Purple Curry

UN-Satisfactory: Why the UN Gets a Failing Grade

2012-02-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

Last year, as president of the United Nations General Assembly, the Swiss politician Joseph Deiss warned that the UN was dangerously close to signing its own death warrant.

Singling out the 15-member Security Council, Deiss told attendees at a conference on global governance that it was unacceptable that the primary institution charged with maintaining international peace remained broken despite nearly two decades of debate.

"Unless we find the determination to advance on this issue, the United Nations will lose its credibility," he said. "Our organization will be marginalized, and important issues will be discussed in other forums and groupings which are perceived to be more efficient and more representative of the new realities of the day."

Sadly, it's well past time for the UN to go the way of its predecessor. Because as it exists, the world body is terminally dysfunctional.

Its latest failure, of course, is Syria.

Even as cameras capture terrifying scenes of blood and chaos in the conflict-ravaged country, the Security Council remains mired in indecision and powerless to act in any meaningful way. Russia and China — two of the Council's most obstinate permanent members — are united in their opposition to an Arab League peace plan, which they say is tantamount to regime change and a violation of Syria's sovereignty.

So even though 13 of the Council's 15 members support a resolution backing the plan, the body is ultimately helpless — held hostage by a counterproductive veto mechanism that leaves it paralyzed in the face of mass atrocities.

Let's face it: Russia and China will never vote enthusiastically to advance principles they don't share. Moscow is adamant to continue arming the government of Syria while it is waging war on its own people. China has previously blocked the Security Council's efforts to act in countries like Sudan, mainly to protect its own economic interests. Africans, in Beijing's view, are free to fight among themselves — as long as they keep pumping oil.

The reality is there exists a fundamental disconnect among the Council's permanent members. And the institution's present structure and methods do not allow it to get much done.

Unless it takes long overdue steps to balance the legitimacy and rights of members with its overall effectiveness, the UN will find itself an anachronism. And the world, to follow Deiss, will have no choice but to declare it dead.

Reality TV Democracy and the Road to Tyranny

2012-01-27T07:42:00.000-08:00

I don't usually subscribe to apocalyptic alarmism about the imminent demise of American democracy. But every now and then, I confess, the doomsayers get it right.

We may not be standing on the precipice of tyranny just yet, but we are slouching dangerously toward a system of government in which supreme power is no longer vested in the people.

I mean, sure, we have a process that appears colorfully and raucously democratic, with televised debates, town halls, tea parties, occupations, and all the attack ads corporate money can buy. But strip away the gloss and turn down the volume — and what's left has all the seriousness of a pantomime.

We've turned politics into a performance art and politicians into entertainers, so that what matters is not how our leaders approach complicated problems, but how they squeeze solutions into 30-second sound bites.

We want catchy slogans and political acrobatics, not bland centrism that might actually make too much sense. Let's face it: Middle of the road is boring. We need to laugh at our politicians, get mad at them, marvel at their audacity or lampoon them on late-night TV. Listening to long explanations based on well-considered principles? Well, that demands way too much attention and time.

The result is a political class that values showmanship over leadership.

Make no mistake: Our politicians aren't practitioners of statecraft in the traditional sense. They aren't concerned with politics as a process of collective decision making. They are, in fact, immersed in the practice of politics as sport. Here, partisanship is what drives the game. Elections are like finale performances. And an electoral victory is the grand prize.

It's a system designed around elections as the end — not the beginning — of a representative political process.

This is why elected officials often seem unfamiliar to the people who vote them into office. With elections as their curtain call, our actor-politicians go back to being themselves just as soon as the results are in — and since we never know who they really are, we're left disillusioned and confused.

Of course, we have only ourselves to blame for this mess. By elevating entertainment over substance, and picking performers over leaders, we have effectively surrendered our democratic power to vote for meaningful change.

This, I think, has gone on long enough.

It's time we realized that politics is not reality TV. Our country needs more than another lousy show.

TED: 'Why SOPA is a Bad Idea'

2012-01-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: If you were among the legions of Internet users frustrated last week after blackout protests by Web giants Google and Wikipedia [among thousands of others], here's a primer on the proposed anti-piracy laws targeted by the action.

Writer and tech guru Clay Shirky, who serves on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, explains why the new social media paradigm is worth saving from the money-grubbing ways of 20th-century content industries. The Stop Online Piracy Act, he says, is a challenge to "our shareable world."

Listen.

Election 2012: A Crisis of Leadership

2012-01-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

So it seems as though President Obama has finally thrown in the towel.

The candidate who asked us to believe in the audacity of hope has all but confessed his own despair to disillusioned American voters. The gauntlet has been run. And the battle is over.

"In terms of the president's relationship with Congress in 2012 — the state of the debate, if you will — the president is no longer tied to Washington, DC," spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters recently at a briefing in Honolulu.

Other than a year-long extension of the payroll tax cut, Mr. Obama considers nothing on his policy agenda to be a "must-do" for lawmakers. He'll chip away at America's challenges by relying strictly on executive action. Big, bold initiatives will have to wait. [Ironic, since the announcement comes as part of the White House's "We Can't Wait" campaign].

Our president, it appears, has decided not to lead. And that's a crying shame. Especially as the unemployment rate hovers above 8 percent and millions of Americans yearn for relief from dire economic events. Even Mr. Obama's most ardent defenders will have to concede that it sounds a bit hollow-hearted to ask supporters to press for change while making a political calculation to turn away from the fight. Effective leaders, he should know, lead with conviction from the front. Cowards run away.

Why should the world's most powerful man (according to Forbes magazine) feel boxed into a corner? Why should he not keep sweating and swinging as long as he's still in the ring?

It's not like there aren't legislative battles worth fighting in an election year.

Consider, for example, the very worthwhile struggle for comprehensive immigration reform, one of Mr. Obama's campaign promises from 2008. This is an issue that is directly relevant to our long-term growth and economic competitiveness — concerns very much on the brain of the average voter.

According to a report published last year by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, foreign firms invested $194 billion in the United States in 2010, fueling 2 million jobs and employing 5 percent of the U.S. private workforce. Overall, these companies employed 5.7 million U.S. workers in 2009, accounting for about 13 percent of the U.S. manufacturing sector. The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task, citing the CEA survey, reported that "foreign firms account for more than 18 percent of total U.S. merchandise exports and, at $40.5 billion, over 14 percent of total U.S. private investment in research and development."

Translation: Remaining open to the world is good for business.

It's also good for the American worker.

Even as wage growth nationwide remains bleak, jobs created by foreign companies pay more than $70,000 a year — that's 30 percent higher than U.S. average pay, according to the CEA. We should be putting in place immigration policies that encourage and stimulate this sort of growth. Instead, the debate is bogged down in a seemingly interminable and intractable dispute over illegal immigration.

The impasse has many negative economic effects.

Zhihang Chi, vice president and general manager for Air China's North American division, told Washington Post Live's Global China Summit last year that the lengthy application process for U.S. visas constituted a significant barrier to tourism and business investment.

The Associated Press, quoting tourism industry insiders, reported in December that the decline in foreign visitors over the past decade is "costing American businesses and workers $859 billion in untapped revenue and at least 500,000 potential jobs at a time when the economy needs both."

Immigration reform, given these facts, should be a key component of any responsible jobs plan. Why, then, doesn't the president lead? Aren't the livelihoods of American workers worth fighting for? Or is politics more sport than governance, where all that matters is the winning play?

In the end, Mr. Obama would do well to follow the example of a leader and innovator he greatly admired. After the passing of Apple's Steve Jobs, the president praised him as a man "brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

We need that kind of leadership in the White House.

Iran is Committing Suicide

2012-01-04T17:13:00.000-08:00

The warmongers in Tehran ought to listen carefully to U.S. Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick Frost.

A spokeswoman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, Frost has been very clear about the consequences of aggression in the strategically important Strait of Hormuz. Any attempt to shut the waterway — choking off 35 percent of the world's seaborne oil — would make Iran a pariah in the international community, putting it "clearly outside the community of nations," to use Frost's elegant diplomatic formulation.

That's Iran vs. World, no exaggeration. Pure strategic, economic and diplomatic suicide.

To be sure, no country anywhere would accept a prolonged period of volatility in an area described as one of the world's most crucial choke points. Not the rapidly developing nations of Asia, which could not afford sharp increases in the price of oil; not the crisis-hit countries of Europe, "collectively the second largest market for Iranian crude after China," according to the Reuters news agency. And certainly not the United States, where a spike in the price of fuel at the pump could take the spark out of a fragile economic recovery.

Troops and navies from everywhere would steam toward the 34-mile-wide strip of sea.

Sure, Iran could hold off the world for a bit, maybe even cause an upset or two, but in the end a few aging destroyers, frigates and fast boats would be no match for the combined naval might of a very determined international community. Tehran would find itself vanquished, humiliated, financially desperate and thoroughly alone.

There would be no appetite for negotiations and no bargaining room.

Of course, if Iran's clerics have figured this out, then they should know that saber-rattling only diminishes their credibility. If you're not going to act, why threaten at all? On the flip side, provocations of any kind would invite outcomes they might not be able to endure. Either way, tough talk only digs them deeper in the hole. So why keep up the false display?

If Iran wishes to be seen as a rational actor, it should steer away from such an obviously irrational course. Pentagon Press Secretary George Little is right. It's time to "lower the temperature."

Zen — Last Words, Two Views

2011-12-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

On Independence

"Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace."

— Václav Havel (1936-2011), writer, dissident playwright and first President of the Czech Republic, in his 1985 essay An Anatomy of Reticence.

"Independence is an attribute of man, the social being; it should not be viewed as the development to perfection of a natural, biological attribute of living matter. This is, in essence, an evolutionary viewpoint. Of course, we do not deny evolutionism itself. Science has long established the fact that man is a product of ages of evolution. Man is a product of evolution, but not his independence. Independence is a social product. Independence is an attribute given to man by society, not nature; it is not a natural gift, but has been formed and developed socially and historically."

— Kim Jong-il (1941-2011), North Korean dictator, in a 1974 address to propagandists of the Korean Workers' Party.

On the Ego

"Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not."

— Havel in Disturbing the Peace, a series of interviews with Czech journalist Karel Hvizdala.

"I am the object of criticism around the world. But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track. "

— Kim, in conversation with former Russian presidential envoy Konstantin Pulikovsky, from Pulikovsky's book The Orient Express.

Russia's Anti-Western Eruption

2011-12-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

In October, just days after Libyan rebels celebrated the liberation of their nation from the tyranny of a cruel dictatorship, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the podium at an official event in Moscow to present the Russian language edition of Fidel Castro's memoirs.

"Comandante Fidel enjoys great respect in our country," Lavrov said, gushing praise for the Cuban dictator. "He is widely known as one of the most influential statesmen and politicians of our time, as a patriot of his Motherland, a champion of social equality and a strong advocate of the formation of a new, fairer polycentric world order."

And by a "new, fairer polycentric" world, Lavrov means a world fundamentally hostile to Western values and interests. For this, in summary, constitutes the foreign policy posture of our Cold War nemesis. The Kremlin will back anyone — any regime — seen as hostile to the West.

Consider the evidence: There was the veto in October of a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the regime of Bashar Assad for its brutal crackdown on pro-reform protesters. Russia's reasoning? The resolution was based on "the philosophy of confrontation." (Since when, one wonders, has Moscow been so Gandhian in its approach?)

Then came the criticism of the Arab League's decision to suspend Syria for failing to end the crackdown. "Those who took this decision have lost a very important opportunity to make the situation more transparent," Lavrov told reporters from Russian news agencies. "Someone really does not want the Syrians to agree among themselves."

Someone, Mr. Foreign Minister? Let me guess, a shadowy "foreign hand"?

Of course, this was also Russia's position when the U.N. intervened in Libya — an effort state-owned television characterized as "aggression by the great world powers against a sovereign country."

And if you're still not convinced, there's the most recent quarrel about Iran.

After an International Atomic Energy Agency report made public that Tehran has carried out computer simulations of nuclear explosions and studied designs for fitting warheads to missiles, Moscow wasted no time in decrying the document's "destructive logic," noting that it amounted to the "intentional demolition of the political-diplomatic process."

When it comes to the West, it's clear, the Russian establishment simply isn't willing to play nice.

Commentator Konstantin von Eggert, formerly with the BBC Russian Service, explained the origins of this attitude in a recent essay for Russia Now: "Moscow's decision-makers and the Russian public view global politics as a zero-sum game: one person's gain is another's loss. It is at the same time the consequence of, and the reason for, Russia's tortuous post-Communist transition. The country is no longer a Soviet empire or a global superpower and not yet a fully fledged nation state. This makes the Russians uncertain and defensive.

"They worship sovereignty — understood as a sort of pre-First World War right of governments to do what they want within their national boundaries – because they saw the Soviet Union disappear overnight."

So in a 21st-century world of webs, the Russians put up walls.

It's a lamentable state of affairs — and one that will keep Moscow, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said, "on the wrong side of history."

Why Washington Should Invest in America's Energy Future

2011-12-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a name for "the next great global industry." And he's writing and talking — and doing everything he can — to spread the word around.

It's E.T., or Energy Technology, if you're wondering. And Friedman wants you to know that there's more to it than science fiction. "[...] We're in a world with a warming climate that is growing from 6.8 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050, so demand for clean energy is going to go through the roof."

In other words, E.T. is big business — and like any business, it will need investment to help it along. Which is where Friedman and others see a role for government — our government, to be exact.

"It needs to be incentivizing businesses to build their next factory in this country — at a time when every other nation is throwing incentives their way; it needs to be recruiting highly skilled immigrants; it needs to be setting the highest national education standards and funding basic research; it needs to be laying down the right energy regulations that will stimulate more clean-tech companies."

Of course, Republicans aren't having any of this liberal drivel; but they've taken aim for now at that bit about "funding basic research." Vindicated in their position after the Obama Administration's embarrassing Solyndra debacle, the GOP is set to pull the budget trigger on green energy investments.

Tucked away in the latest House proposal to extend the one-year payroll tax holiday is a measure to cut a research-and-development credit focused on energy programs. A yes vote would take a sledgehammer to small companies with big E.T. ideas, which is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater — only this time, it could mean the Internet that never gets built.

The key question, to follow authors Eugene Fitzgerald and Andreas Wankerl, is this: "Are national expenditures on research and development like other government spending or are they a national investment?"

PBS NewsHour debated the issue last month. The discussion is worth a listen.

The Problem With Isolationism

2011-12-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

When it comes to international action, Herman Cain wants the United States out of the driver's seat. Whether it's the credit crisis in Europe or human rights in the Arab world, Washington shouldn't take up the mantle.

The mantra is put others in front. The U.S. should follow — only if others lead.

"The United States should not be the sole one to try and prevent [the financial] crisis in Europe," the embattled GOP presidential candidate told the editorial board of New Hampshire's Union Leader.

"Just like in Libya [...] The president said we're going to lead from behind; we expended more in military resources — over a billion dollars more than any European country. They had the most to gain and the most to lose in terms of their oil; most of it goes to Europe. They should have taken a bigger leadership role. They should have spent more money to support the folks that we were trying to support.

"[...] Same thing relative to this crisis. Who has the most to win or lose? Europe. And if I were president, I would insist that the European countries step up to the plate before the United States would put more of its resources. Yes, there would be an impact on the United States because we sell a lot of goods to European countries and vice versa. But I don't think we should be the primary savior of that country."

Never mind that Cain seems unsure about Europe's status as a continent. What's striking about his position is that it betrays a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the contemporary international system — a system with deep ideological and institutional ties to the United States.

Indeed, U.S. involvement in the European muddle is both necessary and proper. Necessary, because like the rest of the word, European lenders rely heavily on the U.S. dollar. As the principal international currency since Bretton Woods, dollar liquidity is vitally important to capital mobility and global market stability. And as "the ultimate supplier of this liquidity," t o quote the macroeconomist Robert E. Keleher, international lender of last resort responsibilities "fall upon the Federal Reserve."

By tightening or easing its monetary policy, the U.S. central bank controls availability and access to the world's dominant international reserve asset. We therefore have a special obligation to make sure there's enough cash to go around.

U.S. involvement is proper — at least in part — because U.S. investment banks created the currency and credit derivatives structures that helped shaky European economies hide their mounting deficits and debt. In other words, we enabled the problem we're now trying so desperately to solve.

Contrary to Cain's assertion, our involvement in Europe has less to do with American benevolence and more to do with the responsibilities that attach to being the cornerstone of the international financial system.

In Libya, too, a dominant U.S. military role only reflects the continued structural dominance of the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Let's remember that throughout the alliance's history, the United States has spent a larger share of its GDP on defense than have most of its partners. Is it any wonder, then, that we possess assets and capabilities no others can match?

On a related note, the headquarters of the United Nations is not in New York City by accident. And the organization's founding charter is held permanently by the National Archives of the United States for a reason: The international world order we know today is, in design and reality, an American world order.

That being the case, it's simply not possible for the U.S. to look away when a troubled world comes knocking.

TIME: Pakistan's 'Pus-Filled Wound'

2011-11-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

Time magazine's Mark Thompson, who has written about national security from Washington since 1979, describes the latest flare-up in tensions between the United States and Pakistan as the "most deadly downturn" to date in a relationship torn asunder by "the chronic and oozing pus-filled wound of the U.S. war in Afghanistan."

If you haven't heard, NATO helicopters and fighter jets are blamed for a Nov. 26 attack on Pakistani army outposts along the country's ill-defined northwestern border that killed 24 soldiers. The "incident," to use the Pentagon's term, could well sound the death knell for Islamabad's cooperation in the fight to stabilize Afghanistan.

So far, the retaliation has been swift and severe. NATO supply lines crossing Pakistani territory have been closed and U.S. forces have 15 days to vacate the Shamsi airbase in western Baluchistan, allegedly being used to operate the controversial drone program.

More fallout is expected, but much of the analysis misses the larger context in which these events occur. As Thompson writes in Time's excellent Battleland blog, any talk of securing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — a bedrock of current U.S. military strategy — ignores fundamental realities on the ground.

"Despite tribal loyalties that go back a thousand years, the West sees the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a nearly-neat frontier, capable of being policed, more or less. But the Pashtun people who fuel the Taliban have ignored that border for centuries, and will continue to do so. That seems to create a challenge well beyond the ability of the U.S., NATO, or any outside power, to surmount."

A prolonged engagement in these lawless badlands can only mean more trouble in the future. That said, any dialogue between the U.S. and Pakistan can only be fruitful if both parties proceed from a position of honest awareness. Pretending that the lines are drawn clearly won't suddenly make them visible.

To follow Thompson, a tourniquet is no way to treat a festering wound.

Zen – On Listening to the Generals

2011-11-23T07:03:00.000-08:00

"Did you hear what I just said? I said we should draw down from 100,000. We don't need 100,000 troops. We don't need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan [...] many of whom can't even cross the wire. We need a presence on the ground that is more akin to 10,000 or 15,000. That will serve our interests in terms of intelligence gathering and Special Forces response capability. And we need to prepare for a world, not just in South Asia, but, indeed, in every corner of the world in which counter-terror – counter-terrorism is going to be in front of us for as far as the eye can see into the 21st century.

"[...] I also remember when people listened to the generals in 1967 and we heard a certain course of action in South Asia that didn't serve our interests very well."

– GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman in a testy exchange with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during CNN's Republican presidential debate on national security in Washington, Nov. 22. The former Utah governor and ambassador to China was responding to criticism of his call for a troop drawdown in Afghanistan.

A Kinder, Gentler Approach to Pakistan?

2011-11-14T16:58:00.000-08:00

Carl Levin wants Pakistan to take the fight to terrorist safe havens in North Waziristan. And he's willing to end Washington's uneasy friendship with Islamabad if lawmakers there fail to do our bidding.

"Our response should be that if the only option Pakistan presents us is a choice between losing an ally and continuing to lose our troops, then we will choose the former," the Michigan Democrat, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a gathering of pundits at the Council on Foreign Relations last month.

"It is unacceptable for the United States to spend its blood and treasure so that Afghanistan does not once again become a breeding ground for militant extremists while Pakistan protects terrorists who cross the border to attack us. Pakistan cannot evade responsibility for its role in allowing and supporting these attacks."

All true, I admit; no argument there. But the senator might want to tone down his rhetoric, since the tough talk does little to help our reluctant friends fix the problem.

You see, politicians in Islamabad would love to crack down on the militant threat to Pakistan's sovereignty, but they lack an important quality absent which they cannot lay claim to the moral and legal authority necessary for the use of decisive violence.

That absolutely vital quality is legitimacy.

Without it, Pakistan's use of force in the remote Federally Administered Tribal Areas (of which North Waziristan is one "agency") carries about the same moral weight and acceptance as American drone strikes on tribal territory.

To be clear, the Pakistani administration in Islamabad is viewed with considerable suspicion by fiercely independent-minded Waziris who don't see themselves as part of one big national family. In fact, the Waziris haven't belonged to anything much bigger than Waziristan since the Mughal Empire began disintegrating in the 18th century. Neither the Sikhs nor the Brits were able to successfully co-opt the tribes, and the region existed as an independent tribal territory outside the British Empire from 1893 until the borders of Pakistan were drawn around it in 1947. So Waziristan's very inclusion in Pakistan is, in a way, an accident of history.

To ask Islamabad to use force in this context is to encourage illegitimate violence that is itself a form of terrorism. This sets us up for failure on three fronts: First, it does great harm to our image as champions of freedom, democracy and human dignity; second, it erodes the internal legitimacy and credibility of the civilian government in Islamabad; and finally, it increases the threat to NATO forces underwriting Afghanistan's security. On the whole, it's a lose-lose-lose proposition that hurts more than it helps.

Levin and his colleagues in the Senate would be wise to pursue strategies that shore up Pakistan's internal sources of legitimacy.

Issuing orders to Islamabad won't do us much good in the long run.

Why Atlanta's Small Businesses Are Hiring ... And a Word From Congressman Price

2011-11-06T12:53:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: I've just returned from a business trip to Atlanta, where I spent the week studying new media technology for a military agency. My work took me to the sleek, high-tech campus of one of the largest, independent broadcast facilities in the country. The place was straight out of a wet dream for tech junkies, but what drew my attention was everything around it: Neighborhoods seemed tidy and well-kept, roads and interstates were in good condition, businesses were hiring (even while the state, overall, suffers double-digit unemployment) — in general, the mood was upbeat.

What, I wondered, was going on?

Then while driving back to the airport it hit me.

Metro Atlanta is home to the largest concentration of colleges and universities in the South. There's Georgia State, Clark Atlanta, Morehouse College, Georgia Tech, Emory — the list goes on. As Harvard's Edward Glaeser has pointed out, "nearly 43 percent of adults in the city of Atlanta have college degrees, as opposed to 27 percent in the nation as a whole [...] The figure is even higher in surrounding Fulton County."

So while small businesses nationally saw hiring decline by 2.9 percent in October, according to the Atlanta Small Business Examiner, businesses in Georgia's capital increased hiring by 3.2 percent. Paycheck sizes also bucked the national trend, moving up 1.4 percent against a 0.6 percent drop nationally. Skills, Glaeser notes, "have long led to urban success, especially when mixed with large urban size."

The city's big secret, folks, is education.

With that in mind, allow me to share this email I received last week from North Carolina Congressman David Price. His message on education deserves our full attention.

Read on.

***

Dear Mr. D'Souza,

As you may have heard, the deficit reduction "Supercommittee" will make recommendations to Congress later this month. Under the terms of the debt limit agreement reached in late July, the Supercommittee has a mandate to identify $1.2 trillion in savings by November 23. Congress must then have an up-or-down vote on these recommendations by December 31.

The Supercommittee's recommendations will have consequences for generations to come. That's why I've been working to make sure that we chart a responsible course back to a balanced budget. We can't achieve balance by cutting the very investments that will ensure our nation's long-term economic success.

Last month I authored a letter, signed by 59 of my colleagues, urging the Supercommittee to protect job-creating investments in education and research. Our education system and our research enterprise are our greatest competitive advantages. They give American workers the tools they need to compete and win in the global economy and the savvy to out-innovate our competitors.

We know these investments work, and President Obama is right to make them central planks [with innovation and infrastructure] in his approach to "Winning the Future." These investments have transformed our state, making North Carolina—and especially the Fourth District—a center of high-tech jobs in R&D and the industries that will drive the 21st Century economy.

Strategic federal investments in education and student aid have made it possible for generations of Americans to obtain a college education, regardless of their income. I was pleased to see President Obama lower student loan interest rates for borrowers just last week, and I count authoring legislation that made student loan interest tax-deductible as one of my proudest achievements in Congress. Accessible, affordable higher education is essential to fully developing our nation's human capital. I believe all our citizens should have the opportunity to achieve the highest possible levels of education, and I will continue to fight for this position as the Supercommittee issues its recommendations.

In addition to taking the lead in advocating for investments in research and education, I have also made some suggestions to the Supercommittee about what they should cut: subsidies for Big Oil and fossil fuel development, and funding for outdated, Cold War-era weapons programs in the Department of Defense budget, to name two.

I hope to hear your thoughts on what you think the Supercommittee should prioritize, and what it should cut. You can follow what the Supercommittee is considering at http://www.deficitreduction.gov/public/.

Sincerely,

David Price
Member of Congress

Why Are We at War in Africa?

2011-10-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt that Joseph Kony is an ugly, brutish, fiend of a man.

As leader of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army, he's responsible for crimes that run the whole gamut of the penal code. A 2005 indictment issued by the International Criminal Court brought 33 charges against him, including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement, rape, pillaging, forced enlisting of child soldiers, you get the idea.

But then, the world is full of psychotic, delusional and murderous men like Mr. Kony. So why send 100 combat-equipped U.S. troops to hunt down his terror army across four famously volatile African countries? And why now?

President Obama's top aides didn't seem to have answers for members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week. Don Yamamoto, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and Alexander Vershbow, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, fumbled when asked about the end game in the region. Both were chastised for being unable to address estimates of the cost and duration of the mission.

Oh, and an exit strategy? Well, there isn't one.

"As part of the decision to deploy our advisers, we agreed that there would be a review after several months in order to assess whether our advisers are making sufficient progress toward our objectives," Vershbow told skeptical committee members. "Continuing this deployment is contingent upon a number of factors including a sustained commitment and sustained cooperation by the regional governments in addressing the LRA threat."

Strip away the obtuse bureaucratese and you have exactly nothing.

This is troubling because advisory missions against stubborn insurgencies have a long history of ending in intractable violence. And by invoking the War Powers Resolution as a matter of "national security," the president has already signaled that this is more serious than "just advising and assisting local forces," as Vershbow put it to lawmakers.

So if we are at war with the LRA, what, pray, is the plan?

As Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen pointed out, wars tend to require rules of engagement, mission parameters and some kind of definition of success — all of which Messrs. Yamamoto and Vershbow seemed content to leave to the stormy winds of fate.

Most crucially, wars should be guided by a clear rationale and an urgent sense of national interest, one that President Obama simply hasn't articulated in this case.

Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly framed the question this way: "What is the strategic interest of the United States in doing this? I mean, there are lots of unpleasant people in the world. There are lots of insurgencies and terrorist movements in the world. The United States obviously cannot try to dethrone every one of them."

Indeed. Mr. President, please explain.

Zen – On the End of Muammar Gaddafi and the Beginning of a New Chapter in Libya's History

2011-10-21T05:11:00.000-07:00

"Wow."

– Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reacting to early news of the dictator's capture.

***

"The news from the Middle East is vindication of the Obama administration's policy in Libya. A man who was an enemy of the American people, someone who killed Americans aboard Pan Am 103, someone who was taking out Americans and acting against our interests in the Middle East for decades has finally been eliminated from the scene.

"[...] For President Obama, after the death of Bin Laden, Al-Awlaki and now, indirectly, Qaddafi, he's left with a terrific narrative in terms of making the case that Democrats aren't weak on national security."

– Fox News political analyst Juan Williams.

***

"If you oppress your people, if you don't engage your civil society, if you stay in power for so many years, this will be your end."

– Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics, on the signal sent by Gaddafi's death to other tyrants in the region.

***

"Let us recognize, immediately, that this is only the end of the beginning. The road ahead for Libya and its people will be difficult and full of challenges."

– U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Occupy Wall Street: The Price of Analog Politics in a Digital World

2011-10-16T06:31:00.000-07:00

MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan was right on the money when he predicted in August that a tornado of populist fury was ready to upend the established order in our nation's centers of power.

America's "mad as hell" moment is now fully upon us. And the "greedy bastards" at the top have nowhere to hide. What began with the Tea Party has metastasized and erupted into a freewheeling and visceral disdain for all things Wall Street and Washington. From taxes and bailouts to slippery credit-default swaps and tricky trade deals, everyone, everywhere, is shaking a clenched fist at something. Got a gripe? Join the tribe.

So it goes.

But what, I wonder, is behind the spontaneous [and sometimes violent] outpouring of discontent?

There are the obvious answers: We're out of work, out of cash, socially divided, politically rudderless, institutionally fragmented — and standing on the precipice of another economic collapse. And yet, truth be told, we've been through all this before.

Think back to the rupture of Civil War, the difficult years of Reconstruction, the Panic of 1893, the Great War and Depression; indeed, trauma, one could argue, has been a central part of the American experience. So what makes this moment special? What makes us seem, as Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez recently put it, "angrier than ever"?

Before you answer, consider that there might be more at work than the machinations of the 24/7 media machine. Yes, social media helped launch the movement, but this season of malcontent has its roots in a profound cultural change a century in the making.

Let me explain.

The world at the turn of the last century was still a vast and mysterious place, with nations, cultures, values and attitudes separated by time and space. By the early 1900s, things had started to change.

The first radio broadcasts brought us sounds from far away, drawing us in a little closer. Automobiles gave us greater mobility, slowly pulling the nation together. Airplanes and rapid advances in commercial aviation allowed us to cross oceans in a matter of hours. Television beamed the world into our living rooms, making the planet seem much smaller. More recently, personal and portable computers wired into the World Wide Web have erased barriers that once neatly divided the globe.

These changes in the dimensions and experience of time and space are bringing about fundamental changes in the culture of our society. Generally speaking, as communications theorists Michel Cartier and Jon Husband have observed, there is a trend toward an "instantaneous culture, built from interconnected immediacy of peoples' thoughts, ideas and expression."

The keyword here is immediacy. And it is exactly what our political system isn't designed to deliver. For while our instantaneous culture may be shaping the 21st century, our cumbersome political institutions and practices are relics of the 18th.

The result is a government that is woefully anachronistic — sadly and totally out of place in time. After all, 18th century institutions can't possibly be expected to keep up with a society measuring information in exabytes.

In the end, today's demonstrations aren't merely about ideological or partisan preferences. The folks camping out in the streets are telling us that our centuries-old democracy needs an urgent software update — especially as anger goes viral.

'Forget Wall Street: Occupy The Voting Booth'

2011-10-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: For the rest of blogger Marni Chan's impassioned plea for meaningful political participation, visit Forbes.com.

"As Cher famously said in Clueless, 'not to be a traitor to my generation or anything' but, if you're going to protest Wall Street, you have to understand the fight.

"As a twenty-something liberal it's incredibly frustrating that young people are willing to sleep on the streets but won't read 848 pages of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act, available on the same interweb utilized by social network savvy protesters, under serious threat of repeal or flaccid implementation, yet disturbingly absent from the dialogue of a protest that's presumably about problems with Wall Street.

"ABC News reported that #OccupyWallStreet participants hit around 5,000 on the busiest day, and crowds have continued to gather daily for three weeks now. Yet out of the 12.5 million voting age citizens of New York, only 72,187 voted in the last election. That's less than one percent. Something is out of proportion when the stamina of our civic duties is puny in comparison to the enthusiasm for making a scene."

Rory Stewart@TEDGlobal 2011: 'Time to End the War in Afghanistan'

2011-10-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: You shouldn't listen to Rory Stewart because of his Oxford erudition.

Yes, he once tutored Princes William and Harry, served as Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights at Harvard, held key positions in Iraq as a member of the British Foreign Office, and became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire at the age of 31. But his credentials say nothing about his unconventional way of getting to the bottom of things. And it is precisely the audacity of his approach that sets the recently elected British member of Parliament apart.

For example, when tasked with studying cultural renewal and sustainable development in Afghanistan, Stewart spent 32 days trekking across the country, from Herat to Kabul. He also walked across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal, learning local languages and making friends while covering 6,000 arduous miles.

It's this sort of intimate knowledge of the world's in-between places that makes Stewart a leading authority on the practice of international relations. And this is why it's worth listening to his position on the war in Afghanistan.

John Boehner's China Syndrome

2011-10-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

There's a dust-up in Congress over the deluge of heavily subsidized and artificially underpriced Chinese goods making their way to a Walmart near you.

And it's tearing the Republicans asunder.

In one corner, there's South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who argues that it's dangerous to let the Chinese do business as usual. As he put it to The Hill's Justin Sink this week: "The Republican Party embraces free trade, and I am going to vote for the free-trade agreements, but I am not going to be a Republican who turns a blind eye to currency manipulation and intellectual property theft, simply because we don't want to offend a trading partner that has economic power over the United States."

In the other corner, there's — wait for it — House Speaker John Boehner (who seems to have forgotten that he represents a state with a rich manufacturing heritage).

"It's a pretty dangerous thing to be moving legislation through the U.S. Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of a currency," the Speaker told reporters shortly after the Senate voted 79-19 to pressure China to allow its currency — nearly 30 percent below its true value — to appreciate.

The U.S. should not be lecturing another country on how to run its monetary policy, Boehner grumbled — even if that means letting the Chinese get away with what one economist called "the largest protectionist measure adopted by any country since the Second World War."

Oh, and never mind the estimated 1.9 million American manufacturing jobs displaced or lost to China's predatory pricing practices since 2001. Boehner, like his cronies at the Heritage Foundation, is afraid of sparking a trade war. What happens, heaven help us, if Beijing decides to retaliate?

It's as if the violence done to our economy by the Chinese hasn't been damaging enough.

Let's be clear: The U.S. is already in an economic war with China. And the Chinese, thanks to Washington, are winning.

According to a study by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute, "The trade deficit with China grew from $84 billion in 2001, when China entered the WTO, to $278 billion in 2010. It eliminated or displaced 2,790,100 jobs, or about 2 percent of total U.S. employment over that period."

What's more, competition with China has resulted in lower wages and less bargaining power for millions of U.S. workers, eroding the prosperity that should ordinarily have accompanied free and fair trade.

Forcing the Chinese to level the playing field hardly amounts to protectionism, as Boehner and the Heritage posse allege. In fact, it's simply the right thing to do.

More than two decades ago, Ronald Reagan imposed import duties on Japanese semiconductors to check unfair trade practices that violated bilateral agreements between the U.S. and Japan. He, too, was accused of protectionism.

Reagan, however, stood firm, making clear that "our commitment to free trade is also a commitment to fair trade."

Boehner and his buddies should take note.

Apple's Steve Jobs: Gone Too Soon

2011-10-05T19:33:00.000-07:00

Enough Is Enough: Palestinians Should Demand the Right to Vote in a Binational Israel

2011-10-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

The definition of insanity, it's been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Someone should hurry up and tell the Israelis.

A year ago, as Vice President Joe Biden visited the region hoping to restart stalled negotiations with the Palestinians, hard-liners in Jerusalem loudly trumpeted plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jews in occupied parts of the city. A furious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the action as "insulting" and warned that Israel risked undermining trust and confidence in an already tenuous peace process. U.S. relations with Israel were "in their worst crisis since 1975," to quote the country's ambassador to Washington. "A crisis of historic proportions."

A year later, the dimwits in Bibi Netanyahu's government appear to be up to no good again.

This week, as American and European negotiators worked feverishly to contain the diplomatic damage from a Palestinian application for full U.N. membership, Israel announced its decision to approve the building of 1,100 new settlements on [illegally occupied] land claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state.

The project literally places a Jewish neighborhood in an "integral part of central Jerusalem," according to the international Quartet on the Middle East. Which casts a long shadow of doubt on the viability of a future Palestine.

Let's be brutally honest: A scattered patchwork of non-contiguous territories can never be taken seriously as a state. And the uninterrupted shrinking of Palestinian space kicks the whole idea of an independent Palestine deep into the realm of political fiction.

So perhaps politicians in Ramallah should abandon the fantasy of a two-state solution once and for all. Maybe it's time they asked for a binational state in which Palestinians have the right to vote.

Memo to Rick Perry: Israel is a Strategic Burden

2011-09-20T18:22:00.000-07:00

Republican presidential wannabe Rick Perry has been huffing and puffing about President Obama's "naive, arrogant, misguided and dangerous" policy in the Middle East.

"We are indignant that certain Middle Eastern leaders have discarded the principle of direct negotiations between the sovereign nation of Israel and Palestinian leadership," he told a clutch of Jewish supporters in New York today as a Palestinian delegation prepared to seek formal recognition of statehood at the U.N. General Assembly.

"We are equally indignant," Perry went on, "of the Obama Administration and their Middle East policy of appeasement that has encouraged such an ominous act of bad faith. [...] It must be said first that Israel is our oldest and strongest ally in the Middle East; a democratic ally in the Middle East, and it has been for more than 60 years. The Obama policy of moral equivalency, which gives equal standing to the grievances of Israelis and Palestinians, including the orchestrators [sic] of terrorism, is a very dangerous insult."

If you think that sounds a little bigoted, you're not alone. And of course, all this has been said before. But what has changed — and this is important — is the political context in which this rhetoric is received, especially in the Middle East.

Perry may well have been addressing his remarks to a narrow audience of American Jewish voters, but in an international media environment, political posturing isn't a local sport. And what sounds like music to the ears of American Jews is absolutely jarring to millions of Muslim youth fighting and dying for democracy and freedom in the Arab street.

In effect, Perry was saying, we ought to place Israel and its Jewish democracy above the aspirations of Palestinians seeking independent self-rule — even as millions across the Muslim world embrace the idea of popular sovereignty. That would make us and the Israelis the only obstacles to sovereignty and democracy in the symbolic heart of the Muslim world.

It's a position that demonstrates a stunning tone-deafness to the changing realities on the ground in the Middle East.

Perry and the rest of his ilk should know that times have changed since the years of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Israel had a joint strategic interest in standing up to the aggression of Soviet-backed Arab states in the region. Indeed, this alliance against Soviet-backed regimes was precisely what President John F. Kennedy had in mind when he told Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir in 1962 that we had a "special relationship with Israel."

In the post-9/11 world, this "special relationship" is a strategic burden, particularly as we try to align ourselves with the universal struggle for human rights in the Arab Middle East. Standing with an Israel led by what the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has called "the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government" in its history is not in our best interests. After all, what's the point of engaging with interlocutors who repeat the same uncompromising lines like wind-up talking dolls?

The Palestinians, Perry and others in his camp should know, are doing what they feel they must. And for this, let's be honest, Israel has only itself to blame.

Buddy Roemer's $100 Bid for the White House

2011-09-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer has been making the rounds on Comedy Central's late night political humor shows to talk about his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. And although his bid for the party's endorsement is no laughing matter, it's clear that most establishment types aren't taking him seriously.

You see, Roemer, who also served four terms in Congress in the 1980s, favors a radical approach to the sordid business of presidential electioneering. Not for him the high-dollar, poll-driven mud wrestling that passes for political campaigning. The soft-spoken Harvard graduate is a road man for accessible, citizen-driven government. That is to say, he wants to make it to the White House on the strength of small contributions from average people — not bundles of cash from shadowy lobbyists.

"What I've done to control the money is to take no PAC money," he explained to comedian Stephen Colbert. "That's the same way I ran for Congress, that's the same way I ran for governor. No PAC money, a $100 limit and full disclosure.

"Money is speech ... I have no problem with that. The Constitution protects it, but I have the God-given and constitutional right as to who I listen to. I will not listen to the special interests with the big checks. I will listen to Americans with $100, $5, or zero dollars who have an idea about how to build a better country."

The special interests, Roemer likes to say in his Cajun drawl, are "hogs in the trough, and we gonna kick 'em out."

Laugh at his dreamy idealism if you will, but the quiet crusader makes a powerful case. Our electoral system is sick, he told The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. "You can't tackle the jobs problem, the tax problem, the budget problem, or America rising, until you tackle the first problem — money and politics."

People can only feel represented in government when those who speak for them think and act like public servants. That's hardly possible in a system corrupted by the power of private wealth and privileged access to decision makers. How democratic can a nation be when average people — the kind that send in a $50 check — have only a slim chance of picking candidates most like them?

When big money determines political viability, our vibrant representative democracy contorts into a greedy and narrow plutocracy — one in which elections serve only as Kabuki theatre for the masses.

This is no way to run a country.

So on this fundamental issue, Roemer has it right. There should be no place in our democracy for what he calls "the tyranny of the big check."

I Believe: A 9/11 Tribute

2011-09-10T17:07:00.000-07:00

Jeff Sachs is Right: America Needs Investment-Led Growth

2011-09-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs isn't counting on American consumers to spend the economy out of a second recession. Not while they're struggling to make ends meet.

"Consumers are exhausted," he told CNN's Fareed Zakaria recently.

"There was a little blip but it's obviously gone away. We're at stagnation at best and maybe entering another recession right now; so we need a different approach. My view is that we can't have consumption-led growth anymore. We have to rebuild the foundations of our economies both in the U.S. and Europe. We have to become more competitive with our new competitors. We have to have better skills, technology [and] infrastructure. That means an investment-led recovery quite different from the short-term stimulus."

It's a strategy that calls for targeted and sensible investment in long-term job growth. And if you can believe it, some members of Congress actually have concrete plans. Listen to House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md., describing some of the bills in a legislative program called the "Make It in America agenda."

"One bill would create a National Infrastructure Development Bank to leverage private investment in much-needed, cutting-edge projects, from broadband networks to energy delivery systems to modern ports. Public-private partnerships to drive these projects can put Americans to work and help us keep pace with competitors like Germany and China, who are investing heavily in their own future growth."

There are also plans for job-training partnerships between advanced manufacturers and colleges, permanent research and development tax credits, a simpler corporate tax code, and mechanisms "to hold countries accountable for currency manipulation," which, Hoyer correctly notes, "costs American jobs."

These are all great ideas. And many have bipartisan support.

Congress and the White House should work resolutely to adopt a job-creating agenda as we teeter on the precipice of another economic collapse. Buying time with short-term stimulus checks won't put us on a path to sustainable growth. Moreover, it's the wrong medicine for a sickness caused by our economy's structural addiction to debt. Let's remember that our present round of troubles began because American consumers were spending money they didn't have. As of May 2011, the Federal Reserve reports, total U.S. consumer debt stood at a crushing $2.43 trillion. That's roughly $7,800 for every man, woman and child.

Consumption-led growth will only make matters worse while doing little to rebalance a global economy that has come to rely on America's insatiable appetite for stuff — purchased mostly on credit.

All things considered, we need a smart and responsible strategy to ensure our future prosperity. And bold leadership to see it through.

From Your Congressman With Love: My Six-Figure Salary Ain't Enough

2011-09-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

As chief executive of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs led the company he co-founded from the brink of ruin in the mid-1990s to global dominance by 2010. Awestruck fans watched as its market cap surged to a staggering $241.5 billion last year, beating Microsoft's $239.5 billion to make it the largest technology company on the planet.

In just over a decade, the indefatigable Jobs turned an also-ran computer manufacturer into a worldwide cultural phenomenon — while earning an official salary of just $1.

Consider that for a minute. Even as Apple grew to one of the most prosperous corporations around, its top executive was compensated only through his holdings in company stock.

It's what business school types call the "alignment hypothesis" — CEOs who align their wealth with the company's success are most driven to pursue robust growth; as the company's shares appreciate, so do their personal fortunes. Think of it as a mechanism to guarantee accountability to stockholders.

It might make sense to apply similar compensation standards to elected officials in Congress, especially as the renegade institution becomes less accountable to its shareholders — the American people. After all, aren't taxpayers like investors who have a real interest in how government performs? Why should they be saddled with the burden of compensating bad managers who can generally be fired only every few years?

At a time when Congress' job approval ratings are lingering near an abysmal 20 percent — with disapproval up to an average of 73.4 percent — why should members of Congress be entitled to salaries and fringe benefits that far exceed those of the average American?

The current compensation package, The Heritage Foundation's Mike Brownfield points out, is lavish beyond reason. Members of Congress earning a salary of $174,000 per year make 3.4 times more than the average full-time American worker. "Even if you compare Members of Congress to more educated, private sector employees, they're still doing pretty well — those Americans earn on average $83,000 per year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

That's not all. "If you count the $110,000 in taxpayer-funded fringe benefits members receive [including plush retirement plans, paid time off, and contributions to Social Security and Medicare taxes], they're earning close to $285,000 per year."

That makes Washington lawmakers "the second highest paid internationally," second only to Japan — another politically dysfunctional developed state, where government debt exceeds 200 percent of GDP.

At Apple, according to the Associated Press, top executives, including Jobs, "are employed at will, without severance or employment agreements, tax reimbursements or supplemental retirement benefits. The company also does not provide perks to the executives other than those available to non-executive employees."

And Apple, in July, had more cash on hand than the U.S. Treasury.

If a profitable corporation doesn't spoil its executives, why should the American taxpayer pamper failing lawmakers who volunteer to be public servants? Does this not make our representatives less like us — and therefore unable to champion our best interests in government? How can such a system of compensation possibly advance American democracy?

Alas, our self-interested public officials seem completely incapable of statesmanship. So instead of talking about a pay cut, some are actually clamoring for a raise. As freshman Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., recently put it to a retirement community in Tallahassee: "If you took the hours that I work and divided it into my pay, the $174,000 salary would not seem so high."

Could someone please hand the telephone to Donald Trump?

How War Criminals Walk Free

2011-08-22T15:34:00.000-07:00

A year ago, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir thumbed his nose at the International Criminal Court when he got on a plane to Chad and received a red-carpet welcome in N'Djamena — despite a warrant from The Hague authorizing his arrest for war crimes in Darfur.

Chadian officials made clear that Bashir would be allowed to return home without a hassle, regardless of their treaty obligations as representatives of an ICC member state.

"We are not obliged to arrest Omar Hassan al-Bashir," Ahmat Mahamat Bachir, the country's interior and security minister, told reporters at the time. "Bashir is a sitting president. I have never seen a sitting president arrested on his travels by the host country."

Instead, the Chadians gave the alleged genocidaire a key to their capital city.

As Bachir explained the decision to the BBC: "We are with the rule of law, and everybody has to pay for his mistakes, and for any crime he commits, but when it will be selectively and targeting only African leaders it should not be accepted."

A year later, we hear echoes of the same reasoning in the argument against the arrest warrant issued for Muammar Gaddafi. "Everyone knows that the ICC always acts at a moment that is not convenient, to put oil on the fire," African Union Commission chairman Jean Ping told AFP, while calling on the AU's 53 members to reject their legal responsibilities.

Again, a war criminal could get away with murder — if only for the time being.

I wrote last year that the ICC should act urgently to correct a perception of anti-African bias that threatens its credibility as a guarantor of human rights. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, allow me to make the point again.

Let's remember that while the ICC's loudest supporters rail against dictators and tyrants from ivory tower perches in New York and London, all the court's open investigations – in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Darfur, the Republic of Kenya, and now Libya – relate to situations in Africa; this, despite evidence of serious crimes committed by governments in other parts of the world. Indeed, some of these governments [including our own] are effectively beyond the jurisdiction of the ICC since they aren't state parties to the Rome Statute that established the court.

So why shouldn't the Africans ask, as Ping did at a continental summit earlier this year, "Why not Argentina, why not Myanmar ... why not Iraq?"

Unless this question is addressed, and soon, the ICC risks becoming irrelevant and obsolete. The world's only permanent court to try humanity's most heinous crimes will find itself reduced, in practice, to a political tool beholden to Western governments and their interests.

If the ICC is worth saving — and I think it is — we should all raise our voices for positive change in the court's prosecutorial discretion.

Waiting, to be clear, means letting war criminals walk free.

In Libya: A Victory for Hearts and Minds

2011-08-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: Excerpts from an article by Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent David Zucchino. Photo caption: "Mohammed Ali Harari, 64, a tailor who makes and sells flags at the Benghazi courthouse, says he increased production of the U.S. flag."

"Reporting from Benghazi, Libya— Omar el Keish wanted to make a strong statement when he headed out with his wife and daughter recently for a revolutionary rally here in the de facto rebel capital.

Keish decided to bring along a flag. It wasn't the ubiquitous Libyan rebel flag that flutters at every downtown rally. He chose the American flag — the Stars and Stripes — on a long, heavy pole.

The 57-year-old airline pilot waved the big fluttering fabric with both arms, and rallygoers smiled and flashed the V for victory sign at the sight of Old Glory.

'Libyans love America,' Keish explained as he cut through a boisterous crowd that numbered in the tens of thousands. 'They love the flag because it stands for freedom and democracy — exactly what they want for Libya.'

In a region where America is often mistrusted and resented, rebel-held eastern Libya stands out as an island of pro-American sentiment. The ragtag forces that drove out Moammar Kadafi's security forces in February credit U.S. and NATO warplanes for rescuing Benghazi from a government counterattack in March.

[...] More American flags have begun to pop up at opposition rallies and outside shops. Some young men sport ball caps emblazoned with a small U.S. flag and the New York Yankees logo.

Anti-Kadafi graffiti that dominates the Benghazi cityscape occasionally includes the American flag or pro-U.S. slogans. Schoolchildren occasionally place the Stars and Stripes in their anti-Kadafi drawings.

[...] 'Thank you America!' Yousif Abuleifa, 31, an oil engineer who has volunteered at the front, hollered at an American reporter who was chatting with Keish, the flag-waving pilot.

'We know we couldn't have faced down this dictator without America's support — France and the UK, too, but especially America,' Abuleifa said, pointing to Keish's flag."

American Manufacturing: How the Chinese are Eating our Lunch

2011-08-17T16:28:00.000-07:00

Two months ago, from a podium at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, President Obama outlined his prescription for a renaissance in American manufacturing.

"We have not run out of stuff to make; we've just got to reinvigorate our manufacturing sector so that it leads the world the way it always has, from paper and steel and cars to new products that we haven't even dreamed up yet. That's how we're going to strengthen existing industries; that's how we're going to spark new ones."

His Advanced Manufacturing Partnership will devote $500 million annually in federal and private sector funding to spur the development of cutting-edge technologies to lead the manufacturing revival. The future, the White House insists, is as bright as energy-efficient LED lighting.

Well, maybe.

The trouble is, $500 million is not nearly enough. As Alan Tonelson of the U.S. Business and Industry Council points out, what's killing American manufacturing is a staggering volume of imports. Writing in The Christian Science Monitor last month, Tonelson noted that U.S. manufacturing ran a $565 billion trade deficit last year.

"So far this year, that deficit is running 14.5 percent higher – despite a slowing economy, which is supposed to curb Americans' appetite for imports. Every dollar of this trade deficit represents lost opportunities for production, employment, and innovation. Worse, the borrowing needed to pay for these goods further boosts already dangerous levels of U.S. debt."

And by "goods," Tonelson isn't talking about the tiny toys in McDonald's Happy Meals or even the cheap T-shirts at Walmart. He's talking about stuff that's supersized — like gargantuan segments of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Get this: According to The New York Times, the Chinese, in July, shipped us "the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field," to be assembled in Oakland as the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge.

"The assembly work in California, and the pouring of the concrete road surface, will be done by Americans," Times reporter David Barboza clarified. "But construction of the bridge decks and the materials that went into them are a Made in China affair," made possible by "hundreds of Chinese laborers" working at "a sprawling manufacturing complex" in Shanghai.

So while California took in billions in stimulus cash for transportation infrastructure projects that were supposed to generate American jobs, state officials saw it fit to ship massive chunks of the $7.2-billion Bay Bridge contract to China. And we wonder why efforts to stimulate the U.S. economy have failed?

In fact, Barboza reports, "California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the 'Buy America' provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers."

And as Brian A. Petersen, the project director, explained it to the Times, the U.S. fabrication industry may not have been able to "put a project like this together."

"Most U.S. companies don't have these types of warehouses, equipment or the cash flow. The Chinese load the ships, and it's their ships that deliver to our piers."

Translation: We in America, despite the president's eloquent assurances, simply aren't good enough.

Folks, that's very, very sad.

It's one thing to have the Chinese assembling our iPhones but quite another to have them building our bridges — better than we ever could. If anything, the Bay Bridge project is a testament to the systematic erosion of America's manufacturing capacity, aided and abetted by corporate greed and decades of short-sighted public policy.

Turning things around will require more than a paltry $500 million and a few encouraging words. Make no mistake: We need a long-term, consumer-led commitment to American manufacturing jobs and employment.

Let's be clear in telling Washington that an American bridge made in China is a bridge too far.

The Debt Deal, Graduate Degrees and the Death of American Economic Power

2011-08-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Four years ago, in an essay for The Washington Post, Microsoft founder Bill Gates made a crucial observation about the nature of growth in modern economies. It's no longer simply about "the interplay between capital and labor," he wrote. "Today we know that these elements are outweighed by a single critical factor: innovation. "

And in the race to innovate, America's highly capable workforce — our human capital — has been the most important driver of progress.

"Scientists and engineers trained in U.S. universities — the world's best — have pioneered key technologies such as the microprocessor, creating industries and generating millions of high-paying jobs."

It's wisdom that slips easily into rhetoric on the campaign trail, where politicians peddle hope and pay lip service to the nation's future. But it holds no sway in Washington's corridors of power. How else to explain a debt deal that eliminates subsidized loans for graduate students?

While politicians and entrenched interests complained noisily about closing tax loopholes benefiting wealthy corporations, they lost no sleep over eliminating special credits for thousands of students earning the very degrees that will help our economy grow. All for a meager $21.6 billion in savings — over the next 10 years.

Thanks to the new law, graduate students can now add thousands of dollars to the cost of going to school.

A student borrowing the maximum of $65,500 in subsidized loans accrues interest at $207 a month over 10 years, CNNMoney.com senior writer Jennifer Liberto explains. "But with a subsidized loan, the government pays that $207 each month the student attends school until six months after graduation."

With the subsidy gone, graduate students will begin accruing interest rate payments while in school, driving up total indebtedness and making advanced degrees less attainable. So much for a down payment on keeping America competitive.

The move may also have long-term consequences for unemployment.

As Mark Tomlinson of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers put it in a column for The Christian Science Monitor: "If America is to hold on to its cutting edge in skilled manufacturing and innovation, it must train a workforce for the 21st century.

"You would think that with 13.9 million unemployed Americans, employers would have their pick of candidates. Unfortunately, that's not the case.

"Many of those laid off – especially from high-volume assembly manufacturing jobs – do not have the skills needed in today's modern plant. [...] Today, the industry needs workers who have the skill to process parts, program and maintain highly sophisticated multitasking machines, and understand how to improve their performance. They need to be problem solvers."

All that requires education — and sometimes, advanced degrees.

The dullards in DC should know that a failure to invest in higher education amounts to mortgaging our economic sovereignty. And that, in no uncertain terms, is a risk we cannot afford.

Zen — For Hard Times

2011-08-06T12:54:00.000-07:00

"Let me embrace thee, sour adversity,
For wise men say it is the wisest course."

— William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part III, Act III, Scene 1, L. 24.

Al Sharpton, Rogue Reverend

2011-08-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Al Sharpton is frothing at the mouth about the hideous Tea Party monster and its wild rampage against the American dream.

How dare our Frankenstein Congress stand between the president and his mounting "bills," forcing the poor fellow to make immoral choices about paying "this, that or the other." It's sacrilege, the MSNBC guest host has been insisting indignantly on his 6 p.m. ET show.

"You're saying seniors with Medicare and poor people with Medicaid should sacrifice but people with private jets, with all kinds of corporate loopholes, they shouldn't sacrifice? I mean, we're talkin' about shame here," the irascible Sharpton growled while scolding Illinois Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh last week.

Of course, the Reverend knows all about the shameless ways of lofty corporate tax dodgers. According to the New York Post, he's a card-carrying member of the club.

"Sharpton owes $359,973 to the IRS for 2009 personal income tax. [And] public records show he owes a total of $3.7 million in city, state and federal taxes, including penalties, dating to 2002."

As head of the nonprofit National Action Network in 2009, Sharpton made a whopping $250,000 in personal income, racked up a tax bill of $1.1 million for the organization, and ended the year "having just $36,397 cash on hand."

Where did all the money go, you ask?

Well, according to the group's 2009 tax return, "first-class or charter travel for Sharpton and other NAN staff."

So while the sanctimonious Reverend shakes his fist at Tea Party obstructionism, let's remember that he belongs squarely in the class of the two-faced, money-grubbing profiteers whose massive gaming of the system got us into this mess in the first place.

Al Sharpton and people like him are infiltrating our institutions and destroying them from within, eroding the public's trust in the pillars that hold up our democratic system. By employing someone with his dubious credentials to serve as spokesman for the American people, MSNBC is guilty of the same nauseating hypocrisy it so desperately calls attention to in our broader political culture.

It's a shameful business, to be sure.

Analysis: The Road to Armageddon

2011-07-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan presents a tour de force critique of U.S. policy through three administrations to explain how the world's most reliable economy got drunk on prosperity and ended up in rehab. For more context, see this 1999 piece by Martin McLaughlin.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Quick Take: The Debt Dilemma and American Apocalypse

2011-07-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

New Yorker essayist James Surowiecki wants the debt ceiling to just go away.

"Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one," he writes. "And, if Congress really wants to hold down government debt, it already has a way to do so that doesn't risk economic chaos—namely, the annual budgeting process."

All this back and forth about deals and steals amounts, in the end, to a whole lot of hokum.

"The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. If the debt ceiling isn't raised, we'll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he'll end up violating the debt ceiling."

It's a logical muddle, to say the least. And it calls attention to the real problem at the heart of this partisan quagmire: Put simply, we have a political system that is very nearly broken.

From a shambolic agglomeration of contradictory rules and laws to the infantile theatrics of the men and women who enact them, Washington today is what we refer to in the vernacular as a hot mess. And Americans are growing ever more frustrated and angry with the state of affairs.

According to a new Rasmussen poll, only 6 percent of likely voters believe Congress is doing a good job. Consider that number: A sickly, measly 6 percent. That's not a rejection of one party or the other; it's a rejection of the institution itself.

Americans are saying, in no uncertain terms, that they are fast losing faith in the idea of representative government. No party, it seems, will speak for them.

This is a troubling measure of the health of our democracy, and it should make us wonder about the road ahead. Abraham Lincoln warned in his 1861 inaugural address that a disillusioned public could easily turn violent.

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it," our 16th president made clear. "Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

I wonder, how much longer before the carnage begins?

The Debt Ceiling And Washington's Crisis of Maturity

2011-07-23T07:56:00.000-07:00

When Americans voted the bums out in 2010 — the year of the anti-politician, as some described it — sober-minded pundits warned about the potential downside of kicking veteran politicos to the curb.

Commentator Doug Pinkham was among the prudent few.

"When voters become so fed up with government that they believe political experience is a handicap," the president of the Washington-based Public Affairs Council wrote in an analysis on his blog, "they're likely to elect less capable candidates.

"Despite popular opinion, constituents who are represented by an experienced Washington insider have a huge advantage.  Whether Republican or Democrat, that 'insider' knows the legislative process, understands public policy issues and has the strong personal relationships needed to get things done."

Inexperience, Pinkham argued, would sharply raise the stakes for American politics and policy-making at a time of unprecedented political and economic crisis.

A year later, we find ourselves reaping the harvest of our choices; for at the heart of the debt ceiling fight is a base and selfish partisanship, driven by precisely the sort of motives our Founding Fathers feared. As George Washington observed in his 1796 farewell address, all political parties are possessed of a "fatal tendency."

"They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests." [Emphasis mine].

Tea Party freshmen and other chest-beating constitutionalists ought to take a minute to consider the first president's words. At a time when five new national polls suggest that Americans support a combination of spending cuts and tax increases as part of any agreement to raise the country's debt ceiling, their intransigent opposition to President Obama's call for a balanced deficit reduction deal comes across as exactly the sort of self-interested project of faction that Washington saw as destructive to the fabric of our democracy.

Inexperienced freshmen lawmakers would be wise to defer to seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealers as the deficit talks come down to the wire.

Now, more than ever, we need judgment and maturity in government.

Zen — On a Debt Ceiling Hike: What Would Reagan Do?

2011-07-20T18:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a clue: The Plum Line's Greg Sargent cites the text of a 1983 letter written by the Gipper to then-Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. In it, the patron saint of the Republican Party implores Congress to waste no time in "passing an extension of the debt ceiling." An excerpt follows; see Sargent's Washington Post blog for the full letter.

And above: Another Reagan-era appeal from a 1987 radio address. Yep, the Great Communicator had many debt ceiling sermons. After all, he raised the limit a staggering 18 times.

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"This country now possesses the strongest credit in the world. The full consequences of a default or even the serious prospect of default by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and on the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result. The risks, the cost, the disruptions, and the incalculable damage lead me to but one conclusion: the Senate must pass this legislation before the Congress adjourns."

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Barack Obama's Twesidency: The Twitter President and American Newspeak

2011-07-15T03:09:00.000-07:00

When the writer George Orwell imagined the dystopian world of his political classic Nineteen Eighty-Four, he knew that to fashion such a terrifying place — a society of perpetual war, complete surveillance and mutually contradictory beliefs — he would have to take away from his characters any capacity for rational judgment.

All genuine thinking would have to cease so that men could be dragooned into service as agents of a totalitarian state. Thought would have to be criminalized; stamped out in the name of ideological correctness. "Thoughtcrime does not entail death," the novel's protagonist Winston Smith warns in sober prose, "thoughtcrime is death." Period.

This pesky quality of free men is cleverly suppressed in the narrative by way of an impoverished language called Newspeak.

Here's the trick: If words are conceived of as the building blocks of thought, wiping words from memory reduces the ability to attach them to ideas. Ideas without words are too quiet to be heard. And there you have it, in effect: the death of thought.

Newspeak, in the Orwellian world of 1984, is a systematic destruction of vocabulary and grammar to make alternative thinking impossible.

The whole business bears a scary resemblance to the contemporary world of the Twitterverse — a strange community of hashtags, tweeps, tweetups, twittermobs and twitterati, all jabbering away in 140 characters or less. The result is a terribly discordant jumble of text; a reductive space in which context is stripped from ideas to reduce words to their literal sense. There is, as Webster University's Art Silverblatt explains it, "no space to examine the implications of meaning." Language is chopped up, abbreviated, and even eliminated in service of an economy of syntax.

In the Twitterverse, language is death, to channel Winston Smith.

How tragic, then, that President Obama should have chosen this venue for lazy oversimplification to engage us in a dialogue on some of the most complex issues facing the country in recent memory — even if his answers were about 2,160 characters longer than a tweet is allowed to be.

When all was typed and texted, the much-touted Twitter Town Hall reeked of election-season gimmickry. Another bells-and-whistles distraction instead of the difficult discussion the president could have chosen to lead. I wonder, would it really have cost him cool points to host a less restrictive exchange elsewhere in cyberspace? Or was this designed to be more about talk than substance? A trendy ploy to keep up the democratic illusion.

Let's be honest: A sincere national conversation is a two-way exchange, as much about the questions as it is about the answers. Serious and substantive answers tend to follow hard and probing inquiries — typically not the kind advanced in Twitter's Orwellian shorthand.

The country's educator-in-chief should remember that true leaders have never been overly concerned with popularity. It's wise to stick with technologies that aren't at war with the dictionary.

Nation-building in Afghanistan? Begin with Transportation

2011-07-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The essay that follows is inconsistent with my general position on the war in Afghanistan. It should be read as a thought experiment of sorts — an attempt to explore a nation-building strategy that might have favorable consequences for constructing an Afghan national identity. It is not a feasible prescription for action but rather an effort to exercise political imagination. Practically speaking, a troop withdrawal remains our most sensible option.

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President Obama's foreign policy mavens tend to writhe in discomfort at the slightest mention of "nation-building" in Afghanistan. It's not the American mission, they hasten to point out. Fix the security situation, sure. Govern the country? No way!

That's the "responsibility of the Afghan people and they are fully capable of it," Vice President Biden likes to remind us. This, while American forces remain deeply entrenched in every effort of the Afghan government to expand its authority, check corruption and assume control of nation-building social and economic programs that may eventually guarantee the country's long-term stability. Who, I wonder, is the vice president kidding?

Nation-building is exactly what we're doing in Afghanistan, so we might as well own up to it and get the business right. We could start with transportation.

Gen. Ann Dunwoody, commander of the U.S. Army's Materiel Command, told a gathering of defense experts last year that mobility remains high on the list of challenges for the U.S. military as it begins the process of moving shiploads of equipment and more than 100,000 military personnel, contractors and civilians from Iraq to Afghanistan – a country where "only two percent of roads are paved" and much of the land is "between 2000 and 10000 feet of elevation with some mountains reaching 24000 feet."

It's an undertaking that ought to seem daunting to even the wildest imagination. But solving the mobility problem is important not just as a logistical feat for military ends. Mobility has what the human geographer Tim Cresswell has described as a metaphysical significance that relates directly to the effort to shape a national identity.

"In Britain, improvements in the road network had led to dramatic reductions in travel time by the early nineteenth century," Cresswell explained in On the Move, his 2006 book. "Although still dependent on horse and coach for travel, improvements in the condition and number of roads meant that although it had taken forty-eight hours to get from London to Bristol in 1750, by 1821 it was possible to reach most of England and Wales in the same amount of time. […] By 1910 all but the north of Scotland was within ten hours travel time of London.

"But it was not just speed that allowed space to be annihilated. Rail travel also included more people in the experience of travel. In 1835 around ten million individual coach journeys were made. Just ten years later, thirty million rail journeys were made. By 1870 the number had reached a staggering 336 million journeys."

These journeys had formative value, bringing together segments of the population from separate social and cultural traditions, and exposing them to a matrix of shared landscapes, practices, icons and representations associated with the experience of travel – in effect, creating and cementing a sense of national geography and community.

In my native, India, the railway system built and operated by the British forced Indians from diverse castes and religions to shed inhibitions about personal proximity, thereby fostering a more inclusive concept of national identity.

In the United States, as J. Elfreth Watkins, the Smithsonian's first curator of transportation, explained it, technologies of transportation contributed pivotally to the country's growth as a nation.

"Nowhere upon the face of the globe does mankind partake of the benefits of personal liberty to as great an extent as in free America," Watkins wrote, adding that the railroad deserved special recognition for linking the vast geography of the United States. "We have become one people — speaking one language, actuated by a common impulse 'with malice toward none and charity for all.'"

Transportation and modernity have a direct and undeniable impact on social, political, cultural and economic integration, which is why any nation-building effort should invest heavily in building efficient and reliable transportation systems to productively link people and places. A country as fragmented and differentiated as Afghanistan cannot grow as a nation-state without the capacity to mobilize as a nation. We would do well to help the Afghans build this capacity.

Goals such as limiting corruption and educating the population may take years to achieve. Building or rebuilding highways, airports, roads and railway lines may be more readily accomplished. These infrastructure projects would have the additional benefit of creating jobs, boosting regional economies and raising the national GDP. Armed with this infrastructure, the Afghan government could create opportunities for its citizens while constituting a sense of national identity – a feeling of being in a national place.

An Afghanistan on some kind of path to a sustainable future might justify the enormous expense of American blood and treasure through nearly a decade of war and occupation.

That's nation-building the Obama Administration could be proud of. And a commitment the American people would forgive.

Libya: Setting the Record Straight

2011-07-02T09:11:00.001-07:00

There's been a lot of self-righteous sermonizing about President Obama's great misadventure in Libya — an ear-numbing cacophony of boilerplate rants against the expansion of presidential power in foreign and military affairs.

Congressional critics have tried to force the president's hand, attempting everything from voting against the continuation of operations to choking off funds through the appropriations process. Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich went as far as calling the Libyan action "an impeachable offense."

But as the military intervention against Muammar Gaddafi grinds on, it's worth remembering how and why we got involved in the first place.

The how is easy. President Obama ordered American military action pursuant to the obligations of the United States under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973.

You see, under the United Nations Charter — the intergovernmental organization's founding treaty — all member states are required "to give the United Nations every assistance in any action taken." Article 25 of the Charter obligates states "to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council [of which the U.S. is a permanent member]." Against this backdrop, a failure to render necessary assistance would amount to a rejection of our treaty obligations. So in committing U.S. military assistance to a Security Council-sanctioned effort in Libya, President Obama acted in accordance with existing law. His decision is hardly comparable to the Bush Administration's intervention in Iraq, which blatantly ignored international rules and principles.

Refusing to support our NATO partners would not only have weakened the credibility of the Security Council but would also have sent the wrong message to countries that have fought alongside us in unpopular [and sometimes illegal] wars. We would effectively be saying to the United Kingdom, for example, that we want British troops to continue fighting and dying with us in Afghanistan but requesting any kind of reciprocal assistance in Libya would be asking rather much. Why would any nation put up with such duplicity?

Isolationism, at the end of the day, is incompatible with a globalized and interconnected world system. Working together has its costs, but also pays dividends.

The why of American involvement is a more complicated argument.

Some insist that U.S. interests in Libya are "decidedly less than vital," to quote Council on Foreign Relations president Richard N. Haas. "Libya accounts for only 2 percent of world oil production. The scale of the humanitarian crisis is not unique; indeed, this is not strictly speaking a humanitarian intervention. It is a decision to participate in Libya's civil war."

Others argue that even if intervention is justified, the costs of military action should give us pause. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wants the White House to concentrate on "nation-building in America, not in Libya." Still others, like The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, think intervention puts us on a slippery slope. As he frames the problem: "Will we take on Yemen, next?"

These and other questions are not easily set aside.

It's true that American interests in Libya are limited, although only in a very narrow sense. As journalist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria points out, "the Libyan case represents a much larger issue.

"For decades, Arabs have regarded Washington as the enemy because it has been the principal supporter of the old order — creating a bizarre series of alliances in which the world's leading democracy has been yoked to the most reactionary forces on the planet. It has also produced a real national-security problem: the rise of Islamic terrorism. Al Qaeda's first argument against the U.S. is that it supports the tyrannies of the Arab world as they oppress their people.

"Now the U.S. has the opportunity to break the dysfunctional dynamic that produces anti-American hatred and violence. The Obama Administration has properly aligned itself with the hopes and aspirations of the Arab people, and it has called for governments in the region to engage in serious reform. But right now all these efforts have been sidelined. Libya is burning. Its people rose, and the tyrant gunned them down. Unless something changes, Muammar Gaddafi and his sons will be able to reassert control over the country amid a mass slaughter of its civilians. This would be a terrible outcome."

Not intervening, then, may have had consequences for our long-term national security interests as a massacre in Benghazi would easily have given a boost to al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

The argument about the insignificance of Libyan oil also does not stand up to scrutiny. If Libya's share of oil production truly doesn't count, why release 30 million barrels from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Clearly, the stability of that country and guaranteed access to its supplies have consequences for U.S. energy and economic security.

The real problems with the intervention have to do with the manner in which the operation has progressed — and the chaos elsewhere in the neighborhood that's raising questions about a clear standard for humanitarian intervention.

The language of the U.N. resolution on Libya was concerned with the protection of civilians; today's operations, to follow Haas, have departed sharply from that mandate, with the West essentially taking sides in a civil war. This is questionable at least and illegal at worst. President Obama, in insisting on Gaddafi's departure, only complicated the American position, limiting the number of possible outcomes and expanding the scope of U.S. military engagement.

He has also failed to lead a discussion on a practical threshold for military intervention in similar conflicts, leaving the door open to accusations of hypocrisy over a relatively muted reaction to events in Syria and Yemen.

Both moves may prove costly down the road.

For now, we should hope for an early end to hostilities in Libya. Even as the debate over policy rages on.

A Word on Presidential Cojones

2011-06-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

Every presidency has a moment that defines it.

Herbert Hoover botched an economic crisis, sinking America into an era of Depression; Franklin Roosevelt led us out of it. Harry Truman introduced us to "the most terrible bomb in the history of the world." Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system.

For John F. Kennedy, the moment came in 1962.

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had begun supplying Cuba with missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads to the United States. The idea was to keep Washington from intervening in a communist takeover of West Berlin, the capitalist half of the German city divided after the Allied victory in World War II. Surveillance photos showed medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles ready to strike major U.S. metros from New York City to Los Angeles. The pressure was mounting on Kennedy to act, with many favoring a surprise air attack. But the president showed restraint.

Kennedy knew that a full retaliation in Cuba had the potential to bring the two superpowers devastatingly close to nuclear war. So he resisted mounting pressure from his generals, set aside the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and pushed aggressively for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

The drama was recounted in Thirteen Days, a 2000 film by director Roger Donaldson that — perhaps with some creative license — depicted a turbulent and tense relationship between Kennedy and his military advisers. Whether or not the details are historically faithful, many in the know agree that the president, as commander in chief, stood up to the brass and made his own call.

That's a lesson No. 44 — and a slew of presidential wannabes — might want to take to heart. Especially after two intractable wars and nearly a decade of bad military advice. The generals, we should remember, haven't always gotten it right. And rubber-stamping their game plans may not be the most responsible course of action.

The commander in chief should consider the recommendations of his military advisers and avoid excessive meddling in their operational planning — but important decisions shouldn't be left to their judgment alone.

Alas, even the presidential candidates opposed to our current strategy seem unwilling to stand their ground.

As GOP front-runner Mitt Romney put it in New Hampshire: "It's time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly can, consistent with the word that comes to our generals that we can hand the country over to ... the Afghan military to defend themselves from the Taliban. ... I want those troops to come home based upon not politics, not based upon economics, but instead based upon the conditions on the ground determined by the generals. But I also think we've learned that our troops shouldn't go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation. Only the Afghanis can win Afghanistan's independence from the Taliban." [Emphasis mine].

So which is it: We want our troops home? Or we want to listen to the generals, many of whom insist on staying the course in Afghanistan? Both, Romney should be clear, don't necessarily go together. It's time to take a stand.

After all, what's at stake here is the moment — and the opportunity to transform it from a period of war and decline to a period of growth and development.

Let's not let it pass us by.

Zen — On the War in Afghanistan

2011-06-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

"If you can't define a winning exit strategy for the American people, where we somehow come out ahead, then we're wasting our money, and we're wasting our strategic resources. ... It's a tribal state, and it always will be. Whether we like it or not, whenever we withdraw from Afghanistan, whether it's now or years from now, we'll have an incendiary situation... Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don't think that serves our strategic interests."

— GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman in an interview with Esquire magazine. The former U.S. Ambassador to China is "the first to call for a rapid withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan."

China and the New Cold War in Cyberspace

2011-06-18T07:27:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, as world leaders huddled at the Asia-Pacific security forum in Singapore, desperate to put in place a plan to shield critical infrastructures from cyber attacks, hackers in Jinan, China, infiltrated the Gmail inboxes of hundreds of senior U.S. government and military officials.

Applying a sophisticated e-mail spoofing tactic known in the tech world as "spear phishing," the information thieves went looking for intelligence while pretending to be trusted sources. Anything they could glean from unwitting victims — insight on the activities of foreign nationals or possibly journalists and activists operating in China — would be grist for the mill. The attack was well under way when Google shut it down, raising serious questions about the vulnerability of our business and government systems to malicious cyber crimes.

When confronted, Beijing was quick to issue denials.

"Allegations that the Chinese government supports hacking activities are completely unfounded," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei told reporters. "The chimerical complaints by Google," went the line in state-run Xinhua News, "have become obstacles for enhancing global trust between stakeholders in cyberspace." In fact, "Google's charge is thickly tainted with political colors," wrote the editorialists at People's Daily.

Never mind that computers at a military vocational school in Jinan were linked to a previous attack on Google's systems 17 months ago. China's communist bosses aren't taking the blame. On the contrary, they seem resolutely unapologetic — and perhaps even on the offensive.

Consider, for example, the position taken by Senior Colonel Ye Zheng and his colleague Zhao Baoxian, both People's Liberation Army scholars writing in the Communist Party-controlled China Youth Daily.

"Of late, an Internet tornado has swept across the world [...] massively impacting and shocking the globe. Behind all this lies the shadow of America. [...] Faced with this warmup for an Internet war, every nation and military can't be passive but is making preparations to fight the Internet war." [Emphasis mine] And this: "Just as nuclear warfare was the strategic war of the industrial era, cyber-warfare has become the strategic war of the information era."

Read between the lines and it's clear that the Chinese are fighting — yes, actively fighting, as the PLA officers point out — a new Cold War in cyberspace. It's a struggle for "Internet sovereignty," the Chinese say, invoking a territorial concept in what has historically been a borderless and deterritorialized space.

The implications of this strategic posture are far-reaching.

Whether or not the Chinese government is found to be behind the Gmail attacks, the stated position of the Chinese military is that it sees the Chinese state as being engaged in a war. And the United States is enemy number one.

Under the circumstances, Washington must not shy away from expanding our own offensive capabilities in cyberspace. So far, the mission of the Fort Meade, Md.-based U.S. Cyber Command has been mainly defensive, with some elements of an offensive capacity. Maybe we need a stronger hand.

Yes, there are complications associated with discussing a national cyberdeterrence strategy in the language of nuclear deterrence. But we must not hesitate to put capacities in place. Let's remember that it makes sense to negotiate from a position of strength.

Spinney: 'Afghan Sitrep: A Grunt from the Front Sounds Off'

2011-06-11T08:01:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: As Gen. David Petraeus and his star-struck Beltway minions begin rehashing familiar arguments to make their case for staying the course in Afghanistan, some senior military commanders are speaking out against a strategy they deride as vacuous and wasteful. One active duty colonel this week, in an email addressed to a peer, slammed the Petraeus plan as "sheer madness," reminiscent of the misguided decisions that got us bogged down in Vietnam. Time magazine blogger [and retired Pentagon analyst] Chuck Spinney obtained a copy of the email. Excerpts follow. For the full text, see Time's Battleland blog.

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"The mendacity is getting so egregious that I am fast losing the ability to remain quiet; these yarns of 'significant progress' are being covered up by the blood and limbs of hundreds - HUNDREDS - of American uniformed service members each and every month, and you know that the rest of this summer is going to see the peak of that bloodshed.

"[According to proponents of the current strategy] 'If Mr. Obama announces the withdrawal of all surge forces from Afghanistan in 2012, the war will likely be lost. Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other global terrorist groups will almost certainly re-establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan. The Afghan state would likely collapse and the country would descend into ethnic civil war. The outcome of this withdrawal policy would be far worse than Nixon's decision to accept defeat in Vietnam, for it would directly increase the threat to the American homeland.

"Apparently they forgot, 'there's a commie behind every bush,' 'the Russians are coming!' and 'if Vietnam falls, all of Asia falls to the Communists!' That logic was absurd in the 1960/70s, and it's even more laughable today - or it would be laughable if it didn't cost so damn many American lives to prop up the fantasy."

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Memo to Islamabad: The Taliban Are Coming

2011-06-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

The Pakistani Taliban, Global Security Newswire reports quoting The Wall Street Journal, has said "it does not intend to carry out strikes on nuclear weapons in the South Asian state."

Whew. Or Masha'allah, as they say where I'm from. Because Lord knows they could succeed if they tried. Especially if last month's events are any indication.

If you haven't heard, six insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades, rocket launchers and light machine guns effectively took over a major Pakistani naval base May 22 and held the installation for an unnerving 17 hours. When all was said and done, two U.S.-made P-3C Orion patrol aircraft were gutted and at least 12 security officers were dead. Two of the six attackers got away, dealing a humiliating blow to Pakistan's elite special operations forces.

This was, after all, supposed to be a "highly secure and guarded" facility. Well, so much for that.

What's worrisome is that it's not the first time militants have seized control of a high-profile Pakistani military installation. In 2009, insurgents armed with explosives occupied parts of the country's army headquarters in Rawalpindi, taking more than 40 hostages before being defeated in an operation that lasted 18 hours. Four terrorists and three hostages were killed in that attack.

The lapses cast a long and ominous shadow over the credibility of Pakistan's nuclear command and control system. Surely a country that can't keep its military facilities safe is vulnerable to more serious attacks targeting its nuclear infrastructure. Even a small incident would have severely destabilizing consequences — in Pakistan and in the region.

And all the insurgents would have to do is try.

For now, the only thing keeping the Pakistani Taliban from attempting a nuclear attack is that the organization has bigger plans. As spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan put it in a telephone interview with the WSJ: "Pakistan is the only Muslim nuclear-power state. [...] Isn't it a shame for us to have the Islamic bomb, and even then we are bowing down to the pressures of America?"

According to the paper, "The group aspires to assume control of the Pakistani government and thus its nuclear arsenal."

Think of it as the worst possible nightmare scenario.

We should do our best to push Pakistan [and India] to seriously reconsider their nuclear programs now. Tomorrow may be too late.

Iraq and the Nation-Building Delusion

2011-05-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

As 170 British sailors waved their goodbyes to the southern port city of Umm Qasr last week, marking the end of the United Kingdom's eight-year military presence in Iraq, a string of early morning explosions near the nation's capital offered a stark reminder: There is little to celebrate in leaving behind one of the most volatile places on the planet.

Sure, violence, as journalists like to remind us, is down — significantly less than in 2006 and 2007, when the nation struggled in the throes of a sectarian civil war. But Iraq is still a violent place. AFP reports that 211 people were killed in April. And now a new wave of assassinations is rattling the political elite. "The killers," according to The Atlantic, "are generally gunmen using silenced weapons [...] and occasionally masked men on motorbikes who place magnetic 'sticky bombs' on motorcades."

The assassins have frightened Iraqi officials into speeding down chaotic streets surrounded by convoys of armed guards. Not a reassuring sight for citizens looking to Baghdad for protection. After all, if the elected representatives they entrust with their safety are apparently on the run, why should ordinary people feel more secure?

Which brings up a troubling point: As things stand, there's really no one in Baghdad to address these critical concerns.

After hobbling along without a government for eight months following the March 2010 elections, Iraq remains without interior and defense ministers. The country also lacks a director of intelligence, leaving its entire national security establishment looking confused and rudderless. At the same time, according to Reuters, "at least 11 senior officers working at the Interior and Defense Ministries have been killed in separate shootings in Baghdad in the last two months. [And] Defense Ministry statistics showed eight senior officers were assassinated in the last week of April alone."

Meanwhile, Iraq's self-serving politicians continue to bicker. The American-backed "national partnership" government is already bloated to the point of ridicule. "Some positions were arbitrarily created to satisfy Iraqi personalities," Ramzy Mardini, a former Iraq desk officer for political affairs at the State Department, wrote in a column for Lebanon's Daily Star.

"The new officialdom embraces 42 ministries, three deputy prime ministers, and three vice presidents. Many roles are ill-defined, and in some cases lack a constitutional basis. But unlike titles, governing power has become a zero-sum game: as a rule of thumb, no sharing agreement, however creative, will satisfy all of Iraq's major players."

The picture that emerges is one of a country teetering on the precipice of disintegration. With weak and dysfunctional political institutions, a headless national security apparatus, widespread corruption, and inadequate infrastructure and essential services, Iraq is hardly the "success" President Obama made it out to be in his 2010 West Point commencement speech.

Contrary to the president's bold assertion, the Iraq we leave behind this year will not be a "democratic," "sovereign," "stable" and "self-reliant" nation "that provides no haven to terrorists." It will, in fact, be a dangerous and divided place that could very easily drift into disorder.

But the burden of fixing Iraq should fall to the country's elected leaders who have so far used the American presence to avoid their sovereign responsibilities. They must be forced to pay the price.

If anything, our very limited gains on the ground should point to the inherent limitations of the nation-building delusion. As we deepen our involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq should remind us that such adventures are seldom worth the cost in blood and treasure.

Goldberg: 'Why Palestinians Have Time on Their Side'

2011-05-24T18:15:00.001-07:00

Editor's Note: The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg makes a salient point about Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's substantively weak and pretentious vision for Middle East peace: It will bring about the undoing of Israel as we know it. In time, as Jewish settlements swallow Palestinian lands, Israel will have no choice but to accept the inevitability of a one-state solution — a state that will either commit violent suicide or revert to Arab sovereignty.

Excerpts follow. Read the full piece here.

****

"If I were a Palestinian (and, should there be any confusion on this point, I am not), and if I were the sort of Palestinian who believed that Israel should be wiped off the map, then I would be quite pleased with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s performance before Congress this morning.

"I would applaud Netanyahu for including no bold initiatives that would have suggested to the world that Israel is alive to the threat posed by its seemingly eternal occupation of the West Bank.

[...]

"The settlements would have my wholehearted backing. I would encourage my brother Palestinians to help build settlements at a brisk pace. I would ask the Israelis to build an even more intricate system of bypass roads on the West Bank that would connect Jewish settlements to one another and to Israel proper.

[...]

"My goal: To hopelessly, ineradicably, entangle the two peoples wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

"Then I would wait as the Israeli population on the West Bank grew, and grew some more. I would wait until 2017, 50 years after the Six Day War, which ended with Israel in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I would go before the UN and say the following:

'We, the Palestinians, no longer seek a homeland of our own. We recognize the permanence of Israeli occupation, the dominion of the Israeli military and the power of the Israeli economy. So we would like to join them. In the 50 years since the beginning of the 'temporary' occupation, we have seen hundreds of thousands of Israelis build communities near our own communities. We admire what they have built, and the system of laws that governs their lives. Unlike them, many of us live under Israeli military law but have no say in choosing the Israelis who rule us. So we no longer want statehood. We simply want the vote.'

"And this, of course, would bring about the end of Israel.

"Either the Jews of Israel would grant the Palestinians the vote, at which point their country would lose its Jewish majority and its identity as a refuge for the Jewish people, or it would deny them the vote, and become an apartheid state."

****

The Myth of Pakistan's Sovereignty

2011-05-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of hand-wringing and harrumphing in Pakistan over the violation of its sovereignty by marauding American troops.

The "Abbottabad fiasco" was how one newspaper summed up the Bin Laden raid. The U.S. is "enemy number one," declared another, "and has the status of a foe equal to India." [Yikes!] "A disgrace to Pakistan's honor and pride," Punjab's chief minister Shahbaz Sharif chirped to the local press. "Pakistan's sovereignty is being violated in exchange for dollars." And this from the cabinet's defense committee: "Safeguarding Pakistan's sovereignty [...] is a sacred duty, which will be ensured at all costs."

Can you feel the chill?

All right. Maybe the Pakistanis believe they have a prima facie case. After all, we did cross their border without so much as a whisper to Islamabad — something the United Nations Charter says is clearly verboten, as it would constitute an attack on the "political independence and territorial integrity" of a sovereign state. However, the premise of this argument is that Pakistan is, in fact, sovereign.

Which is where we run into a bit of a muddle.

You see, a nation isn't sovereign because a government says it is so. It must be sovereign in law and in actuality; endowed with both the legal right to govern the body politic and the actual institutional ability to command respect for its laws. The most basic definition of sovereignty, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SEP], requires that a state or government possess "supreme authority within a territory." That is to say, the holder of sovereignty must be "superior to all authorities under its purview." There is no room in this arrangement for the supremacy of any competing authority.

"During the Middle Ages," the SEP explains, "manifold authorities held some sort of legal warrant for their authority, whether feudal, canonical, or otherwise, but very rarely did such warrant confer supremacy."

In short, a sovereign state must be constitutionally invested with supreme and exclusive jurisdiction within its borders.

Seen in this light, the contours of Pakistan's sovereignty problem should be painfully obvious. Whether one points to the terrorism and rampant lawlessness in its tribal belt, or to the militant secessionists in Balochistan, or to the rogue elements in its security establishment, or to the runaway corruption eroding the legitimacy of its institutions, Pakistan today faces a minefield of challenges that undermine the very fact of its sovereignty. These challenges prevent the country from meeting both its internal and international obligations, weakening any claim for full recognition as a sovereign state.

So all bitterness and indignation aside, the case against the United States is ultimately a lot of smoke but no fire. Instead of railing against the world for trampling on its factually weak [and practically nonexistent] sovereignty, the Pakistani government would do well to take time for introspection.

The nation's real threat, let's be honest, lies within.

Fareed Zakaria GPS: 'The Best Strategy to Win the War on Terror'

2011-05-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The CNN analyst and former managing editor of Foreign Affairs puts it plainly. "There was a debate at the start of the Obama Administration over policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some, like Vice President Biden, wanted a limited counterterrorism operation with fewer troops.

"Others wanted a broader counterinsurgency campaign that involved all kinds of things that we would generally call nation building. The counterterrorism advocates lost. General Petraeus won. But the counterterrorism guys were right."

Enough said.

The Petraeus Plan for Victory in Afghanistan — And Defeat at Home

2011-05-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

David Petraeus, our indomitable colossus of military wisdom, wants the U.S. to stay the course in Afghanistan. It's the prudent thing to do, he told the Associated Press last week, since "al-Qaeda is only one of a number of international terrorist organizations that would be eager to flood into an unstable Afghanistan if NATO forces left."

We'll have the devil to pay if these groups reestablish safe havens in the mountains, the general warned soberly. "Clearing communities of insurgents and then establishing governance" should remain top priorities.

Never mind previous attempts (and failures) by the Soviets and the Brits before them. Never mind the culture's reflexive resistance to occupation built up over centuries of foreign invasions.

David Petraeus wants you to forget about the Greco-Bactrians, the Kushans, the Indo-Sassanids, the Shahi, the Saffarids, the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, the Ghurids, the Kartids, the Timurids, the Mughals, the Hotakis and the Durranis. We're better than all those losers combined. After all, we have a counterinsurgency manual, full of mystical formulae for lasting change. We'll do the impossible. Just wait and see.

That this illusory miracle costs us nearly $7 billion per month, according to some estimates, seems not to bother the general. National security, he would say, is priceless. And a stable Afghanistan is in our national interest.

I wonder, what would happen if a fragmented Yemen turned into a haven for al-Qaeda and other groups? Would Petraeus advocate that we turn our attention there? Or what about Libya once the dictator's gone? Surely we can't tolerate the extremists there. Ah, but there's also the possibility of militant Islamism in Syria, where the Muslim Brotherhood has been held down for decades. And what to do about Somalia, where al-Shabaab and its Islamist insurgents control vast swaths of the country?

If fighting violent extremism by building stable societies is a vital national security interest for the United States, shouldn't we be committing enormous resources to replicating this effort wherever threats exist? What good would it do us to fix Afghanistan only to be attacked by lunatics from Sana'a?

In fact, there are some who would like the United States to formally take on the role of the world's chief evangelist for democracy and globalization. The military geostrategist and former Naval War College professor Thomas P.M. Barnett is among them.

A few years ago, Barnett was a rock star in Defense Department circles. He went around promoting a strange and pretentious book called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. Perfectly packaged for the Bush Administration, the book divided the world into a "Functioning Core" and a "Non-Integrated Gap." The Core, it argued, plays by international rules and is represented in global trade; the Gap is plagued by unstable leadership and absence from international trade. The mission of the Core should be to plug Gap countries into the global system.

How, you ask? Well, Barnett had it all mapped out. The plan was called the "A-to-Z Rule Set for Processing Politically Bankrupt States."

Step 1 : "UN Security Council indicts."
Step 2: "G-20, acting as functioning executive, unleashes the Leviathan [overwhelming American and international military force] and finances reconstruction."
Step 3: "Leviathan intervenes."
Step 4: "SysAdmin [a force made up of older, more experienced personnel] stabilizes and begins nation-building."
Step 5: "International Reconstruction Fund oversees rebuild."
Step 6: "International Criminal Court adjudicates identified war criminals."

Presto! Democracy in a box. Amazing, no?

If all that sounds a little brainsick, consider that the Air Force once required every officer attaining the rank of general to sit through one of Barnett's glib presentations. This is the sort of shallow intellectualism that pervades our national security state.

Gen. Petraeus' "counterinsurgency-in-a-box" — as former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg describes it — is similarly vacuous. To suggest that we could build a sustainable state in Afghanistan in three years is to ignore our own experience in that country and a history that goes back thousands of years.

Meanwhile, we risk avoiding the threat that poses a formidable challenge to our future security. To quote Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, that "most significant threat" is our national debt. As Mullen explains it: "The strength and the support and the resources that our military uses are directly related to the health of our economy over time.

"That's why it's so important that the economy move in the right direction."

As things stand, our economy is teetering on the precipice of collapse. Intractable wars could push us over the edge. Former Goldman Sachs economist Dambisa Moyo frames the question this way: "Should America be underwriting global public goods at the expense of her own economic survival?"

The answer — the only answer — is a resounding no. President Obama and his team would do well to reach the same conclusion.

Why We Should Have Listened to Biden — and not Petraeus — on Afghanistan

2011-05-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, as President Obama weighed a request to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan to conduct an expanded counterinsurgency campaign, a lone voice in his inner circle spoke out publicly against the strategy.

Newsweek's Holly Bailey captured the drama at one White House Situation Room meeting in September that year: "Joe Biden had a question," she began. It had to do with clarifying a factual point.

"'How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?'" the vice president asked. "Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. "'And how much will we spend on Pakistan?' Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. 'Well, by my calculations that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?'"

The room, Bailey wrote, "fell silent."

Biden's point was knifelike, slicing through the gloss of grandiose military schemes packaged to keep the American taxpayer ATM machine open to the Pentagon. More boots on the ground, in his view, simply didn't add up to victory. A smaller, more focused mission seemed to promise better results.

The vice president called his plan "Counterterrorism-Plus" and called for surgical operations to take out key terrorist leaders. The suggestion didn't go down well. He was ridiculed for his ideas, especially by the military chiefs who found him a tad annoying. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal later put it to Rolling Stone, Biden's strategy was "shortsighted" and a recipe for "Chaos-istan." Even the mighty David Petraeus was opposed. Counterinsurgency — his dubious but politically marketable doctrine — was, far and away, the best plan of action. End of argument.

Fast forward two years, and it's clear that Biden was right.

"We found [Osama] bin Laden in Pakistan without troops on the ground," counterterrorism expert Michael Cohen told columnist Timothy P. Carney of The Washington Examiner. "We didn't need troops on the ground to carry out a very successful operation."

And we don't need massive deployments of troops to continue our fight against violent extremism. As Carney wisely points out: "This notion underestimates the capabilities of American intelligence and military forces: Our drones, spies and special forces can strike basically anywhere."

In essence, a limited, counterterrorism strategy should be the order of the day.

The approach is gaining traction.

On Thursday, Democratic Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, of Maine, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, called on President Obama to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. She is joined by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Republican Reps. Walter Jones, of North Carolina, and Ron Paul, of Texas, who have added their support to a bill that would end combat operations in Afghanistan.

The president should seize this opportunity to shift gears.

Staying the course, he should know, offers no sustainable advantage. When Gen. Petraeus left Iraq, he characterized the progress in that country as "fragile and reversible." Afghanistan will be no different. Remember that it's been the way it is for centuries; a few years assuredly won't change much.

The White House could take a page from the world's oil and commodities traders.

Shortly after Bin Laden's death, crude prices beat a retreat as markets adjusted what energy analysts call the "geopolitical risk premium." The Obama Administration should react with comparable efficiency by adjusting our national security premium in Afghanistan.

We need a smarter strategy — and soon.

Osama Bin Laden and the Lessons of Abbottabad

2011-05-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

As the world celebrates the death of one of history's most notorious terrorists, let's take a moment to remember the continuing sacrifice of our men and women in uniform. Osama bin Laden's death is their victory — and ours.

There will be weeks and months to make sense of this moment, and what it means for the struggle against violent extremism, but let's make no mistake: This is a milestone. And we owe it to the brave souls who serve our national security interests in some of the most hostile places on the planet. We owe thanks also to our allies, who serve alongside American troops in dark and difficult places. This is their victory, too.

Of course, the fight against terrorism will go on. We should remember that today's campaign is against the ideology of radical Islam, not the lunatics who have become its public face. As Princeton University's Evan Thomas wrote in 2006, no matter how often U.S. forces "capture a 'high-value target' — a top Qaeda leader — a new one seems to emerge as the shadowy terror network metastasizes. It is unclear if a Qaeda Central, a hierarchical command structure, still exerts authority, but it may not matter: with the Internet and fanatical inspiration al-Qaeda can morph and spread."

The Pakistani author and analyst Ahmed Rashid calls it "franchise" terrorism. Al-Qaeda's philosophy today, he wrote in a column for the BBC, is "one man, one bomb."

"Anyone can join it by planting a bomb somewhere. Almost anyone can come to Pakistan or Afghanistan and be offered training with key al-Qaeda allies such as the Pakistani Taliban or the Afghan group headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani."

The result is the "lone wolf" terrorist and "leaderless jihad" — men like would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and "Underwear Bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Needless to say, the terrorism problem will be with us for some time to come.

But Sunday's operation raises important questions about strategy.

Just consider that a few CIA operatives and elite Navy SEALs, using what The Christian Science Monitor described as "high-tech surveillance and old-fashioned detective work," accomplished in 40 minutes what tens of thousands of boots on the ground couldn't accomplish in nearly a decade. That says something about the effectiveness of the war paradigm in the ongoing fight against terrorism.

For years, the Bush Administration convinced us that war was the only way to defeat our enemies, and worth a heavy price in American blood and treasure. And yet it was a return to a narrower and more targeted approach that got us our man in the end. That should give us pause.

President Obama can use this moment to change the national security narrative. He must lock in our exit from intractable wars that have us hemorrhaging money we desperately need to offset our yawning national debt. With Bin Laden dead, we have an opportunity — to declare victory and change strategy: Ending the clumsy war on terrorism, but maintaining a focused and flexible regime of measures on the ground — an updated approach that addresses the new reality of self-radicalizing extremists, infinitely more maneuverable than the average military formation.

He might also wish to take a second look at our intelligence apparatus.

Here's the problem: Osama bin Laden wasn't cowering in a cave. He was, according to ABC News, living in "an acre-large, million-dollar compound with 12 to 18-foot walls [...] eight times the size of other homes in the area and just off a major highway" — some 800 yards from Pakistan's military academy in Abbottabad. And it took us a decade to find him. Really?

What that says about our relationship with Pakistan is another story for another time. For now, let's make hay while the sun shines.

Why You Should Write Your Representative About The 'Y Article'

2011-04-26T14:16:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: The "Y Article," as it has come to be known, is a bold policy proposal from two of the Pentagon's top military minds — Navy Capt. Wayne Porter and Marine Col. Mark Mykleby, both special assistants to Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It attempts, in thoughtful and insightful language, to shift the orientation of our national security perspective from combating perceived threats overseas to addressing the "domestic foundations of our national strength." We cannot project "smart power" abroad, its authors argue, "until we practice 'smart growth' at home." National security is linked to national prosperity, which is at the heart of America's ability to influence an increasingly interconnected and interdependent international order.

The "Y Article" represents a paradigmatic shift in security strategy. It should be read as a blueprint for a new concept of security in a century witnessing what the Harvard University political theorist Joseph Nye has described as a transition and diffusion of power.

An excerpt follows; the emphasis is my own. For the full essay, click here.

***

"As Americans we have access to a vast array of resources. Perhaps the most important first step we can take, as part of a National Strategy, is to identify which of these resources are renewable and sustainable, and which are finite and diminishing. Without doubt, our greatest resource is America's young people, who will shape and execute the vision needed to take this nation forward into an uncertain future. But this may require a reawakening, of sorts. Perhaps because our nation has been so blessed over time, many of us have forgotten that rewards must be earned, there is no 'free ride' – that fair competition and hard work bring with them a true sense of accomplishment. We can no longer expect the ingenuity and labor of past generations to sustain our growth as a nation for generations to come. We must embrace the reality that with opportunity comes challenge, and that retooling our competitiveness requires a commitment and investment in the future.

"Inherent in our children is the innovation, drive, and imagination that have made, and will continue to make, this country great. By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans – the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members, and parents, of tomorrow – we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future. Our first investment priority, then, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America's youth.

"Our second investment priority is ensuring the nation's sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them. As has been stated already, Americans view security in the broader context of freedom and peace of mind. Rather than focusing primarily on defense, the security we seek can only be sustained through a whole of nation approach to our domestic and foreign policies. This requires a different approach to problem solving than we have pursued previously and a hard look at the distribution of our national treasure. For too long, we have underutilized sectors of our government and our citizenry writ large, focusing intensely on defense and protectionism rather than on development and diplomacy. This has been true in our approach to domestic and foreign trade, agriculture and energy, science and technology, immigration and education, public health and crisis response, Homeland Security and military force posture. Security touches each of these and must be addressed by leveraging all the strengths of our nation, not simply those intended to keep perceived threat a safe arm's length away.

"America is a resplendent, plentiful and fertile land, rich with natural resources, bounded by vast ocean spaces. Together these gifts are ours to be enjoyed for their majesty, cultivated and harvested for their abundance, and preserved for following generations. Many of these resources are renewable, some are not. But all must be respected as part of a global ecosystem that is being tasked to support a world population projected to reach nine billion peoples midway through this century. These resources range from crops, livestock, and potable water to sources of energy and materials for industry. Our third investment priority is to develop a plan for the sustainable access to, cultivation and use of, the natural resources we need for our continued well-being, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace."

Friedman on Israel's 'Spoiled-Child' Behavior and its Looming National Security Problem

2011-04-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Anyone wondering about what the tidal waves of popular unrest sweeping North Africa and the Middle East might mean for the future of Israel should listen to Thomas Friedman.

The three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist not only predicted the youth revolutions now known as the Arab Spring months before the first protesters marched in Tunisia, he also warned that a seismic shift in the politics of the region could force the United States to rethink (and perhaps temper) its support for the Jewish state.

In refusing to work with the Palestinian Authority on creating the conditions for a "secure peace," Friedman has argued, Israel is behaving like "a spoiled child." Especially on the thorny policy of settlement construction, which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems intent on pursuing with reckless vigor. Even as the Israelis pay lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, the future capital of an independent Palestine is being overrun by housing developments built with incentives from the Netanyahu regime.

The construction is driving a stake through the heart of a sustainable peace — this we know. But it is also driving a stake through the heart of a democratic Israel. As Friedman noted in this Oct. 19, 2010 column, "Israel can't remain a Jewish democracy in the long run if it continues to control 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank."

Things are fast approaching a crescendo. Earlier this month, Israel deployed the second phase of its Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system amid the most severe flare-up of violence with Hamas since the 2008-09 Gaza War.

As political and economic convulsions transform the landscape of international relations, Americans are certain to grow increasingly impatient with Israel, and are certain to be less willing to come to its aid. This, Friedman told the country's Channel 2 News last year, could become "a national security problem for Israel."

For more, see the clip.

Why You Should Care About Human Rights in China

2011-04-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

You may not have heard of Ai Weiwei, but you probably know his work.

When the Chinese government welcomed the world to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, a spellbound crowd gathered at the iconic "Bird's Nest" stadium — a Weiwei creation — to witness what many described as China's big coming out; the nation's debut on the world stage, so to speak.

As artistic consultant, Weiwei lent his talent to the noble cause of national pride but continued to shake a clenched fist at the Politburo, seizing every opportunity to voice his contempt for the country's repressive communist regime. His most provocative effort came in December 2008, when he supported an investigation into student casualties in the devastating earthquake in China's southwestern Sichuan province.

Weiwei and others compiled a list of thousands of names, which he then published to his blog before it was shut down by government minders. He was beaten up by police for trying to expose the shoddy construction of school buildings and ended up in a Munich hospital with a cerebral hemorrhage. In 2010, his newly-built Shanghai studio came under fire from local authorities who argued that its construction broke the law; the facility was torn down in January this year. But the worst was yet to come.

Trouble began brewing last week, when Weiwei was whisked into detention before boarding a flight to Hong Kong. He had been a vocal supporter of the rallies sweeping the Middle East, and had apparently alarmed Beijing with his popular Twitter feed. A swarm of police officers sealed his private studio, confiscated laptops and questioned staff. The dissident artist hasn't been heard from since — and many around the world fear for his fate.

Weiwei joins Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and at least four others in becoming the sixth Chinese dissident of international renown to be forced from public life in the past two years. The arrests turn the spotlight on a glaring contradiction in modern China. Put plainly, even as the country grows more assertive on the world stage, it remains, at its heart, a nation still unsure of its own destiny.

From Sichuan to Xinjiang and Tibet, China today faces internal pressures that tear at the fabric of its society, to the point where the slightest bit of unrest could very easily tip the balance. So even as scholars imagine the Asian tiger transforming power relations across the world's major regions and continents, lawmakers in Beijing worry about the simple fact of China's continued existence as a sovereign state.

Unless the country can resolve these domestic tensions, its ascendance as a world power will remain tenuous at best. Violent dissension and widespread sociopolitical unrest will preoccupy China's leaders and cripple or derail the economic engine that today supplies the international market. That is to say, a crisis in China could cause economic shocks around the world.

Remember that the Middle Kingdom is currently the second largest economy on the planet. In 2010, the Massachusetts-based economic and financial analysis firm IHS Global Insight noted that China contributed 19.8 percent of the world's manufacturing output, making it the largest manufacturer anywhere. Put another way, that means a factory strike in Guangzhou could arm-twist Walmart into rethinking "everyday low prices."

This is what connects Ai Weiwei and China's human rights abuses to people far away. Standing up for the defenseless in that country is no longer just a matter of principle; there are rational, economic reasons to demand that Beijing heed the calls for greater reform.

Let's add our voices to the outcry.

Wheel of Fortune

2011-04-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

The Wheel of Fortune, it does turn
And like a Tempest does it churn
A churlish world within its realm
Is there a Captain at the helm?
To right us in this treacherous storm?
Or must we simply wait 'til morn?
Travelers wrecked and forlorn

Hold on! The clouds are clearing!
See the Wheel of Fortune turning?

Ah, you think, a lesson's learned!
Bridges built, and bridges burned
Lovers won, some lovers spurned
You're ready now to cross the Berm
But wait, here comes another turn
The Wheel, it keeps on spinning
Can you bat another inning?
It's how Saints have done their Sinning
Forgiving and forgetting
Endings spin into Beginnings
Gamblers squander all their Winnings
Where's the Tally? Who's keeping count?
Remember Jesus on the Mount?
Fortunes swap inside out
The Wheel is turning

On and on
We keep on living

Alas, no one's really sure we know
If the turning Wheel does ever slow
Stopped by memories from before
As we stand at Peter's door
When the Veil is thinning

Will it stop or keep on spinning?

Defining Victory in Libya — Why the Right is Wrong

2011-03-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

In June 1999, when the last NATO bombs fell on Belgrade, a diminished Slobodan Milošević withdrew his repressive security forces from Kosovo. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia clung tenuously to what remained of its sovereignty while the predominantly Albanian territory slipped immediately into effective political and economic separation.

Milošević, by then an indicted war criminal, continued as president until September of the following year, when he was defeated in a fiercely contested election. More than a decade later, Kosovo's political status remains in dispute, but its people now have a chance to chart their own course toward a sustainable peace. And while it may be controversial to call the military campaign a success, it is perhaps just as inaccurate to describe it as a failure.

This is the uneasy halfway mark between decisive victory and manifest defeat that causes some Republicans on Capitol Hill to erupt in gestures of impotent rage. From Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya, they insist on unambiguous metrics of victory in wars that are simply too complicated to reach straightforward conclusions.

The U.S. intervention in Libya, we should all be clear, is about being actively engaged in a country threatened by imminent humanitarian crisis. It is about creating a safe political space to allow Libyans to solve their own problems. It is about responding to an international mandate to prevent abuses of sovereign authority. It is not about militarily forcing regime change in Tripoli.

Yes, President Obama has made Muammar Gaddafi's departure the ultimate goal of U.S. policy in Libya. But that is not now — and should never be — the objective of American military action. Even support for the country's rebel fighters may amount to a dangerous gamble. What happens, for example, when civilians loyal to the dictator take up arms against their countrymen? The UN Security Council resolution on Libya obligates us to protect all civilians; it does not necessarily authorize the international community to pick a side.

The Obama Administration must tune out the hawkish voices in Washington — because listening may bait us into a second Iraq. The current approach is both legal and prudent. We shouldn't crank up the thermostat.

Expanding the mission could easily send us down a slippery slope. Let's not lose our balance.

The Changing Face of the Middle East

2011-03-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

Editor's Note: A fascinating discussion on the organic democratic revolutions sweeping the nations of the Middle East — and what they might mean for U.S. foreign policy. Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna investigates the regionalization of conflict resolution in a part of the world where history and politics have, for decades, been influenced and shaped by the West.

Also, an intriguing perspective on the Arab League and the increasingly important distinction between Arab governments and the Arab street.

The Arab League: Not a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

2011-03-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

Now that the West is responding powerfully and vigorously to international demands for a no-fly zone in Libya, the Arab League is vacillating about whether to continue its support for the UN/NATO-led military effort.

Secretary General Amr Moussa griped to reporters about the indefensible "shelling of more civilians." The League sanctioned a no-fly zone, Mr. Moussa whined, not the pyrotechnics of war.

Malarkey.

Mr. Moussa should look up the definition of disingenuous. No politician with his experience could ever have expected the enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011) to involve anything short of a massive military operation. Even the text of the resolution explicitly authorizes member states "to take all necessary measures [...] to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack."

That includes putting out of commission Muammar Gaddafi's battle tanks, multiple rocket launchers, heavy machine and anti-aircraft guns, Sukhoi jets, helicopter gunships, self-propelled howitzers and infantry combat vehicles, to cripple the colonel's ability to terrorize his own people. Looked at any way, this can only mean war — but a just war waged in response to a Libyan appeal to protect an organic movement for democratic reform against the despotism of an illegitimate government.

Yes, there will be casualties in this war. But we shouldn't forget that there would be serious and grave casualties with or without the current Western intervention. The heart of the problem is Libya's brutal dictator, whose continuation in office is an affront to human rights and international law.

Instead of shilly-shallying about its political stance, and arming the tyrant with rhetorical ammunition to use against a unified international community, the Arab League and the African Union should make every effort to show Colonel Gaddafi the door. Sitting on the fence, or criticizing the UN action, will have the effect of strengthening the hand of a paranoid megalomaniac with an insatiable appetite for destruction.

Dithering, the League should know, isn't doing it any favors. By backtracking on their support for military intervention, the organization's 22 members have cast their lot with such paragons of justice and virtue as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, both of whom have (predictably) condemned the NATO action as a shameless grab for oil. Never mind obvious concerns about what a consensus on intervention might mean for their own political futures.

The League's other friends — the Russians and the Chinese — are more self-interested than sincere. China's reputation for crushing reform movements is well known, especially in separatist Tibet and Xinjiang provinces. And Russian violence in volatile Chechnya is ongoing. Politics, not principle, informed those abstentions on the Libyan action.

So, in the end, the Arab League must choose between conviction and convenience. It must either stand firmly with the Libyan rebels or watch them suffer abuses behind the curtain of sovereign power. Let's hope it chooses wisely.

Libya: A Lesson in Arab Hypocrisy

2011-03-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

It's easy to lambaste the United States — and perhaps much of the West — for pursuing foreign policy interests that seem to have all the moral conviction of a hooker in an Amsterdam shop window. But save a harsh word or two for the Arab League.

The 22-member regional organization of Arab states last week called on the UN Security Council to immediately impose a no-fly zone over Libya. The League also took up the matter of recognizing the opposition Libyan National Council as the country's only legitimate government. "The main priority right now is to stop the deadly situation," Secretary General Amr Moussa said gravely while announcing the organization's decision in Cairo.

Good, yes — but then there was this: A second resolution opposing any direct foreign military intervention. Shooting dictator Muammar Gaddafi's rogue airplanes out of the sky? OK. Crippling the air defenses that protect those airplanes (while simultaneously threatening the lives of NATO pilots): Not OK.

So let's get this straight: We're supposed to send our pilots into harm's way without creating the conditions to ensure their success? And the Arab League's contribution in all of this is... what again? Oh right, two resolutions that lack the quality of being resolute. In fact, two resolutions that smack of a particularly insidious hypocrisy. For by opposing foreign intervention, the League's members have protected themselves against future challenges to their own sovereign authority — possibly at the expense of human rights — while paying lip service to the Libyan appeal for UN military assistance.

It's a classic case of having one's cake and eating it too. And it's both duplicitous and wrong.

Let's be clear: A no-fly zone requires intervention. And intervention is a slippery slope. What begins as an air raid could end with boots on the ground. Sanctioning one is sanctioning the other. Sitting on the fence does no one any good.

Next time, the Arab League should try to pick a side. Here's a hint: Dictators make for very poor company.

Help Japan: Text REDCROSS to 90999

2011-03-12T17:27:00.001-08:00

What's at Stake in Libya

2011-03-11T16:51:00.000-08:00

"Those who argue that we have no national-security interests in Libya are correct in the narrow sense. But the Libyan case represents a much larger issue. The Arab world is experiencing a genuine awakening. People in the region have lost faith in the old order. Whether they can actually overthrow the government, as they did in Egypt and Tunisia, or merely demand real reform, as in Jordan and the Gulf states, they are searching for a new political identity.

"For the U.S., this presents a powerful opportunity. For decades, Arabs have regarded Washington as the enemy because it has been the principal supporter of the old order — creating a bizarre series of alliances in which the world's leading democracy has been yoked to the most reactionary forces on the planet. It has also produced a real national-security problem: the rise of Islamic terrorism. Al Qaeda's first argument against the U.S. is that it supports the tyrannies of the Arab world as they oppress their people.

"Now the U.S. has the opportunity to break the dysfunctional dynamic that produces anti-American hatred and violence. The Obama Administration has properly aligned itself with the hopes and aspirations of the Arab people, and it has called for governments in the region to engage in serious reform. But right now all these efforts have been sidelined. Libya is burning. Its people rose, and the tyrant gunned them down. Unless something changes, Muammar Gaddafi and his sons will be able to reassert control over the country amid a mass slaughter of its civilians.

"This would be a terrible outcome."

— Journalist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria in Time magazine. For the full column, see The Libyan Conundrum.

Libya's ICC Referral: Why an International Court with Its Own Legitimacy Crisis is Not the Right Answer

2011-03-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

The International Criminal Court announced this week that it has started a formal investigation to bring Muammar Gaddafi and his goons to book for crimes against humanity. Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has said senior Libyan officials, including the delusional colonel and his sons, have been put on notice.

The court acted in response to instructions from the UN Security Council – a body that once welcomed Libya as a non-permanent member – to deter the dictator's enthusiasm for slaughtering his own people. Even China voted in favor of referral, making it the Security Council's unanimous desire that Libya's bloody-minded tyrants be held to account.

All positive steps, with just a few glaring problems: For starters, China is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which created the permanent criminal court in 2002. And the United States has formally withdrawn its intent to ratify the treaty signed by the Clinton Administration in 2000 – a decision that places us in the company of only Israel and (hold your nose) Sudan.

In its 2002 letter to then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Bush Administration made clear that the United States "does not intend to become a party to the treaty" and accordingly "has no legal obligations arising from its signature." The Obama Administration has made "positive, principled engagement" its guideline for interactions with the court, but has announced no formal change in policy.

So as things stand, we have asked a world court we ourselves have only limited faith in to bring a fascist butcher and his henchmen to justice, while being fully aware of that court's utterly dismal track record. As former federal prosecutor T. Markus Funk observed in The National Law Journal, despite formal complaints about ongoing atrocities in more than 140 countries, the court, in its nine years of existence, "has not obtained a single verdict, sentence or victim-reparations order."

Is this the best we can do to affirm our commitment to human rights, especially as Libyans fighting terror and oppression beg for international protection? Is it really that hard to get the UN to agree on something more meaningful – like, say, a no-fly zone over Tripoli?

Sure, the U.S. defense establishment is understandably reluctant, especially with ominous whispers about a deadly "third front." But this does not have to be a unilateral endeavor. And in a region where actions speak louder than words, it would make a powerful statement about American – and indeed, Western – values.

Not acting decisively, we should all be certain, will cost us in the long run. The world needs to be actively engaged in this conflict – and we need bold leadership now.

The Gospel According to Fox: Obama's Mysterious Gaddafi Connection

2011-02-27T08:05:00.001-08:00

It didn't take long for the growling demagogues at Rupert Murdoch's industrial-size fiction factory (Fox News, if you're wondering) to begin churning out malicious falsehoods attacking President Obama's slow response to the deteriorating situation in Libya.

Fox Nation, a few days ago, promoted the view that the president's initial hesitation might have had something to do with Gaddafi's ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, "Obama's spiritual adviser for more than 23 years." Wright and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan had visited the Libyan tyrant in 1984, and the three are, according to several accounts, well acquainted. Which is fueling reports that the president's "multiple close ties to activists who have had relationships with Gaddafi" could have hobbled his ability to respond decisively to end the suffering in the North African state.

Not even a mention of how running a fully-staffed diplomatic mission in the contested capital of a failing state creates serious personal security challenges for American diplomats in Libya; a redeeming word about how that complicates the task for an American president making decisions or statements that could impact the occupational and personal safety of U.S. citizens on the ground. Not a passing contextual reference to the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, when students and militants took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in support of the Iranian Revolution. Or to the burning of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli the same year.

Nope, just conspiratorial nonsense about Obama's surreptitious ties to an evil regime.

Never mind that the president would not have had to worry about these problems if we didn't have a diplomatic relationship with a tyrant in the first place. And for that embarrassing misstep we can thank his predecessor.

When George W. Bush restored full diplomatic ties with Gaddafi's government in May 2006, he broke with more than a quarter century of U.S. policy. American presidents until then had correctly marginalized the dictator as an international pariah, condemning his sponsorship of terrorism and brazen disregard for human rights and international law. But the Bush White House ignored all that. Promising that Libya had begun a turnaround, the administration rapidly welcomed the colonel back into the fold.

"We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since Sept. 11, 2001," then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained in a statement.

Libyan exiles were, to put it mildly, not in the least bit pleased.

"Col. Gaddafi will most certainly use this to tighten his hold on the Libyans who aspire for such simple things such as freedom of expression and freedom to have a constitution," opposition leader Fayez Jibril told NBC News from neighboring Egypt in 2006.

Five years later, his words have returned to haunt us. And once again President Obama must clean up the mess.

But this is not how the folks at Fox tell the story. Let's face it: Conspiracies, foreign intrigues and plot twists make for better fiction.

David Cameron: UN 'Should Act Against Libya'

2011-02-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you've been seething with anger at Muammar Gaddafi's conspicuously and outrageously reprehensible violations of just about every tenet of human dignity, David Cameron's words should bring a smidgen of comfort.

The British prime minister has correctly called for tough and decisive UN Security Council action against the Libyan tyrant — not namby-pamby expressions of "grave concern," but bold, swift and consequential action to replace a man who has lost the confidence and trust of his people and the world.

Muammar Gaddafi's continued rule is a sad testament to the impotence of international institutions that were once envisioned as bulwarks against "barbarous acts [that] outraged the conscience of mankind," to quote the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted and proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in 1948. It represents the manifest failure of the international community to check illegal abuses of sovereign power. And it trivializes the legitimacy of institutions — such as the 47-member UN Human Rights Council — to which his government still belongs (at least, at the time of this writing).

Absent significant efforts to end Gaddafi's reign of terror, the UN risks becoming a casualty of the tragedy in Libya. World leaders, especially President Obama, must commit to action now.

Why Egypt's Success is al-Qaeda's Nightmare

2011-02-21T06:40:00.000-08:00

When Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak boarded a plane for the coastal city of Sharm el-Sheikh shortly after stepping down as the country's president, observers around the world hailed the moment as a triumph of democracy over dictatorship.

President Obama compared the events to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Gandhi's struggle for Indian independence from British rule. Both comparisons call attention to another feature of the revolution in Egypt: its reliance on nonviolence and peaceful resistance to achieve transformative political change.

Indeed, the victory in Tahrir Square was also a victory for the forces of moderation against those of violent extremism; for the steady voices of Muslim democrats over the strident din of the militant jihadists.

And it has al-Qaeda very worried about the future. So worried that it prompted a 34-minute videotape from the group's Egyptian-born second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Democracy, the terrorist leader warned, "means that sovereignty is to the desires of the majority, without committing to any quality, value or creed. A democratic state can only be secular, meaning non-religious."

Democracy — not the end of dictatorship — seemed to be al-Zawahiri's main concern. After all, for years, al-Qaeda and other organizations of its kind relied on political disaffection in the oppressed societies of the Muslim world to provide a reliable stream of recruits. The demise of dictatorship and the creation of political space now threaten the supply of vulnerable youth ripe for radicalization.

What's more, the generally peaceful protests present a tactical challenge to those who hold up revolutionary violence as the most effective means to promote Islamic governance. The demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia have, to quote President Obama, put "the lie to the idea that justice is best gained through violence" — an argument that goes to the heart of the division within political Islam.

Five years ago, al-Zawahiri accused the Muslim Brotherhood of selling out to secular authority by participating in Egypt's parliamentary elections. The political process, he insisted, would never lift the iron fist of authoritarian government. The elections were "a game run by America in Egypt [...] with the aim of deceiving the Muslim masses."

Today, all that sounds like a lot of hooey.

As it turned out, the people of Egypt weren't deceived at all — and when they chose to rise up, they chose the way of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, eschewing violence as an acceptable means of conflict resolution.

Their success is a blow to al-Qaeda and to the violent fringe of political Islam. And that should give us all reason to celebrate.

Egypt and Oil's Slippery Slope

2011-02-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

Texas financier T. Boone Pickens was in Washington last week selling his plan to wean the United States off its dependence on foreign oil. The events in Egypt, he pointed out, show exactly how vulnerable our energy markets can be to crises over which we have little control.

In the three weeks since Arab anger spilled out onto the streets of Cairo, oil prices have pierced alarming highs, with one major global contract topping $100 per barrel, according to the Associated Press. Since we import a staggering 62 percent of our oil, any spike in prices might mean we'll be breaking the bank to fill 'er up at the pump.

"I think we'll see gas prices hit $4 a gallon by this summer." Boone says.

Which of course is very bad for an American economy limping back to strength.

The danger is real.

As the Washington Post's Robert J. Samuelson explains it, while Egypt produces only 700,000 barrels a day, nearly three million barrels a day (mbd) are shipped through the Suez Canal and the Suez-Mediterranean pipeline. "If these supplies were blocked, prices would almost certainly rise."

But "the real flash point would occur if a cascade of political turmoil cut production from major suppliers: Saudi Arabia (present output: 8.5 mbd), Kuwait (2.3 mbd), Iran (3.7 mbd), Iraq (2.4 mbd) or Algeria (1.3 mbd). This danger will remain no matter how the present crisis ends."

The Obama Administration needs to take stock. So far, the White House has focused its energy reform efforts on encouraging innovative alternatives to carbon-based fuels. And although this should certainly remain a long-term policy goal, our short-term objectives could use some adjustment. After all, as Samuelson puts it, "oil isn't going gently into the night [...it] will meet a quarter or more of global energy demand for decades."

With that in mind, we've got to do our best to bridge the transition to a post-carbon energy future. Boone and Samuelson have two helpful suggestions.

The first, from Boone, is low-carbon road transport: Expand the use of natural gas as a motor fuel.

According to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists, not only does natural gas offer "a substantial advantage in reducing global warming emissions and improving public health," it's also abundantly available.

"The United States is endowed with substantial natural gas resources, and new discoveries have revised estimates of their size sharply upward in the past few years. In 2007, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated that the U.S. possesses 1,533 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that could be recovered using current technology, enough to supply the nation's needs at the 2008 rate of consumption for over 65 years. According to the latest assessment from the Potential Gas Committee, the recent expansion of production from unconventional gas deposits has raised the U.S. gas resource base to 2,074 trillion cubic feet, a 35 percent increase.

"This latest figure suggests that the U.S. gas supply could last for 90 years at current consumption rates."

Boone wants President Obama to commit the federal government to purchasing only vehicles powered by natural gas or some other domestically-produced renewable fuel. It's a viable first step toward a sustainable energy future.

The other thing is to check our voracious appetite for oil.

Samuelson favors a higher gasoline tax. Gradually introduced, such a tax "would dampen wild swings in fuel prices and push consumers to buy the more-fuel-efficient vehicles that the government is ordering auto companies to make."

Both ideas deserve the president's attention — especially as worldwide demand for oil surges to an overwhelming 90 million barrels per day.

Related blogs:

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Zen – On Smart People

2011-02-12T10:23:00.000-08:00

The smartest people in the world aren't those who seem to have all the answers, but those who ask the most thoughtful questions.

Zen — On President Obama's Disappointing Response to the Crisis in Egypt

2011-02-07T16:50:00.000-08:00

"The images that have come out of Egypt over the past week are stunning: tens of thousands of largely unarmed protesters facing tanks, teargas and live ammunition and who are still demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down. But throughout the upheaval, the United States' response has been guarded, if not inadequate. After days of tepid statements and measured acknowledgements of the Egyptian people's 'legitimate grievances,' even an eventual call for 'free and fair elections,' the Obama administration would still not publicly call for Mr. Mubarak's departure.

"Only after Mubarak announced yesterday that he would be stepping down after the elections in September did President Obama call for 'an orderly transition' that 'must begin now.' Such a decisive position is long overdue, and in the days to come, the White House must take stock of the fears, the arguments, and historical alliance that delayed such a public response. Not only has the administration's official silence on Mubarak made America seem grossly out of touch with the realities faced by Egypt's struggling population, it may have jeopardized any future role the US might play in the people's new Egypt, and even in the region as a whole. Washington must now make amends."

— Anthropologist and author Rachel Newcomb in The Christian Science Monitor. For the full story, click here.

Why Alan Dershowitz Gets an F on Egypt

2011-02-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

Harvard Law School's Alan Dershowitz, the man exalted by Newsweek magazine as one of America's "most distinguished defenders of individual rights," offered up a puzzling tidbit this week in his Huffington Post piece on the political earthquake shaking Egypt.

While predicting the beginning of "structural democracy" — or fairer elections — in the autocratic state, Dershowitz sought to make the rather pessimistic point that we should expect a "Lebanon-type Islamic regime" to eventually take shape. Real functional democracy — what we know as the "freedom of speech, assembly, press, religion and dissent" — will probably remain elusive. Expect a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood: "A violent, radical group with roots in Nazism and an uncompromising commitment to end the cold peace with Israel."

Powerful (and perhaps vaguely plausible) stuff, but not as jarring and strange as his parting salvo: "Compared to other repressive dictatorships I have visited over the years, it was a 5 or 6 on a scale of 10 for the average Egyptian."

I'm sorry, professor, but why even bring this up? Should we be less supportive of organic struggles for democracy when the dictators involved are nicer than others? Would the cause be more urgent if Mubarak reached a 7 or 8? And what about dictatorships that don't break a 5? Should we look the other way? Oh, and who makes up this scale for measuring the worst of the worst?

I thought the United States stood, unconditionally and unequivocally, for governments that represent the will of the people. Are we saying that applies only when the folks agitating for freedom are exactly like us?

Call me a raging lefty, but it doesn't take a Harvard genius to spot a double standard.

I'll say it simply: Dershowitz is wrong. In fact, it is precisely this sort of duplicitous hedging that has earned us the suspicion and scorn of the Arab street. If anything, the protests in North Africa present a unique opportunity for us to prove that our core principles aren't adrift in the winds of political convenience; that they rest firmly on a foundation of integrity and moral courage.

In the end, Egypt's democrats deserve our support — even if they do not share our cultural values.

On Arab Democracy and America's Image in the Middle East

2011-01-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

When the runaway sloganeering and political noisemaking in the boulevards along the Nile and the dusty streets of Sana'a become yesterday's story, U.S. policymakers will have an unprecedented opportunity to make things right with the Arab world.

For decades, Washington has displayed a lack of consistency, backing repressive autocrats while paying lip service to a "freedom deficit" in the Middle East. Now, our leaders have a chance to speak coherently: By throwing their weight behind organic democratic forces in the region.

President Obama and his diplomatic team have been criticized for their initially timid response to the Egyptian government's brutal crackdown, especially as Hosni Mubarak's tyrannical regime devours a sizable $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military aid. But the administration's measured reaction can be forgiven. After all, the governments of Egypt and Yemen have been important American allies through the years, steadfast in their support for our crusade against violent extremism. And as uplifting as the stirrings of democracy can seem, let's remember that an Egyptian or Yemeni democracy may look and feel quite different from our own.

A Pew Global Attitudes survey released in December found that a staggering 82 percent of Muslims in Egypt "endorse the stoning of people who commit adultery"; 77 percent favor "whippings and cutting off of hands for crimes like theft and robbery"; 84 percent say Muslims leaving the religion should face the death penalty; 54 percent want the segregation of men and women in the workplace written into state law.

Indeed, from the standpoint of human rights, Egypt under a democratic regime may be at least as terrifying as Egypt under effective dictatorship.

The difference, however, is that free people can be influenced to change their minds, and eventually, their laws. And this is why democracy, as a system of government, almost always makes sense.

In his 2009 speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, the president affirmed his personal commitment to support and promote "governments that reflect the will of the people." That said, he – and certainly the rest of us – must not miss this rare opportunity to stand on the right side of history.

Washington Heavyweights Back Security Council Resolution Condemning Israeli Settlements

2011-01-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: In a significant development, a number of highly influential Washington commentators and members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment this week sent a letter to President Obama urging him to direct the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to vote in support of a formal Security Council resolution condemning Israel's illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories. The full text of the letter can be found at The Washington Note. Excerpts follow.

"There are today over half a million Israelis living beyond the 1967 line - greatly complicating the realization of a two-state solution. That number has grown dramatically in the years since the peace process was launched: in 1993 there were 111,000 settlers in the West Bank alone; in 2010 that number surpassed 300,000.

"The settlements are clearly illegal according to article 49 of the Fourth Geneva convention - a status recognized in an opinion issued by the State Department's legal advisor on April 28, 1978, a position which has never since been revised.

"That official US legal opinion describes the settlements as being 'inconsistent with international law.' US policy across nine administrations has been to oppose the settlements, with the focus for the last two decades being on the incompatibility of settlement construction with efforts to advance peace. The Quartet Roadmap, for instance, issued during the Bush presidency in 2003, called on Israel to 'freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth.'

"At this critical juncture, how the US chooses to cast its vote on a settlements resolution will have a defining effect on our standing as a broker in Middle East peace. But the impact of this vote will be felt well beyond the arena of Israeli-Palestinian deal-making - our seriousness as a guarantor of international law and international legitimacy is at stake.

"America's credibility in a crucial region of the world is on the line - a region in which hundreds of thousands of our troops are deployed and where we face the greatest threats and challenges to our security."

Narrative Matters: Why Politicians Must Tell Stories

2011-01-14T08:07:00.000-08:00

As HBO tells it, the "special relationship" between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair began when the young British opposition leader flew to Washington for a huddle with top Democratic strategists who had been the architects of the American president's 1992 election win.

"Policy will only get you so far," a character playing one of Clinton's aides suggests in the movie. What's important is to craft a narrative, strike a balance, moderate the extremes. It's hard to change people, so better to change the party.

Cut to 1997: Labour sweeps the polls and a center-left revolution is under way on both sides of the Atlantic. Blair's narrative of progressive centrism has clearly won the day.

Hollywood history? Sure. Apocryphal? Perhaps. But Blair's belief in the power of political narrative was well documented at the time.

It turns out the former British prime minister may no longer be a strong believer. As he put it to CNN's Fareed Zakaria in a recent interview, "If you're smart and articulate and so on, you can usually articulate the vision. And, you know, you know basically where you want to go. The hard thing about the modern world is how to do it."

Translation: It's about policy, not narrative.

Here's Blair again: "My experience of change is when you propose it, everyone tells you it's a bad idea, when you're doing it, it's hell, and, after you've done it, people think things were always like that. And so what I've found by the end of my time was that I was always wishing I'd actually pushed the envelope further."

Push. Change. Command.

Now note that neither Blair nor his Labour Party remain popular in Britain today.

The story of Nancy Pelosi's Democratic House isn't much different.

Like Blair, Pelosi and her minions set narrative aside, aggressively pursuing policies they believed most Americans backed. Selling the agenda wasn't deemed necessary since an election had already been won; a mandate meant the Dems could enact most of their legislative program in an audacious 100 hours. It's the stuff Blair calls pushing the envelope. Change now, talk later.

And there's a problem with this approach.

Put simply, no policy is airtight. The best democratically formulated policies are compromises. In the absence of compromise, there emerges a relentless struggle for meaning. This is why narrative is always and ultimately important. Not taking the time to explain and build a foundation for change gives grounds for accusations of Big Brother-knows-best authoritarianism – which is exactly what got Pelosi and her boys the boot.

Consider that even centrist Democrats had confessed their unease, as former Washington Rep. Brian Baird did in an interview with The Hill. If even congressional Democrats weren't sold on the former Speaker's agenda and style, it's clear that the party under Pelosi had lost its way, not to mention the blessings of a jumbo-sized chunk of the American electorate.

When the Dems abandoned the business of controlling the narrative – the way that policy is given meaning and justification – they lost a grasp of their own reason for being. The omission was both internally corrosive and politically toxic.

Blair likes to speak of "strength and conviction in leadership." Absolute moral certainty. Pelosi too shares an affinity for the sentiment. And President Bush, you'll remember, spoke mightily of being "the decider." It's no coincidence that all three saw their popularity plummet in office.

The reason is straightforward: Narrative matters. Selling ideas to people, even after an election, is vital to securing the legitimacy of the decisions that follow. Citizens in democracies don't like being told to shut up and deal. Shared morals and values are cultivated, not forced.

The party would do well to remember this in the lead-up to 2012. To win again, we need to tell a more centrist story.

The Human Condition

2011-01-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

There are, I have come to reason, two aspects of the human condition worthy of our attention: The first is tangible, measurable, empirically verifiable, certain and physical; the other only perceptible, vague, ethereal and intangible.

The physical self is the body we understand. It is the one we dissect and analyze, the one we hold and weigh and shape; the other – the spiritual self – is less understood, mysterious. It is talked about, felt and imagined, but never described with any certainty in the language of science. It is the stuff of religion and metaphysics, not lab work.

We are comfortable in discussions about the physical self but are often unsettled in conversations about the spirit. We have a common vocabulary and a language to talk about the body, but no shared language to describe its intangible essence. And yet no one would dispute that people carry around with them a certain energy – an aura that makes its presence felt. Indeed, passion and love would have no place in the human experience were it not for this elusive something.

So the spirit exists, but we do not know it – at least not in the way we know the body. It is perhaps unknowable, existing outside the limits of systematic study.

Science offers us no understanding of the spirit, and religion – often inflexible and divisive – seems incapable of bringing clarity to the discussion. Hence a whole realm of the human experience is placed beyond our grasp and comprehension. We are condemned to know only the body, not the soul; our understanding of the human condition is rendered precarious and incomplete.

I wonder, are we to live with this limitation forever?

Self-censorship II? Journalism Historian Michael S. Sweeney on Press-Military Relations in the WikiLeaks Era

2010-12-23T09:16:00.000-08:00

Ohio University journalism professor Michael S. Sweeney is an authority on the history of voluntary self-censorship in American journalism. The Washington Post called his 2001 book, Secrets of Victory, "one of those books you wish you could make people read."

In it, Sweeney examined the U.S. government's hugely successful program of managing the news during World War II through the efforts of a wartime agency known as the Office of Censorship. Headed by Byron Price, a former news executive with the Associated Press, the Office of Censorship was able to persuade thousands of fiercely competitive American journalists to abide by a code of practices that required them to censor their reports for the sake of national security.

Persuasion, not coercion, Price believed, was the key to cultivating a culture of responsible reporting to advance the story of war without compromising the interests and safety of those engaged in its prosecution.

Times may have changed, but Sweeney says Price's methods may still be worth examining – especially in the era of WikiLeaks and social media.

"If the media and the public can be convinced of the necessity to fight and win a war, then professional and possibly even citizen journalists may repeat the self-censorship that helped win World War II."

As Sweeney explains it: In defending his release of classified information, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange reasoned that "publication of secrets may do more good than harm by helping deter future abuses. [But] several major challenges complicate such utilitarian arithmetic.

"First, it is impossible to precisely predict future consequences stemming from publication. We cannot know for certain whether lives will be saved or lost, battles won, or opinion altered by publication of a story. Second, we cannot accurately assign 'weights' to the benefits and harms of potential publication in any objective, reliable way. [...] And third, outside observers may legitimately question why the journalist, and not some other person, should be allowed to determine how best to act in the public interest with regard to news stories of any magnitude."

These are problems worth considering as we look to the future of press-military relations. To be sure, a lot rides on the relationship between these two institutions.

"The press needs to tell a story," Sweeney says. "And in order to maintain public support and government funding, the military must tell one. Only with trust, including knowing when to keep secrets, can journalists get close enough to military sources to a clear, nuanced, and truthful picture of war."

That's food for thought.

Wiki Freaks: WikiLeaks and Democracy Gone Wrong

2010-12-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

Editor's Note: Next week, American journalism historian Michael S. Sweeney discusses strategies for press-military relations in the WikiLeaks era.

Walter Lippmann knew a thing or two about journalism and democracy.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and founding editor of The New Republic was more than an icon of 20th century American journalism. He was deeply philosophical — a scholar with an intimate understanding of the workings of democratic institutions in a public sphere characterized by great and growing complexity.

Lippmann believed that further democratization wasn't necessarily the best way to solve the problems of democracy. You couldn't expect a lifelong farmer in rural Idaho to contribute to a discussion on the uses of torpedoes in maritime warfare with the technical savvy of a naval engineer. In an industrial era, governing, Lippmann reasoned, required expertise. The "omnicompetent citizen" was a "false ideal."

To trust people at large with the many elaborately complex details of policymaking would be to leave society vulnerable to what he called the trampling and roaring "bewildered herd." It's why our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom and foresight, established the United States as a constitutional republic — a representative democracy with limitations on popular government.

The information age can make this thinking seem obsolete.

After all, anyone with an Internet connection and a Web browser can today pretend to an illusory expertise. But while Google and Wikipedia may provide access to a wealth of information, they do not help essentially ignorant readers think critically and analyze data with the perspective necessary to reach sensible judgments. Specialized decisions still require specialized training and preparation. A surgeon, for example, is sent to the emergency room after years of experience in trauma and acute care, not after reading a few books on the human anatomy. The omnicompetent citizen, despite our unprecedented access to information, is still a false ideal.

And here lies my problem with WikiLeaks.

In releasing massive volumes of stolen classified information to the public, the website's publishers have placed an irrational and unwarranted faith in popular government — a belief sharply at odds with the history and practice of democracy. And they have done this without a full contextual analysis; without explaining how the published material was obtained and how it might be interpreted. Context, we must remember, is as important as content in the process of decision making.

WikiLeaks has overwhelmed the discussion about America's foreign policy without illuminating it in any significant way. The website's proponents have pursued notoriety at the expense of reasoning, functioning in a manner inconsistent with the discipline of verifying, reporting and analyzing the news that is a hallmark of professional journalism.

Moreover, they have set a precedent that, in the words of the international advocacy group Reporters Without Borders, "leaves all those people throughout the world who risk their freedom and sometimes their lives for the sake of online information even more exposed to reprisals."

As the organization, which advocates for freedom of the press, put it in its Aug. 12 open letter to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, "Such imprudence endangers your own sources and, beyond that, the future of the Internet as an information medium ."

The website's actions amount to a reckless, thoughtless, and ultimately, selfish, way to make a political point. And they deserve strong and unequivocal condemnation.

Personally, I'm with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein: Prosecute Julian Assange. Now.

Solving the Korean Conundrum: Why We Need to Stop Worrying and Start Talking Peace

2010-12-07T17:06:00.001-08:00

Two weeks ago, pundits and political types nattered on with great seriousness about the imminent outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula. War loomed ominously on the horizon, they had us believe.

A belligerent North had crossed the proverbial line when it fired a barrage of artillery shells at a small island controlled by the South near the disputed West Sea border. Reuters called it the "fiercest attack in decades," pushing the neighbors to the "brink of war," while Fox News made clear that the North had abandoned "all constraints on its behavior" by pursuing a "dangerously escalating pattern of provocations."

No one was taking any chances.

In the Philippines, President Benigno Aquino ordered his government to test all evacuation protocols to assist Filipinos living in South Korea. In Tokyo, the Japanese parliament unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the attack. And the Chinese joined an angry Pyongyang in lodging their first official protest of a joint ROK-U.S. show of force near the edge of their territorial waters.

Everywhere, war drums thundered as battle flags were unfurled.

Then all went silent. And history turned a page. As with most outbursts on the peninsula, the latest flare-up was more smoke and no fire.

After all, set in proper context, the situation was not unusual. Remember that the exchange took place across the Northern Limit Line, a heavily contested maritime demarcation line the North has disputed openly since 1973. Unlike the international border established through the middle of the Demilitarized Zone, the NLL is only a de facto boundary, excluded from the original 1953 Armistice Agreement.

On the ground, de facto boundaries are violent places.

Consider the Line of Control dividing the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The LOC, as it is called, is frequently the site of armed clashes and proxy wars — mostly limited engagements to assert minor territorial claims. The Shatt al-Arab waterway is a continuing source of tension between Iran and Iraq. Japan, China and Taiwan claim possession of a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that were recently at the center of a major international controversy after a Chinese trawler collided with a Japanese patrol boat. Pakistan and Afghanistan share a vague and famously volatile border.

My point is: Violence of the sort witnessed on Yeonpyeong Island in November is an unfortunate reality of life along disputed international borders. It is a sad but familiar occurrence. Reacting to it with international panic and mass hysteria is dangerous and counterproductive to the ultimate goal of a negotiated settlement. Calls for retaliation, fueled by hyperbolic media coverage, serve only to raise tensions and further destabilize an already difficult situation; to be sure, this is exactly how wars begin.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the North's shelling came as the South was conducting an artillery exercise close to the disputed border, and while Seoul mobilized some 70,000 troops for a week of large-scale military maneuvers in the West Sea. You could forgive Pyongyang for being just a little perturbed.

As long as the two Koreas remain in a state of war, provocations on both sides have the potential to result in violence. The only sensible way forward is to replace the 1953 armistice with a formal peace treaty, incorporating mechanisms to build confidence and trust between all involved parties, including the United States. While the particulars of such a treaty would need to be worked out, making it an explicit goal would help move the peninsula toward a realistic and sustainable security strategy.

The current approach, like so much TV news, has given us loops of the same stock video footage.

Perhaps it's time we changed the channel.

Palestine: Now or Never

2010-11-20T11:31:00.000-08:00

Nearly two weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the Jewish Federation of North America's General Assembly in New Orleans and shook an angry fist at Palestinian obstructionism. The Palestinians, he said, weren't serious at all about Mideast peace.

Israelis "want to know that just as we are ready to recognize a state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians are ready to recognize Israel as the state for the Jewish people," Netanyahu told the gathering.

No half measures. No pesky preconditions. Israel for the Jews. Period.

Almost as he spoke, halfway across the world, Israeli planners in his administration announced a project for 1,000 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem on land sought by Palestinians as the capital of a future state — this, despite American and Palestinian requests for a settlement freeze to help restart stalled peace talks.

It was a moment of shocking diplomatic and cognitive dissonance. How could the prime minister speak of a state for the Palestinians while his government continued to force them off their land? And in the absence of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state, how could anyone, in good conscience, recognize Israel as a state for the Jewish people?

Just to be clear: Without an immediate end to settlement activity, it will take an act of willful blindness to recognize Israel as anything but a binational state — and one in which the rights and freedoms of Palestinians may require special protection. By refusing to acknowledge these facts, Netanyahu and other pro-settler hard-liners risk undermining Israel's future, both as a Jewish homeland and as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

Make no mistake, the greatest existential threat to Israel comes not from without but from within. A nuclear Iran might stir up more mischief in the region, but a failure to resolve the Palestinian question would mean the certain death of Israel as we know it.

The prime minister this month spoke resolutely of his desire for "real security" — "security on the ground" — but his actions create the very conditions that jeopardize the only sensible long-term solution to Israel's security crisis. Increasingly, a negotiated settlement is falling out of favor with the Palestinians. A recent survey by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that Palestinian support for a two-state solution fell from 64 percent in December 2009 to 57 percent in March this year. And with about 500,000 Jewish settlers already living in the occupied territories, it's likely that support for a two-state solution will continue to decline.

A binational state will have serious consequences for Israel's self-image. As Hebrew University professor Ya'akov Shamir has pointed out, "a binational state is a much greater threat to the identity of the Israeli public than it is to the identity of the Palestinian public." Indeed, Israel's national character — and the Jewish national project — will experience fundamental and permanent change.

Netanyahu told attendees at the conference that the United States, as a friend of Israel, should never allow hope for a two-state solution to fade. But this may mean that we do what true friendship demands: Stop friends from making decisions they will later regret.

Israel seems committed to a pattern of self-destructive behavior. So the only way to save the two-state solution may be to recognize a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood. Doing so would preserve the identity and character of Israel while creating new possibilities for a sustainable peace.

"Any measure that would make the Israeli-Palestinian dispute more 'normal' — that is to say, a dispute between states — would also advance the prospect for negotiations," Shlomo Avineri, a Hebrew University political scientist and a former director-general of Israel's foreign ministry, wrote in an op-ed for the Haaretz newspaper. "It would be far easier to conduct negotiations on borders, the future of the settlements, territorial exchanges, Jerusalem and other issues between states."

What's more, in founding their state, the Palestinians would "free both themselves and Israel of the burden of occupation."

True, it's no magic bullet to fix the region's problems. But it's a way to keep hope alive. And in the end, isn't that what friends are for?

America: A Nation in Peril?

2010-11-10T14:11:00.000-08:00

There was troubling news in September from the statistical wonks at Gallup.

The polling organization's annual Governance survey found a sharp downturn in public trust in a wide variety of American institutions. Trust in Congress — the legislative branch of government — fell to an abysmal 36 percent, the lowest level in Gallup's history; "trust in the executive branch fell 11 points, and in the judicial branch, 10 points." Across the board, Americans expressed a profound and widespread dissatisfaction with government.

Even the military's public image has taken a hit. Gallup's Confidence in Institutions survey, conducted in July, found that 76 percent of Americans now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the military, down six percentage points from last year. By comparison, confidence in the presidency plummeted 15 points to a dismal 36 percent. That is to say, more Americans may be willing to trust a top military commander than his civilian commander-in-chief. But fewer trust both institutions this year than did last year.

All in all, the sentiment may have unsettling consequences for democracy and free society in the United States. As Harvard University's Pippa Norris has written, "an erosion of confidence in the major institutions of society, especially those of representative democracy, is a far more serious threat to democracy than a loss of trust in other citizens or politicians.

"Political leaders come and go with swings of the electoral pendulum, and trust in them may rise and fall with citizens' evaluation of their performance in office. [But] institutions are large, impersonal, and broadly based, and the public's estimation of them is less immediately affected by particular news items or specific events. Thus, loss of confidence in institutions may well be a better indicator of public disaffection with the modern world because they are the basic pillars of society. If they begin to crumble, then there is, indeed, cause for concern."

We see symptoms of this metastasizing disaffection in nearly every news story — from xenophobia and bigotry in the general attitude toward Muslims in America to the wave of anti-incumbency that brought political upheaval to Washington.

Against the backdrop of dwindling confidence in our national institutions, double-digit poverty, near double-digit unemployment, mounting public debt, two wars and profligate federal spending have combined to create a dark and desperate public mood. The so-called "Tea Party" movement is but one face of America's angst; rising Islamophobia and draconian immigration laws are other manifestations of this rapidly spreading malaise.

Our nation, to be clear, is ill — and unless we move quickly to treat this illness, we risk drastic and far-reaching damage to our body politic.

Change must begin with renewed attention to government performance. Americans today, despite the political noise, are less concerned with ideology and are more persuaded by results. Our elected representatives must deliver the goods. It's not enough to push for sweeping reform. Lawmakers must constantly measure the impacts of policy interventions and commit to an honest dialogue about what works and what doesn't. We shouldn't be afraid to change our minds.

The point of the exercise is to rebuild social and political trust. Norris notes that "countries with low levels of social trust are less likely to build the kind of vibrant civil society that spurs strong government performance [...] The result will be low citizen confidence in government and public institutions."

With that in mind, our leaders in Washington need to make a new kind of "pledge to America" — a promise grounded in commitment to performance-based governance and not in the partisan gimmickry of election-year politics.

Why Being Mad as Hell is Bad for Our Health

2010-10-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

Remember Howard Dean and the scream heard around the world?

From a West Des Moines ballroom festooned with campaign signs and posters, the failed candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination rolled up his sleeves, clenched his teeth, and punctured unsuspecting ear drums with a high-decibel vow to "take back the White House."

The man who would be president screamed until he was red in the face. And Americans watched, shell-shocked and disturbed.

The "Dean Scream" was the subject of much breathless commentary. "Dizzy Dean" had lost his mind; "unpresidential"; "insane"; "he just seemed to go nuts"; the doctor had administered "a lethal self-injection"; he sounded like "a bloodsucking leftist." And on and on.

Howard Dean was the wrong man for the job. Howard Dean was too angry. End of story.

Fast forward six years — and anger is all the rage.

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson is angry — so angry he shouted down the president during a September 2009 address to a joint session of Congress. Sarah Palin is angry, and railing against the "lame-stream media." Rand Paul, Kentucky's Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, is angry about an attack ad challenging his Christianity. New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino wants to take "a baseball bat to Albany." Mark Levin is convinced the president is a "Marxist." And Rush Limbaugh sees us going the way of Hitler's Germany. On the Left, Michael Moore is still shaking a fist at the man, training his guns most recently on Democrats in bed with Wall Street types; and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken is proving that even a professional comedian can turn into "one of the more aggressive politicians on the Hill," according to Politico.

There is, in fact, a rising public appetite for anger.

A recent Newsweek poll found that 23 percent of American voters today describe themselves as "angry," while 54 percent say they're "frustrated" — a sentiment that can degenerate quickly into anger. Some "74 percent of angry voters are more likely to support a candidate who expresses anger about the economy and jobs," while 75 percent "prefer a candidate who shows anger over federal spending, taxes, and the deficit."

That is to say, writer Sharon Begley notes, this isn't merely the year of the angry voter; it's "the year of voters wanting [...] really angry candidates."

In other words, it's the sort of season in which a red-faced Howard Dean might have been right at home. And that raises troubling questions about the coarsening of our political culture. To quote the journalist Sasha Abramsky, we now find ourselves in the throes of "the most rageful moment in modern American history."

Perhaps most concerning is that this erosion of civility in American politics and public life coincides with a plummeting faith in our democratic institutions. A staggering two-thirds of Americans, according to Abramsky, think the country "is on the wrong track — a proportion that has not changed much from the latter part of the Bush presidency through the second year of the Obama presidency. And large majorities of the public, more than 80 percent, say they do not trust their leaders in Washington, the highest number in a half-century."

Abraham Lincoln warned long ago that when people "grow weary of their constitutional right to amend the government, they shall exert their revolutionary right to dismember and overthrow that government."

Consider that a chilling admonition for our times.

My Union, 'Tis of Thee?

2010-10-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

In her preface to Christopher Dandeker's prescient 1998 book Nationalism and Violence, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation's Karen Colvard made a salient point about why scholars ought to care about the idea of the nation. It matters little that communities are "imagined," or that traditions are "invented," she wrote. "Nationalism, however fictive, recent and imaginary, leads to real bloodshed."

It is, in fact, this shedding of blood that, for many, constitutes the nation; its members baptized together in a kind of virtuous blood-letting. As the French writer and philosopher Ernest Renan once observed, "Unity is always effected by means of brutality," and later celebrated [sanitized?] in anthems and songs. Violence and sacrifice give life to the nation, and so identity is essentialized and guarded with jealous passion. Sovereignty – the people's hard-won right to consent to political authority – isn't normally surrendered without a fight. God and country are held in equal esteem.

Which is why the events in Ireland last year came as something of a surprise.

Voters in that country decided last October to approve a far-reaching treaty meant to consolidate the power of the European Union. By a margin of about two to one, they set aside a nationalist tradition dating back to the 17th century to empower a supranational political organization far removed from Dublin. And they did this while shouting ecstatically in the streets and holding aloft posters declaring their wholehearted support for an economically vital Europe: "We're better together," the slogan went.

And thus nationalist theory was turned on its head.

For years it had been assumed that transnational groups could never muster enough support to take the place of the nation-state. "Even if it is possible and desirable that the nation-state become involved in supranational organizations," Dandeker wrote, "a significant limitation on this process is the extent to which public attachments and loyalties to them can be generated: such organizations do not have the potential of legitimacy that nation-states have."

That is to say, we might ask our sons and daughters to give up their lives Pro Deo et Patria, but certainly not for some nebulous alliance of nations. How many American parents, for example, would surrender their children to march in a "United Nations Army"? And to which flag would these young recruits owe allegiance?

A subordination of national goals to supranational interests was thought entirely out of the question – until Ireland went to the polls.

The Lisbon Treaty contests many long-held assumptions. It is, to be clear, a significant departure from the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. Besides creating a full-time E.U. presidency, the treaty's ratification marks the first time in history that 27 European countries will give up national vetoes in key policy areas – from climate change and energy security to foreign policy and defense. While important elements of national sovereignty will still be preserved, the sum of sovereign power in these nations will henceforth be divided.

If absolute sovereignty, in the language of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, is "quintessential modern sovereignty," national sovereignty in 21st-century Europe has the potential to be decidedly non-absolute. The Lisbon Treaty is steering the continent in the direction of a "divisible sovereignty" – and this shift will have profound consequences for international order and democracy.

If others follow Europe's lead, the future will assuredly witness the intensification of fissiparous pressures on the nation-state. And whatever form these take, one thing is certain: where there is fission there is heat.

Why the Aussies May Have a Point About China

2010-09-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic's James Fallows recently expressed great irritation at the results of a survey on Australian opinion conducted by the Lowy Institute, a well-regarded Sydney-based think tank. The group asked Australians to name the nation they consider the world's leading economy: The answer? For about 55 percent, China.

The United States, favored by 32 percent, was a slightly distant second. Only three percent picked Japan; and Europe was chosen by a mere eight percent. The results were alarming, Fallows wrote – about as alarming as the verdict in a Pew study "showing that 44 percent of Americans thought that China was the 'world's leading economic power.'"

"At last there's proof," the veteran journalist fumed. "44 percent of Americans are crazy." And the Australians too, or so it would seem.

Well, I'm going to say yes – and no.

Yes, China faces many fundamental and far-reaching social, political, economic and environmental challenges. Yes, regional development in the country is still uneven and inconsistent. Yes, as Fallows points out, China "has just now surpassed Japan in total economic output – with ten times as many people [to support] as Japan has." There is no doubt the nation has a long way to go.

But the world is not crazy. China today wields enormous clout in the international system. Its economy grew by nearly 12 percent in the first quarter of 2010; its foreign exchange reserves – at $2.4 trillion – account for 30 percent of the world's total; it is the world's biggest exporter, with "a $196 billion trade surplus for 2009," according to the Associated Press. And if Nobel laureate Robert Fogel is correct, its economy will reach $123 trillion in 2040, "or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000." China may not be the world's top economy just yet, but its "economic hegemony" is well under way.

This is why so many of us already think of the Middle Kingdom as the world's economic center of gravity. China today is a leading power – and herein lies its problem: For with great power comes great responsibility. Fallows writes about taking China "very seriously" and preparing "for a world in which it plays a major part." But that world is already upon us. The trouble is, even the Chinese won't admit it.

Consider the tensions on the Korean peninsula, for example. World leaders – from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to South Korean President Lee Myung-bak – coaxed, cajoled and prodded, but failed to convince the Chinese to take a stand on North Korea's involvement in the sinking of a South Korean warship; this, despite a 400-page report meticulously documenting the attack. The Chinese remain predictably noncommittal, promising "aggressive negotiations and cooperation" but little else.

On Iran, China remains committed to limiting its diplomatic and military risks, skillfully dodging Western calls for robust sanctions against its third-largest crude supplier. If the latest sanctions against the Islamic republic seem timid at best, it's because China sees virtue in the status quo. After all, intervening in world affairs can sometimes invite unwelcome scrutiny, which in turn can get in the way of development. As Premier Wen Jiabao put it to reporters at a news conference earlier this year, Beijing's fundamental foreign policy objective "is to uphold China's national interests, China's sovereignty and territorial integrity in particular."

The emphasis on sovereignty has long been a signature feature of China's policy of non-intervention. The goal, as Deng Xiaoping explained it, is "to adopt a low profile." Engage with the world to get ahead, but don't get too involved. Getting involved will eventually mean inviting the world in. And inviting the world in would compromise sovereignty, critical to furthering the Chinese development agenda. Remember that advancing national interests – not higher international ideological interests – remains the basic aim.

The problem, however, is that China's formidable economic weight and membership in key international organizations makes it impossible to ignore. As a great power in the modern world, the international community can reasonably expect Beijing to play a leadership role. Not long ago, it was said of the United States that even inaction on our part could be construed as strategy by virtue of our highly influential position in the world. Today, the same can be said of China.

The question that must be answered is: When and how will Beijing respond?

Sure, we can blame the Aussies for giving China's international profile a premature boost. But I say we thank them for stepping up the pressure on Beijing to assume a greater share of international responsibilities. It could turn out, as Fallows grudgingly concedes, that the Aussies are perhaps "more attuned to shifting realities than the Yanks are."