From Secrecy News:
SELECTED CRS REPORTS
New reports from the Congressional Research Service, not readily available to the public, include these:
"Intelligence Issues for Congress," July 12, 2006: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL33539.pdf"
Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah: The Current Conflict," July 21, 2006: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33566.pdf
Wrap...
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Well finally! The CIA turned it loose....
I'm talking, of course, about TJ Water's book, "Class 11", the story of the first CIA class put together after 9/11. Just had an email from TJ, and he said:
"Book is now set for October 19 in stores everywhere. We just sold tv/film rights to Fox on Friday. Don't know ifthey'll do a movie or a series (they're talking series), but I'm not holding my breath just yet. "
No question but that his agent and publisher and editor are doing right by him. :))
I do believe I've been waiting, come October, for a year to get my hands on this book! :))
******************
And then came another email announcing this new book. I'm not sure, but I do believe Jeremy Blachman had a blog. In any case, he has a neat website. So here's his announcement [I do believe he's mighty happy]:
FROM: Anonymous Lawyer
TO: All partners, associates, e-mail correspondents, support slaves
RE: Required reading
Announcing a temporary change to the firm's long-standing policy that employees are not allowed to read anything besides lease agreements. Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel hits stores today, July 25th, and is also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, or your favorite on-line retailer. No, not that one. I mean the one that sells books.
Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/pf283
Barnes & Noble: http://tinyurl.com/pmbvs
Powell's: http://tinyurl.com/pqxao
In the novel, Anonymous Lawyer sets out on a quest to eliminate his biggest rival, The Jerk, and become chairman of the firm -- while dealing with incompetent associates, his spendthrift wife, and the inner torment deep in his soul. Very deep. It's not a compilation of blog posts. That would be like double-billing a client. And we never double-bill clients. Okay, we do, but not this time. New material.
USA Today calls the book "wickedly amusing," Publishers Weekly calls it "side-achingly funny," the New York Post gives it 4 stars out of 4, and my grandmother really loves it too.
We'll also be needing you to work this weekend on a memo for a case we've already settled, and there's a typo somewhere in the tax code that we need you to find. Thanks.
Back to work,
Anonymous Lawyer
http://anonymouslawfirm.com
Wrap...
"Book is now set for October 19 in stores everywhere. We just sold tv/film rights to Fox on Friday. Don't know ifthey'll do a movie or a series (they're talking series), but I'm not holding my breath just yet. "
No question but that his agent and publisher and editor are doing right by him. :))
I do believe I've been waiting, come October, for a year to get my hands on this book! :))
******************
And then came another email announcing this new book. I'm not sure, but I do believe Jeremy Blachman had a blog. In any case, he has a neat website. So here's his announcement [I do believe he's mighty happy]:
FROM: Anonymous Lawyer
TO: All partners, associates, e-mail correspondents, support slaves
RE: Required reading
Announcing a temporary change to the firm's long-standing policy that employees are not allowed to read anything besides lease agreements. Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel hits stores today, July 25th, and is also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, or your favorite on-line retailer. No, not that one. I mean the one that sells books.
Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/pf283
Barnes & Noble: http://tinyurl.com/pmbvs
Powell's: http://tinyurl.com/pqxao
In the novel, Anonymous Lawyer sets out on a quest to eliminate his biggest rival, The Jerk, and become chairman of the firm -- while dealing with incompetent associates, his spendthrift wife, and the inner torment deep in his soul. Very deep. It's not a compilation of blog posts. That would be like double-billing a client. And we never double-bill clients. Okay, we do, but not this time. New material.
USA Today calls the book "wickedly amusing," Publishers Weekly calls it "side-achingly funny," the New York Post gives it 4 stars out of 4, and my grandmother really loves it too.
We'll also be needing you to work this weekend on a memo for a case we've already settled, and there's a typo somewhere in the tax code that we need you to find. Thanks.
Back to work,
Anonymous Lawyer
http://anonymouslawfirm.com
Wrap...
Monday, July 24, 2006
Underhanded dealings with FISA bills....
From the Washington Post:
Surveillance Bill Meets Resistance in Senate
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006; Page A09
A Senate surveillance bill personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic.
The Senate legislation, drafted during negotiations between the White House and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), would allow the administration to submit the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program to a secret intelligence court for review of its legality.
In GA Senate surveillance bill personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic.
The proposal was billed as a rare and noteworthy compromise by the administration when unveiled last week. But the legislation quickly came under attack from Democrats and many national security experts, who said it would actually give the government greater powers to spy on Americans without court oversight.
A competing bill introduced by Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) was endorsed this week by two key House GOP leaders: Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the intelligence committee chairman, and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (Wis.), head of the Judiciary Committee.
Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, canceled a markup session for his proposal that had been scheduled for yesterday. He announced instead plans instead for a full committee hearing Wednesday on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 1978 statute at the center of the debate.
The developments add to the uncertainty surrounding the eavesdropping program, which allows the NSA to intercept telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas without court approval if one of the parties is suspected of links to terrorism.
The program -- secretly ordered by Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but not revealed publicly until media reports in December -- has been the focus of fierce congressional debate. The Justice Department has spent much of its time fending off a flurry of legal challenges to the program in the courts, including a class-action lawsuit that was allowed to proceed yesterday by a federal judge in California.
Specter's proposal would, among other things, allow the transfer of all pending lawsuits to a secret FISA appeals court that could throw the cases out for "any reason." The bill would also allow -- but not require -- the administration to seek legal approval for the NSA program from another secret court that administers FISA.
The legislation also would lengthen the amount of time the government could spy on alleged terrorism suspects before receiving warrants, and would explicitly affirm the president's "constitutional authority" to conduct spying programs on his own.
Specter defended the proposal during a committee hearing on Tuesday, calling the agreement with Bush "a major breakthrough" that included necessary but acceptable compromises. He also argued that the language acknowledging Bush's legal authority has no real impact but was insisted on by White House negotiators.
"I do believe that it would be a significant precedent if we work this out and the president fulfills a commitment to refer to FISA," Specter said.
But critics say the proposal would effectively gut the FISA law and give the government too much leeway in clandestine surveillance. Opponents also say the bill would allow the FISA court to approve surveillance programs as a whole, rather than reviewing warrants for specific cases as it does now.
Other GOP proposals -- including bills proposed by Wilson and Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) -- are opposed by Democrats and civil liberties groups because they formally authorize the NSA program. But the scope of the Wilson bill, for example, is more limited than Specter's, and requires the executive branch to brief all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said she opposes all the GOP's proposals dealing with the NSA issue, calling them "solutions in search of a problem."
Staff writers Charles Babington and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
Wrap...
Surveillance Bill Meets Resistance in Senate
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006; Page A09
A Senate surveillance bill personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic.
The Senate legislation, drafted during negotiations between the White House and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), would allow the administration to submit the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program to a secret intelligence court for review of its legality.
In GA Senate surveillance bill personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic.
The proposal was billed as a rare and noteworthy compromise by the administration when unveiled last week. But the legislation quickly came under attack from Democrats and many national security experts, who said it would actually give the government greater powers to spy on Americans without court oversight.
A competing bill introduced by Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) was endorsed this week by two key House GOP leaders: Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), the intelligence committee chairman, and F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (Wis.), head of the Judiciary Committee.
Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, canceled a markup session for his proposal that had been scheduled for yesterday. He announced instead plans instead for a full committee hearing Wednesday on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 1978 statute at the center of the debate.
The developments add to the uncertainty surrounding the eavesdropping program, which allows the NSA to intercept telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas without court approval if one of the parties is suspected of links to terrorism.
The program -- secretly ordered by Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but not revealed publicly until media reports in December -- has been the focus of fierce congressional debate. The Justice Department has spent much of its time fending off a flurry of legal challenges to the program in the courts, including a class-action lawsuit that was allowed to proceed yesterday by a federal judge in California.
Specter's proposal would, among other things, allow the transfer of all pending lawsuits to a secret FISA appeals court that could throw the cases out for "any reason." The bill would also allow -- but not require -- the administration to seek legal approval for the NSA program from another secret court that administers FISA.
The legislation also would lengthen the amount of time the government could spy on alleged terrorism suspects before receiving warrants, and would explicitly affirm the president's "constitutional authority" to conduct spying programs on his own.
Specter defended the proposal during a committee hearing on Tuesday, calling the agreement with Bush "a major breakthrough" that included necessary but acceptable compromises. He also argued that the language acknowledging Bush's legal authority has no real impact but was insisted on by White House negotiators.
"I do believe that it would be a significant precedent if we work this out and the president fulfills a commitment to refer to FISA," Specter said.
But critics say the proposal would effectively gut the FISA law and give the government too much leeway in clandestine surveillance. Opponents also say the bill would allow the FISA court to approve surveillance programs as a whole, rather than reviewing warrants for specific cases as it does now.
Other GOP proposals -- including bills proposed by Wilson and Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) -- are opposed by Democrats and civil liberties groups because they formally authorize the NSA program. But the scope of the Wilson bill, for example, is more limited than Specter's, and requires the executive branch to brief all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said she opposes all the GOP's proposals dealing with the NSA issue, calling them "solutions in search of a problem."
Staff writers Charles Babington and Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
Wrap...
BushCo adores rich...disdains everyone else...
From American Progress:
ECONOMY -- ADMINISTRATION CUTS AUDITS ON WEALTHY AMERICANS:
The administration is pushing to reduce the number of estate tax auditors nearly in half over the next two months. These lawyers are responsible for auditing the tax returns of America's wealthiest citizens. President Bush has been a strong opponent of the estate tax, claiming it hurts the growth of small, family-owned businesses.
But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes, "At an exemption level of $3.5 million ($7 million per couple), as will exist in 2009, fewer than 100 family businesses and only 65 farm estates would have paid any estate tax."
Sharyn Phillips, a veteran IRS estate tax lawyer, believes this personnel reduction is a "back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."
For each hour these lawyers work, "they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government," according to Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner. Last year, just 30 out of more than 180,000 millionaires were audited by the IRS. Low-income taxpayers were almost twice as likely to be audited as the wealthy.
Wrap...
ECONOMY -- ADMINISTRATION CUTS AUDITS ON WEALTHY AMERICANS:
The administration is pushing to reduce the number of estate tax auditors nearly in half over the next two months. These lawyers are responsible for auditing the tax returns of America's wealthiest citizens. President Bush has been a strong opponent of the estate tax, claiming it hurts the growth of small, family-owned businesses.
But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes, "At an exemption level of $3.5 million ($7 million per couple), as will exist in 2009, fewer than 100 family businesses and only 65 farm estates would have paid any estate tax."
Sharyn Phillips, a veteran IRS estate tax lawyer, believes this personnel reduction is a "back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax."
For each hour these lawyers work, "they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government," according to Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner. Last year, just 30 out of more than 180,000 millionaires were audited by the IRS. Low-income taxpayers were almost twice as likely to be audited as the wealthy.
Wrap...
Don't use that camera! Sneak the pic with cell phone...
From the LA Times:
Patt Morrison: Tourist Photos? Get Me Security!
Taking pictures of public spaces is becoming illegal in downtown L.A.
July 20, 2006
IT WAS the talking building that finally did it for Will Funk.His photography students had been trudging through downtown Los Angeles — in from Claremont, you know, taking in the big-city sights — and they were walking near 7th and Figueroa — walking, mind you, not even pausing, much less taking pictures — when a voice came out of a wall.
"Put away the camera. No picture taking here."
Funk, a retired cop turned photographer, had been threatened with arrest before, under a law no one could name, for trying to take a picture of the Federal Building in Santa Ana. It took a call to his congressman to get that settled. But a building saying back off?
One by one, like pixels in an image, incidents assemble and a pattern appears. Someone takes a picture, or tries to, of a public space, in a public place. Muscle appears. Sometimes badges are flashed. Vague laws are vaguely invoked. A man taking pictures of a symmetrical array of school buses gets a visit from Homeland Security. A shutterbug shooting 16-millimeter film of the scenery outside the train window is questioned, and the film is confiscated.
A history student taking photos of the New York state Capitol for her class project finds the police at her door. Another student in Seattle, photographing a popular tourist sight, is corralled by men declaring themselves to be "homeland security." A Texas railroad buff takes pictures of trains and gets grilled for five hours by the FBI and the cops.
To the absurdities of overreaching "no-fly" lists that keep infants off airplanes, add this one: photographers, amateur and professional, being menaced for taking pictures of public sights in plain sight.
In the online photo magazine Vivid Light Photography, Jim McGee writes about photographer-cop encounters and "wild tales about 'made-up' laws that cops pull out of the air to justify their actions. Is photography becoming illegal in the United States?" A courthouse, a library, a skyline, a beautiful bridge — they're not Suri Cruise. They're part of the public vista and public life. The notion that security muscle, public or private, would view tourists as terrorists and treat them like paparazzi, with a "no pictures" strong-arm, is as silly as it is unworkable.
Especially in tourist meccas like Los Angeles. People don't just want the postcard — they want to be in the photo. "See, here I am in front of the big ball of twine / the Pacific Ocean / City Hall, where they make all those movies."
Downtown L.A. has finally been getting a tourism payoff from years of building and boosterism. Take the Bunker Hill Steps, inspired by the spectacular Spanish Steps in Rome. They're at the foot of what's known as the Library Tower. It's the tallest building west of the Mississippi, 73 stories, and reportedly the target of an unspecified terrorist plot after 9/11. The steps and their waterfall, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, are listed everywhere as public art, as is the Robert Graham sculpture at the top of the steps. But picture takers who believe that are getting intercepted by security.
Last month, Funk's students were snapping the steps when a security officer stopped them. Funk said his students were on a public sidewalk. "That's actually private property," the guard told him. "They always say, 'Ever since 9/11, things have changed.' I was a cop for 18 years, and I'm completely sympathetic to security concerns," Funk told me. "But come on, a bunch of tourists taking pictures of a waterfall?"
On the website laobserved.com, locals and tourists have reported the same encounters. One man standing on the Bunker Hill Steps was told — incorrectly, it turns out — that it's illegal to take pictures of the public library. Another man photographing the steps from the sidewalk was told to stop because he was on private property.
Something's wrong here. I asked the L.A. Conservancy, which conducts downtown tours, and was told that since 9/11, photography has been banned on the Library Tower site. But that's where the Bunker Hill Steps are, and the Graham sculpture. Public art on private property? How does that work? The Community Redevelopment Agency told me that the Graham sculpture is public art but that the steps are not — which may be news to the man who crafted them.
Once again we have to find our way between license and absolute limits. Is that really so hard? Not for some people. At the Sears Tower in Chicago, the nation's tallest building and a favorite tourist snapshot, security people are trained to distinguish between people taking the usual gee-whiz pictures and those photographing out-of-the-way, unusual things like mechanical operations, according to the American Society for Industrial Security.
If that's too difficult, here's another suggestion. During World War II, when the Douglas Aircraft Co. wanted to disguise itself from air attacks, it turned to Hollywood. Workers from Warner Bros. whipped together millions of square feet of chicken wire to canopy Douglas' buildings, hangars and runway. On top of the mesh, they laid lightweight "neighborhoods" — fake houses and garages, trees with leafy, green-painted chicken feathers, even clotheslines with waving laundry.
So, Tourist L.A., if you don't want anyone taking your picture, fine. There are 650 creative people just laid off from Disney's movie production operation looking for work. They can make you look like anything, or nothing. If nothing is what you really want to be.
Wrap...
Patt Morrison: Tourist Photos? Get Me Security!
Taking pictures of public spaces is becoming illegal in downtown L.A.
July 20, 2006
IT WAS the talking building that finally did it for Will Funk.His photography students had been trudging through downtown Los Angeles — in from Claremont, you know, taking in the big-city sights — and they were walking near 7th and Figueroa — walking, mind you, not even pausing, much less taking pictures — when a voice came out of a wall.
"Put away the camera. No picture taking here."
Funk, a retired cop turned photographer, had been threatened with arrest before, under a law no one could name, for trying to take a picture of the Federal Building in Santa Ana. It took a call to his congressman to get that settled. But a building saying back off?
One by one, like pixels in an image, incidents assemble and a pattern appears. Someone takes a picture, or tries to, of a public space, in a public place. Muscle appears. Sometimes badges are flashed. Vague laws are vaguely invoked. A man taking pictures of a symmetrical array of school buses gets a visit from Homeland Security. A shutterbug shooting 16-millimeter film of the scenery outside the train window is questioned, and the film is confiscated.
A history student taking photos of the New York state Capitol for her class project finds the police at her door. Another student in Seattle, photographing a popular tourist sight, is corralled by men declaring themselves to be "homeland security." A Texas railroad buff takes pictures of trains and gets grilled for five hours by the FBI and the cops.
To the absurdities of overreaching "no-fly" lists that keep infants off airplanes, add this one: photographers, amateur and professional, being menaced for taking pictures of public sights in plain sight.
In the online photo magazine Vivid Light Photography, Jim McGee writes about photographer-cop encounters and "wild tales about 'made-up' laws that cops pull out of the air to justify their actions. Is photography becoming illegal in the United States?" A courthouse, a library, a skyline, a beautiful bridge — they're not Suri Cruise. They're part of the public vista and public life. The notion that security muscle, public or private, would view tourists as terrorists and treat them like paparazzi, with a "no pictures" strong-arm, is as silly as it is unworkable.
Especially in tourist meccas like Los Angeles. People don't just want the postcard — they want to be in the photo. "See, here I am in front of the big ball of twine / the Pacific Ocean / City Hall, where they make all those movies."
Downtown L.A. has finally been getting a tourism payoff from years of building and boosterism. Take the Bunker Hill Steps, inspired by the spectacular Spanish Steps in Rome. They're at the foot of what's known as the Library Tower. It's the tallest building west of the Mississippi, 73 stories, and reportedly the target of an unspecified terrorist plot after 9/11. The steps and their waterfall, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, are listed everywhere as public art, as is the Robert Graham sculpture at the top of the steps. But picture takers who believe that are getting intercepted by security.
Last month, Funk's students were snapping the steps when a security officer stopped them. Funk said his students were on a public sidewalk. "That's actually private property," the guard told him. "They always say, 'Ever since 9/11, things have changed.' I was a cop for 18 years, and I'm completely sympathetic to security concerns," Funk told me. "But come on, a bunch of tourists taking pictures of a waterfall?"
On the website laobserved.com, locals and tourists have reported the same encounters. One man standing on the Bunker Hill Steps was told — incorrectly, it turns out — that it's illegal to take pictures of the public library. Another man photographing the steps from the sidewalk was told to stop because he was on private property.
Something's wrong here. I asked the L.A. Conservancy, which conducts downtown tours, and was told that since 9/11, photography has been banned on the Library Tower site. But that's where the Bunker Hill Steps are, and the Graham sculpture. Public art on private property? How does that work? The Community Redevelopment Agency told me that the Graham sculpture is public art but that the steps are not — which may be news to the man who crafted them.
Once again we have to find our way between license and absolute limits. Is that really so hard? Not for some people. At the Sears Tower in Chicago, the nation's tallest building and a favorite tourist snapshot, security people are trained to distinguish between people taking the usual gee-whiz pictures and those photographing out-of-the-way, unusual things like mechanical operations, according to the American Society for Industrial Security.
If that's too difficult, here's another suggestion. During World War II, when the Douglas Aircraft Co. wanted to disguise itself from air attacks, it turned to Hollywood. Workers from Warner Bros. whipped together millions of square feet of chicken wire to canopy Douglas' buildings, hangars and runway. On top of the mesh, they laid lightweight "neighborhoods" — fake houses and garages, trees with leafy, green-painted chicken feathers, even clotheslines with waving laundry.
So, Tourist L.A., if you don't want anyone taking your picture, fine. There are 650 creative people just laid off from Disney's movie production operation looking for work. They can make you look like anything, or nothing. If nothing is what you really want to be.
Wrap...
Sunday, July 23, 2006
As for building the fence between us and Mexico...
From Voice of San Diego.org :
Scrapping Lady Liberty
By Gary Sutton
Monday, July 24, 2006
China's booming economy means our new fence between the U.S. and Mexico is going to cost us taxpayers a bunch. But there’s a nifty solution. It's a solution that solves another pesky problem.It's no secret that the booming Chinese economy is sucking up much of the world’s steel, concrete and copper. Cement prices are up 7 percent over a year ago and steel costs 12 percent more. And that's on top of prices thought to be sky-high last year.
Copper's at record highs, and a new kind of theft has emerged; stripping pipes and wiring out of construction projects at night. A penny's copper value is now above one cent per coin. Melt 'em down.This is the stuff that our new fence between San Diego and Tijuana will be made of.
But there's a respectable supply of it, in New York, serving no function today, so we should see if it can be scrapped and shipped west to help build our fence. Transportation costs will eat up some of our savings, of course, but depending on the fence design, this source could supply enough copper, steel and concrete to run a good thirty to forty miles inland from the Pacific shore.
The Statue of Liberty contains 179,200 pounds of copper, 250,000 pounds of steel and 27,000 tons of concrete. Pulverize the concrete and cook the metals. There’s the raw stuff to begin our fence.This also eliminates false advertising. The plaque on this statue, which was given to us by the French, after all, says something we simply no longer want said:
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"How absurdly corny. And exactly what we don't want to say any more. Well, I'm glad this country felt that way back when my grandmother immigrated, illegally, from Ireland. And when my wife's grandmother also slipped in from Sweden. Both were indentured servants with seven years of free labor given their masters to pay for passage.
How archaic.
Robert Frost, that sentimental poet said "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall," but he's way out of touch with today.
History's full of fences and walls. The Great Wall of China being the prime example, to protect that country. Of course, when the Mongols decided to overrun China, the Great Wall was barely a speed bump.Then we had that Maginot Line, built by France to ensure the Germans could never attack. Hah! And when the Allies countered, those shrewd Germans made a stand at the Maginot Line to stop them. Concrete and steel bunkers, interconnected, armed and impossible to run over. For about two, maybe three hours.
Ah, but we had the famous Berlin Wall, which lasted awhile. Its construction was reviled and its destruction a celebration.Interesting. It kind of makes the world's fence builders look less than bright. Especially when they talk about putting it on the southern border, since the Sept. 11 hijackers came in over the northern. Well, maybe killers are welcome while those wanting jobs need to be stopped in their tracks.
Gary Sutton is a retired CEO. He is the author of "Corporate Canaries?Avoid Business Disasters with a Coal Miner's Secrets."
Send a letter to the editor here.
Wrap...
Scrapping Lady Liberty
By Gary Sutton
Monday, July 24, 2006
China's booming economy means our new fence between the U.S. and Mexico is going to cost us taxpayers a bunch. But there’s a nifty solution. It's a solution that solves another pesky problem.It's no secret that the booming Chinese economy is sucking up much of the world’s steel, concrete and copper. Cement prices are up 7 percent over a year ago and steel costs 12 percent more. And that's on top of prices thought to be sky-high last year.
Copper's at record highs, and a new kind of theft has emerged; stripping pipes and wiring out of construction projects at night. A penny's copper value is now above one cent per coin. Melt 'em down.This is the stuff that our new fence between San Diego and Tijuana will be made of.
But there's a respectable supply of it, in New York, serving no function today, so we should see if it can be scrapped and shipped west to help build our fence. Transportation costs will eat up some of our savings, of course, but depending on the fence design, this source could supply enough copper, steel and concrete to run a good thirty to forty miles inland from the Pacific shore.
The Statue of Liberty contains 179,200 pounds of copper, 250,000 pounds of steel and 27,000 tons of concrete. Pulverize the concrete and cook the metals. There’s the raw stuff to begin our fence.This also eliminates false advertising. The plaque on this statue, which was given to us by the French, after all, says something we simply no longer want said:
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"How absurdly corny. And exactly what we don't want to say any more. Well, I'm glad this country felt that way back when my grandmother immigrated, illegally, from Ireland. And when my wife's grandmother also slipped in from Sweden. Both were indentured servants with seven years of free labor given their masters to pay for passage.
How archaic.
Robert Frost, that sentimental poet said "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall," but he's way out of touch with today.
History's full of fences and walls. The Great Wall of China being the prime example, to protect that country. Of course, when the Mongols decided to overrun China, the Great Wall was barely a speed bump.Then we had that Maginot Line, built by France to ensure the Germans could never attack. Hah! And when the Allies countered, those shrewd Germans made a stand at the Maginot Line to stop them. Concrete and steel bunkers, interconnected, armed and impossible to run over. For about two, maybe three hours.
Ah, but we had the famous Berlin Wall, which lasted awhile. Its construction was reviled and its destruction a celebration.Interesting. It kind of makes the world's fence builders look less than bright. Especially when they talk about putting it on the southern border, since the Sept. 11 hijackers came in over the northern. Well, maybe killers are welcome while those wanting jobs need to be stopped in their tracks.
Gary Sutton is a retired CEO. He is the author of "Corporate Canaries?Avoid Business Disasters with a Coal Miner's Secrets."
Send a letter to the editor here.
Wrap...
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Frank Rich raises hell about stem cell research...
From NY Times:
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
July 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Passion of the Embryos
By FRANK RICH
HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.
Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he’s consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action — on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president’s base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq’s marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.
The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.
That the administration’s stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party’s far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo’s condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program’s canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he’s read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush’s side.
The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell “compromise” could make “more than 60” cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board’s audit committee.
This time around, with the administration’s credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn’t fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren’t required because there was “far more promise from adult stem cells,” The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn’t produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells “cruelly deceive patients.”
No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush’s veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been “adopted.” As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.
If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm “moral” line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party’s base won’t be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right’s presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to “one or two at a time.” A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.
Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush’s canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We’ll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush’s moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.
Mr. Reed’s primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990’s with a telegenic choirboy’s star power has now changed his movement’s face again, this time to mud.
The humiliating Reed defeat — by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state — is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it’s what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff’s clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.
Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry — older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn’t some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right’s most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed’s smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing “the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century.”
Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.
By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn’t be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed’s unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president’s men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.
It’s possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right’s Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he’s surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed “inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours” by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.
Wrap...
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/opinion/23rich.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
July 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Passion of the Embryos
By FRANK RICH
HOW time flies when democracy is on the march in the Middle East! Five whole years have passed since ominous Qaeda chatter reached its pre-9/11 fever pitch, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”
History has since condemned President Bush for ignoring that intelligence. But to say that he did nothing that summer is a bum rap. Just three days later, on Aug. 9, he took a break from clearing brush in Crawford to reveal the real priority of his presidency, which had nothing to do with a nuisance like terrorism. His first prime-time address after more than six months in office was devoted to embryonic stem-cell research instead. Placing his profound religious convictions above the pagan narcissism of Americans hoping for cures to diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, he decreed restrictions to shackle the advance of medical science.
Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he’s consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action — on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president’s base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq’s marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.
The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.
That the administration’s stem-cell policy is a political fiasco for its proponents is evident from a single fact: Bill Frist, the most craven politician in Washington, ditched the president. In past pandering to his party’s far-right fringe, Mr. Frist, who calls himself a doctor, misdiagnosed the comatose Terri Schiavo’s condition after watching her on videotape and, in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, refused to dispute an abstinence program’s canard that tears and sweat could transmit AIDS. If Senator Frist is belatedly standing up for stem-cell research, you can bet he’s read some eye-popping polls. His ignorance about H.I.V. notwithstanding, he also knows that the facts about stem cells are not on Mr. Bush’s side.
The voting public has learned this, too. Back in 2001, many Americans gave the president the benefit of the doubt when he said that his stem-cell “compromise” could make “more than 60” cell lines available for federally financed study. Those lines turned out to be as illusory as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: there were only 22, possibly all of them now contaminated or otherwise useless. Fittingly, the only medical authority to endorse the Bush policy at the time, the Houston cancer doctor John Mendelsohn, was a Bush family friend. He would later become notorious for lending his empirical skills to the Enron board’s audit committee.
This time around, with the administration’s credibility ruined by Iraq, official lies about science didn’t fly. When Karl Rove said that embryonic stem cells weren’t required because there was “far more promise from adult stem cells,” The Chicago Tribune investigated and found that the White House couldn’t produce a single stem-cell researcher who agreed. (Ahmad Chalabi, alas, has no medical degree.) In the journal Science, three researchers summed up the consensus of the reality-based scientific community: misleading promises about adult stem cells “cruelly deceive patients.”
No less cruelly deceptive was the photo op staged to sell Mr. Bush’s veto: television imagery of the president cradling so-called Snowflake babies, born via in vitro fertilization from frozen embryos that had been “adopted.” As Senator Arlen Specter has pointed out, only 128 of the 400,000 or so rejected embryos languishing in deep freeze in fertility clinics have been adopted. Many of the rest are destined to be tossed in the garbage.
If you believe, as Mr. Bush says he does, that either discarding or conducting research with I.V.F. embryos is murder, then fertility clinic doctors, like stem-cell researchers, belong on death row. But the president, so proud of drawing a firm “moral” line, will no sooner crack down on I.V.F. than he did on Kim Jong Il: The second-term Bush has been downsized to a paper tiger. His party’s base won’t be so shy. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican who led the Senate anti-stem-cell offensive and sees himself as the religious right’s presidential candidate, has praised the idea of limiting the number of eggs fertilized in vitro to “one or two at a time.” A Kentucky state legislator offered a preview of coming attractions, writing a bill making the fertilization of multiple eggs in I.V.F. treatments a felony.
Tacticians in both political parties have long theorized that if a conservative Supreme Court actually struck down Roe v. Wade, it would set Republicans back at the polls for years. Mr. Bush’s canonization of clumps of frozen cells over potential cancer cures may jump-start that backlash. We’ll see this fall. Already one Republican senatorial candidate, Michael Steele of Maryland, has stepped in Mr. Bush’s moral morass by egregiously comparing stem-cell research to Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.
Mr. Reed’s primary defeat is as much a blow to religious-right political clout as the White House embrace of stem-cell fanaticism. The man who revolutionized the face of theocratic politics in the 1990’s with a telegenic choirboy’s star power has now changed his movement’s face again, this time to mud.
The humiliating Reed defeat — by 12 points against a lackluster rival in a conservative primary in a conservative state — is being pinned on his association with the felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who also tainted that other exemplar of old-time religion, Tom DeLay. True enough, but it’s what Mr. Reed did for Mr. Abramoff’s clients that is most damning, far more so than the golf junkets and money-grubbing. The causes Mr. Reed enabled through manufactured grass-roots campaigns (unwittingly, he maintains) were everything he was supposedly against: Indian casinos and legal loopholes that allowed forced abortions and sexual slavery in the work force of an American commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands.
Hypocrisy among self-aggrandizing evangelists is as old as Elmer Gantry — older, actually. But Mr. Reed wasn’t some campfire charlatan. He was the religious right’s most effective poster boy in mainstream America. He had been recruited for precisely that mission by Pat Robertson, who made him the frontman for the Christian Coalition in 1989, knowing full well that Mr. Reed’s smarts and youth could do P.R. wonders that Mr. Robertson and the rest of the baggage-laden Falwell generation of Moral Majority demagogues could not. And it worked. In 1995, Mr. Reed was rewarded with the cover of Time, for representing “the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by an essentially religious organization in this century.”
Actually, the Christian Coalition was soon to be accused of inflating its membership, Enron-accounting style, and was careening into debt. Only three years after his Time cover, Mr. Reed, having ditched the coalition to set up shop as a political consultant, sent his self-incriminating e-mail to Mr. Abramoff: “I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” He also humped in noncorporate accounts, like the Bush campaigns of 2000 and 2004.
By 2005 Mr. Reed had become so toxic that Mr. Bush wouldn’t be caught on camera with him in Georgia. But the Bush-Rove machine was nonetheless yoked to Mr. Reed in their crusades: the demonization of gay couples as boogeymen (and women) in election years, the many assaults on health (not just in stem-cell laboratories but in federal agencies dealing with birth control and sex education), the undermining of the science of evolution. The beauty of Mr. Reed’s unmasking is the ideological impact: the radical agenda to which he lent an ersatz respectability has lost a big fig leaf, and all the president’s men, tied down like Gulliver in Iraq, cannot put it together again to bamboozle suburban voters.
It’s possible that even Joe Lieberman, a fellow traveler in the religious right’s Schiavo and indecency jeremiads, could be swept out with Rick Santorum in the 2006 wave. Mr. Lieberman is hardly the only Democrat in the Senate who signed on to the war in Iraq, but he’s surely the most sanctimonious. He is also the only Democrat whose incessant Bible thumping (while running for vice president in 2000) was deemed “inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours” by the Anti-Defamation League. As Ralph Reed used to say: amen.
Wrap...
Hezbollah's strategy...
From Strategic Forecasting, Inc:
Special Report:
Why Hezbollah Fights
To understand Hezbollah, it is important to begin with this point: Almost all Muslim Arabs opposed the creation of the state of Israel. Not all of them supported, or support today, the creation of an independent Palestinian state or recognize the Palestinian people as a distinct nation. This is a vital and usually overlooked distinction that is the starting point in our thinking.
When Israel was founded, three distinct views emerged among Arabs. The first was that Israel was a part of the British mandate created after World War I and therefore should have been understood as part of an entity stretching from the Mediterranean to the other side of Jordan, from the border of the Sinai, north to Mount Hermon. Therefore, after 1948, the West Bank became part of the other part of the mandate, Jordan.
There was a second view that argued that there was a single province of the Ottoman Empire called Syria and that all of this province -- what today is Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the country of Syria -- is legitimately part of it. This obviously was the view of Syria, whose policy was and in some ways continues to be that Syria province, divided by Britain and France after World War I, should be reunited under the rule of Damascus.
A third view emerged after the establishment of Israel, pioneered by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. This view was that there is a single Arab nation that should be gathered together in a United Arab Republic. This republic would be socialist, more secular than religious and, above all, modernizing, joining the rest of the world in industrialization and development. All of these three views rejected the existence of Israel, but each had very different ideas of what ought to succeed it.
The many different Palestinian groups that existed after the founding of Israel and until 1980 were not simply random entities. They were, in various ways, groups that straddled these three opinions, with a fourth added after 1967 and pioneered by Yasser Arafat. This view was that there should be an independent Palestinian state, that it should be in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, extend to the original state of Israel and ultimately occupy Jordan as well.
That is why, in September 1970, Arafat tried to overthrow King Hussein in Jordan. For Arafat, Amman, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were all part of the Palestinian homeland.
After the Iranian revolution, a fifth strain emerged. This strain made a general argument that the real issue in the Islamic world was to restore religious-based government. This view opposed the pan-Arab vision of Nasser with the pan-Islamic vision of Khomeini. It regarded the particular nation-states as less important than the type of regime they had.
This primarily Shiite view was later complemented by what was its Sunni counterpart. Rooted partly in Wahhabi Sunni religiosity and partly in the revolutionary spirit of Iran, its view was that the Islamic nation-states were the problem and that the only way to solve it was a transnational Islamic regime -- the caliphate -- that would restore the power of the Islamic world.
That pedantic lesson complete, we can now locate Hezbollah's ideology and intentions more carefully. Hezbollah is a Shiite radical group that grew out of the Iranian revolution. However, there is a tension in its views, because it also is close to Syria. As such, it is close to a much more secular partner, more in the Nasserite tradition domestically. But it also is close to a country that views Lebanon, Jordan and Israel as part of greater Syria, the Syria torn apart by the British and French.
There are deep contradictions ideologically between Iran and Syria, though they share a common interest. First, they both oppose the Sunnis. Remember that when Lebanon first underwent invasion in 1975, it was by Syria intervening on behalf of Christian friends and against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Syria hated Arafat because Arafat insisted on an independent Palestinian state and Syria opposed it. This was apart from the fact that Syria had business interests in Lebanon that the PLO was interfering with. Iran also opposed the PLO because of its religious/ethnic orientation; moreso because it was secular and socialist.
Hezbollah emerged as a group representing Syrian and Iranian interests. These were:
Opposition to the state of Israel
An ambiguous position on an independent Palestine
Hostility to the United States for supporting Israel and later championing Yasser Arafat
Hezbollah had to straddle the deep division between Syrian secularity and Iranian religiosity. However the other three interests allowed them to postpone the issue.
This brings us to the current action. Three things happened to energize Hezbollah:
First, the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon under pressure from the United States undermined an understanding between Israel and Syria. Israel would cede Lebanon to Syria. Syria would control Hezbollah. When Syria lost out in Lebanon, its motive for controlling Hezbollah disappeared.
Syria, in fact, wanted the world to see what would happen if Syria left Lebanon. Chaos was exactly what Syria wanted.
Second, the election of a Hamas-controlled government in the Palestinian territories created massive fluidity in Palestinian politics. The Nasserite Fatah was in decline and a religious Sunni movement was on the rise. Both accepted the principle of Palestinian independence. None made room for either Syrian or Iranian interests. It was essential that Hezbollah, representing itself and the two nations, have a seat at the table that would define Palestinian politics for a generation.
But Hezbollah was more a group of businessmen making money in Beirut than a revolutionary organization. It had to demonstrate its commitment to the destruction of Israel even if it was ambiguous on the nature of the follow-on regime. It had to do something.
Third, the Sunni-Shiite fault line had become venomous. Tensions not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Pakistan were creating a transnational civil war between these two movements. Iran was positioning itself to replace al Qaeda as the revolutionary force in the Islamic world and was again challenging Saudi Arabia as the center of gravity of Islamic religiosity. Israel was a burning issue. It had to be there. Moreover, in its dealings with the United States over Iraq, Iran needed as many levers as possible, and a front in Lebanon confronting Israel, particularly if it bogged down the Israelis, would do just that.
Hezbollah is enabled by both Syria and Iran. But precisely because of both national and ideological differences between those two countries, Hezbollah is not simply a tool for them. They each have influence over Hezbollah but this influence is sometimes contradictory. Syria's interests and Iran's are never quite the same. Nor are Hezbollah's interests quite the same as those of its patrons.
Hezbollah has business interests in legal and illegal businesses around the world. It has interests within Lebanese politics and it has interests in Palestinian politics. As a Syrian client, it looks at the region as one entity. As an Iranian client, it looks to create a theocratic state in the region. As an entity in its own right, it must keep itself going.
Given all these forces, Hezbollah was in a position in which it had to take some significant action in Lebanon, Israel and the Islamic world or be bypassed by other, more effective, groups. Hezbollah chose to act. The decision it made was to go to war with Israel. It did not think it could win the war but it did think it could survive it. And if it fought and survived, it would have a seat at the Palestinian and Lebanese tables, and maintain and reconcile the patronage of Syria and Iran. The reasons were complex, the action was clear.
Hezbollah had prepared for war with Israel for years. It had received weapons and training from Iran and Syria. It had prepared systematic fortifications using these weapons in southern Lebanon after Israel's withdrawal, but also in the Bekaa Valley, where its main base of operations was and in the area south of Beirut, where its political center was. It had prepared for this war carefully, particularly studying the U.S. experience in Iraq.
In our view, Hezbollah has three military goals in this battle:
1. Fight the most effective defensive battle ever fought against Israel by an Arab army, surpassing the performance of Egypt and Syria in 1973.
2. Inflict direct and substantial damage on Israel proper using conventional weapons in order to demonstrate the limits of Israeli power.
3. Draw Israel into an invasion of Lebanon and, following resistance, move to an insurgency that does to the Israelis what the Sunnis in Iraq have done to the Americans.
In doing this, the U.S.-Israeli bloc would be fighting simultaneously on two fronts. This would place Jordan in a difficult position. It would radicalize Syria (Syria is too secular to be considered radical in this context). It would establish Hezbollah as the claimant to Arab and Islamic primacy along the Levant. It also would establish Shiite radicalism as equal to Sunni radicalism.
The capture of two Israeli soldiers was the first provocation, triggering Israeli attacks. But neither the capture nor the retaliation represented a break point. That happened when Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa, several times, presenting Israel with a problem that forced it to take military steps -- steps for which Hezbollah thought it was ready and which it thought it could survive, and exploit. Hezbollah had to have known that attacking the third largest city in Israel would force a response. That is exactly what it wanted.
Hezbollah's strategy will be to tie down the Israelis as long as possible first in the area south of the Litani River and then north in the Bekaa. It can, and will, continue to rocket Haifa from further north. It will inflict casualties and draw the Israelis further north. At a certain point Hezbollah will do what the Taliban and Saddam Hussein did: It will suddenly abandon the conventional fight, going to ground, and then re-emerge as a guerrilla group, inflicting casualties on the Israelis as the Sunnis do on the Americans, wearing them down.
Israel's strategy, as we have seen, will be to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure but not occupy any territory. In other words, invade, smash and leave, carrying out follow-on attacks as needed. Hezbollah's goal will be to create military problems that force Israel to maintain a presence for an extended period of time, so that its follow-on strategy can be made to work. This will be what determines the outcome of the war. Hezbollah will try to keep Israel from disengaging. Israel will try to disengage.
Hezbollah sees the war in these stages:
1. Rocket attacks to force and Israeli response.
2. An extended period of conventional combat to impose substantial losses on the Israelis, and establish Hezbollah capabilities to both Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds. This will involve using fairly sophisticated weaponry and will go on as long as Hezbollah can extend it.
3. Hezbollah's abandonment of conventional warfare for a prepared insurgency program.
What Hezbollah wants is political power in Lebanon and among the Palestinians, and freedom for action within the context of Syrian-Iranian relations. This war will cost it dearly, but it has been preparing for this for a generation. Some of the old guard may not have the stomach for this, but it was either this or be pushed aside by the younger bloods. Syria wanted to see this happen. Iran wanted to see this happen. Iran risks nothing. Syria risks little since Israel is terrified of the successor regime to the Assads. So long as Syria limits resupply and does not intervene, Israel must leave Damascus out.
Looked at from Hezbollah's point of view, taking the fight to the Israelis is something that has not happened in quite a while. Hezbollah's hitting of Haifa gives it the position it has sought for a generation. If it can avoid utter calamity, it will have won -- if not by defeating Israel, then by putting itself first among the anti-Israeli forces. What Hezbollah wants in Israel is much less clear and important than what it opposes. It opposes Israel and is the most effective force fighting it. Fatah and Hamas are now bystanders in the battle for Israel. They have no love for or trust in Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is doing what they have only talked about. Israel's mission is to crush Hezbollah quickly. Hezbollah's job is to survive and hurt Israel and the IDF as long as possible. That is what this war is about for Hezbollah.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap...
Special Report:
Why Hezbollah Fights
To understand Hezbollah, it is important to begin with this point: Almost all Muslim Arabs opposed the creation of the state of Israel. Not all of them supported, or support today, the creation of an independent Palestinian state or recognize the Palestinian people as a distinct nation. This is a vital and usually overlooked distinction that is the starting point in our thinking.
When Israel was founded, three distinct views emerged among Arabs. The first was that Israel was a part of the British mandate created after World War I and therefore should have been understood as part of an entity stretching from the Mediterranean to the other side of Jordan, from the border of the Sinai, north to Mount Hermon. Therefore, after 1948, the West Bank became part of the other part of the mandate, Jordan.
There was a second view that argued that there was a single province of the Ottoman Empire called Syria and that all of this province -- what today is Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the country of Syria -- is legitimately part of it. This obviously was the view of Syria, whose policy was and in some ways continues to be that Syria province, divided by Britain and France after World War I, should be reunited under the rule of Damascus.
A third view emerged after the establishment of Israel, pioneered by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. This view was that there is a single Arab nation that should be gathered together in a United Arab Republic. This republic would be socialist, more secular than religious and, above all, modernizing, joining the rest of the world in industrialization and development. All of these three views rejected the existence of Israel, but each had very different ideas of what ought to succeed it.
The many different Palestinian groups that existed after the founding of Israel and until 1980 were not simply random entities. They were, in various ways, groups that straddled these three opinions, with a fourth added after 1967 and pioneered by Yasser Arafat. This view was that there should be an independent Palestinian state, that it should be in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, extend to the original state of Israel and ultimately occupy Jordan as well.
That is why, in September 1970, Arafat tried to overthrow King Hussein in Jordan. For Arafat, Amman, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv were all part of the Palestinian homeland.
After the Iranian revolution, a fifth strain emerged. This strain made a general argument that the real issue in the Islamic world was to restore religious-based government. This view opposed the pan-Arab vision of Nasser with the pan-Islamic vision of Khomeini. It regarded the particular nation-states as less important than the type of regime they had.
This primarily Shiite view was later complemented by what was its Sunni counterpart. Rooted partly in Wahhabi Sunni religiosity and partly in the revolutionary spirit of Iran, its view was that the Islamic nation-states were the problem and that the only way to solve it was a transnational Islamic regime -- the caliphate -- that would restore the power of the Islamic world.
That pedantic lesson complete, we can now locate Hezbollah's ideology and intentions more carefully. Hezbollah is a Shiite radical group that grew out of the Iranian revolution. However, there is a tension in its views, because it also is close to Syria. As such, it is close to a much more secular partner, more in the Nasserite tradition domestically. But it also is close to a country that views Lebanon, Jordan and Israel as part of greater Syria, the Syria torn apart by the British and French.
There are deep contradictions ideologically between Iran and Syria, though they share a common interest. First, they both oppose the Sunnis. Remember that when Lebanon first underwent invasion in 1975, it was by Syria intervening on behalf of Christian friends and against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Syria hated Arafat because Arafat insisted on an independent Palestinian state and Syria opposed it. This was apart from the fact that Syria had business interests in Lebanon that the PLO was interfering with. Iran also opposed the PLO because of its religious/ethnic orientation; moreso because it was secular and socialist.
Hezbollah emerged as a group representing Syrian and Iranian interests. These were:
Opposition to the state of Israel
An ambiguous position on an independent Palestine
Hostility to the United States for supporting Israel and later championing Yasser Arafat
Hezbollah had to straddle the deep division between Syrian secularity and Iranian religiosity. However the other three interests allowed them to postpone the issue.
This brings us to the current action. Three things happened to energize Hezbollah:
First, the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon under pressure from the United States undermined an understanding between Israel and Syria. Israel would cede Lebanon to Syria. Syria would control Hezbollah. When Syria lost out in Lebanon, its motive for controlling Hezbollah disappeared.
Syria, in fact, wanted the world to see what would happen if Syria left Lebanon. Chaos was exactly what Syria wanted.
Second, the election of a Hamas-controlled government in the Palestinian territories created massive fluidity in Palestinian politics. The Nasserite Fatah was in decline and a religious Sunni movement was on the rise. Both accepted the principle of Palestinian independence. None made room for either Syrian or Iranian interests. It was essential that Hezbollah, representing itself and the two nations, have a seat at the table that would define Palestinian politics for a generation.
But Hezbollah was more a group of businessmen making money in Beirut than a revolutionary organization. It had to demonstrate its commitment to the destruction of Israel even if it was ambiguous on the nature of the follow-on regime. It had to do something.
Third, the Sunni-Shiite fault line had become venomous. Tensions not only in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Pakistan were creating a transnational civil war between these two movements. Iran was positioning itself to replace al Qaeda as the revolutionary force in the Islamic world and was again challenging Saudi Arabia as the center of gravity of Islamic religiosity. Israel was a burning issue. It had to be there. Moreover, in its dealings with the United States over Iraq, Iran needed as many levers as possible, and a front in Lebanon confronting Israel, particularly if it bogged down the Israelis, would do just that.
Hezbollah is enabled by both Syria and Iran. But precisely because of both national and ideological differences between those two countries, Hezbollah is not simply a tool for them. They each have influence over Hezbollah but this influence is sometimes contradictory. Syria's interests and Iran's are never quite the same. Nor are Hezbollah's interests quite the same as those of its patrons.
Hezbollah has business interests in legal and illegal businesses around the world. It has interests within Lebanese politics and it has interests in Palestinian politics. As a Syrian client, it looks at the region as one entity. As an Iranian client, it looks to create a theocratic state in the region. As an entity in its own right, it must keep itself going.
Given all these forces, Hezbollah was in a position in which it had to take some significant action in Lebanon, Israel and the Islamic world or be bypassed by other, more effective, groups. Hezbollah chose to act. The decision it made was to go to war with Israel. It did not think it could win the war but it did think it could survive it. And if it fought and survived, it would have a seat at the Palestinian and Lebanese tables, and maintain and reconcile the patronage of Syria and Iran. The reasons were complex, the action was clear.
Hezbollah had prepared for war with Israel for years. It had received weapons and training from Iran and Syria. It had prepared systematic fortifications using these weapons in southern Lebanon after Israel's withdrawal, but also in the Bekaa Valley, where its main base of operations was and in the area south of Beirut, where its political center was. It had prepared for this war carefully, particularly studying the U.S. experience in Iraq.
In our view, Hezbollah has three military goals in this battle:
1. Fight the most effective defensive battle ever fought against Israel by an Arab army, surpassing the performance of Egypt and Syria in 1973.
2. Inflict direct and substantial damage on Israel proper using conventional weapons in order to demonstrate the limits of Israeli power.
3. Draw Israel into an invasion of Lebanon and, following resistance, move to an insurgency that does to the Israelis what the Sunnis in Iraq have done to the Americans.
In doing this, the U.S.-Israeli bloc would be fighting simultaneously on two fronts. This would place Jordan in a difficult position. It would radicalize Syria (Syria is too secular to be considered radical in this context). It would establish Hezbollah as the claimant to Arab and Islamic primacy along the Levant. It also would establish Shiite radicalism as equal to Sunni radicalism.
The capture of two Israeli soldiers was the first provocation, triggering Israeli attacks. But neither the capture nor the retaliation represented a break point. That happened when Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa, several times, presenting Israel with a problem that forced it to take military steps -- steps for which Hezbollah thought it was ready and which it thought it could survive, and exploit. Hezbollah had to have known that attacking the third largest city in Israel would force a response. That is exactly what it wanted.
Hezbollah's strategy will be to tie down the Israelis as long as possible first in the area south of the Litani River and then north in the Bekaa. It can, and will, continue to rocket Haifa from further north. It will inflict casualties and draw the Israelis further north. At a certain point Hezbollah will do what the Taliban and Saddam Hussein did: It will suddenly abandon the conventional fight, going to ground, and then re-emerge as a guerrilla group, inflicting casualties on the Israelis as the Sunnis do on the Americans, wearing them down.
Israel's strategy, as we have seen, will be to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure but not occupy any territory. In other words, invade, smash and leave, carrying out follow-on attacks as needed. Hezbollah's goal will be to create military problems that force Israel to maintain a presence for an extended period of time, so that its follow-on strategy can be made to work. This will be what determines the outcome of the war. Hezbollah will try to keep Israel from disengaging. Israel will try to disengage.
Hezbollah sees the war in these stages:
1. Rocket attacks to force and Israeli response.
2. An extended period of conventional combat to impose substantial losses on the Israelis, and establish Hezbollah capabilities to both Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds. This will involve using fairly sophisticated weaponry and will go on as long as Hezbollah can extend it.
3. Hezbollah's abandonment of conventional warfare for a prepared insurgency program.
What Hezbollah wants is political power in Lebanon and among the Palestinians, and freedom for action within the context of Syrian-Iranian relations. This war will cost it dearly, but it has been preparing for this for a generation. Some of the old guard may not have the stomach for this, but it was either this or be pushed aside by the younger bloods. Syria wanted to see this happen. Iran wanted to see this happen. Iran risks nothing. Syria risks little since Israel is terrified of the successor regime to the Assads. So long as Syria limits resupply and does not intervene, Israel must leave Damascus out.
Looked at from Hezbollah's point of view, taking the fight to the Israelis is something that has not happened in quite a while. Hezbollah's hitting of Haifa gives it the position it has sought for a generation. If it can avoid utter calamity, it will have won -- if not by defeating Israel, then by putting itself first among the anti-Israeli forces. What Hezbollah wants in Israel is much less clear and important than what it opposes. It opposes Israel and is the most effective force fighting it. Fatah and Hamas are now bystanders in the battle for Israel. They have no love for or trust in Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is doing what they have only talked about. Israel's mission is to crush Hezbollah quickly. Hezbollah's job is to survive and hurt Israel and the IDF as long as possible. That is what this war is about for Hezbollah.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap...
John Dean on Conservatives...
From Alternet.org via truthout.org:
FOCUS John Dean: The Authoritarian Streak in the Conservative Movement
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072206X.shtml
John Dean writes, "Authoritarianism is not well understood and seldom discussed in the context of American government and politics, yet it now constitutes the prevailing thinking and behavior among conservatives. Regrettably, empirical studies reveal, however, that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, anti-democratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral. They are also often conservatives without conscience who are capable of plunging this nation into disasters the likes of which we have never known."
Wrap...
FOCUS John Dean: The Authoritarian Streak in the Conservative Movement
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072206X.shtml
John Dean writes, "Authoritarianism is not well understood and seldom discussed in the context of American government and politics, yet it now constitutes the prevailing thinking and behavior among conservatives. Regrettably, empirical studies reveal, however, that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, anti-democratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral. They are also often conservatives without conscience who are capable of plunging this nation into disasters the likes of which we have never known."
Wrap...
Friday, July 21, 2006
BushCo is a Cancer on the Presidency....
From Salon:
The emperor's new veto
Bush's first veto of Congress marks the collapse of his imperial presidency -- and a crisis for the paranoid style he and his party have mastered.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Jul. 20, 2006
President Bush's first veto marks the first time he has lost control of the Republican Congress. But it is significant for more than that. Until now the president has felt no need to assert his executive power over the legislative branch. Congress was whipped into line to uphold his every wish and stifle nearly every dissent. Almost no oversight hearings were held. Investigations into the Bush administration's scandals were quashed. Potentially troublesome reports were twisted and distorted to smear critics and create scapegoats, like the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on faulty intelligence leading into the Iraq war. Legislation, which originates in the House of Representatives, was carefully filtered by imposition of an iron rule that it must always meet with the approval of the majority of the majority. By employing this standard, the Republican House leadership, acting as proxy for the White House, managed to rely on the right wing to dominate the entire congressional process.
The extraordinary power Bush has exercised is unprecedented. Bill Clinton issued 37 vetoes, George H.W. Bush 44, and Ronald Reagan 78. To be sure, they had to contend with Congresses led by the opposing party. Nonetheless, all presidents going back to the 1840s, and presidents before them, used the veto power, even when their parties were in the congressional majority. Just as the absence of any Bush vetoes has highlighted his absolute power, so his recourse to the veto signals its decline.
The vote in the Senate on Tuesday in favor of federal support for medical research using embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to cure many diseases and disabilities, while short of the two-thirds required to override a veto, was an overwhelming break with Bush, 63 to 37. The administration has struck back with false claims made by Karl Rove (assuming the role of science advisor) that adult stem cells are equivalent to embryonic ones, and with the accusation, made by White House press secretary Tony Snow, that using the thousands of routinely discarded embryos for research would amount to "murder." On Wednesday, Bush declared that the bill "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. So I vetoed it."
One-party congressional rule has been indispensable to Bush's imperial presidency. Its faltering reflects Republican panic in anticipation of the midterm elections, the disintegration of Bush's authority and of his concept of a radical presidency. As the consequences of Bush's rule bear down on the Republicans, the right demands that he recommit to the radicalism that has entangled him in one fiasco after another. Bush's latest crisis is also a crisis of the paranoid style that has been instrumental in sustaining Republican ascendancy.
The first principle underlying the Bush presidency was never more succinctly articulated than at the July 12 hearing called by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Supreme Court had ruled two weeks earlier, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the administration's detainee policy was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and without a legal basis. Steven Bradbury, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, appeared to defend not only the discredited policy but also the notion that as commander in chief Bush has the authority to make or enforce any law he wants -- the explicit basis of the infamous torture memo of 2002. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Bradbury about the president's bizarre claim that the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision in fact "upheld his position on Guantánamo."
"Was the president right or was he wrong?" asked Leahy. "It's under the law of war--," said Bradbury. Leahy repeated his question: "Was the president right or was he wrong?" Bradbury then delivered his immortal reply: "The president is always right."
Bradbury meant more than that Bush personally is "always right." He had condensed into a phrase the legal theory of presidential infallibility. In his capacity of commander in chief, the president can never be wrong, simply because he is president. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan that presidential powers in foreign policy do not override or supplant those that the Constitution assigns to Congress, Bradbury instinctively fell back on the central dogma of the Bush White House. According to the doctrine, the rule of law is just an expression of executive fiat. He can suspend due process of detainees, conduct domestic surveillance without warrants, and decide which laws and which parts of laws he will enforce by appending signing statements to legislation at will. The president becomes an elective monarch who should be above checks and balances.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he reiterated his belief in presidential infallibility. Under questioning, he admitted that Bush himself had denied security clearances to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, thereby thwarting its investigation into whether government lawyers had acted properly in approving and overseeing the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance, ordered by the president to evade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Never before in its 31-year history has the OPR been denied clearances, much less through the direct intervention of the president. But Gonzales insisted that the president cannot do wrong. "The president of the United States makes decisions about who is ultimately given access," he said. And he is always right. Case closed.
Bush's coverup, legitimate because he says it is, and Gonzales' defense, smug in his certitude, are only the latest wrinkles in his radical presidency. "The president and vice president, it appears," writes John W. Dean, the former counsel to President Nixon, in his new book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," "believe the lesson of Watergate was not to stay within the law, but rather not to get caught. And if you do get caught, claim that the president can do whatever he thinks necessary in the name of national security."
The metastasizing of conservatism under Bush is a problem that has naturally obsessed Dean. His part in the Watergate drama as the witness who stepped forward to describe a "cancer on the presidency" has given him an unparalleled insight into the roots of the current presidency's pathology. He recalls the words of Charles Colson, Nixon's counselor and overseer of dirty tricks: "I would do anything the president of the United States would ask me to do, period." This vow of unthinking obedience is a doctrinal forerunner of Bush's notion of presidential infallibility.
Dean, moreover, was close to Barry Goldwater, progenitor of the conservative movement and advocate of limited government. Dean was the high school roommate of Barry Goldwater Jr. and became close to his father. In his retirement, the senator from Arizona, who had been the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, had become increasingly upset at the direction of the Republican Party and the influence of the religious right. He and Dean talked about writing a book about the perverse evolution away from conservatism as he believed in it, but his illness and death prevented him from the task. Now, Dean has published "Conservatives Without Conscience," whose title is a riff on Goldwater's creedal "Conscience of a Conservative," and intended as an homage.
onservatism, as Dean sees it, has been transformed into authoritarianism. In his book, he revives an analysis of the social psychology of the right that its ideologues spent decades trying to deflect and discourage. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and a team of social scientists published "The Authoritarian Personality," exploring the psychological underpinnings of those attracted to Nazi, fascist and right-wing movements. In the immediate aftermath of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's rise and fall, the leading American sociologists and historians of the time -- Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset and others -- contributed in 1955 to "The New American Right," examining the status anxieties of reactionary populism. The 1964 Goldwater campaign provided grist for historian Hofstadter to offer his memorable description of the "paranoid style" of the "pseudo-conservative revolt."
While Dean honors Goldwater, he picks up where Hofstadter left off. "During the past half century," he writes, "our understanding of authoritarianism has been significantly refined and advanced." In particular, he cites the work of Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba, whose studies have plumbed the depths of those he calls "right-wing authoritarians." They are submissive toward authority, fundamentalist in orientation, dogmatic, socially isolated and insular, fearful of people different from themselves, hostile to minorities, uncritical toward dominating authority figures, prone to a constant sense of besiegement and panic, and punitive and self-righteous. Altemeyer estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of Americans might be categorized as right-wing authoritarians.
According to Dean's assessment, "Nixon, for all his faults, had more of a conscience than Bush and Cheney ... Our government has become largely authoritarian ... run by an array of authoritarian personalities," who flourish "because the growth of contemporary conservatism has generated countless millions of authoritarian followers, people who will not question such actions."
But it is Bush's own actions that have produced a political crisis for Republican one-party rule. In their campaign to retain Congress, Republicans are staking their chips on the fear generated by the war on terror and the culture war, doubling and tripling their bets on the paranoid style. To that end, House Republicans have unveiled what they call the "American Values Agenda." Despite the defeat of key parts of the program -- constitutional amendments against gay marriage and flag burning -- and the congressional approval of embryonic stem cell research, the Republicans hope that these expected setbacks will only inflame the conservative base. Their strategy is to remind their followers that enemies surround them and that the president is always right.
Wrap...
The emperor's new veto
Bush's first veto of Congress marks the collapse of his imperial presidency -- and a crisis for the paranoid style he and his party have mastered.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Jul. 20, 2006
President Bush's first veto marks the first time he has lost control of the Republican Congress. But it is significant for more than that. Until now the president has felt no need to assert his executive power over the legislative branch. Congress was whipped into line to uphold his every wish and stifle nearly every dissent. Almost no oversight hearings were held. Investigations into the Bush administration's scandals were quashed. Potentially troublesome reports were twisted and distorted to smear critics and create scapegoats, like the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's report on faulty intelligence leading into the Iraq war. Legislation, which originates in the House of Representatives, was carefully filtered by imposition of an iron rule that it must always meet with the approval of the majority of the majority. By employing this standard, the Republican House leadership, acting as proxy for the White House, managed to rely on the right wing to dominate the entire congressional process.
The extraordinary power Bush has exercised is unprecedented. Bill Clinton issued 37 vetoes, George H.W. Bush 44, and Ronald Reagan 78. To be sure, they had to contend with Congresses led by the opposing party. Nonetheless, all presidents going back to the 1840s, and presidents before them, used the veto power, even when their parties were in the congressional majority. Just as the absence of any Bush vetoes has highlighted his absolute power, so his recourse to the veto signals its decline.
The vote in the Senate on Tuesday in favor of federal support for medical research using embryonic stem cells, which have the potential to cure many diseases and disabilities, while short of the two-thirds required to override a veto, was an overwhelming break with Bush, 63 to 37. The administration has struck back with false claims made by Karl Rove (assuming the role of science advisor) that adult stem cells are equivalent to embryonic ones, and with the accusation, made by White House press secretary Tony Snow, that using the thousands of routinely discarded embryos for research would amount to "murder." On Wednesday, Bush declared that the bill "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect. So I vetoed it."
One-party congressional rule has been indispensable to Bush's imperial presidency. Its faltering reflects Republican panic in anticipation of the midterm elections, the disintegration of Bush's authority and of his concept of a radical presidency. As the consequences of Bush's rule bear down on the Republicans, the right demands that he recommit to the radicalism that has entangled him in one fiasco after another. Bush's latest crisis is also a crisis of the paranoid style that has been instrumental in sustaining Republican ascendancy.
The first principle underlying the Bush presidency was never more succinctly articulated than at the July 12 hearing called by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Supreme Court had ruled two weeks earlier, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the administration's detainee policy was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and without a legal basis. Steven Bradbury, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, appeared to defend not only the discredited policy but also the notion that as commander in chief Bush has the authority to make or enforce any law he wants -- the explicit basis of the infamous torture memo of 2002. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., asked Bradbury about the president's bizarre claim that the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision in fact "upheld his position on Guantánamo."
"Was the president right or was he wrong?" asked Leahy. "It's under the law of war--," said Bradbury. Leahy repeated his question: "Was the president right or was he wrong?" Bradbury then delivered his immortal reply: "The president is always right."
Bradbury meant more than that Bush personally is "always right." He had condensed into a phrase the legal theory of presidential infallibility. In his capacity of commander in chief, the president can never be wrong, simply because he is president. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdan that presidential powers in foreign policy do not override or supplant those that the Constitution assigns to Congress, Bradbury instinctively fell back on the central dogma of the Bush White House. According to the doctrine, the rule of law is just an expression of executive fiat. He can suspend due process of detainees, conduct domestic surveillance without warrants, and decide which laws and which parts of laws he will enforce by appending signing statements to legislation at will. The president becomes an elective monarch who should be above checks and balances.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he reiterated his belief in presidential infallibility. Under questioning, he admitted that Bush himself had denied security clearances to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, thereby thwarting its investigation into whether government lawyers had acted properly in approving and overseeing the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic surveillance, ordered by the president to evade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Never before in its 31-year history has the OPR been denied clearances, much less through the direct intervention of the president. But Gonzales insisted that the president cannot do wrong. "The president of the United States makes decisions about who is ultimately given access," he said. And he is always right. Case closed.
Bush's coverup, legitimate because he says it is, and Gonzales' defense, smug in his certitude, are only the latest wrinkles in his radical presidency. "The president and vice president, it appears," writes John W. Dean, the former counsel to President Nixon, in his new book, "Conservatives Without Conscience," "believe the lesson of Watergate was not to stay within the law, but rather not to get caught. And if you do get caught, claim that the president can do whatever he thinks necessary in the name of national security."
The metastasizing of conservatism under Bush is a problem that has naturally obsessed Dean. His part in the Watergate drama as the witness who stepped forward to describe a "cancer on the presidency" has given him an unparalleled insight into the roots of the current presidency's pathology. He recalls the words of Charles Colson, Nixon's counselor and overseer of dirty tricks: "I would do anything the president of the United States would ask me to do, period." This vow of unthinking obedience is a doctrinal forerunner of Bush's notion of presidential infallibility.
Dean, moreover, was close to Barry Goldwater, progenitor of the conservative movement and advocate of limited government. Dean was the high school roommate of Barry Goldwater Jr. and became close to his father. In his retirement, the senator from Arizona, who had been the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, had become increasingly upset at the direction of the Republican Party and the influence of the religious right. He and Dean talked about writing a book about the perverse evolution away from conservatism as he believed in it, but his illness and death prevented him from the task. Now, Dean has published "Conservatives Without Conscience," whose title is a riff on Goldwater's creedal "Conscience of a Conservative," and intended as an homage.
onservatism, as Dean sees it, has been transformed into authoritarianism. In his book, he revives an analysis of the social psychology of the right that its ideologues spent decades trying to deflect and discourage. In 1950, Theodor Adorno and a team of social scientists published "The Authoritarian Personality," exploring the psychological underpinnings of those attracted to Nazi, fascist and right-wing movements. In the immediate aftermath of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's rise and fall, the leading American sociologists and historians of the time -- Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset and others -- contributed in 1955 to "The New American Right," examining the status anxieties of reactionary populism. The 1964 Goldwater campaign provided grist for historian Hofstadter to offer his memorable description of the "paranoid style" of the "pseudo-conservative revolt."
While Dean honors Goldwater, he picks up where Hofstadter left off. "During the past half century," he writes, "our understanding of authoritarianism has been significantly refined and advanced." In particular, he cites the work of Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba, whose studies have plumbed the depths of those he calls "right-wing authoritarians." They are submissive toward authority, fundamentalist in orientation, dogmatic, socially isolated and insular, fearful of people different from themselves, hostile to minorities, uncritical toward dominating authority figures, prone to a constant sense of besiegement and panic, and punitive and self-righteous. Altemeyer estimates that between 20 and 25 percent of Americans might be categorized as right-wing authoritarians.
According to Dean's assessment, "Nixon, for all his faults, had more of a conscience than Bush and Cheney ... Our government has become largely authoritarian ... run by an array of authoritarian personalities," who flourish "because the growth of contemporary conservatism has generated countless millions of authoritarian followers, people who will not question such actions."
But it is Bush's own actions that have produced a political crisis for Republican one-party rule. In their campaign to retain Congress, Republicans are staking their chips on the fear generated by the war on terror and the culture war, doubling and tripling their bets on the paranoid style. To that end, House Republicans have unveiled what they call the "American Values Agenda." Despite the defeat of key parts of the program -- constitutional amendments against gay marriage and flag burning -- and the congressional approval of embryonic stem cell research, the Republicans hope that these expected setbacks will only inflame the conservative base. Their strategy is to remind their followers that enemies surround them and that the president is always right.
Wrap...
Bush tries bullshit on NAACP...
From Greg Palast:
THEY DON'T CALL IT THE "WHITE" HOUSE FOR NOTHING
Bush at the NAACP Convention
July 21, 2006
By Greg Palast
God lost this time. I counted: Bush mentioned God only six times in his speech to the NAACP today. The winner was 'faith' -- which got seven mentions, though if you count "The Creator" as God, well, then the Lord tied it.
Coming in right behind God and Faith, other big mentions in the First Home Boy's rap included: The Voting Rights Act, his family's "commitment to civil rights," the "death tax," rebuilding New Orleans and "public school choice" and "soft bigotry."
As the philosopher Aretha Franklin once said, "Who's zoomin' who?"
Let's take it one point at a time.
Death and Taxes -- Inheritance taxes apply only to those who leave assets exceeding $2 million. Mr. Bush realized how crucial this issue was to the NAACP. He said, "The [current] 'death tax' will prevent future African American entrepreneurs from being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next."
His heart went out to the families of Gulf Coast flood victims who discovered that they could collect only the first two million bucks of their inheritance tax-free. Apparently, Mr. Bush heard that, among the 2,000 folk drowned in New Orleans, there were several millionaires. Luckily, the rumor proved false.
School Choice -- Our Voucher Salesman-in-Chief offered the Black folk a truly exciting deal:
"When we find schools that are not teaching and will not change, our parents should have a different option…. charter schools and public school choice and opportunity scholarships to be able to enable parents to move their child out of a school that‘s not teaching."
What he meant in this statement that was nearly in English ("to be able to enable"?) was that his No Child Left Behind Act gives all parents the right to move their kids to better schools.
Indeed, the Behind Act does require school systems to offer that choice. In New York, for example, a third of a million students qualify under the law to escape poorly performing schools -- but only 8,000 could do so. Mr. Bush forgot to include the money. His parents never asked for a handout to move him to Phillips Andover Academy to pay for the moves.
Voting Rights Act -- This was a big applause line. Bush gloated about his convincing the White Sheets Caucus of the Republican Party to go along with the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. But he forgot to mention the fine print. The Southern GOP only went along for renewing the law on the understanding that the law would never be enforced.
Think I'm kidding? Check this: in July 2004, the US Civil Rights Commission voted to open a civil and criminal investigation of his brother's Administration in Florida for knowingly renewing a racially-biased scrub of voter rolls. In April 2004, Governor Jeb Bush, of the "family committed to civil rights," personally ordered this new purge of "felons" from voter rolls, despite promising never to repeat the infamous scrub of 2000. The new purge violated a settlement he signed with the, uh, NAACP.
It also violated the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Commission turned the case over to the US Justice Department which, two years on, has yet to begin the investigation. That's not to say President Bush did nothing. He swiftly replaced every member of the Commission who voted to investigate his brother.
Ownership Society -- Our President was really excited recounting how he spoke to actual Black people in Mississippi, asking how many of them had 401(k) investment plans. Strangely, he didn't ask them if they had health insurance. Since Mr. Bush took office, the number of African-American adults without it has grown to 7.3 million. That's a kind of death tax, too, Mr. President.
Our President completed the White-washing of his record by railing against, "the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you have low expectations," he said, "you're going to get lousy results."
Well, the NAACP never expected much from this President, and the results have proved his point.
**********
Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." Go to www.GregPalast.com.
Palast will speak at the Harlem Book Fair this Saturday, 1pm to 2pm at the Schomberg Center on West 135th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues. And hear Palast with Robert Kennedy Jr., discussing Oil and War -- on Air America. Watch this space for details.
Media inquiries: interviews(at) gregpalast.com
Wrap...
THEY DON'T CALL IT THE "WHITE" HOUSE FOR NOTHING
Bush at the NAACP Convention
July 21, 2006
By Greg Palast
God lost this time. I counted: Bush mentioned God only six times in his speech to the NAACP today. The winner was 'faith' -- which got seven mentions, though if you count "The Creator" as God, well, then the Lord tied it.
Coming in right behind God and Faith, other big mentions in the First Home Boy's rap included: The Voting Rights Act, his family's "commitment to civil rights," the "death tax," rebuilding New Orleans and "public school choice" and "soft bigotry."
As the philosopher Aretha Franklin once said, "Who's zoomin' who?"
Let's take it one point at a time.
Death and Taxes -- Inheritance taxes apply only to those who leave assets exceeding $2 million. Mr. Bush realized how crucial this issue was to the NAACP. He said, "The [current] 'death tax' will prevent future African American entrepreneurs from being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next."
His heart went out to the families of Gulf Coast flood victims who discovered that they could collect only the first two million bucks of their inheritance tax-free. Apparently, Mr. Bush heard that, among the 2,000 folk drowned in New Orleans, there were several millionaires. Luckily, the rumor proved false.
School Choice -- Our Voucher Salesman-in-Chief offered the Black folk a truly exciting deal:
"When we find schools that are not teaching and will not change, our parents should have a different option…. charter schools and public school choice and opportunity scholarships to be able to enable parents to move their child out of a school that‘s not teaching."
What he meant in this statement that was nearly in English ("to be able to enable"?) was that his No Child Left Behind Act gives all parents the right to move their kids to better schools.
Indeed, the Behind Act does require school systems to offer that choice. In New York, for example, a third of a million students qualify under the law to escape poorly performing schools -- but only 8,000 could do so. Mr. Bush forgot to include the money. His parents never asked for a handout to move him to Phillips Andover Academy to pay for the moves.
Voting Rights Act -- This was a big applause line. Bush gloated about his convincing the White Sheets Caucus of the Republican Party to go along with the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. But he forgot to mention the fine print. The Southern GOP only went along for renewing the law on the understanding that the law would never be enforced.
Think I'm kidding? Check this: in July 2004, the US Civil Rights Commission voted to open a civil and criminal investigation of his brother's Administration in Florida for knowingly renewing a racially-biased scrub of voter rolls. In April 2004, Governor Jeb Bush, of the "family committed to civil rights," personally ordered this new purge of "felons" from voter rolls, despite promising never to repeat the infamous scrub of 2000. The new purge violated a settlement he signed with the, uh, NAACP.
It also violated the Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Commission turned the case over to the US Justice Department which, two years on, has yet to begin the investigation. That's not to say President Bush did nothing. He swiftly replaced every member of the Commission who voted to investigate his brother.
Ownership Society -- Our President was really excited recounting how he spoke to actual Black people in Mississippi, asking how many of them had 401(k) investment plans. Strangely, he didn't ask them if they had health insurance. Since Mr. Bush took office, the number of African-American adults without it has grown to 7.3 million. That's a kind of death tax, too, Mr. President.
Our President completed the White-washing of his record by railing against, "the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you have low expectations," he said, "you're going to get lousy results."
Well, the NAACP never expected much from this President, and the results have proved his point.
**********
Greg Palast is the author of the just-released New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." Go to www.GregPalast.com.
Palast will speak at the Harlem Book Fair this Saturday, 1pm to 2pm at the Schomberg Center on West 135th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues. And hear Palast with Robert Kennedy Jr., discussing Oil and War -- on Air America. Watch this space for details.
Media inquiries: interviews(at) gregpalast.com
Wrap...
Government spending gone public...for a change...
From Secrecy News:
SEEKING TRANSPARENCY IN FEDERAL FUNDING
A new legislative initiative would require the government to disclose and to publish online all federal contracts, grants, and other forms of spending.
"I like to think of this bill as 'Google for Government Spending',"said Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). "The concept behind the bill is really quite simple: Put information on government spending out there for all to see and greater accountability will follow. It will also change the expectations of those receiving funds that they will know in advance that the information will be public," he said.
The bill has neatly circumvented the usual partisan divisions and has won bipartisan support and co-sponsorship from the likes of Sen.Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and endorsements from Greenpeace and the Heritage Foundation.
A July 18 Senate hearing on the proposal (S. 2590) featured statements from Senators Coburn, Obama and McCain, and testimony from Gary D.Bass of OMB Watch and Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner and the blog Tapscott's Copy Desk.
See their prepared statements here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2006/index.html#ffa
The Los Angeles Times editorialized on the bill in "Googling theFeds," July 21:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-coburn21jul21,0,4134575.story
Wrap...
SEEKING TRANSPARENCY IN FEDERAL FUNDING
A new legislative initiative would require the government to disclose and to publish online all federal contracts, grants, and other forms of spending.
"I like to think of this bill as 'Google for Government Spending',"said Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). "The concept behind the bill is really quite simple: Put information on government spending out there for all to see and greater accountability will follow. It will also change the expectations of those receiving funds that they will know in advance that the information will be public," he said.
The bill has neatly circumvented the usual partisan divisions and has won bipartisan support and co-sponsorship from the likes of Sen.Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), and endorsements from Greenpeace and the Heritage Foundation.
A July 18 Senate hearing on the proposal (S. 2590) featured statements from Senators Coburn, Obama and McCain, and testimony from Gary D.Bass of OMB Watch and Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner and the blog Tapscott's Copy Desk.
See their prepared statements here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2006/index.html#ffa
The Los Angeles Times editorialized on the bill in "Googling theFeds," July 21:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-coburn21jul21,0,4134575.story
Wrap...
Stratfor called it: It's a ground war...
From Strategic Forecasting Inc:
Red Alert: The Battle Joined
The ground war has begun. Several Israeli brigades now appear to be operating between the Lebanese border and the Litani River. According to reports, Hezbollah forces are dispersed in multiple bunker complexes and are launching rockets from these and other locations.
Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties.
This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing. Israel is caught between three strategic imperatives. First, it must end the threat to Israeli cities, which must involve the destruction of Hezbollah's launch capabilities south of the Litani River. Second, it must try to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure, which means it must move into the Bekaa Valley and as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Third, it must do so in such a way that it is not dragged into a long-term, unsustainable occupation against a capable insurgency.
Hezbollah has implemented its strategy by turning southern Lebanon into a military stronghold, consisting of well-designed bunkers that serve both as fire bases and launch facilities for rockets. The militants appear to be armed with anti-tank weapons and probably anti-aircraft weapons, some of which appear to be of American origin, raising the question of how they were acquired. Hezbollah wants to draw Israel into protracted fighting in this area in order to inflict maximum casualties and to change the psychological equation for both military and political reasons.
Israelis historically do not like to fight positional warfare. Their tendency has been to bypass fortified areas, pushing the fight to the rear in order to disrupt logistics, isolate fortifications and wait for capitulation. This has worked in the past. It is not clear that it will work here. The great unknown is the resilience of Hezbollah's fighters. To this point, there is no reason to doubt it. Israel could be fighting the most resilient and well-motivated opposition force in its history.
But the truth is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah really knows what performance will be like under pressure. Simply occupying the border-Litani area will not achieve any of Israel's strategic goals. Hezbollah still would be able to use rockets against Israel. And even if, for Hezbollah, this area is lost, its capabilities in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut will remain intact. Therefore, a battle that focuses solely on the south is not an option for Israel, unless the Israelis feel a defeat here will sap Hezbollah's will to resist. We doubt this to be the case.
The key to the campaign is to understand that Hezbollah has made its strategic decisions. It will not be fighting a mobile war. Israel has lost the strategic initiative: It must fight when Hezbollah has chosen and deal with Hezbollah's challenge. However, given this, Israel does have an operational choice. It can move in a sequential fashion, dealing first with southern Lebanon and then with other issues. It can bypass southern Lebanon and move into the rear areas, returning to southern Lebanon when it is ready. It can attempt to deal with southern Lebanon in detail, while mounting mobile operations in the Bekaa Valley, in the coastal regions and toward south Beirut, or both at the same time.
There are resource and logistical issues involved. Moving simultaneously on all three fronts will put substantial strains on Israel's logistical capability. An encirclement westward on the north side of the Litani, followed by a move toward Beirut while the southern side of the Litani is not secured, poses a serious challenge in re-supply. Moving into the Bekaa means leaving a flank open to the Syrians. We doubt Syria will hit that flank, but then, we don't have to live with the consequences of an intelligence failure.
Israel will be sending a lot of force on that line if it chooses that method. Again, since many roads in south Lebanon will not be secure, that limits logistics.
Israel is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Hezbollah has created a situation in which Israel must fight the kind of war it likes the least -- attritional, tactical operations against prepared forces -- or go to the war it prefers, mobile operations, with logistical constraints that make these operations more difficult and dangerous. Moreover, if it does this, it increases the time during which Israeli cities remain under threat. Given clear failures in appreciating Hezbollah's capabilities, Israel must take seriously the possibility that Hezbollah has longer-ranged, anti-personnel rockets that it will use while under attack.
Israel has been trying to break the back of Hezbollah resistance in the south through air attack, special operations and probing attacks. This clearly hasn't worked thus far. That does not mean it won't work, as Israel applies more force to the problem and starts to master the architecture of Hezbollah's tactical and operational structure; however, Israel can't count on a rapid resolution of that problem.
The Israelis have by now thought the problem through. They don't like operational compromises -- preferring highly focused solutions at the center of gravity of an enemy. Hezbollah has tried to deny Israel a center of gravity and may have succeeded, forcing Israel into a compromise position. Repeated assaults against prepared positions are simply not something the Israelis can do, because they cannot afford casualties. They always have preferred mobile encirclement or attacks at the center of gravity of a defensive position. But at this moment, viewed from the outside, this is not an option.
An extended engagement in southern Lebanon is the least likely path, in our opinion. More likely -- and this is a guess -- is a five-part strategy:
1. Insert airmobile and airborne forces north of the Litani to seal the rear of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Apply air power and engineering forces to reduce the fortifications, and infantry to attack forces not in fortified positions. Bottle them up, and systematically reduce the force with limited exposure to the attackers.
2. Secure roads along the eastern flank for an armored thrust deep into the Bekaa Valley to engage the main Hezbollah force and infrastructure there. This would involve a move from Qiryat Shimona north into the Bekaa, bypassing the Litani to the west, and would probably require sending airmobile and special forces to secure the high ground. It also would leave the right flank exposed to Syria.
3. Use air power and special forces to undermine Hezbollah capabilities in the southern Beirut area. The Israelis would consider a move into this area after roads through southern Lebanon are cleared and Bekaa relatively secured, moving into the area, only if absolutely necessary, on two axes of attack.
4. Having defeated Hezbollah in detail, withdraw under a political settlement shifting defense responsibility to the Lebanese government.
5. Do all of this while the United States is still able to provide top cover against diplomatic initiatives that will create an increasingly difficult international environment.There can be many variations on this theme, but these elements are inevitable:
1. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without entering the Bekaa Valley, at the very least.
2. At some point, resistance in southern Lebanon must be dealt with, regardless of the cost.
3. Rocket attacks against northern Israel and even Tel Aviv must be accepted while the campaign unfolds.
4. The real challenge will come when Israel tries to withdraw.
No. 4 is the real challenge. Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other.
The other solution is to shift the occupational burden to another power that is motivated to prevent the re-emergence of an anti-Israeli military force -- as that is what Hezbollah has become. The Lebanese government is the only possible alternative, but not a particularly capable one, reflecting the deep rifts in Lebanon.
Israel has one other choice, which is to extend the campaign to defeat Syria as well. Israel can do this, but the successor regime to Syrian President Bashar al Assad likely would be much worse for Israel than al Assad has been. Israel can imagine occupying Syria; it can't do it. Syria is too big and the Arabs have learned from the Iraqis how to deal with an occupation. Israel cannot live with a successor to al Assad and it cannot take control of Syria. It will have to live with al Assad. And that means an occupation of Lebanon would always be hostage to Syrian support for insurgents.
Hezbollah has dealt Israel a difficult hand. It has thought through the battle problem as well as the political dimension carefully. Somewhere in this, there has been either an Israeli intelligence failure or a political failure to listen to intelligence. Hezbollah's capabilities have posed a problem for Israel that allowed Hezbollah to start a war at a time and in a way of its choosing. The inquest will come later in Israel. And Hezbollah will likely be shattered regardless of its planning. The correlation of forces does not favor it. But if it forces Israel not only to defeat its main force but also to occupy, Hezbollah will have achieved its goals.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap....
Red Alert: The Battle Joined
The ground war has begun. Several Israeli brigades now appear to be operating between the Lebanese border and the Litani River. According to reports, Hezbollah forces are dispersed in multiple bunker complexes and are launching rockets from these and other locations.
Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties.
This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing. Israel is caught between three strategic imperatives. First, it must end the threat to Israeli cities, which must involve the destruction of Hezbollah's launch capabilities south of the Litani River. Second, it must try to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure, which means it must move into the Bekaa Valley and as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Third, it must do so in such a way that it is not dragged into a long-term, unsustainable occupation against a capable insurgency.
Hezbollah has implemented its strategy by turning southern Lebanon into a military stronghold, consisting of well-designed bunkers that serve both as fire bases and launch facilities for rockets. The militants appear to be armed with anti-tank weapons and probably anti-aircraft weapons, some of which appear to be of American origin, raising the question of how they were acquired. Hezbollah wants to draw Israel into protracted fighting in this area in order to inflict maximum casualties and to change the psychological equation for both military and political reasons.
Israelis historically do not like to fight positional warfare. Their tendency has been to bypass fortified areas, pushing the fight to the rear in order to disrupt logistics, isolate fortifications and wait for capitulation. This has worked in the past. It is not clear that it will work here. The great unknown is the resilience of Hezbollah's fighters. To this point, there is no reason to doubt it. Israel could be fighting the most resilient and well-motivated opposition force in its history.
But the truth is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah really knows what performance will be like under pressure. Simply occupying the border-Litani area will not achieve any of Israel's strategic goals. Hezbollah still would be able to use rockets against Israel. And even if, for Hezbollah, this area is lost, its capabilities in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut will remain intact. Therefore, a battle that focuses solely on the south is not an option for Israel, unless the Israelis feel a defeat here will sap Hezbollah's will to resist. We doubt this to be the case.
The key to the campaign is to understand that Hezbollah has made its strategic decisions. It will not be fighting a mobile war. Israel has lost the strategic initiative: It must fight when Hezbollah has chosen and deal with Hezbollah's challenge. However, given this, Israel does have an operational choice. It can move in a sequential fashion, dealing first with southern Lebanon and then with other issues. It can bypass southern Lebanon and move into the rear areas, returning to southern Lebanon when it is ready. It can attempt to deal with southern Lebanon in detail, while mounting mobile operations in the Bekaa Valley, in the coastal regions and toward south Beirut, or both at the same time.
There are resource and logistical issues involved. Moving simultaneously on all three fronts will put substantial strains on Israel's logistical capability. An encirclement westward on the north side of the Litani, followed by a move toward Beirut while the southern side of the Litani is not secured, poses a serious challenge in re-supply. Moving into the Bekaa means leaving a flank open to the Syrians. We doubt Syria will hit that flank, but then, we don't have to live with the consequences of an intelligence failure.
Israel will be sending a lot of force on that line if it chooses that method. Again, since many roads in south Lebanon will not be secure, that limits logistics.
Israel is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Hezbollah has created a situation in which Israel must fight the kind of war it likes the least -- attritional, tactical operations against prepared forces -- or go to the war it prefers, mobile operations, with logistical constraints that make these operations more difficult and dangerous. Moreover, if it does this, it increases the time during which Israeli cities remain under threat. Given clear failures in appreciating Hezbollah's capabilities, Israel must take seriously the possibility that Hezbollah has longer-ranged, anti-personnel rockets that it will use while under attack.
Israel has been trying to break the back of Hezbollah resistance in the south through air attack, special operations and probing attacks. This clearly hasn't worked thus far. That does not mean it won't work, as Israel applies more force to the problem and starts to master the architecture of Hezbollah's tactical and operational structure; however, Israel can't count on a rapid resolution of that problem.
The Israelis have by now thought the problem through. They don't like operational compromises -- preferring highly focused solutions at the center of gravity of an enemy. Hezbollah has tried to deny Israel a center of gravity and may have succeeded, forcing Israel into a compromise position. Repeated assaults against prepared positions are simply not something the Israelis can do, because they cannot afford casualties. They always have preferred mobile encirclement or attacks at the center of gravity of a defensive position. But at this moment, viewed from the outside, this is not an option.
An extended engagement in southern Lebanon is the least likely path, in our opinion. More likely -- and this is a guess -- is a five-part strategy:
1. Insert airmobile and airborne forces north of the Litani to seal the rear of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Apply air power and engineering forces to reduce the fortifications, and infantry to attack forces not in fortified positions. Bottle them up, and systematically reduce the force with limited exposure to the attackers.
2. Secure roads along the eastern flank for an armored thrust deep into the Bekaa Valley to engage the main Hezbollah force and infrastructure there. This would involve a move from Qiryat Shimona north into the Bekaa, bypassing the Litani to the west, and would probably require sending airmobile and special forces to secure the high ground. It also would leave the right flank exposed to Syria.
3. Use air power and special forces to undermine Hezbollah capabilities in the southern Beirut area. The Israelis would consider a move into this area after roads through southern Lebanon are cleared and Bekaa relatively secured, moving into the area, only if absolutely necessary, on two axes of attack.
4. Having defeated Hezbollah in detail, withdraw under a political settlement shifting defense responsibility to the Lebanese government.
5. Do all of this while the United States is still able to provide top cover against diplomatic initiatives that will create an increasingly difficult international environment.There can be many variations on this theme, but these elements are inevitable:
1. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without entering the Bekaa Valley, at the very least.
2. At some point, resistance in southern Lebanon must be dealt with, regardless of the cost.
3. Rocket attacks against northern Israel and even Tel Aviv must be accepted while the campaign unfolds.
4. The real challenge will come when Israel tries to withdraw.
No. 4 is the real challenge. Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other.
The other solution is to shift the occupational burden to another power that is motivated to prevent the re-emergence of an anti-Israeli military force -- as that is what Hezbollah has become. The Lebanese government is the only possible alternative, but not a particularly capable one, reflecting the deep rifts in Lebanon.
Israel has one other choice, which is to extend the campaign to defeat Syria as well. Israel can do this, but the successor regime to Syrian President Bashar al Assad likely would be much worse for Israel than al Assad has been. Israel can imagine occupying Syria; it can't do it. Syria is too big and the Arabs have learned from the Iraqis how to deal with an occupation. Israel cannot live with a successor to al Assad and it cannot take control of Syria. It will have to live with al Assad. And that means an occupation of Lebanon would always be hostage to Syrian support for insurgents.
Hezbollah has dealt Israel a difficult hand. It has thought through the battle problem as well as the political dimension carefully. Somewhere in this, there has been either an Israeli intelligence failure or a political failure to listen to intelligence. Hezbollah's capabilities have posed a problem for Israel that allowed Hezbollah to start a war at a time and in a way of its choosing. The inquest will come later in Israel. And Hezbollah will likely be shattered regardless of its planning. The correlation of forces does not favor it. But if it forces Israel not only to defeat its main force but also to occupy, Hezbollah will have achieved its goals.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap....
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Bits & Pieces...guaranteed to frustrate...
From The Progress Report:
Think Fast
"Today, al-Qaida has not only regrouped, but it is on the march," Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Al-Qaida is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it."
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) advice to those running for reelection this year: "You obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda." "The first thing I'd do is acknowledge that there have been mistakes made," Thune said.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who refused to back John Bolton to be U.N. Ambassador when he was first nominated last year, has caved. In an op-ed titled, "Why I'll Vote for Bolton," Voinovich said questioning Bolton's renomination "would jeopardize our influence in the United Nations" and "undermin[e] our policies and agenda."
Yesterday was the "deadliest day yet in the deepening two-front Middle East crisis." "Israeli weaponry rained down on Lebanon throughout the day and into the night, killing 63 people by nightfall," virtually all civilians, while two Israeli Arab brothers, ages 3 and 9, were killed by Hezbollah rockets "as they played outside in Nazareth."
After promising to make its unconstitutional military commissions comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the White House yesterday took a "harder line" and announced it would propose "only minor changes" to the tribunals.
Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) "has pulled an image of a burning World Trade Center from a campaign commercial attacking Rep. Sherrod Brown's (D-OH) record on national security because the image was a fake." The spot was produced by the firm responsible for the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads.
Yesterday the House voted to "bar federal courts from ruling on the constitutional validity" of the Pledge of Allegiance. "We are making an all-out assault on the Constitution of the United States which, thank God, will fail," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that many hospital patients who have a limited ability to speak English and who need a translator often don't get one, which puts them at risk for poor and sometimes life-threatening medical care. One study showed that no interpreter was used in 46 percent of emergency department cases involving such patients. "
A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism."
And finally: No need to be scared of the giant inflatable shark that miraculously swam through the Discovery Channel's offices in Silver Spring, MD. After just one day of being on display, it seems to have been attacked.
Wrap...
Think Fast
"Today, al-Qaida has not only regrouped, but it is on the march," Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Al-Qaida is now functioning exactly as its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, envisioned it."
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) advice to those running for reelection this year: "You obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda." "The first thing I'd do is acknowledge that there have been mistakes made," Thune said.
Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who refused to back John Bolton to be U.N. Ambassador when he was first nominated last year, has caved. In an op-ed titled, "Why I'll Vote for Bolton," Voinovich said questioning Bolton's renomination "would jeopardize our influence in the United Nations" and "undermin[e] our policies and agenda."
Yesterday was the "deadliest day yet in the deepening two-front Middle East crisis." "Israeli weaponry rained down on Lebanon throughout the day and into the night, killing 63 people by nightfall," virtually all civilians, while two Israeli Arab brothers, ages 3 and 9, were killed by Hezbollah rockets "as they played outside in Nazareth."
After promising to make its unconstitutional military commissions comply with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the White House yesterday took a "harder line" and announced it would propose "only minor changes" to the tribunals.
Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH) "has pulled an image of a burning World Trade Center from a campaign commercial attacking Rep. Sherrod Brown's (D-OH) record on national security because the image was a fake." The spot was produced by the firm responsible for the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads.
Yesterday the House voted to "bar federal courts from ruling on the constitutional validity" of the Pledge of Allegiance. "We are making an all-out assault on the Constitution of the United States which, thank God, will fail," said Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that many hospital patients who have a limited ability to speak English and who need a translator often don't get one, which puts them at risk for poor and sometimes life-threatening medical care. One study showed that no interpreter was used in 46 percent of emergency department cases involving such patients. "
A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism."
And finally: No need to be scared of the giant inflatable shark that miraculously swam through the Discovery Channel's offices in Silver Spring, MD. After just one day of being on display, it seems to have been attacked.
Wrap...
And the G-8 accomplishes....
From Strategic Forecasting, Inc:
A Time of Change for the G-8
By Bart Mongoven
For the second consecutive year, the G-8 summit was overshadowed by other world events. Suicide bombers attacked London's rail system in 2005 as G-8 leaders were meeting in Scotland. This year the story was Hezbollah and Israel. When the G-8 meets next year in Heiligendamm, Germany, it will take effort to remember when the discussions on the G-8 agenda actually dominated the news.
In both 2005 and 2006, the items on the official agenda had little to do with bombs, guns or the conditions underlying the violence -- and in both cases, outside events completely stole the spotlight from the agreements the G-8 leaders made. This somewhat diminished the stature of the G-8 as an institution; media attention has gone elsewhere, the momentum built up by working groups on thematic issues for the summit is lost, and the leaders have appeared to be distracted by other issues.
Though addressing global security was never the G-8's purpose, voters expected the leaders present to give some response to the bombs in London and the tensions this year in the Middle East.
Thus, for two years running, the G-8 summit has been unfocused, despite ambitious action plans on climate change, debt and AIDS (2005) and energy security (2006). Extending this logic a bit further, an argument could be made that the G-8 has outlived its usefulness. The issues that it was founded to solve -- primarily global economic matters -- are now the subject of negotiations and discussions (some of which occurs under the auspices of the G-8 structure) by finance ministry officials year round.
A host of other international organizations (some formal and some informal) have been created in the past 15 years to harmonize or coordinate international action on other issues that fall within the G-8's purview, including environment, energy and global trade.
The fact that so many of the issues the G-8 was created to address now have been taken up by others as their raison d'etre shows that the G-8 correctly identified the major issues requiring international cooperation. However, these small working groups, sub-groups and separate organizations are terribly unglamorous, and national leaders stand to gain few political benefits at home from the pragmatic, incremental work plans these groups produce. So while the mission of the G-8 is being fulfilled, it offers world leaders little more than a yearly photo opportunity.
A Mixed Record
The G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, generated great expectations in 2005: British Prime Minster Tony Blair put climate change at the top of the agenda, and rock stars Bono and Sir Bob Geldof led a giant "Make Poverty History" campaign focusing on aid and debt relief for Africa. The results so far have been mixed. Clear progress has been made on debt issues, but less progress is visible on diseases and even less on climate change.
Poverty activists argue that they were let down by the Gleneagles plan on poverty reduction, but the numbers tend to show that the G-8 agreement has scored some success in reducing the debt of the poorest countries. The specific numbers get tricky, but according to nongovernmental organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), which was co-founded by Bono, the G-8 are on track to meet their commitments. The multilateral debts for 19 of the world's poorest countries, 14 of them in Africa, already have been cancelled -- with immediate and tangible benefits -- and 44 other countries have been qualified for similar debt relief.
Despite this evidence that commitments have been taken seriously, critics still complain that the debt cancellation promises made at Gleneagles fell short of the commitments made by the same governments years earlier; they argue that the gains represent only a minor improvement in the financial status of the world's poorest countries.
On climate, there have been fewer results. Blair tacitly acknowledged at Gleneagles that the Kyoto Protocol could not provide the model for global climate change policy moving forward, and that a new approach -- one that had the buy-in of the United States and that would be based on development and sharing of technology -- would need to be embraced.
But though the private sector has made significant strides in addressing climate concerns since that announcement, no movement has really been made in U.S. or international policy. President George W. Bush did announce an agreement with Australia, China and India to pursue an alternative to Kyoto. However, not only has the U.S. climate initiative failed to become a forum for world policymaking, the most important steps toward its implementation -- meetings designed to translate broad promises into concrete activities -- have been delayed. The only progress toward a dramatic shift in national climate-change policy in the United States has come at the state level, and is completely unrelated to the G-8.
Similar outcomes have been noted with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- which is constantly receiving pledges that are not fully met -- and with aspirations for reducing agriculture subsidies during the Doha Round of trade talks.
Protesters Stymied
Given the course of outside events, the G-8 summits of the past two years have not produced the kinds of results that activist groups who organize demonstrations around the meetings have been hoping for either. Protesters have become a feature of the summits that is almost as standard as the posed "family portrait" shots of the world leaders who attend them.
Radical protesters begin with the premise that the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world gather at the G-8 to plot their continued global dominance. Less radical demonstrators view the meeting as a unique opportunity to communicate their position directly to the most important world leaders. Finally, because each agenda is organized around dominant issue themes, the meeting attracts protesters who focus on the key issue of the year.
In the meeting at St. Petersburg this year, this meant a focus on energy. The protests that have been staged around G-8 meetings have been large at times and, in some cases, have led to riots that turned violent (as in Genoa, Italy, in 2001). From 1999 to 2003, the G-8 summit was seen as a place to make complaints known about the power amassed in capitalist countries and to protest corporate globalization. This fad faded relatively quickly, however, and those who have gathered to protest at meetings in recent years tend to be issue-focused activists, such as the debt-relief campaigners from churches who demonstrated at Gleneagles.
Protests at the St. Petersburg venue essentially were outlawed by the Russian government (and those identified as potential protesters soon found themselves being conscripted into military service).
Across the globe, however, activists organized demonstrations to coincide with the meeting, hoping to capitalize on the media coverage of the meeting to bring attention to their campaigns.
Most of the protests this year focused on climate change, though G-8 leaders separated environmental discussions from energy discussions as much as possible. Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East ratcheted upward suddenly and seriously. Thus, for the second consecutive year, the protesters found the same thing as the G-8 leaders themselves: the media coverage they hoped to attract to their agendas was not to be found.
Finding a Purpose
As it stands, the most pressing global issue of the day -- wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, and the possibilities of terrorist strikes around the world -- is not a subject for the G-8 meeting. So what then is the purpose of the G-8 summit? In some ways, the G-8 leaders are in a bind. On one hand, the annual summit is an event where important leaders gather to talk. This alone makes it newsworthy.
Further, the G-8 as an institution fosters a number of working groups. Government representatives meet with little fanfare to discuss issues such as currencies and trade, judicial harmonization, terrorism and organized crime. The action plans created for the G-8 summit are the result of these conversations, but these sub-groups do much more behind-the-scenes work that does not appear in the consensus statements and receives little media attention, but nonetheless brings changes in public policy within G-8 member countries.
On the other hand, the agreements that heads of state make -- with much fanfare -- at the summits are not addressing the public policies that are foremost in the public mind. And this makes the group seem less relevant. Moreover, the concessions they make in the official documents amplify the fact that the official work of the summit is highly political -- and often geared toward each leader's domestic audience rather than the rest of the world.
A line in the 2006 St. Petersburg consensus statement illustrates this well: "Those of us who have or are considering plans related to the use of safe and secure nuclear energy underlined its important contribution to global energy security." Paraphrased: Those of us who agree that this is a good thing agreed that this is a good thing; those who do not, did not. Such lines capture the naked political purpose the G-8 serves.
The heads of state look like world leaders when they attend the G-8, and every head of state at the summit derives some political benefits at home from attending. For Bush, whose unilateral tendencies in foreign policy have been widely criticized, the summit is an opportunity to show that he is willing to work in international forums and to cooperate in global affairs. For leaders like Stephen Harper and Romano Prodi, it provides a sense of legitimacy; voters in Canada and Italy see these new heads of state on the same global stage as George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
The topics that are selected for discussion further allow for domestic political gain. Consumers in all Western countries are being affected by high energy prices, and Russia's use of natural gas supplies as a tool in foreign policy made "energy security" a meaningful term for Europeans. Of course, G-8 leaders did nothing in St. Petersburg to increase world oil supplies or to decrease demand for them -- nor did they win a commitment from Putin that Moscow would not again use its natural gas supplies as a weapon against European governments. The leaders did, however, talk about these issues, which from a political standpoint is the next best thing to solving the problem.
Moving forward
Despite the overt indications that the G-8 summit has devolved into a three-day photo op, the degree of cooperation between the G-8 governments is increasing markedly -- and not just at the diplomatic level. Regulators, judges and legislators are meeting more and more frequently to learn from each other, and broad consensus among the world's largest democracies is emerging on many global regulatory issues.
On the surface, it would seem a paradox that the G-8 has become a less-meaningful talk shop just as government representatives are coming together in meaningful ways more often, but the development actually makes sense. As government representatives work together, there is less friction between G-8 governments -- and thus, fewer issues that need to be resolved at the head-of-state level.
Finance ministers have a number of forums (the G7, G-8 plus 5 and G-20) to discuss matters of global financial stability, exchange-rate volatility and other critical issues. Securities regulators have the International Organization for Securities Commissions (IOSCO), which attempts to regulate corporations and financial institutions effectively in an era of globalized business. Intelligence on terrorism and organized crime is shared better than ever before among state police organizations, and through Interpol and other global networks of police forces. Dozens of these global government networks exist and are efficiently harmonizing laws and regulations across borders.
The G-8 member states might be comfortable in this evolving role, but this is unlikely. It is more likely that successive G-8 hosts -- who set the agenda for the organization for a year -- will try, as Blair did, to increase the relevance of the group's work. But with security issues off the table, their options are limited. The temptation would be to follow Blair's model and bring forward a major, somewhat ignored global issue that the assembled nations actually can address, with great certainty of success. The downside is that this moves the G-8's work farther from the most immediate and pressing concerns of the world.
Another option would be to draw more attention to the intergovernmental work that takes place behind the scenes. This would show the world the heretofore invisible but important work that the G-8 and its member states do -- but with the risk of awakening fears of either an emerging "world government," or of global capitalist collusions, among those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.
Finally, they could acknowledge that the most important work accomplished at the G-8 summit is relationship-building between world leaders -- a time for casual conversation (and, oddly, the occasional back rub) -- and to openly admit that it is otherwise a retreat and photo opportunity, with a discussion agenda that is transparently meaningless.
The third option seems the least likely, while the first holds the most promise for the G-8 leaders -- who, after all, win elections by promising to achieve visions, not simply to deal competently with international frictions.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap...
A Time of Change for the G-8
By Bart Mongoven
For the second consecutive year, the G-8 summit was overshadowed by other world events. Suicide bombers attacked London's rail system in 2005 as G-8 leaders were meeting in Scotland. This year the story was Hezbollah and Israel. When the G-8 meets next year in Heiligendamm, Germany, it will take effort to remember when the discussions on the G-8 agenda actually dominated the news.
In both 2005 and 2006, the items on the official agenda had little to do with bombs, guns or the conditions underlying the violence -- and in both cases, outside events completely stole the spotlight from the agreements the G-8 leaders made. This somewhat diminished the stature of the G-8 as an institution; media attention has gone elsewhere, the momentum built up by working groups on thematic issues for the summit is lost, and the leaders have appeared to be distracted by other issues.
Though addressing global security was never the G-8's purpose, voters expected the leaders present to give some response to the bombs in London and the tensions this year in the Middle East.
Thus, for two years running, the G-8 summit has been unfocused, despite ambitious action plans on climate change, debt and AIDS (2005) and energy security (2006). Extending this logic a bit further, an argument could be made that the G-8 has outlived its usefulness. The issues that it was founded to solve -- primarily global economic matters -- are now the subject of negotiations and discussions (some of which occurs under the auspices of the G-8 structure) by finance ministry officials year round.
A host of other international organizations (some formal and some informal) have been created in the past 15 years to harmonize or coordinate international action on other issues that fall within the G-8's purview, including environment, energy and global trade.
The fact that so many of the issues the G-8 was created to address now have been taken up by others as their raison d'etre shows that the G-8 correctly identified the major issues requiring international cooperation. However, these small working groups, sub-groups and separate organizations are terribly unglamorous, and national leaders stand to gain few political benefits at home from the pragmatic, incremental work plans these groups produce. So while the mission of the G-8 is being fulfilled, it offers world leaders little more than a yearly photo opportunity.
A Mixed Record
The G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, generated great expectations in 2005: British Prime Minster Tony Blair put climate change at the top of the agenda, and rock stars Bono and Sir Bob Geldof led a giant "Make Poverty History" campaign focusing on aid and debt relief for Africa. The results so far have been mixed. Clear progress has been made on debt issues, but less progress is visible on diseases and even less on climate change.
Poverty activists argue that they were let down by the Gleneagles plan on poverty reduction, but the numbers tend to show that the G-8 agreement has scored some success in reducing the debt of the poorest countries. The specific numbers get tricky, but according to nongovernmental organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), which was co-founded by Bono, the G-8 are on track to meet their commitments. The multilateral debts for 19 of the world's poorest countries, 14 of them in Africa, already have been cancelled -- with immediate and tangible benefits -- and 44 other countries have been qualified for similar debt relief.
Despite this evidence that commitments have been taken seriously, critics still complain that the debt cancellation promises made at Gleneagles fell short of the commitments made by the same governments years earlier; they argue that the gains represent only a minor improvement in the financial status of the world's poorest countries.
On climate, there have been fewer results. Blair tacitly acknowledged at Gleneagles that the Kyoto Protocol could not provide the model for global climate change policy moving forward, and that a new approach -- one that had the buy-in of the United States and that would be based on development and sharing of technology -- would need to be embraced.
But though the private sector has made significant strides in addressing climate concerns since that announcement, no movement has really been made in U.S. or international policy. President George W. Bush did announce an agreement with Australia, China and India to pursue an alternative to Kyoto. However, not only has the U.S. climate initiative failed to become a forum for world policymaking, the most important steps toward its implementation -- meetings designed to translate broad promises into concrete activities -- have been delayed. The only progress toward a dramatic shift in national climate-change policy in the United States has come at the state level, and is completely unrelated to the G-8.
Similar outcomes have been noted with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria -- which is constantly receiving pledges that are not fully met -- and with aspirations for reducing agriculture subsidies during the Doha Round of trade talks.
Protesters Stymied
Given the course of outside events, the G-8 summits of the past two years have not produced the kinds of results that activist groups who organize demonstrations around the meetings have been hoping for either. Protesters have become a feature of the summits that is almost as standard as the posed "family portrait" shots of the world leaders who attend them.
Radical protesters begin with the premise that the leaders of the most powerful countries in the world gather at the G-8 to plot their continued global dominance. Less radical demonstrators view the meeting as a unique opportunity to communicate their position directly to the most important world leaders. Finally, because each agenda is organized around dominant issue themes, the meeting attracts protesters who focus on the key issue of the year.
In the meeting at St. Petersburg this year, this meant a focus on energy. The protests that have been staged around G-8 meetings have been large at times and, in some cases, have led to riots that turned violent (as in Genoa, Italy, in 2001). From 1999 to 2003, the G-8 summit was seen as a place to make complaints known about the power amassed in capitalist countries and to protest corporate globalization. This fad faded relatively quickly, however, and those who have gathered to protest at meetings in recent years tend to be issue-focused activists, such as the debt-relief campaigners from churches who demonstrated at Gleneagles.
Protests at the St. Petersburg venue essentially were outlawed by the Russian government (and those identified as potential protesters soon found themselves being conscripted into military service).
Across the globe, however, activists organized demonstrations to coincide with the meeting, hoping to capitalize on the media coverage of the meeting to bring attention to their campaigns.
Most of the protests this year focused on climate change, though G-8 leaders separated environmental discussions from energy discussions as much as possible. Meanwhile, tensions in the Middle East ratcheted upward suddenly and seriously. Thus, for the second consecutive year, the protesters found the same thing as the G-8 leaders themselves: the media coverage they hoped to attract to their agendas was not to be found.
Finding a Purpose
As it stands, the most pressing global issue of the day -- wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, and the possibilities of terrorist strikes around the world -- is not a subject for the G-8 meeting. So what then is the purpose of the G-8 summit? In some ways, the G-8 leaders are in a bind. On one hand, the annual summit is an event where important leaders gather to talk. This alone makes it newsworthy.
Further, the G-8 as an institution fosters a number of working groups. Government representatives meet with little fanfare to discuss issues such as currencies and trade, judicial harmonization, terrorism and organized crime. The action plans created for the G-8 summit are the result of these conversations, but these sub-groups do much more behind-the-scenes work that does not appear in the consensus statements and receives little media attention, but nonetheless brings changes in public policy within G-8 member countries.
On the other hand, the agreements that heads of state make -- with much fanfare -- at the summits are not addressing the public policies that are foremost in the public mind. And this makes the group seem less relevant. Moreover, the concessions they make in the official documents amplify the fact that the official work of the summit is highly political -- and often geared toward each leader's domestic audience rather than the rest of the world.
A line in the 2006 St. Petersburg consensus statement illustrates this well: "Those of us who have or are considering plans related to the use of safe and secure nuclear energy underlined its important contribution to global energy security." Paraphrased: Those of us who agree that this is a good thing agreed that this is a good thing; those who do not, did not. Such lines capture the naked political purpose the G-8 serves.
The heads of state look like world leaders when they attend the G-8, and every head of state at the summit derives some political benefits at home from attending. For Bush, whose unilateral tendencies in foreign policy have been widely criticized, the summit is an opportunity to show that he is willing to work in international forums and to cooperate in global affairs. For leaders like Stephen Harper and Romano Prodi, it provides a sense of legitimacy; voters in Canada and Italy see these new heads of state on the same global stage as George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin.
The topics that are selected for discussion further allow for domestic political gain. Consumers in all Western countries are being affected by high energy prices, and Russia's use of natural gas supplies as a tool in foreign policy made "energy security" a meaningful term for Europeans. Of course, G-8 leaders did nothing in St. Petersburg to increase world oil supplies or to decrease demand for them -- nor did they win a commitment from Putin that Moscow would not again use its natural gas supplies as a weapon against European governments. The leaders did, however, talk about these issues, which from a political standpoint is the next best thing to solving the problem.
Moving forward
Despite the overt indications that the G-8 summit has devolved into a three-day photo op, the degree of cooperation between the G-8 governments is increasing markedly -- and not just at the diplomatic level. Regulators, judges and legislators are meeting more and more frequently to learn from each other, and broad consensus among the world's largest democracies is emerging on many global regulatory issues.
On the surface, it would seem a paradox that the G-8 has become a less-meaningful talk shop just as government representatives are coming together in meaningful ways more often, but the development actually makes sense. As government representatives work together, there is less friction between G-8 governments -- and thus, fewer issues that need to be resolved at the head-of-state level.
Finance ministers have a number of forums (the G7, G-8 plus 5 and G-20) to discuss matters of global financial stability, exchange-rate volatility and other critical issues. Securities regulators have the International Organization for Securities Commissions (IOSCO), which attempts to regulate corporations and financial institutions effectively in an era of globalized business. Intelligence on terrorism and organized crime is shared better than ever before among state police organizations, and through Interpol and other global networks of police forces. Dozens of these global government networks exist and are efficiently harmonizing laws and regulations across borders.
The G-8 member states might be comfortable in this evolving role, but this is unlikely. It is more likely that successive G-8 hosts -- who set the agenda for the organization for a year -- will try, as Blair did, to increase the relevance of the group's work. But with security issues off the table, their options are limited. The temptation would be to follow Blair's model and bring forward a major, somewhat ignored global issue that the assembled nations actually can address, with great certainty of success. The downside is that this moves the G-8's work farther from the most immediate and pressing concerns of the world.
Another option would be to draw more attention to the intergovernmental work that takes place behind the scenes. This would show the world the heretofore invisible but important work that the G-8 and its member states do -- but with the risk of awakening fears of either an emerging "world government," or of global capitalist collusions, among those at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.
Finally, they could acknowledge that the most important work accomplished at the G-8 summit is relationship-building between world leaders -- a time for casual conversation (and, oddly, the occasional back rub) -- and to openly admit that it is otherwise a retreat and photo opportunity, with a discussion agenda that is transparently meaningless.
The third option seems the least likely, while the first holds the most promise for the G-8 leaders -- who, after all, win elections by promising to achieve visions, not simply to deal competently with international frictions.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.
Wrap...
Meanwhile, in Sacramento CA...Stem Cells!
From KFMB Channel 8...CBS:
Schwarzenegger Gives $150M Loan To Stem Cell Agency
Last Updated:07-20-06 at 6:38PM
A day after President Bush vetoed a measure that would have expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday authorized a $150 million loan to fund the state's moribund stem cell institute, which has been stalled by lawsuits.
The move has distinct political benefits for the governor who is seeking to put as much distance as possible between himself and the deeply unpopular president as he seeks re-election this year.
Schwarzenegger said the state cannot afford to wait to fund the critical science associated with stem cells."I remain committed to advancing stem cell research in California, in the promise it holds for millions of our citizens who suffer from chronic diseases and injuries that could be helped as a result of stem cell research," Schwarzenegger said in a letter to his finance director authorizing the loan.
Lawyers with ties to anti-abortion and anti-tax groups have sued, arguing that the state's stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is unconstitutional. Voters created the agency in 2004 when they passed Proposition 71, which authorized $3 billion in bonds to be sold to fund 10 years of research that the federal government will not fund.
On April 21, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled the institute was a legitimate state agency. But if opponents continue to contest the agency in court, they could hold up the institute's financing until at least next year.
Wrap....
Schwarzenegger Gives $150M Loan To Stem Cell Agency
Last Updated:07-20-06 at 6:38PM
A day after President Bush vetoed a measure that would have expanded federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Thursday authorized a $150 million loan to fund the state's moribund stem cell institute, which has been stalled by lawsuits.
The move has distinct political benefits for the governor who is seeking to put as much distance as possible between himself and the deeply unpopular president as he seeks re-election this year.
Schwarzenegger said the state cannot afford to wait to fund the critical science associated with stem cells."I remain committed to advancing stem cell research in California, in the promise it holds for millions of our citizens who suffer from chronic diseases and injuries that could be helped as a result of stem cell research," Schwarzenegger said in a letter to his finance director authorizing the loan.
Lawyers with ties to anti-abortion and anti-tax groups have sued, arguing that the state's stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, is unconstitutional. Voters created the agency in 2004 when they passed Proposition 71, which authorized $3 billion in bonds to be sold to fund 10 years of research that the federal government will not fund.
On April 21, an Alameda County Superior Court judge ruled the institute was a legitimate state agency. But if opponents continue to contest the agency in court, they could hold up the institute's financing until at least next year.
Wrap....
Cuss, spit, hell, damn!!!
There is a glitch in Microsoft Word that won't let me open an email attachment in Word. Click on that attachment, Word seems to open, but immediately an error screen pops up. No matter what I click on it, Word entirely disappears. Gave me a fit.
Happily, one of the writers had the same problem and found the solution. Here it is:
1. Open Word and call up a blank document.
2. Diminish the Word window onto your tool bar.
3. Go back and open the Word attachment in e-mail.
4. The screen should blink then the Word window will enlarge by itself and the document will open.
THAT WORKS!
:))) Wrap...
Happily, one of the writers had the same problem and found the solution. Here it is:
1. Open Word and call up a blank document.
2. Diminish the Word window onto your tool bar.
3. Go back and open the Word attachment in e-mail.
4. The screen should blink then the Word window will enlarge by itself and the document will open.
THAT WORKS!
:))) Wrap...
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Army's new manual.....
From Secrecy News:
U.S. ARMY ISSUES MANUAL ON POLICE INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS
A new U.S. Army Field Manual introduces the concept of "police intelligence operations," an emerging hybrid of military intelligence and law enforcement."
Police intelligence operations are a military police function that supports, enhances, and contributes to a commander's situational understanding and battlefield visualization and FP [forceprotection] programs by portraying the relevant criminal threat and friendly information, which may affect his operational and tactical environment.
"The new manual presents doctrine that is broadly applicable to support military operations abroad as well as domestic military facility protection.
A copy of the new manual was obtained by Secrecy News.
See "Police Intelligence Operations," Field Manual 3-19.50, 21 July2006 (3.8 MB PDF):
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-50.pdf
Wrap...
U.S. ARMY ISSUES MANUAL ON POLICE INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS
A new U.S. Army Field Manual introduces the concept of "police intelligence operations," an emerging hybrid of military intelligence and law enforcement."
Police intelligence operations are a military police function that supports, enhances, and contributes to a commander's situational understanding and battlefield visualization and FP [forceprotection] programs by portraying the relevant criminal threat and friendly information, which may affect his operational and tactical environment.
"The new manual presents doctrine that is broadly applicable to support military operations abroad as well as domestic military facility protection.
A copy of the new manual was obtained by Secrecy News.
See "Police Intelligence Operations," Field Manual 3-19.50, 21 July2006 (3.8 MB PDF):
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-50.pdf
Wrap...
Bush, the oblivious...
From Information Clearing House:
Maureen Dowd: Animal House Summit :
Reporters who covered W.'s 2000 campaign often wondered whether the Bush scion would give up acting the fool if he got to be the king.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14071.htm
Wrap...
Maureen Dowd: Animal House Summit :
Reporters who covered W.'s 2000 campaign often wondered whether the Bush scion would give up acting the fool if he got to be the king.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14071.htm
Wrap...
Witnesses: Keeping them hidden and alive...
From the Sacramento Bee:
Witness protection a world of secrets
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 6:33 am PDT Tuesday, July 18, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - An old mobster once gave Joseph Paonessa some advice that, if a bit chilling, has served him well during his many years working in the federal witness protection program.
"He said, 'Kid, three people can keep a secret when two of them are dead,'" said Paonessa, a senior official in the U.S. Marshals Service.
When managing a program that has relocated and provided new identities to 18,000 people, keeping a tight lid on information is more than a fond wish.
So it was all the more surprising when the Marshals Service invited a few reporters to its suburban Virginia headquarters Monday for the start of an international conference on witness protection programs.
Commonsense tips were the order of the day, at least in the portion of the meeting reporters were allowed to attend.
One important rule: Don't find a counterfeiter a job in a printing plant, said Gerald Shur. A retired federal prosecutor, Shur is widely credited with creating the witness protection program to overcome the reluctance of witnesses to testify in Mafia trials.
When obtaining a legal name change for someone with a new identity, ask a judge to do it in secret and dispense with the requirement that the new name be published in a newspaper's legal notices.
Remember that spouses and children are often part of the deal.
One teenager asked his father, a protected witness, for a new car. When the father refused, Shur said, the teenager replied, "I'm going to go out and tell everybody who you are."
Those issues might not be foremost in the minds of the international officials attending the weeklong meeting. The focus is on witnesses from one country who are relocated to another country after they testify, a practice officials said is sometimes necessary in smaller countries.
Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Australia and Canada were among more than a dozen countries represented by officials who provide security for witnesses who testify mainly in organized crime and war crimes trials.
The goals are similar wherever witness protection programs exist: Try to ensure that a witness can provide key testimony without being harmed or intimidated.
The Marshals brag that no one who has followed the rules has been killed or harmed since the U.S. program was established in 1970.
Roughly 8,000 witnesses - most of them criminals - and 10,000 family members have been given new identities. The program costs taxpayers $50 million a year, said Kearn Knowles, who is retiring this week as the program's director.
The conviction rate in cases in which those witnesses testified is 90 percent, said Maureen Killion, director of the Justice Department office that oversees witness security.
But there have been problems. Almost all the witnesses are themselves criminals and some find it hard to stay clean, Paonessa said.
Nearly one in five protected witnesses have been charged with new crimes, according to a study cited by the Marshals.
Other people have quit the program, against the advice of authorities, sometimes with tragic results. Brenda Paz, a former gang member who had been helping with a federal murder case against her former boyfriend, died of multiple stab wounds in 2003, two months after she gave up federal protection. Two members of the MS-13 gang in Northern Virginia were convicted of killing her, while two others, including the ex-boyfriend, were acquitted.
A Justice Department inspector general's report last year warned that witness safety could be compromised if the government doesn't reverse a steady drop in marshals assigned to the program.
Under new Director John Clark, the Marshals Service is trying to raise its public profile, an effort designed to win more money from Congress once lawmakers and the public have a better idea of what the service does.
The rare look inside the witness protection program was a part of that effort.
The Marshals who look after protected witnesses are, it turns out, part social worker, minister, lawyer and marriage counselor.
One witness persuaded the government to accept 20 family members into the program with him, after demonstrating that they were at risk of harm, Shur said.
Another witness won permission to include his wife, mistress and mother. The latter two lived together, Shur said, and everyone was OK with that arrangement.
But there was one line the government would not cross.
One witness wanted to relocate with his mistress, but not his wife.
Wrap...
Witness protection a world of secrets
By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Last Updated 6:33 am PDT Tuesday, July 18, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) - An old mobster once gave Joseph Paonessa some advice that, if a bit chilling, has served him well during his many years working in the federal witness protection program.
"He said, 'Kid, three people can keep a secret when two of them are dead,'" said Paonessa, a senior official in the U.S. Marshals Service.
When managing a program that has relocated and provided new identities to 18,000 people, keeping a tight lid on information is more than a fond wish.
So it was all the more surprising when the Marshals Service invited a few reporters to its suburban Virginia headquarters Monday for the start of an international conference on witness protection programs.
Commonsense tips were the order of the day, at least in the portion of the meeting reporters were allowed to attend.
One important rule: Don't find a counterfeiter a job in a printing plant, said Gerald Shur. A retired federal prosecutor, Shur is widely credited with creating the witness protection program to overcome the reluctance of witnesses to testify in Mafia trials.
When obtaining a legal name change for someone with a new identity, ask a judge to do it in secret and dispense with the requirement that the new name be published in a newspaper's legal notices.
Remember that spouses and children are often part of the deal.
One teenager asked his father, a protected witness, for a new car. When the father refused, Shur said, the teenager replied, "I'm going to go out and tell everybody who you are."
Those issues might not be foremost in the minds of the international officials attending the weeklong meeting. The focus is on witnesses from one country who are relocated to another country after they testify, a practice officials said is sometimes necessary in smaller countries.
Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Australia and Canada were among more than a dozen countries represented by officials who provide security for witnesses who testify mainly in organized crime and war crimes trials.
The goals are similar wherever witness protection programs exist: Try to ensure that a witness can provide key testimony without being harmed or intimidated.
The Marshals brag that no one who has followed the rules has been killed or harmed since the U.S. program was established in 1970.
Roughly 8,000 witnesses - most of them criminals - and 10,000 family members have been given new identities. The program costs taxpayers $50 million a year, said Kearn Knowles, who is retiring this week as the program's director.
The conviction rate in cases in which those witnesses testified is 90 percent, said Maureen Killion, director of the Justice Department office that oversees witness security.
But there have been problems. Almost all the witnesses are themselves criminals and some find it hard to stay clean, Paonessa said.
Nearly one in five protected witnesses have been charged with new crimes, according to a study cited by the Marshals.
Other people have quit the program, against the advice of authorities, sometimes with tragic results. Brenda Paz, a former gang member who had been helping with a federal murder case against her former boyfriend, died of multiple stab wounds in 2003, two months after she gave up federal protection. Two members of the MS-13 gang in Northern Virginia were convicted of killing her, while two others, including the ex-boyfriend, were acquitted.
A Justice Department inspector general's report last year warned that witness safety could be compromised if the government doesn't reverse a steady drop in marshals assigned to the program.
Under new Director John Clark, the Marshals Service is trying to raise its public profile, an effort designed to win more money from Congress once lawmakers and the public have a better idea of what the service does.
The rare look inside the witness protection program was a part of that effort.
The Marshals who look after protected witnesses are, it turns out, part social worker, minister, lawyer and marriage counselor.
One witness persuaded the government to accept 20 family members into the program with him, after demonstrating that they were at risk of harm, Shur said.
Another witness won permission to include his wife, mistress and mother. The latter two lived together, Shur said, and everyone was OK with that arrangement.
But there was one line the government would not cross.
One witness wanted to relocate with his mistress, but not his wife.
Wrap...
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