2007 shortly before he left the country. He apparently envisioned it as a strategic alternative to the Uzbek power line. After all, at that time the repressive Uzbek regime had denied Washington the use of what was seen as a key military base in Central Asia, Karshi-Khanabad, and so functionally kicked U.S. troops out of the country. Naturally, then, it was also seen as an unreliable political partner for the U.S.-backed regime of Hamid Karzai.
Following up, USAID officials told the Karzai government that they could build a diesel plant in Kabul in just over two years for $120 million. It would, the ambassador indicated, be functional just in time for the 2009 elections, allowing Karzai to claim that he had provided power to the electricity-starved capital. The Afghan president readily agreed to the plan, instructing anxious officials at the ministry of finance to approve the scheme in early 2007. He even agreed to put $20 million of Afghan funds into the project -- after being assured that the U.S. would pay for the rest.
Over the next two years, while Indian engineers raced the Americans to provide power to Kabul (ultimately winning handily), the ministry of energy and water was having a hard time keeping the lights on during Kabul's harsh winters. And while the city waited for these promised sources of power to come on line, the new political-business elite, with its specially set up companies like Zahid Walid, was winning government-issued contracts to supply diesel to the old Kabul power plant -- and making money hand over fist.
Zahid Walid was hardly the only politically well-connected business to clean up: Ghazanfar, a company from Mazar-i-Sharif, also won $17 million in diesel-supply contracts in the winter of 2006-2007, and then an astonishing $78 million in new contracts for 2008-early 2009. Not surprisingly, Ghazanfar turns out to be run by a family that is very close to President Karzai. (One sister, Hosn Banu Ghazanfar, is the women's minister and a brother is a member of parliament.)
In March 2009, the Ghazanfars opened a new bank in the capital, plastering the city with giant billboard advertisements featuring a cascade of gold coins. Less than six months later, the bank wrote out a two million dollar interest-free loan to Karzai for his election campaign, paying back the favors his government had done for them over the previous three years.
Afghanistan as a Patronage Machine
This week, Mohammed Qasim Fahim will be sworn in as the next vice-president of the new government of Afghanistan. Under an agreement with USAID, this new government is required to spend Afghan money to buy yet more diesel for the Tarakhil power plant, which in turn will put money exclusively and directly into the vice president's brother's pocket.
Hamid Jalil, the aid coordinator for the Ministry of Finance, points out that wasting money on unnecessary projects like Tarakhil has helped to hobble Afghanistan's progress in the last eight years. "The donor projects undermine the legitimacy of the government and do not allow us to build capacity," he says, adding in the weary tone you often hear in Kabul today, "corruption is everywhere in post-conflict countries like ours."
Former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani summed up the whole profitably corrupt system that has run Afghanistan into a cul-de-sac this way. "It's not crazy, it's absurd," he says. "Crazy is when you don't know what you're doing. Absurd is when you don't provide a sense of ownership and a sense of sustainability."
WSJ Editorial: Iran, Its Hostages and the West
Source: WSJ (11-18-09)
Iran's big news yesterday is that the government will formally kill five people who participated in June's pro-democracy rallies. Consider, though, the implications for the West's peace-brokers of the case of Frenchwoman Clotilde Reiss...
... In its 30 years, the Islamic Republic has used assassination squads, fatwas, terrorism and hostage-taking as tools of its war with the West. A nearly unbroken string of outrages connects the taking of the U.S. embassy in 1979 to the death sentence demanded for writer Salman Rushdie in 1989 to, more recently, the grabbing of British sailors in 2007. Add to that the detention and trial of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi earlier this year, the 12-year prison sentence meted last month to Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakshsh and, most recently, the charges of espionage leveled against the three American backpackers who stumbled across the Iranian border in July...
... For too long the West has responded to these various outrages by offering Iran little more than meek compliance, plus a clean slate the moment any one crisis is resolved. Now President Barack Obama is again beseeching Iran to take the nuclear deal offered to it last month. Nobody should expect Iran's leaders to show good faith. Not when their days are spent executing protestors and abusing the likes of Clotilde Reiss.
John Vinocur: Why Europe Feels Rejected by Obama
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
[John Vinocur is a journalist for the Paris-based newspaper The International Herald Tribune.]
Why would an American president not come to a celebration marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with it, the triumphant end of the Cold War — one of the high points of the United States’ and Europe’s common 20th-century history?
Whatever the exact answer — and it could be that a fatigued Barack Obama didn’t want the physical strain of a trans-Atlantic trip days before a weeklong tour of Asia — his absence from the Nov. 9 ceremonies in Germany has reinforced Europe’s fear that it has become an increasingly insignificant part of the president’s worldview.
This week offers a telling juxtaposition:
Mr. Obama, after giving Berlin a conspicuous miss, is concentrating by his presence America’s attention and future hopes on China and Asia. Virtually at the same moment, the European Union, in what’s plainly an effort to assert its relevance, will choose (with considerable difficulty and potential irrelevance) a common president and foreign minister for the first time.
Together, that’s hardly a guarantee of a warmer trans-Atlantic clasp of hands. Instead, it’s a remarkable contrast to Secretary of State James Baker’s proposal, a month after the wall fell, of a new, organic economic and political relationship between Europeans and Americans.
Now, Denis MacShane, a former British minister for Europe, who met with other Atlanticists at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Edinburgh over the weekend, describes the circumstances this way: “There’s a growing worry everywhere in Europe that we have the first U.S. president since 1945 to show no interest in what’s happening on this side of the relationship.”
That can be held up against a show-us-and-we’ll-get-back-to-you version of the administration’s view of European-American cooperation offered a week earlier by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State Department’s director of policy planning. Asked by a French reporter about where she situated a newly reorganized, constitutional Europe, Ms. Slaughter replied that there were enormous possibilities.
“But,” she said, “it’s up to post-Lisbon Europe to put its house in order in a way that would allow us to be effective partners. Europe’s choices in the coming months are going to be very important.”
That’s not what you’d call an embrace. It’s reinforcement for the idea that the president over his first year in office has shunned, or taken for granted, Europe’s initial burst of affection for him. The fallout — either attributed to the private comments of European leaders, or reflected in major editorial voices — is an expression of skepticism about Mr. Obama’s capabilities and the depth of the change he claims to represent.
In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper that knows Chancellor Angela Merkel well, has written ironically of how little has changed, outside atmospherics, from the Bush to Obama administrations in attitudes toward Germany. Over the weekend, it found that Mr. Obama’s America seems “to be taking pleasure in the idea of having a G-2 condominium” with China that would leave little place for a European share of global power.
In France, the tone has been harsher. Olivier Debouzy, a lawyer and former French Foreign Ministry official, wrote last week that foreign governments were “opaque” for Mr. Obama because he projected his own notion of American rationality on them. Mr. Debouzy asserted that the president also showed a sense of his and America’s superiority to foreign leaders.
“He expresses this by holding himself at a distance from them, which is unusual for an American political figure,” Mr. Debouzy wrote. “It makes personal relations with him complicated, a fact attested to by more than one European chief of state or government.”
The current issue of Le Canard Enchaîné, the controversy-loving French political weekly, which specializes in putting direct quotes into the mouths of French politicians — regarded with interest here although not as verbatim scripture — has President Nicolas Sarkozy saying:...
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Charles Cooper: Rage Nation 2.0
Source: CBS News (11-17-09)
[Charles Cooper blogs for CBS News]
In 1964, the Columbia University historian, Richard Hofstadter, described in a magazine piece the "paranoid style in American politics" (a theme he later expanded in a book on the same topic).
Talk about political prescience.
The American lexicon is suddenly chockablock with a collection of colorful descriptions forged in the cauldron of an increasingly heated political debate - terms like tea parties, three percenters, birthers, town hall disrupters, and oath keepers. As language reflects the times we live in, this is the new nomenclature used to define an eruption of anti-government rage that increasingly has marked the Obama administration's first ten months in office.
Though other administrations have gotten an earful from critics, both from the left as well as the right, the Anti Defamation League has a new report out which makes the case that this is more than the usual political carping between political parties. The study should be required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary U.S. politics. Not that the ADL's narrative is going to settle anything - how long before Michelle Malkin, Alex Jones and the rest of the rage boys (and girls) work up a purple fury at the organization's chutzpah for daring to single out rightwing overkill? - but the report offers a disturbing examination into why our political debate has turned rancid. What separates this period from other epochs, the ADL suggests, is a widespread belief within anti-government circles that the Obama administration presents a danger to the future of this country.
"Some accuse Obama of plotting to bring socialism to the United States, while others claim he will bring about Nazism or fascism. All believe that Obama and his administration will trample on individual freedoms and civil liberties, due to some sinister agenda, and they see his economic and social policies as manifestations of this agenda. In particular anti-government activists used the issue of health care reform as a rallying point, accusing Obama and his administration of dark designs ranging from "socialized medicine" to "death panels," even when the Obama administration had not come out with a specific health care reform plan. Some even compared the Obama administration's intentions to Nazi eugenics programs."
It's too easy to chalk this up entirely to old fashioned racism - though the race factor can't be ignored - but the ADL report makes clear that paranoia and belief in conspiracies now informs many mainstream and grass-roots anti-government movements, which left unchecked, could spill over into violence. The ADL says the first warning signs flashed during the summer when people with extremist backgrounds showed up at public events ostentatiously packing heat. From the report:
"But some groups have gone much further, implicitly or explicitly suggesting armed resistance to the government of some sort. Open calls to violent action are rare; what is more common is rhetoric that speaks of resisting the government, “restoring” the government, or using weapons to defend one’s rights from the “tyrannical” Obama administration."
"Significantly, many of these groups have appropriated an idealized version of Revolutionary War history for their own purposes, stressing the armed resistance of the American colonists to British “tyranny” and suggesting, in varying degrees of openness, that Americans today should act as their revolutionary forebears did and throw off the perceived shackles of the allegedly tyrannical government."
Too much? We'll only know for sure in retrospect. This much is clear: the fringe has found a way to insinuate its way into the national conversation.
Kristen Breitweiser: Justice American Style
Source: Huffington Post (11-16-09)
[Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow and activist]
Even after witnessing the horrors of 9/11 that included me helplessly watching the murder of my husband on live television, I still believe that we are a civilized nation of laws. And like the Nuremberg trials that brought the murderers of millions to justice, now more than ever, Americans need to trust our own judicial system to fully and openly prosecute the mass murderers of 9/11 while the rest of the world bears witness.
Because while the terrorists were successful in bringing down the Twin Towers and hijacking airplanes on 9/11, our Constitution should never be hijacked or brought down as a result of anything--let alone the potential adversity faced in prosecuting modern day monsters like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Indeed, in the fight against Islamist extremism, we should never bow to the terrorists by compromising, manipulating, re-writing or flat-out ignoring the core, bedrock principles of our Constitution that speak to the very heart of who we are as a nation--a democracy.
Yet, quite alarmingly, Republicans seem to be exhibiting just this sort of crisis of confidence in our Constitution's ability to prosecute these horrible men. Republicans argue that men like KSM are war criminals who can only be convicted in military commissions where they won't receive the protections of our laws. Republicans seem to lack a certain faith in our Constitution's ability and adaptability in meting out the demands of modern day justice.
So the once-brazen, chest-thumping Republicans who preemptively started a war in Iraq, claimed mission accomplished, and ordained that they wanted Osama Bin Laden's head on a platter, are now off crying in a corner lost in their own feigned anger and fear. Complaining that it will be too dangerous. Worried that it will make New York City a target.
First, I've got news for anyone who didn't already know this: New York has been, is, and will always be a terrorist target. That's why many of us wanted millions spent on hardening domestic soft targets like NYC (and mass transportation systems, chemical plants, nuclear plants, borders, etc). But after 9/11, the Bush Administration chose instead to spend billions on starting a war in Iraq.
Indeed, in the quantitative analysis of what truly makes us a terrorist target, holding a trial in the Southern District of New York does not top the list. The war in Iraq wins that contest hands down. And the Bush Administration's illegal torture policies come in at a close second. These are the things that have fomented the most hatred towards Americans and placed us at the highest risk from terrorist attack.
To be clear, the only danger posed by prosecuting men like KSM in an open court in New York is the red alert it poses to the Republican Party's faltering reputation in fighting their "war on terror."
And that is the real reason why Republicans are supporting the use of military
commissions instead of Article III courts. Because military commissions are held in secret. Republicans want the dirty, damning truth about their failed torture policies to remain hidden away from public view. And they'll use every lame excuse in the book to get their way.
God forbid, the truth came out about torture. Imagine the worst--that KSM, one of the world's most heinous terrorists, is set free after the evidence needed to convict him is thrown out because it was illegally obtained through torture. Imagine further that KSM's torture bore no fruit at all--in other words, it provided no information that prevented any attacks or saved any lives. In essence, KSM's torture proved useless and counter-productive. Talk about a public relations nightmare for the party who once with grand cowboy swagger announced that they'd bring 'em all to justice.
But will KSM ever walk free? Absolutely not. First, haven't we all seen enough Law & Order re-runs to know that prosecutors don't proceed with cases unless they know they've got the goods to convict? Not to mention that KSM also made a self-admission about planning the 9/11 attacks on al-Jazeera long before he was captured and tortured by our government. So I'm confident that even taking into account all the mishandling and mistakes made by the Bush Administration, KSM will not be set free.
However, remain cognizant that were such an acquittal even remotely possible, it would not be due to any shortcomings of our nation's 200-year-old, well-established legal process. Nor would it be a result of some wily terrorist making a "mockery of our rule of law." Rather, responsibility for such a ghastly acquittal would fall squarely on the shoulders of Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales--those who in a panic after 9/11, breathlessly ordered the illegal use of torture because they didn't know what else to do. And that, folks, is the big dark dirty secret that Republicans don't want any of us to find out.
But, the prosecutors in the Southern District of NY do know what their doing--especially when it comes to winning terrorist convictions. Moreover, long established safeguards will be in place to protect sources, methods and any other classified information from leaking to the public. In fact, because we are a democracy, KSM will be given a fair trial, in an open courtroom facing certain and swift justice just steps from Ground Zero. And once convicted, he will receive the maximum penalty--death.
When that happens, 8 years after 9/11, justice will have finally prevailed.
Marcus Buckingham: Women won the gender wars
Source: Huffington Post (11-17-09)
[Internationally renowned and celebrated, Marcus Buckingham is the go-to consultant in his field, a sought-after speaker, and a New York Times bestselling author.]
In its recent special on the State of Women, Time magazine announced that the gender wars were over and declared a tie. "It's no longer a man's world," Time concluded. "Nor is it a woman's nation. It's a cooperative, with bylaws under constant negotiation, and expectations that profits be equally shared."
I'm not so sure. In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.
Men's attitudes more and more resemble women's attitudes. In 1977, for example, 72 percent of men believed that men should be the primary breadwinners and women should be the primary caretakers of home and family. Today, only 42 percent of men hold those opinions, which happens to be almost exactly the same as the percentage of women who feel that way (38 percent).
Men's behaviors are becoming more and more like women's. In 1977, men spent, on average, only six hours a week doing housework, as compared to 21 hours for women. Today, when it comes to the "second shift," men look a lot like women--men now spend 13 hours a week on housework, while women spend 17. Similarly, 40 years ago, the average Don Draper spent only two hours a day caring for his non-teen kids, while the average Betty devoted almost twice that much time to her kids--3.8 hours per day. Today, Betty's kid time is exactly the same, while Don's has climbed to three hours per day. Gen Y dads have taken it up a notch. They now spend more than four hours a day on childcare.
"To know a culture, look to its heroes," goes the saying, and here, too, we see change and new models of leadership. Gone are the macho monarchs--Jack "Neutron" Welch, George "The Decider" Bush, Michael "Micro-manager" Eisner, and Carly "The Fighter" Fiorina (not all male models are masculine). In their place we now honor a new style of leader, no less visionary, but more pragmatic, more conciliatory, building consensus as they quietly get things done--in the Oval Office, Barak Obama; at Hewlett Packard, Mark Hurd; at Disney HQ, Bob Eiger; and at the Welch mansion, the softer, friendlier hybrid, JackandSuzy.
Even our entertainment heroes have lost their masculine muscle. Arnold, Bruce, and Stallone are long gone from the screen, but even the flirty, flaky, funny adolescents--Tom, Brad, Jim, and Will--no longer charm us quite as much as they once did. Instead, our leading men are the likes of Zac Efron who, though he can still "Michael Jordan" it on the court, now has to sing and dance charmingly to earn our affection. Or the dangerous but effete and oh-so-delicate Robert Pattinson of "Twilight" fame. Or the gender-bending, pirate-styling and pretty Johnny Depp. Even James Bond has found his feminine side--all he wants is a quantum of solace, crushed as he is at the thought that the one he loved, really truly loved, betrayed him.
The war is over. Women won. And, as ever, to the victor go the spoils.
And what are the spoils of this particular war?
The spoils are choice. Women have more choice than ever before in their work, home, and lifestyles. And yes, men are becoming more like women, and so men are starting to face the same multitude of choices that women tackle.
Today, with many companies offering paternal leave, men now have the choice to stay at home after the birth of their newborn--which, as any dad will tell you, is a wondrous gift. But they also have the choice to take advantage of this leave and stay at home wondering whether or not this absence will hurt their careers.
Men have the choice to stay at home even longer and assume the chief caregiver role-- this happens in 40 percent of U.S. households, either through choice or circumstance (in 40 percent of U.S. households, the woman is the primary wage earner). But they have to face the fact that, in making this choice, their skills might become obsolete and their wages, when they re-enter the workforce, will wind up reflecting their out-of-date proficiency. According to recent research, this kind of career interruption with its attendant decline in relevant skills, rather than pure gender discrimination, accounts for almost all of the fabled 77 cents-on-the-dollar male/female wage gap.
Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice.
The choice-filled world that women have bestowed on men is a tough world. Tough on women; even tougher on men. At least that's what the data reveal. In 1977, 41 percent of women reported feeling some level of work/life conflict, whereas only 35 percent of men did. Today, about the same percentage of women report work/life conflict, but 59 percent of men are now similarly torn.
Or maybe it's not tougher on men. It's just that men aren't used to it, and so they feel it more. And so they complain more, as all novices do.
The victors are leading men into a new world, a world devoid of narrow paths and clear finish lines, a world of broad expanses of choice and role, a world where you, not society, can decide your definitions of success and fulfillment. In its abundance, it is a wonderful world. It is also a world where, as women have found, if you possess a poor internal compass you can wind up utterly lost.
So wake up, men. Whatever women are feeling, you are now free to feel it, too.
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