Supreme Success, by M. Edward Whelan III
Thanks to Bush, we have a chance for a Roberts Court.
Monday, December 29, 2008
National Reveiw Vol. LX, No. 24
Dwight Eisenhower called his appointments of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan his two biggest mistakes as president. With ample reason, George W. Bush regards his appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito as two of his best decisions.
In the space of barely six months, from mid-July 2005 to the end of January 2006, President Bush achieved what his Republican predecessors since Eisenhower each failed to accomplish through the whole of their presidencies: the nomination, confirmation, and appointment of two new justices whose sterling qualifications appear to include a deep commitment to respect the broad play the Constitution gives to the operations of representative government. It's too early, to be sure, to take for granted that Roberts and Alito will prove to be superb justices over the long haul and that they will resist the temptation to "grow" to curry the favor of the liberal elites in legal academia and the media. But their strong performance in their initial years on the Court and their admirable characters and temperaments justify lofty expectations.
Lest Bush's 2-for-2 record on Supreme Court appointments be underappreciated, it is important to recall that the great Ronald Reagan went only 1 for 3 (a stellar pick in Antonin Scalia, but tragic failings in Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) -- or 2 for 4 if you include his elevation of William Rehnquist to chief justice. Bush's father batted 1 for 2 (the home run of Clarence Thomas, preceded by the dismal whiff of David Souter).
To the essential virtue of judicial restraint, Roberts and Alito both add the virtue of (relative) youth. Roberts, who became the youngest chief justice since John Marshall, is still only 53, and Alito is 58. It is reasonable to hope that they -- and Clarence Thomas, who is only 60 (and nine years younger than the next youngest justice) -- will serve on the Court for a long time to come.
The fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination must be acknowledged. Whatever Miers's merits, she was surely not in the top tier of qualified Supreme Court candidates. As Reagan did with O'Connor in 1981, Bush made the mistake of deciding in advance that his nominee must be a woman, and Miers was somehow the only one left standing after other, better-qualified candidates were knocked off the list. The conservative movement deserves credit for grasping the importance of what was at stake and objecting vociferously (some publicly, others privately). Bush in the end also deserves credit for taking the difficult step of withdrawing the nomination of his longtime friend. Thus, a Justice Miers is not part of his legacy in the way that O'Connor, alas, is part of Reagan's.
While President Bush earns the highest marks for Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, his project of restoring the Court to its proper role in a constitutional republic remains incomplete for the simple reason that he was presented with only two Supreme Court vacancies over his eight years in office. The "Roberts Court" bears that title only as a formality, as Chief Justice Roberts is one vote short of a working majority that is broadly aligned with his jurisprudential principles. Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito form a strong core of four, but in politically contentious cases Kennedy frequently sides with, or even leads, the liberal-activist quartet of Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer in inventing newfangled constitutional rights. So, if President-elect Obama fails to inflict irreversible damage on the Court, it will be up to a future president to pick up where Bush left off and build on his excellent progress.
President Bush's record on lower-court appointments is much more mixed. Let's begin with the numbers. Bush appointed 62 judges* to the federal courts of appeals. That's even fewer than the 65 that President Clinton appointed, amidst bitter Democratic complaints and media buzz about a confirmation slowdown by Senate Republicans. Bush's total also includes three of Clinton's unsuccessful nominees whom Bush renominated -- two in 2001 in unrequited gestures of goodwill, and one in 2008 as part of a Sixth Circuit deal. The numbers for the federal district courts are even worse: 261 Bush appointees versus 305 Clinton appointees. The Bush numbers are all the more disappointing as Republicans controlled the Senate for more than half of the Bush presidency, whereas Clinton enjoyed Democratic control for only two of his eight years.
There's plenty of blame to go around. When they were in the minority, Senate Democrats resorted to unprecedented measures of obstruction. Until the presidency of George W. Bush, there had never been a partisan filibuster against a judicial nominee. In 2003 and 2004, Democrats unleashed the filibuster and succeeded in defeating some 20 cloture petitions on ten different nominees, five of whom -- including Miguel Estrada, the superbly qualified nominee to the D.C. Circuit -- were never ultimately confirmed. Even as the bipartisan "Gang of 14" agreement in May 2005 permitted some of the filibustered nominees to be confirmed, it undercut what would have been a successful Republican effort to revise Senate rules to forbid the filibuster of judicial nominees.
Many Senate Republicans, meanwhile, seemed to demonstrate more interest in the patronage opportunities that judicial nominations presented them -- getting their own home-state folks nominated and confirmed -- than in moving Bush's judicial nominees generally. Indeed, the Senate Judiciary Committee under Republican leadership dramatically expanded the Senate's "blue slip" policy by giving individual senators an effective veto over judicial nominations in their states (including over federal appellate judgeships, which the laws do not assign by state and whose workload has no more connection to one state than to any other in a circuit). This Senate Republican conferral of extraordinary leverage on obstructionist Democrats explains, for example, why a Fourth Circuit seat regarded as belonging to Maryland has been vacant throughout Bush's presidency -- and why so many other seats were filled with compromise candidates.
After retaking control of the Senate in 2007, Democrats were even better positioned to play hardball. Over the last two years, the Senate confirmed only 10 federal appellate judges (including one former Clinton nominee), compared with 15 confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate in the last two years of the Clinton administration. Among the nominees left languishing were Peter Keisler, a brilliant lawyer whose nomination to the D.C. Circuit in June 2006 received hearty bipartisan acclaim; Robert Conrad, a Fourth Circuit nominee who, like Keisler, received the ABA's highest rating and who had the ardent support of both Republican senators from North Carolina; and Glen Conrad, a Fourth Circuit nominee from Virginia, who was pre-approved by Democratic senator James Webb.
The Fourth Circuit, long stalwart in its judicial conservatism, provides perhaps the starkest illustration of the Bush administration's failure to get its nominees confirmed. The 15-member court, which covers Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, has four vacancies, three of which have existed for the entirety of the Bush presidency. Among the eleven active judges, six are Republican appointees and five (counting Roger Gregory, the Clinton recess appointee who was renominated by Bush) are Democratic. So President-elect Obama will likely soon be able to establish a Democratic majority on the Fourth Circuit.
There is no evidence that the Bush White House ever developed a general strategy to counter Democratic obstruction and Republican indifference in the Senate, and, especially once Democrats regained control of the Senate, it's far from clear what strategy would have been effective.
The good news on the lower courts is that President Bush did succeed in appointing a number of outstanding judges to the courts of appeals, judges who have already made their mark and will continue to do so. Fifteen Bush appointees serving on federal appellate courts are 50 or younger, and several more are just over 50. If and when a future president is ready to help build a real Roberts Court, that president will have plenty of strong Bush appointees to choose from. Let's hope that President Bush's full Supreme Court legacy proves to be even greater than his outstanding appointments of Roberts and Alito.
-- Mr. Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a regular contributor to National Review Online's Bench Memos blog.
* Correction: the number of Senate-confirmed appointees for Bush is 61, versus 65 for Clinton; if one includes recess appointments, the Bush total is 62, versus 66 for Clinton.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Relax: British Embassy Breach Is an Iranian InfoOp
Relax: British Embassy Breach Is an Iranian InfoOp. By Steve Schippert
Folks, the "storming" of the British Embassy in Tehran by "a large group of people and students" is an Iranian Information Operation (IO) intended to be perceived (by you) as just an impromptu gaggle of angry Iranian citizens expressing rage at Israel's operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is, never forget, the newest Iranian satellite and client.
The British Embassy was not stormed by angry everyday Iranian citizens, folks. You are looking at a coordinated event staged by the regime employing the Basij (see here for a lightweight, digestible introduction), which is the mullah regime equivalent to the Hitler Youth. These embassy stormers, it should be noted, are the same regime Basij youth corps that is unleashed on Iranian people who dare defy the regime. And we are supposed to believe that those who beseiged (pardoning the aural pun) the British embassy are those same defiant Iranians. Don't. They aren't.
At least this early story from the UK's Telegraph eventually hits the target — but only after first playing up the alarm. (Wrong way to counter clear IO, but what should we expect journalists to know?):
Look carefully at the AFP/Getty image included in the story. Couple things to make note of.
First, just as the "storming" begins (both gates are not even open yet, just one), a photographer just happened to be ahead of the wave to take a very convenient snap of "The Breach." These are the things that Pulitzers are made of, what with these zany photographers who just happen to be in the right spot for the money shot, no? Bilal Hussein, anyone?
Second, note that there are two members of Iranian security (cough) in riot gear in the photo.
First thought: It's "The Breach" and there are but two near the gates.
Second thought: Iranian crowd control is not known for their tepid restraint. If the regime wanted to control the situation, they would be outside the gates and not inside, and there would be a general beatdown with injury and immediate dispersal by the "large group of people and students" in reaction.
Third thought: Similarly, average Iranians do not defy regime (read: Revolutionary) thugs enforcing "security." That is a precious rarity, plain and simple. This group of Basij members knows full well that the "security force" is part of the IO Dog & Pony Show and not a bodily injury risk. Who, in defiance of regime thugs, smiles as they run past the "riot police" and toward the waiting photographer(s) but fellow regime thugs? Answer: In Iran, no one. These "people and students" are the Basij, whose role and embrace has been renewed and reinvigorated under Ahmadinejad, himself a former commander in the "all grown up" Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So sit back and enjoy the show, folks. Staged Iranian information operations are best enjoyed with a spot of tea, a few biscuits and a touch of jam. Their inherent inferiority complex causes the Iranian regime to do the most bizarre things, sometimes entertaining and sometimes dangerous and deadly. This one falls on the entertaining side.
Accept this one for what it is, an amusing sideshow, and be sure to play your part of the alarmed and impacted IO target.
Folks, the "storming" of the British Embassy in Tehran by "a large group of people and students" is an Iranian Information Operation (IO) intended to be perceived (by you) as just an impromptu gaggle of angry Iranian citizens expressing rage at Israel's operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas is, never forget, the newest Iranian satellite and client.
The British Embassy was not stormed by angry everyday Iranian citizens, folks. You are looking at a coordinated event staged by the regime employing the Basij (see here for a lightweight, digestible introduction), which is the mullah regime equivalent to the Hitler Youth. These embassy stormers, it should be noted, are the same regime Basij youth corps that is unleashed on Iranian people who dare defy the regime. And we are supposed to believe that those who beseiged (pardoning the aural pun) the British embassy are those same defiant Iranians. Don't. They aren't.
At least this early story from the UK's Telegraph eventually hits the target — but only after first playing up the alarm. (Wrong way to counter clear IO, but what should we expect journalists to know?):
Iran’s official news agency said: “A large group of people and students entered the Gulhak Gardens, which are occupied by the British embassy to protest at Britain’s policies in supporting the Zionist regime and put up the Palestinian flag there.”
The demonstrators had torched the British, US and Israeli flags, other Iranian media reports said.
There appears to be little doubt that the Iranian regime orchestrated or at least inspired the attack on Gulhak. Just days ago Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, suggested his force should facilitate “revolutionary action” similar to the capture of the “Den of Spies” – the US embassy — on November 4, 1979.
The remarks, made in a speech to hardline university students from a large paramilitary vigilante organisation under his control, were seen as a thinly-veiled threat against the British embassy which has become of the main focus of ire against the West since the American embassy became defunct.
Look carefully at the AFP/Getty image included in the story. Couple things to make note of.
First, just as the "storming" begins (both gates are not even open yet, just one), a photographer just happened to be ahead of the wave to take a very convenient snap of "The Breach." These are the things that Pulitzers are made of, what with these zany photographers who just happen to be in the right spot for the money shot, no? Bilal Hussein, anyone?
Second, note that there are two members of Iranian security (cough) in riot gear in the photo.
First thought: It's "The Breach" and there are but two near the gates.
Second thought: Iranian crowd control is not known for their tepid restraint. If the regime wanted to control the situation, they would be outside the gates and not inside, and there would be a general beatdown with injury and immediate dispersal by the "large group of people and students" in reaction.
Third thought: Similarly, average Iranians do not defy regime (read: Revolutionary) thugs enforcing "security." That is a precious rarity, plain and simple. This group of Basij members knows full well that the "security force" is part of the IO Dog & Pony Show and not a bodily injury risk. Who, in defiance of regime thugs, smiles as they run past the "riot police" and toward the waiting photographer(s) but fellow regime thugs? Answer: In Iran, no one. These "people and students" are the Basij, whose role and embrace has been renewed and reinvigorated under Ahmadinejad, himself a former commander in the "all grown up" Basij, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So sit back and enjoy the show, folks. Staged Iranian information operations are best enjoyed with a spot of tea, a few biscuits and a touch of jam. Their inherent inferiority complex causes the Iranian regime to do the most bizarre things, sometimes entertaining and sometimes dangerous and deadly. This one falls on the entertaining side.
Accept this one for what it is, an amusing sideshow, and be sure to play your part of the alarmed and impacted IO target.
US Sate Dept On Dispute Regarding Gas Delivery from Russia to Ukraine
Press Statement
Gordon K. Duguid, Acting Deputy Spokesman
Washington, DC, January 1, 2009
Ukraine: Dispute Regarding Gas Delivery from Russia to Ukraine
We are concerned that Gazprom has cut off gas sold to Ukraine. The U.S. encourages Gazprom and Naftogaz to resume negotiations on an agreement that will maintain the reliability of gas delivery to Ukraine and Europe. We urge Russia and Ukraine to resolve their dispute over the gas debt and the terms of their natural gas supply arrangements in a transparent, commercial manner.
Released on January 1, 2009
Gordon K. Duguid, Acting Deputy Spokesman
Washington, DC, January 1, 2009
Ukraine: Dispute Regarding Gas Delivery from Russia to Ukraine
We are concerned that Gazprom has cut off gas sold to Ukraine. The U.S. encourages Gazprom and Naftogaz to resume negotiations on an agreement that will maintain the reliability of gas delivery to Ukraine and Europe. We urge Russia and Ukraine to resolve their dispute over the gas debt and the terms of their natural gas supply arrangements in a transparent, commercial manner.
Released on January 1, 2009
US State Dept Secretary's Remarks: Situation in Gaza
US State Dept Secretary's Remarks: Situation in Gaza
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:43:15 -0600
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
The White House, Washington, DC, January 2, 2009
SECRETARY RICE: Good morning. I’ve just had a chance to brief the President and to discuss with him the situation in Gaza. Obviously, the United States is very concerned about the situation there and is working very hard with our partners around the world to address it.
I want to begin by noting that Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas, the legitimate President of the Palestinian people. The Hamas has used Gaza as a launching pad for rockets against Israeli cities and has contributed deeply to a very bad daily life for the Palestinian people in Gaza, and to a humanitarian situation that we have all been trying to address. But frankly, Hamas has made it very difficult for the people of Gaza to have a reasonable life.
We are working toward a ceasefire that would not allow a reestablishment of the status quo ante where Hamas can continue to launch rockets out of Gaza. It is obvious that that ceasefire should take place as soon as possible, but we need a ceasefire that is durable and sustainable. I might note that it was Hamas that rejected the Egyptian and Arab calls for an extension of the Takia that Egypt had negotiated. But I have been in constant contact with the key Arab states. I have talked with our European colleagues, and we are talking constantly with the Israeli Government to find a solution to Gaza that will be a sustainable one for the people of Gaza, for the people of Israel and for the people of the Palestinian territories of the Middle East more broadly.
The President has also been in touch with the major leaders of the Arab States and with the Israelis. And we’re going to continue our work toward a ceasefire that will not allow a return to the status quo ante and that will be durable. Thank you very much.
QUESTION: Dr. Rice, do you plan to go to the Mideast to broker…?
SECRETARY RICE: I have no plans at this point. Thank you.
Released on January 2, 2009
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 09:43:15 -0600
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
The White House, Washington, DC, January 2, 2009
SECRETARY RICE: Good morning. I’ve just had a chance to brief the President and to discuss with him the situation in Gaza. Obviously, the United States is very concerned about the situation there and is working very hard with our partners around the world to address it.
I want to begin by noting that Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas, the legitimate President of the Palestinian people. The Hamas has used Gaza as a launching pad for rockets against Israeli cities and has contributed deeply to a very bad daily life for the Palestinian people in Gaza, and to a humanitarian situation that we have all been trying to address. But frankly, Hamas has made it very difficult for the people of Gaza to have a reasonable life.
We are working toward a ceasefire that would not allow a reestablishment of the status quo ante where Hamas can continue to launch rockets out of Gaza. It is obvious that that ceasefire should take place as soon as possible, but we need a ceasefire that is durable and sustainable. I might note that it was Hamas that rejected the Egyptian and Arab calls for an extension of the Takia that Egypt had negotiated. But I have been in constant contact with the key Arab states. I have talked with our European colleagues, and we are talking constantly with the Israeli Government to find a solution to Gaza that will be a sustainable one for the people of Gaza, for the people of Israel and for the people of the Palestinian territories of the Middle East more broadly.
The President has also been in touch with the major leaders of the Arab States and with the Israelis. And we’re going to continue our work toward a ceasefire that will not allow a return to the status quo ante and that will be durable. Thank you very much.
QUESTION: Dr. Rice, do you plan to go to the Mideast to broker…?
SECRETARY RICE: I have no plans at this point. Thank you.
Released on January 2, 2009
US State Dept on Burma's Independence Day
Press Statement
Sean McCormack
Washington, DCJanuary 2, 2009
Burma's Independence Day
Sunday, January 4, 2009 marks the 61st anniversary of Burma’s independence from British rule. We wish to express our warmest wishes to the people of Burma on this occasion. As we reflect on Burma’s independence struggle, led by General Aung San, we are reminded of our own history.
We support the peaceful efforts of people everywhere to exercise freely their universal human rights. We stand with the Burmese people today in honoring Aung San’s vision for an independent, peaceful, and democratic Burma and look forward to the day when Burma’s citizens will be able to enjoy the fruits of freedom and democracy. We earnestly hope that day will come soon.
2009/002
Released on January 2, 2009
Sean McCormack
Washington, DCJanuary 2, 2009
Burma's Independence Day
Sunday, January 4, 2009 marks the 61st anniversary of Burma’s independence from British rule. We wish to express our warmest wishes to the people of Burma on this occasion. As we reflect on Burma’s independence struggle, led by General Aung San, we are reminded of our own history.
We support the peaceful efforts of people everywhere to exercise freely their universal human rights. We stand with the Burmese people today in honoring Aung San’s vision for an independent, peaceful, and democratic Burma and look forward to the day when Burma’s citizens will be able to enjoy the fruits of freedom and democracy. We earnestly hope that day will come soon.
2009/002
Released on January 2, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Haass and Indyk: Beyond Iraq
Beyond Iraq. By Richard N. Haass and Martin Indyk
A New U.S. Strategy for the Middle East
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
Summary: To be successful in the Middle East, the Obama administration will need to move beyond Iraq, find ways to deal constructively with Iran, and forge a final-status Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
On taking office, U.S. President Barack Obama will face a series of critical, complex, and interrelated challenges in the Middle East demanding urgent attention: an Iraq experiencing a fragile lull in violence that is nonetheless straining the U.S. military, an Iran approaching the nuclear threshold, a faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace process, weak governments in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories challenged by strong militant Islamist groups, and a U.S. position weakened by years of failure and drift. He will also discover that time is working against him.
For six years, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been dominated by Iraq. This need not, and should not, continue. The Obama administration will be able to gradually reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, limit their combat role, and increasingly shift responsibility to Iraqi forces. The drawdown will have to be executed carefully and deliberately, however, so as not to risk undoing recent progress.
The improved situation in Iraq will allow the new administration to shift its focus to Iran, where the clock is ticking on a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear program. Obama should offer direct official engagement with the Iranian government, without preconditions, along with other incentives in an attempt to turn Tehran away from developing the capacity to rapidly produce substantial amounts of nuclear-weapons-grade fuel. At the same time, he should lay the groundwork for an international effort to impose harsher sanctions on Iran if it proves unwilling to change course.
Preventive military action against Iran by either the United States or Israel is an unattractive option, given its risks and costs. But it needs to be examined carefully as a last-ditch alternative to the dangers of living with an Iranian bomb. To increase Israel's tolerance for extended diplomatic engagement, the U.S. government should bolster Israel's deterrent capabilities by providing an enhanced anti-ballistic-missile defense capability and a nuclear guarantee.
The U.S. president should also spend capital trying to promote peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in particular Syria. Damascus is currently allied with Tehran, and an Israeli-Syrian deal would weaken Iran's regional influence, reduce external support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and improve the prospects for stability in Lebanon. On the Israeli-Palestinian front, there is an urgent need for a diplomatic effort to achieve a two-state solution while it is still feasible. Although divisions on both sides and the questionable ability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to control any newly acquired territory make a sustainable peace agreement unlikely for the moment, these factors argue not for abandoning the issue but rather for devoting substantial time and effort now to creating the conditions that would help diplomacy succeed later. What all these initiatives have in common is a renewed emphasis on diplomacy as a tool of U.S. national security policy, since the United States can no longer achieve its objectives without the backing of its regional allies as well as China, Europe, and Russia.
Some might argue that these efforts are not worth it, that the Bush administration paid too much attention to and invested too much American blood and treasure in an ill-advised attempt to transform the Middle East and that the Obama administration should focus its attention at home or elsewhere abroad. But such arguments underestimate the Middle East's ability to force itself onto the U.S. president's agenda regardless of other plans. Put simply, what happens in the Middle East will not stay in the Middle East. From terrorism to nuclear proliferation to energy security, managing contemporary global challenges requires managing the Middle East.
[...]
Full article: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20090101faessay88104/richard-n-haass-martin-indyk/obama-s-middle-east-agenda.html
A New U.S. Strategy for the Middle East
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
Summary: To be successful in the Middle East, the Obama administration will need to move beyond Iraq, find ways to deal constructively with Iran, and forge a final-status Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
On taking office, U.S. President Barack Obama will face a series of critical, complex, and interrelated challenges in the Middle East demanding urgent attention: an Iraq experiencing a fragile lull in violence that is nonetheless straining the U.S. military, an Iran approaching the nuclear threshold, a faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace process, weak governments in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories challenged by strong militant Islamist groups, and a U.S. position weakened by years of failure and drift. He will also discover that time is working against him.
For six years, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been dominated by Iraq. This need not, and should not, continue. The Obama administration will be able to gradually reduce the number of U.S. troops in Iraq, limit their combat role, and increasingly shift responsibility to Iraqi forces. The drawdown will have to be executed carefully and deliberately, however, so as not to risk undoing recent progress.
The improved situation in Iraq will allow the new administration to shift its focus to Iran, where the clock is ticking on a dangerous and destabilizing nuclear program. Obama should offer direct official engagement with the Iranian government, without preconditions, along with other incentives in an attempt to turn Tehran away from developing the capacity to rapidly produce substantial amounts of nuclear-weapons-grade fuel. At the same time, he should lay the groundwork for an international effort to impose harsher sanctions on Iran if it proves unwilling to change course.
Preventive military action against Iran by either the United States or Israel is an unattractive option, given its risks and costs. But it needs to be examined carefully as a last-ditch alternative to the dangers of living with an Iranian bomb. To increase Israel's tolerance for extended diplomatic engagement, the U.S. government should bolster Israel's deterrent capabilities by providing an enhanced anti-ballistic-missile defense capability and a nuclear guarantee.
The U.S. president should also spend capital trying to promote peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in particular Syria. Damascus is currently allied with Tehran, and an Israeli-Syrian deal would weaken Iran's regional influence, reduce external support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and improve the prospects for stability in Lebanon. On the Israeli-Palestinian front, there is an urgent need for a diplomatic effort to achieve a two-state solution while it is still feasible. Although divisions on both sides and the questionable ability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to control any newly acquired territory make a sustainable peace agreement unlikely for the moment, these factors argue not for abandoning the issue but rather for devoting substantial time and effort now to creating the conditions that would help diplomacy succeed later. What all these initiatives have in common is a renewed emphasis on diplomacy as a tool of U.S. national security policy, since the United States can no longer achieve its objectives without the backing of its regional allies as well as China, Europe, and Russia.
Some might argue that these efforts are not worth it, that the Bush administration paid too much attention to and invested too much American blood and treasure in an ill-advised attempt to transform the Middle East and that the Obama administration should focus its attention at home or elsewhere abroad. But such arguments underestimate the Middle East's ability to force itself onto the U.S. president's agenda regardless of other plans. Put simply, what happens in the Middle East will not stay in the Middle East. From terrorism to nuclear proliferation to energy security, managing contemporary global challenges requires managing the Middle East.
[...]
Full article: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20090101faessay88104/richard-n-haass-martin-indyk/obama-s-middle-east-agenda.html
The NYT: Grief Marks Anniversary of Triumph of Castro
Grief Marks Anniversary of Triumph of Castro, by Damien Cave
TNYT, December 31, 2008
HIALEAH, Fla. — Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrified to be recognized.
The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda Garcia thinks one of them might be her son — and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?
“How many mothers are going through this?” Ms. Garcia said in an interview at her daughter’s apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies. “How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?”
Fifty years ago today, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans — as evidenced by the Canadian tour agencies advertising trips “to celebrate five decades of resilience.”
But the bodies speak to a different legacy. Here in South Florida, where roughly 850,000 Cubans have settled over the years, repeated waves of painful exile and family separation define the Castro era. The revolution never met their hopeful expectations, the island they love has slipped into decay, and for many, this week’s golden anniversary provides little more than a flashback to traumas, old and new.
“It pounds in everybody’s conscience every day,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, 54, the founder of Movimiento Democracia, a Cuban-American group known for using boats to stage protests. “Fifty years is something very hard to accept.”
Some Cubans remain defiant. Huber Matos, a former revolutionary leader who came to Miami after Mr. Castro sent him to jail in 1959 for suggesting that the Cuban government included too many Communists, said that the anniversary inspired him to keep pushing for change.
“When you think of what you have to do, you can’t be sad,” Mr. Matos, 90, said. “To continue working, that’s the key.”
But for many, the revolution’s 50th anniversary has inspired a period of reflection. Cubans across Florida say they are mourning privately, or trying to forget, and formal commemorations are being kept to a minimum. If Miami in the 1980s was a place of militants, where “Havana vanities come to dust,” as Joan Didion wrote, today it is also a home to newer arrivals who ask, Must the pain go on?
A poll released this month by Florida International University shows that 55 percent of Cubans in Florida favor lifting the United States embargo against Cuba, up from 42 percent a year ago. It is the first time a clear majority has held that position since the survey began in 1991.
President-elect Barack Obama — while backing away from an earlier pledge to meet with Cuban leaders during his first year in office — condemned the current “failed policy” during the presidential campaign and promised to make it easier for Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island or send them larger amounts of money.
Even among those who support the 46-year-old embargo, like Senator Mel Martinez, a Republican, continued damage to families has become a more prominent concern.
“This is an ongoing tragedy,” said Mr. Martinez, who left Cuba at age 15 and spent four years without his parents. “How many people today are still being separated? How many people in Cuba are making plans to leave?”
Ms. Garcia was a “balsera,” one of the 38,000 rafters who fled Cuba in 1994. She said she left her suburb of Havana because her daughter needed medical care she could not get in Cuba for a brain tumor. Her son, Osmani, stayed. He was 20 at the time, a speaker of English and French, who became an independent journalist.
His work often put him at odds with the Castro government. In one dispatch, published on Oct. 26, 2007, he condemned Cuba’s foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, for mischaracterizing comments from President Bush.
“I will not take the time to point out all the lies told by Felipe Pérez Roque at this press conference, but I will say there was a worried look on his face and those of his cohorts,” Mr. Garcia wrote, in an article posted online. “It almost seems that they too are realizing there is little time left to the Castro dictatorship and that change is very near.”
Instead, over the next year, political pressure on Mr. Garcia increased. In June, according to a report in a Cuban online forum, he was arrested and interrogated by state officials. Two months later, his mother said, he was filmed by a Cuban television reporter at a protest against the government, scaring him enough to flee.
Mr. Garcia’s relatives said that on the night of Aug. 15, he climbed aboard a boat with no motor and seven or eight other people, pushing off from an area near Havana with hopes of reaching Florida within a few days.
The pace mattered; the sea was churning. By early Monday morning, Tropical Storm Fay had moved through Cuba into the Florida Straits, bringing nearly a foot of rain, swells of several feet and winds that would strengthen to 60 miles per hour.
Ms. Garcia, 64, a home health aide, said she was not sure if her son had known the storm was coming. Even if he had, she said, “he was desperate and needed to go.”
She said her son had done all he could to change Cuba from the inside. “How can Cubans confront the government, with rocks and sticks?” Ms. Garcia said. “Everyone has nothing, and the people are afraid.”
She found out about the bodies from the news. The first one, tagged 0107 in morgue records, appeared in the waters off Craig Key just after 5 p.m. on Aug. 21. A fisherman called the Coast Guard, and two Monroe County police officers pulled the dead man from the teal-blue sea. Three other bodies followed, appearing offshore over the next 24 hours in a line heading north.
Detective Terry Smith, one of the lead detectives investigating the case with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, said the locations and currents suggested that the bodies had probably spent several days in the water, drifting from somewhere to the south, though the Coast Guard’s computer analyses were not definitive.
Their identities have been even harder to determine. E. Hunt Scheuerman, the medical examiner for Monroe County, which includes the Keys, said all four bodies were naked and gnarled, with only three defining characteristics. Body 0107 wore a ring with a Celtic cross and green stone on the fourth finger of his left hand; 0109 arrived with a white sock and blue Lotto running shoe on his right foot; and 0110 had a tattoo on the inside of his lip that said “Raquel.”
Ms. Garcia said the ring sounds similar to one she gave Osmani, but the ring in the morgue is yellow, suggesting gold, and the ring she gave her son was silver.
She said she hoped her son was at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she was processed before coming to the United States. And initially it seemed possible. The Coast Guard stopped a boat near the Bahamas with eight or nine Cuban rafters a few days after Aug. 15. But it must have been another group, Detective Smith said; Mr. Garcia’s name could not be found on the Coast Guard’s list of repatriated refugees.
At least two other Cuban families in Miami are in a position similar to Ms. Garcia’s. In emotional phone calls, they have told Detective Smith about relatives who left Cuba on Aug. 15 in a boat, never to be heard from again.
“What if the four we received are not any of their relatives?” the detective said, discussing what haunts him most.
DNA may be the only way to know for sure. In September, Detective Smith swabbed Ms. Garcia’s mouth and sent the sample to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a comparison with the bodies. For the other two families, the DNA must be collected from closer female relatives, who live in Cuba.
Mr. Sanchez, of Movimiento Democracia, has been trying to arrange for secure samples from the island. “There are hundreds, probably thousands of Cubans who think they lost relatives in the high seas,” he said. But so far, he has received little help from either the Cuban or American governments.
And so the cycle continues. According to Coast Guard statistics, 10,489 Cubans have been stopped at sea since the beginning of 2005, more than double the 4,223 who were caught in the previous four years. A report in May from the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami found that 131,000 Cubans had settled in the United States permanently over the last four years, and its title predicts more of the same. “Not Going Away,” it says. “Cuban Mass Migration to Florida.”
Ms. Garcia said she just wanted an end to the 50-year pattern: the uncertainty, tears and tales of woe.
Three months after her DNA reached the F.B.I., she is still waiting for answers. Conversations about her son are drenched with tears, and she is never far from a photograph that shows him staring straight ahead, with a stern face, a few wrinkles and thick, dark hair.
It looks like a passport picture — of a man who may have only reached a Florida morgue.
TNYT, December 31, 2008
HIALEAH, Fla. — Four months after they appeared in the waters between Havana and Miami, the four dead men remain nameless. At a morgue in the Florida Keys, they lie on stretchers stacked like bunk beds, their bodies chewed by sharks, their faces too putrified to be recognized.
The police suspect they were Cuban rafters. Nilda Garcia thinks one of them might be her son — and the thought makes her weep. Fourteen years after she left Cuba on her own makeshift boat, she finds herself wondering once again: When will it end?
“How many mothers are going through this?” Ms. Garcia said in an interview at her daughter’s apartment here as she awaited DNA results on the bodies. “How many more are crying for their losses? How many young people have drowned in this sea? How many?”
Fifty years ago today, many Cubans cheered when Fidel Castro seized power in Havana, and even now, the revolution attracts many fans — as evidenced by the Canadian tour agencies advertising trips “to celebrate five decades of resilience.”
But the bodies speak to a different legacy. Here in South Florida, where roughly 850,000 Cubans have settled over the years, repeated waves of painful exile and family separation define the Castro era. The revolution never met their hopeful expectations, the island they love has slipped into decay, and for many, this week’s golden anniversary provides little more than a flashback to traumas, old and new.
“It pounds in everybody’s conscience every day,” said Ramon Saul Sanchez, 54, the founder of Movimiento Democracia, a Cuban-American group known for using boats to stage protests. “Fifty years is something very hard to accept.”
Some Cubans remain defiant. Huber Matos, a former revolutionary leader who came to Miami after Mr. Castro sent him to jail in 1959 for suggesting that the Cuban government included too many Communists, said that the anniversary inspired him to keep pushing for change.
“When you think of what you have to do, you can’t be sad,” Mr. Matos, 90, said. “To continue working, that’s the key.”
But for many, the revolution’s 50th anniversary has inspired a period of reflection. Cubans across Florida say they are mourning privately, or trying to forget, and formal commemorations are being kept to a minimum. If Miami in the 1980s was a place of militants, where “Havana vanities come to dust,” as Joan Didion wrote, today it is also a home to newer arrivals who ask, Must the pain go on?
A poll released this month by Florida International University shows that 55 percent of Cubans in Florida favor lifting the United States embargo against Cuba, up from 42 percent a year ago. It is the first time a clear majority has held that position since the survey began in 1991.
President-elect Barack Obama — while backing away from an earlier pledge to meet with Cuban leaders during his first year in office — condemned the current “failed policy” during the presidential campaign and promised to make it easier for Cuban-Americans to visit relatives on the island or send them larger amounts of money.
Even among those who support the 46-year-old embargo, like Senator Mel Martinez, a Republican, continued damage to families has become a more prominent concern.
“This is an ongoing tragedy,” said Mr. Martinez, who left Cuba at age 15 and spent four years without his parents. “How many people today are still being separated? How many people in Cuba are making plans to leave?”
Ms. Garcia was a “balsera,” one of the 38,000 rafters who fled Cuba in 1994. She said she left her suburb of Havana because her daughter needed medical care she could not get in Cuba for a brain tumor. Her son, Osmani, stayed. He was 20 at the time, a speaker of English and French, who became an independent journalist.
His work often put him at odds with the Castro government. In one dispatch, published on Oct. 26, 2007, he condemned Cuba’s foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, for mischaracterizing comments from President Bush.
“I will not take the time to point out all the lies told by Felipe Pérez Roque at this press conference, but I will say there was a worried look on his face and those of his cohorts,” Mr. Garcia wrote, in an article posted online. “It almost seems that they too are realizing there is little time left to the Castro dictatorship and that change is very near.”
Instead, over the next year, political pressure on Mr. Garcia increased. In June, according to a report in a Cuban online forum, he was arrested and interrogated by state officials. Two months later, his mother said, he was filmed by a Cuban television reporter at a protest against the government, scaring him enough to flee.
Mr. Garcia’s relatives said that on the night of Aug. 15, he climbed aboard a boat with no motor and seven or eight other people, pushing off from an area near Havana with hopes of reaching Florida within a few days.
The pace mattered; the sea was churning. By early Monday morning, Tropical Storm Fay had moved through Cuba into the Florida Straits, bringing nearly a foot of rain, swells of several feet and winds that would strengthen to 60 miles per hour.
Ms. Garcia, 64, a home health aide, said she was not sure if her son had known the storm was coming. Even if he had, she said, “he was desperate and needed to go.”
She said her son had done all he could to change Cuba from the inside. “How can Cubans confront the government, with rocks and sticks?” Ms. Garcia said. “Everyone has nothing, and the people are afraid.”
She found out about the bodies from the news. The first one, tagged 0107 in morgue records, appeared in the waters off Craig Key just after 5 p.m. on Aug. 21. A fisherman called the Coast Guard, and two Monroe County police officers pulled the dead man from the teal-blue sea. Three other bodies followed, appearing offshore over the next 24 hours in a line heading north.
Detective Terry Smith, one of the lead detectives investigating the case with the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, said the locations and currents suggested that the bodies had probably spent several days in the water, drifting from somewhere to the south, though the Coast Guard’s computer analyses were not definitive.
Their identities have been even harder to determine. E. Hunt Scheuerman, the medical examiner for Monroe County, which includes the Keys, said all four bodies were naked and gnarled, with only three defining characteristics. Body 0107 wore a ring with a Celtic cross and green stone on the fourth finger of his left hand; 0109 arrived with a white sock and blue Lotto running shoe on his right foot; and 0110 had a tattoo on the inside of his lip that said “Raquel.”
Ms. Garcia said the ring sounds similar to one she gave Osmani, but the ring in the morgue is yellow, suggesting gold, and the ring she gave her son was silver.
She said she hoped her son was at the American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where she was processed before coming to the United States. And initially it seemed possible. The Coast Guard stopped a boat near the Bahamas with eight or nine Cuban rafters a few days after Aug. 15. But it must have been another group, Detective Smith said; Mr. Garcia’s name could not be found on the Coast Guard’s list of repatriated refugees.
At least two other Cuban families in Miami are in a position similar to Ms. Garcia’s. In emotional phone calls, they have told Detective Smith about relatives who left Cuba on Aug. 15 in a boat, never to be heard from again.
“What if the four we received are not any of their relatives?” the detective said, discussing what haunts him most.
DNA may be the only way to know for sure. In September, Detective Smith swabbed Ms. Garcia’s mouth and sent the sample to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a comparison with the bodies. For the other two families, the DNA must be collected from closer female relatives, who live in Cuba.
Mr. Sanchez, of Movimiento Democracia, has been trying to arrange for secure samples from the island. “There are hundreds, probably thousands of Cubans who think they lost relatives in the high seas,” he said. But so far, he has received little help from either the Cuban or American governments.
And so the cycle continues. According to Coast Guard statistics, 10,489 Cubans have been stopped at sea since the beginning of 2005, more than double the 4,223 who were caught in the previous four years. A report in May from the Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami found that 131,000 Cubans had settled in the United States permanently over the last four years, and its title predicts more of the same. “Not Going Away,” it says. “Cuban Mass Migration to Florida.”
Ms. Garcia said she just wanted an end to the 50-year pattern: the uncertainty, tears and tales of woe.
Three months after her DNA reached the F.B.I., she is still waiting for answers. Conversations about her son are drenched with tears, and she is never far from a photograph that shows him staring straight ahead, with a stern face, a few wrinkles and thick, dark hair.
It looks like a passport picture — of a man who may have only reached a Florida morgue.
Helen Suzman, R.I.P. Posted by David Boaz
Cato at Liberty, Jan 01, 2009
Helen Suzman, the longtime leader of the parliamentary opposition to apartheid, has died at 91. The Times of London writes:
In South Africa they knew the difference between liberals and leftists. Plenty of leftists and communists opposed the National Party and its apartheid system. But so did liberals like Suzman, people committed to human rights, freedom of thought, and a market economy. She did not forget her liberalism when apartheid finally fell and the African National Congress came to power. She continued to speak out against repressive policies and the Thabo Mbeki government’s continuing support for Robert Mugabe.
I loved reading about her quick wit in parliamentary debates. She sent the minister of law and order a postcard from the Soviet Union, saying, “You would like it here. Lots of law and order.” Once she told a government minister to go into the black townships and see their appalling conditions for himself. He would be quite safe, she said, if he went “heavily disguised as a human being.” In a famous exchange a certain minister shouted: “You put these questions just to embarrass South Africa overseas.” To which she coolly replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa – it is your answers.” When an Afrikaner in Parliament sneered at her Jewish roots and asked what her ancestors were doing when his were bringing the Bible to the “savages,” she snapped, ”They were writing the Bible.”
In 1989 Helen Suzman was a Distinguished Lecturer at the Cato Institute. See a picture on page 55 of this very large pdf of our 25-Year Annual Report. Her remarks were reprinted in Cato Policy Report and then in Toward Liberty, our compilation of essays from our first 25 years, and can be read here.
On the first day of the new year, the world has lost one of its great champions of freedom. May she inspire many more.
Cato at Liberty, Jan 01, 2009
Helen Suzman, the longtime leader of the parliamentary opposition to apartheid, has died at 91. The Times of London writes:
Helen Suzman had a special place in South African history, being generally recognised as the most effective parliamentary fighter against apartheid policies.
For 13 years - from 1961 to 1974 - she was the sole representative in Parliament of the liberal Progressive Party, forerunner of the Democratic Party.
In South Africa they knew the difference between liberals and leftists. Plenty of leftists and communists opposed the National Party and its apartheid system. But so did liberals like Suzman, people committed to human rights, freedom of thought, and a market economy. She did not forget her liberalism when apartheid finally fell and the African National Congress came to power. She continued to speak out against repressive policies and the Thabo Mbeki government’s continuing support for Robert Mugabe.
I loved reading about her quick wit in parliamentary debates. She sent the minister of law and order a postcard from the Soviet Union, saying, “You would like it here. Lots of law and order.” Once she told a government minister to go into the black townships and see their appalling conditions for himself. He would be quite safe, she said, if he went “heavily disguised as a human being.” In a famous exchange a certain minister shouted: “You put these questions just to embarrass South Africa overseas.” To which she coolly replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa – it is your answers.” When an Afrikaner in Parliament sneered at her Jewish roots and asked what her ancestors were doing when his were bringing the Bible to the “savages,” she snapped, ”They were writing the Bible.”
In 1989 Helen Suzman was a Distinguished Lecturer at the Cato Institute. See a picture on page 55 of this very large pdf of our 25-Year Annual Report. Her remarks were reprinted in Cato Policy Report and then in Toward Liberty, our compilation of essays from our first 25 years, and can be read here.
On the first day of the new year, the world has lost one of its great champions of freedom. May she inspire many more.
US State Dept on Status of Food Aid Deliveries to North Korea
US State Dept Press Statement
Sean McCormack
Washington, DC, December 30, 2008
Question Taken on December 30, 2008
Status of Food Aid Deliveries to North Korea (Taken Question)
Question: Will you please provide an update on the deliveries of food aid to North Korea?
Answer: To date, over 143,000 metric tons of U.S. food (wheat, corn, and soybeans) has been delivered to North Korea. Of that amount, the latest shipment of 25,000 metric tons of corn and soybeans arrived in North Korea on November 23 and has completed unloading for distribution by the U.S. NGOs. The latest shipment of food aid (totaling 21,000 metric tons), which was expected to arrive by the end of December, is now expected to arrive in the DPRK on January 2, due to recent rough seas.
The United States has not stopped food aid to North Korea. Under the terms of our agreement with the DPRK, there is to be no limit imposed on the Korean language capabilities of the World Food Program (WFP) and U.S. NGO staff implementing the food aid program. The lack of sufficient Korean speakers on the WFP program is one of the key issues in ongoing discussions. The issuance of visas for Korean-speaking monitors for the WFP program is another issue currently being discussed, along with other technical issues. A delegation that recently visited North Korea, identified problems in the implementation of the world food program portion of the food aid program. Those problems are not yet resolved.
2008/1105
Released on December 30, 2008
Sean McCormack
Washington, DC, December 30, 2008
Question Taken on December 30, 2008
Status of Food Aid Deliveries to North Korea (Taken Question)
Question: Will you please provide an update on the deliveries of food aid to North Korea?
Answer: To date, over 143,000 metric tons of U.S. food (wheat, corn, and soybeans) has been delivered to North Korea. Of that amount, the latest shipment of 25,000 metric tons of corn and soybeans arrived in North Korea on November 23 and has completed unloading for distribution by the U.S. NGOs. The latest shipment of food aid (totaling 21,000 metric tons), which was expected to arrive by the end of December, is now expected to arrive in the DPRK on January 2, due to recent rough seas.
The United States has not stopped food aid to North Korea. Under the terms of our agreement with the DPRK, there is to be no limit imposed on the Korean language capabilities of the World Food Program (WFP) and U.S. NGO staff implementing the food aid program. The lack of sufficient Korean speakers on the WFP program is one of the key issues in ongoing discussions. The issuance of visas for Korean-speaking monitors for the WFP program is another issue currently being discussed, along with other technical issues. A delegation that recently visited North Korea, identified problems in the implementation of the world food program portion of the food aid program. Those problems are not yet resolved.
2008/1105
Released on December 30, 2008
Indonesian President's Praise of Natsir
Indonesian President's Praise of Natsir Raises Questions, by Walter Lohman
Heritage WebMemo #2181
December 31, 2008
These are perilous times for those in the idea business. Whether you're a think tanker or a politician, it is easier than ever to be misunderstood. Words reach the four corners of the world at the speed of light; it is impossible to segregate audiences.
Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono seemed to be aiming at a very specific audience a couple weeks ago when he capped a long-standing push to designate M. Natsir a national hero with a speech in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. His host, West Sumatra's Governor Gamawan Fauzi, used the occasion to note that history will forever remember President Yudhoyono's leadership in making the determination. Indeed. But what did the president intend by conferring essentially favored son status on this very learned--and by all accounts polite and unassuming--Islamist?
A Suitable Role Model?
The president sought to explain. He lauded Natsir for his anti-colonialism and his fundamental contribution to Indonesia's unity. Natsir's anti-colonialism credentials are best judged by Indonesians; but they seem to be beyond question. With regard to his impact on Indonesian unity, the debate will continue. Some will surely fault the president's logic in praising someone so closely identified with rebellion.
But the seriously perplexing part of the speech came when the president praised Natsir as a model for addressing misunderstandings about Islam and serving as a bridge between cultures and religions.
Natsir is associated with a political ideology that informed people do not generally associate with Indonesia. His founding of Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII) alone would make him an inappropriate role model for the nation. Theodore Friend, a highly regarded historian, describes DDII as "extreme," "intolerant," and yes, "Islamist." Among its targets, he counts "Muslim liberalism," "the economic dominance of the Chinese," and a "conspiracy to Christianize Indonesia." The DDII's problem with Christians in particular makes it strikingly odd to commend its founder for an ability to bridge understanding between religions.
Natsir's precise views on and personal history with Pancasila (Indonesia's founding non-sectarian state philosophy) were no doubt complex. But when all is said and done, history remembers him as Indonesia's foremost advocate for the direct role of Islam in government and the ideal of the Islamic state.
Perplexing Politics
So what's a friend of Indonesia to do? He could tell himself that it's pure politics. The presence of the Islamist PKS minister of agriculture in the entourage to West Sumatra is good evidence of that. But to the president's Islamist political allies, this is about much more than politics. And so, given the stakes, that is not a satisfactory answer. One could say that it's an anomaly, but there are too many similar developments in Indonesia to consider it an anomaly. This year there was the violent Islamist attacks at Indonesia's national monument, the fatwa on Ahmadiyya, and the media circus over the execution of the Bali bombers. Last year's enormous Hizbut Tahrir rally in Jakarta and near victory of an Islamist candidate for governor of Jakarta also jolted observers of Indonesian politics.
A friend of Indonesia would definitely tell his colleagues that all of this must be kept in perspective. Despite a 2004 electoral surge for Islamist standard-bearer PKS, considerable success at the local and provincial levels since, and high hopes for 2009, the fundamentalists are further from taking control than they were in the 1950s. He would cite the centuries-old ebb and flow of fundamentalism that has always left the Islamists on the losing end of Indonesian history. He would also note Indonesia's extraordinary well-springs of cultural and religious tolerance.
But the Islamists are savvy. They understand better than anyone that ideas can transform a political environment without ever owning it. From Natsir until today, they have sought to prepare the grassroots for Islamization of the state. So even while national politics may register only an occasional flare of radicalism, underneath, the coals glow bright. This friend of Indonesia worries that Indonesia's mainstream political leaders will wake up too late to find that Indonesia's house is on fire and that not only did they not prevent it, but they unwittingly fanned it.
Only Time Will Tell
For a politician, sometimes the only way to deal with different audiences is to just say what he has to and accept that he may be misunderstood by those on the outside. To make that call, however, the political need should far outweigh the risk of alienating his other audiences.
In the case of President Yudhoyono's praise of Natsir, one can only conclude that either the need to accommodate Islamist sentiment is much greater than Indonesia's friends abroad appreciate or that he is miscalculating the strength of the Islamists and unnecessarily appropriating beliefs he doesn't himself hold.
Neither is a particularly comforting conclusion, but at least one friend of Indonesia hopes it is the latter.
Walter Lohman is Director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation. A version of this article first appeared in the December 31, 2008, edition of The Jakarta Globe.
Heritage WebMemo #2181
December 31, 2008
These are perilous times for those in the idea business. Whether you're a think tanker or a politician, it is easier than ever to be misunderstood. Words reach the four corners of the world at the speed of light; it is impossible to segregate audiences.
Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono seemed to be aiming at a very specific audience a couple weeks ago when he capped a long-standing push to designate M. Natsir a national hero with a speech in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. His host, West Sumatra's Governor Gamawan Fauzi, used the occasion to note that history will forever remember President Yudhoyono's leadership in making the determination. Indeed. But what did the president intend by conferring essentially favored son status on this very learned--and by all accounts polite and unassuming--Islamist?
A Suitable Role Model?
The president sought to explain. He lauded Natsir for his anti-colonialism and his fundamental contribution to Indonesia's unity. Natsir's anti-colonialism credentials are best judged by Indonesians; but they seem to be beyond question. With regard to his impact on Indonesian unity, the debate will continue. Some will surely fault the president's logic in praising someone so closely identified with rebellion.
But the seriously perplexing part of the speech came when the president praised Natsir as a model for addressing misunderstandings about Islam and serving as a bridge between cultures and religions.
Natsir is associated with a political ideology that informed people do not generally associate with Indonesia. His founding of Dewan Dakwah Islamiyah Indonesia (DDII) alone would make him an inappropriate role model for the nation. Theodore Friend, a highly regarded historian, describes DDII as "extreme," "intolerant," and yes, "Islamist." Among its targets, he counts "Muslim liberalism," "the economic dominance of the Chinese," and a "conspiracy to Christianize Indonesia." The DDII's problem with Christians in particular makes it strikingly odd to commend its founder for an ability to bridge understanding between religions.
Natsir's precise views on and personal history with Pancasila (Indonesia's founding non-sectarian state philosophy) were no doubt complex. But when all is said and done, history remembers him as Indonesia's foremost advocate for the direct role of Islam in government and the ideal of the Islamic state.
Perplexing Politics
So what's a friend of Indonesia to do? He could tell himself that it's pure politics. The presence of the Islamist PKS minister of agriculture in the entourage to West Sumatra is good evidence of that. But to the president's Islamist political allies, this is about much more than politics. And so, given the stakes, that is not a satisfactory answer. One could say that it's an anomaly, but there are too many similar developments in Indonesia to consider it an anomaly. This year there was the violent Islamist attacks at Indonesia's national monument, the fatwa on Ahmadiyya, and the media circus over the execution of the Bali bombers. Last year's enormous Hizbut Tahrir rally in Jakarta and near victory of an Islamist candidate for governor of Jakarta also jolted observers of Indonesian politics.
A friend of Indonesia would definitely tell his colleagues that all of this must be kept in perspective. Despite a 2004 electoral surge for Islamist standard-bearer PKS, considerable success at the local and provincial levels since, and high hopes for 2009, the fundamentalists are further from taking control than they were in the 1950s. He would cite the centuries-old ebb and flow of fundamentalism that has always left the Islamists on the losing end of Indonesian history. He would also note Indonesia's extraordinary well-springs of cultural and religious tolerance.
But the Islamists are savvy. They understand better than anyone that ideas can transform a political environment without ever owning it. From Natsir until today, they have sought to prepare the grassroots for Islamization of the state. So even while national politics may register only an occasional flare of radicalism, underneath, the coals glow bright. This friend of Indonesia worries that Indonesia's mainstream political leaders will wake up too late to find that Indonesia's house is on fire and that not only did they not prevent it, but they unwittingly fanned it.
Only Time Will Tell
For a politician, sometimes the only way to deal with different audiences is to just say what he has to and accept that he may be misunderstood by those on the outside. To make that call, however, the political need should far outweigh the risk of alienating his other audiences.
In the case of President Yudhoyono's praise of Natsir, one can only conclude that either the need to accommodate Islamist sentiment is much greater than Indonesia's friends abroad appreciate or that he is miscalculating the strength of the Islamists and unnecessarily appropriating beliefs he doesn't himself hold.
Neither is a particularly comforting conclusion, but at least one friend of Indonesia hopes it is the latter.
Walter Lohman is Director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation. A version of this article first appeared in the December 31, 2008, edition of The Jakarta Globe.
Conservative views: National Security Resolutions for 2009
National Security Resolutions for 2009, by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.
Heritage WebMemo #2182
December 31, 2008
The United States should resolve to help make the world a better place with initiatives that keep Americans safe, free, and prosperous in the coming year. Here is a short list of commitments Washington can offer:
Finish the Job in Iraq. A stable, secure, and free Iraq remains a worthy long-term U.S. goal, but this project now rests primarily in Iraqi hands. However, America still has a vital role to play in training and supporting Iraqi security forces and building the instruments of governance for a fledgling democracy. Meeting these obligations should be the most important factor in determining the pace of the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Finish the Long War. Rooting out the al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan would be a severe--if not fatal--blow to the transnational Islamist terrorist movement. Achieving that end will require an integrated policy that gets Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India working together jointly toward that end.
Don't Mess with Homeland Security. U.S. law enforcement has thwarted a number of post-9/11 conspiracies aimed at killing Americans. Meanwhile, FEMA has just completed a record year of responding to floods, forest fires, and hurricanes. Further major reorganization or changes in the Department of Homeland Security's mission are wholly unwarranted.
Build Missile Defenses. Of all the threats of the modern era, the danger of a ballistic missile attack on the U.S. is most troubling. While the U.S. has built land-based interceptors capable of dealing with a missile fired from North Korea, much more needs to be done. America as well as friends and allies in the Middle East and Europe would be largely defenseless against an Iranian ballistic missile threat. To address that, the U.S. needs to, as it promised to NATO, build land-based missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. In addition, the United States must field land- and sea-based regional assets, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense systems. More work also needs to be done on developing "boost-phase" interceptors capable of knocking down enemy missiles right after they are fired and are their most vulnerable. Finally, we need to continue, with our friends and allies, to develop a global command and control network capable of dealing with new missile threats wherever they might come from.
Do Something about Space. Space is the "ultimate" high ground, not just for the military but for the private sector as well. U.S. assets and assured "access" to space are vulnerable to disruption and direct attack. At a minimum, the United States needs to develop better "space awareness" with hardened and redundant capabilities to track both what is being sent into space and activities in earth-orbit. Washington can get the ball rolling by funding a space-based platform for experimentation this year.
Worry about Iran. Iran routinely employs terrorism as instrument of foreign policy. It is developing long-range ballistic missiles to threaten other nations. It supported insurgents in Iraq who targeted American soldiers and fermented ethnic-civil war. It may test a nuclear weapon at any time. For starters, the U.S. must lead an international coalition to impose the strongest possible targeted economic sanctions against Iran and mobilize allies to contain and deter Iran's drive for regional hegemony.
Build Better Border Security. The Bush Administration has made significant progress in making America's borders more secure, from a host of measures for thwarting terrorist travel to the Merida Initiative--an effort to promote U.S./Mexican cooperation in combating transnational smuggling in drugs, people, arms, and money. Terrorists see post-9/11 America as a hard target, not easy to get to. Meanwhile, both the unlawful population in the United States and the number of attempted illegal border crossings are on the decline. Successful programs--from building border obstacles to enforcing immigration laws and strengthening the surety of identity credentials like driver's licenses--need to continue. Stopping now would roll back progress.
Get Smart on Cybersecurity. Many in Washington have rightly expressed concerned over the surety of information technology and control systems that serve our economy. Most, however, are woefully ignorant about the nature of these systems and the threats to them. Even as Washington wrestles with issues concerning organization, authorities, responsibilities, and programs to deal with cyber competition, it must place more emphasis on developing leaders who are competent to engage in these issues. This will require a professional development system that can provide a program of education, assignment, and accreditation to develop a corps of experienced, dedicated service professionals who have an expertise in the breadth of issues related to the cyber environment. This program must be backed by effective public-private partnerships that produce cutting-edge research, development, and capabilities to operate with freedom, safety, and security in the cyber world.
Stop Doing Stupid Security. A number of congressional national security mandates have proven unnecessary and unworkable, consuming precious time, manpower, and money to implement measures of little value at great cost. Requirements such as 100 percent scanning of cargo sent to the United States have been documented by the Department of Homeland Security and the Government Accountability Office as extremely problematic. Congress should repeal ill-advised mandates and refrain from imposing excessive regulatory restrictions in the name of national security.
Don't Let the Military Go Hollow. A military is hollow when it lacks the resources to conduct current missions, maintain adequate trained and ready forces, and prepare for future threats. There is no way to prevent the armed forces from becoming inadequate to defend the nation's interests and provide for our men and women in uniform other than robust defense budgets year in and year out. Changes in strategy, cuts in acquisition programs, and promises to slash fraud, waste, and abuse are all chimeras--smokescreens to cut costs without appearing weak on national security. The United States must spend at least 4 percent of its annual GDP over the next decade to recover from the long post-Cold War "peace dividend" of the 1990s and refurbish the military after years of fighting the long war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To plan to do anything less over the foreseeable future will put both the nation's security and the lives of our troops in jeopardy.
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Assistant Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage WebMemo #2182
December 31, 2008
The United States should resolve to help make the world a better place with initiatives that keep Americans safe, free, and prosperous in the coming year. Here is a short list of commitments Washington can offer:
Finish the Job in Iraq. A stable, secure, and free Iraq remains a worthy long-term U.S. goal, but this project now rests primarily in Iraqi hands. However, America still has a vital role to play in training and supporting Iraqi security forces and building the instruments of governance for a fledgling democracy. Meeting these obligations should be the most important factor in determining the pace of the drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq.
Finish the Long War. Rooting out the al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan would be a severe--if not fatal--blow to the transnational Islamist terrorist movement. Achieving that end will require an integrated policy that gets Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India working together jointly toward that end.
Don't Mess with Homeland Security. U.S. law enforcement has thwarted a number of post-9/11 conspiracies aimed at killing Americans. Meanwhile, FEMA has just completed a record year of responding to floods, forest fires, and hurricanes. Further major reorganization or changes in the Department of Homeland Security's mission are wholly unwarranted.
Build Missile Defenses. Of all the threats of the modern era, the danger of a ballistic missile attack on the U.S. is most troubling. While the U.S. has built land-based interceptors capable of dealing with a missile fired from North Korea, much more needs to be done. America as well as friends and allies in the Middle East and Europe would be largely defenseless against an Iranian ballistic missile threat. To address that, the U.S. needs to, as it promised to NATO, build land-based missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. In addition, the United States must field land- and sea-based regional assets, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense systems. More work also needs to be done on developing "boost-phase" interceptors capable of knocking down enemy missiles right after they are fired and are their most vulnerable. Finally, we need to continue, with our friends and allies, to develop a global command and control network capable of dealing with new missile threats wherever they might come from.
Do Something about Space. Space is the "ultimate" high ground, not just for the military but for the private sector as well. U.S. assets and assured "access" to space are vulnerable to disruption and direct attack. At a minimum, the United States needs to develop better "space awareness" with hardened and redundant capabilities to track both what is being sent into space and activities in earth-orbit. Washington can get the ball rolling by funding a space-based platform for experimentation this year.
Worry about Iran. Iran routinely employs terrorism as instrument of foreign policy. It is developing long-range ballistic missiles to threaten other nations. It supported insurgents in Iraq who targeted American soldiers and fermented ethnic-civil war. It may test a nuclear weapon at any time. For starters, the U.S. must lead an international coalition to impose the strongest possible targeted economic sanctions against Iran and mobilize allies to contain and deter Iran's drive for regional hegemony.
Build Better Border Security. The Bush Administration has made significant progress in making America's borders more secure, from a host of measures for thwarting terrorist travel to the Merida Initiative--an effort to promote U.S./Mexican cooperation in combating transnational smuggling in drugs, people, arms, and money. Terrorists see post-9/11 America as a hard target, not easy to get to. Meanwhile, both the unlawful population in the United States and the number of attempted illegal border crossings are on the decline. Successful programs--from building border obstacles to enforcing immigration laws and strengthening the surety of identity credentials like driver's licenses--need to continue. Stopping now would roll back progress.
Get Smart on Cybersecurity. Many in Washington have rightly expressed concerned over the surety of information technology and control systems that serve our economy. Most, however, are woefully ignorant about the nature of these systems and the threats to them. Even as Washington wrestles with issues concerning organization, authorities, responsibilities, and programs to deal with cyber competition, it must place more emphasis on developing leaders who are competent to engage in these issues. This will require a professional development system that can provide a program of education, assignment, and accreditation to develop a corps of experienced, dedicated service professionals who have an expertise in the breadth of issues related to the cyber environment. This program must be backed by effective public-private partnerships that produce cutting-edge research, development, and capabilities to operate with freedom, safety, and security in the cyber world.
Stop Doing Stupid Security. A number of congressional national security mandates have proven unnecessary and unworkable, consuming precious time, manpower, and money to implement measures of little value at great cost. Requirements such as 100 percent scanning of cargo sent to the United States have been documented by the Department of Homeland Security and the Government Accountability Office as extremely problematic. Congress should repeal ill-advised mandates and refrain from imposing excessive regulatory restrictions in the name of national security.
Don't Let the Military Go Hollow. A military is hollow when it lacks the resources to conduct current missions, maintain adequate trained and ready forces, and prepare for future threats. There is no way to prevent the armed forces from becoming inadequate to defend the nation's interests and provide for our men and women in uniform other than robust defense budgets year in and year out. Changes in strategy, cuts in acquisition programs, and promises to slash fraud, waste, and abuse are all chimeras--smokescreens to cut costs without appearing weak on national security. The United States must spend at least 4 percent of its annual GDP over the next decade to recover from the long post-Cold War "peace dividend" of the 1990s and refurbish the military after years of fighting the long war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To plan to do anything less over the foreseeable future will put both the nation's security and the lives of our troops in jeopardy.
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Assistant Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
US Interior Dept: Royalties from energy production almost double the amount last year
‘Tis the Season: Development of U.S. Energy Resources Nets Taxpayers $23.4 Billion in Royalties. By Institute for Energy Research
Interior Announces Largest Disbursement of Funds in Department’s History – Almost Double the Amount Distributed Last Year
December 30, 2008
Washington, DC – Institute for Energy Research president Thomas J. Pyle issued the following statement today in response to news from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) that the agency distributed a record $23.4 billion to states, tribes and the federal treasury in fiscal year 2008 – every penny of which came from the responsible and diligent development of America’s abundant, homegrown energy resources:
“ As lawmakers look to increase government revenue this year by thinking up creative new ways to separate taxpayers from their money, they and the people they represent would be well-served to take note of the $23.4 billion in royalties, rents, and bonus payments made available thanks to the responsible development of America’s abundant energy resources. In fact, almost $10 billion of that sum was directed to taxpayers in the form of bonus bids alone – which means that even when no new energy was produced, taxpayers still got paid.
“Keep in mind this is money that flows to state, local and federal coffers completely separate from the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and fees tied to domestic energy exploration. All told, we’re talking about an awful lot of money – as much as $4 trillion in potential revenue waiting to be collected and disbursed, according to one recent study. As it is, energy production accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in government revenue each year – none of which would available to taxpayers today if opponents of responsible energy development had their way.
“At a time of unprecedented economic insecurity, the new Congress and incoming administration have pledged to leave no stone unturned in looking for ways to get our economy back on track. Fair enough. But if they’re interested in finding a plan that creates millions of new jobs, billions in new revenue, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny, they’ll need to dig just a little bit deeper – preferably below the surface.”
For more information: http://www.mms.gov/ooc/press/2008/pressDOI1120.htm
The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a not-for-profit public foundation that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets. Founded in 1989, IER is funded entirely by tax deductible contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations. No financial support is sought or accepted from government (taxpayers).
Interior Announces Largest Disbursement of Funds in Department’s History – Almost Double the Amount Distributed Last Year
December 30, 2008
Washington, DC – Institute for Energy Research president Thomas J. Pyle issued the following statement today in response to news from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) that the agency distributed a record $23.4 billion to states, tribes and the federal treasury in fiscal year 2008 – every penny of which came from the responsible and diligent development of America’s abundant, homegrown energy resources:
“ As lawmakers look to increase government revenue this year by thinking up creative new ways to separate taxpayers from their money, they and the people they represent would be well-served to take note of the $23.4 billion in royalties, rents, and bonus payments made available thanks to the responsible development of America’s abundant energy resources. In fact, almost $10 billion of that sum was directed to taxpayers in the form of bonus bids alone – which means that even when no new energy was produced, taxpayers still got paid.
“Keep in mind this is money that flows to state, local and federal coffers completely separate from the hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and fees tied to domestic energy exploration. All told, we’re talking about an awful lot of money – as much as $4 trillion in potential revenue waiting to be collected and disbursed, according to one recent study. As it is, energy production accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in government revenue each year – none of which would available to taxpayers today if opponents of responsible energy development had their way.
“At a time of unprecedented economic insecurity, the new Congress and incoming administration have pledged to leave no stone unturned in looking for ways to get our economy back on track. Fair enough. But if they’re interested in finding a plan that creates millions of new jobs, billions in new revenue, and doesn’t cost taxpayers a penny, they’ll need to dig just a little bit deeper – preferably below the surface.”
For more information: http://www.mms.gov/ooc/press/2008/pressDOI1120.htm
The Institute for Energy Research (IER) is a not-for-profit public foundation that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets. Founded in 1989, IER is funded entirely by tax deductible contributions from individuals, foundations and corporations. No financial support is sought or accepted from government (taxpayers).
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Shlaes In the WaPo: A Chilling Uncertainty
A Chilling Uncertainty, by Amity Shlaes
The Washington Post, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The United States has entered the era of the experiment. President-elect Barack Obama is putting forward an infrastructure program whose plans and price tag are unclear. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson whipped up the Troubled Asset Relief Program to buy up bad mortgage instruments, and, expanding on that experiment, President Bush wants to try extending TARP to autoworkers.
The idea that experiments are warranted in current circumstances comes from the New Deal. The official history is familiar: FDR put forward multiple projects, some at cross-purposes. Yet New Deal inconsistency was not a problem and might have been a virtue. Through "bold, persistent experimentation," his catchphrase, Franklin Roosevelt brought recovery.
Modern economists, monetarist or Keynesian, have not rejected this story line. The trouble with the 1930s, in their view, is that government did not fiddle enough. Had the Federal Reserve, the Treasury or the White House fiddled more, the Depression might have been shorter or less severe. The New Deal Fed, they say, never got the price level quite right. Or, the New Deal stimulus programs were too little. And so on.
But there is significant evidence that the very arbitrariness of the New Deal made the Depression worse.
In 1932, stunned market players and citizens wanted to know what the new rules were. They voted for a party with a platform so moderate it could have been written by today's Concord Coalition: stability, sound money, balanced budgets. That was the Democratic Party, led by Roosevelt.
Many of FDR's initial plans did bring stability: His first Treasury secretary worked to sort out banks with the outgoing Hoover administration in a fashion so fair that an observer noted that those present "had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats." By creating deposit insurance, FDR reduced bank runs. His Securities Act of 1933 laid the ground for a transparent national stock market. Equities shot up.
But other policies were more arbitrary. Using emergency powers, FDR yanked the country off the gold standard. Both American and international markets looked forward to a London conference at which a new monetary accord was to be struck among nations. Over the course of the conference, though, FDR changed orders to his emissaries multiple times. Some days he was the internationalist, sending wires about international currency coordination. Other days he was the cowboy, declaring that all that mattered was what the dollar bought in farm states. The conference foundered.
Some of the worst destruction came with FDR's gold experiment. If he could drive up the price of gold by buying it, he reasoned, other prices would rise as well. Roosevelt was right to want to introduce more money into the economy (the United States was deflating). But his method was like trying to raise an ocean level by adding water by the thimbleful. What horrified markets even more was that FDR managed the operation personally, day by day, over a breakfast tray. No one ever knew what the increase would be. One Friday in November 1933, for example, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he thought the gold price ought to be raised 21 cents. Why that amount, Morgenthau asked. "Because it's three times seven," FDR replied.
Morgenthau later wrote that "if anybody knew how we set the gold price, through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened."
They were. The "Roosevelt Rally" flattened. The arbitrary quality of other initiatives reinforced concerns. The New Deal centerpiece, the National Recovery Administration, helped some businesses compete and criminalized others for the same behavior. Sometimes Roosevelt goaded federal prosecutors into harassing corporate executives. Other times, he schmoozed the same execs at the White House. In 1936, FDR pushed through deficit spending. In 1937, he was Mr. Budget Hawk.
Uncertain, markets froze. Businesses refused to hire or invest in equipment. Unemployment stayed stuck in the teens. The 'deal' part of the New Deal phrase was problematic; businesses didn't want individual favors, they wanted clear laws for all. Industrialist Ernest Weir summed up what his community was desperate for FDR to do: "Above all to make the program clear and then stick to it."
Today, uncertainty also chills. Questions abound over the future regulation of stocks and derivatives, over tax policy, over bailouts. All this makes it hard for the market to settle on equity or home prices. And Americans follow stories about names--Secretary Paulson, Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner--more than they do the news about the Fed or the Treasury.
Luckily, we are entering the optimal time for reducing uncertainty: a new president's first hundred days, with a majority to back him on the Hill. Obama might start by rebuilding key institutions: creating a super-Securities and Exchange Commission, a tough regulator with clear plans for overseeing stocks as well as those instruments that had been monitored unpredictably because of vague status. He should also halve corporate tax rates, currently some of the world's highest, and reduce the capital gains rate to 5 percent. Rewriting the Fed law to clarify it will make avoiding an Alan Greenspan bubble easier. Defining his infrastructure program clearly would have the effect of putting up a sign: Open for Business.
Some will say all that sounds politically impossible. Until recently, though, so did a trillion-dollar infrastructure project. A new hundred days spent making good laws will bring sturdy recovery. A hundred days spent making more deals will not.
Amity Shlaes is an adjunct fellow at AEI. She is the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
The Washington Post, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The United States has entered the era of the experiment. President-elect Barack Obama is putting forward an infrastructure program whose plans and price tag are unclear. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson whipped up the Troubled Asset Relief Program to buy up bad mortgage instruments, and, expanding on that experiment, President Bush wants to try extending TARP to autoworkers.
The idea that experiments are warranted in current circumstances comes from the New Deal. The official history is familiar: FDR put forward multiple projects, some at cross-purposes. Yet New Deal inconsistency was not a problem and might have been a virtue. Through "bold, persistent experimentation," his catchphrase, Franklin Roosevelt brought recovery.
Modern economists, monetarist or Keynesian, have not rejected this story line. The trouble with the 1930s, in their view, is that government did not fiddle enough. Had the Federal Reserve, the Treasury or the White House fiddled more, the Depression might have been shorter or less severe. The New Deal Fed, they say, never got the price level quite right. Or, the New Deal stimulus programs were too little. And so on.
But there is significant evidence that the very arbitrariness of the New Deal made the Depression worse.
In 1932, stunned market players and citizens wanted to know what the new rules were. They voted for a party with a platform so moderate it could have been written by today's Concord Coalition: stability, sound money, balanced budgets. That was the Democratic Party, led by Roosevelt.
Many of FDR's initial plans did bring stability: His first Treasury secretary worked to sort out banks with the outgoing Hoover administration in a fashion so fair that an observer noted that those present "had forgotten to be Republicans or Democrats." By creating deposit insurance, FDR reduced bank runs. His Securities Act of 1933 laid the ground for a transparent national stock market. Equities shot up.
But other policies were more arbitrary. Using emergency powers, FDR yanked the country off the gold standard. Both American and international markets looked forward to a London conference at which a new monetary accord was to be struck among nations. Over the course of the conference, though, FDR changed orders to his emissaries multiple times. Some days he was the internationalist, sending wires about international currency coordination. Other days he was the cowboy, declaring that all that mattered was what the dollar bought in farm states. The conference foundered.
Some of the worst destruction came with FDR's gold experiment. If he could drive up the price of gold by buying it, he reasoned, other prices would rise as well. Roosevelt was right to want to introduce more money into the economy (the United States was deflating). But his method was like trying to raise an ocean level by adding water by the thimbleful. What horrified markets even more was that FDR managed the operation personally, day by day, over a breakfast tray. No one ever knew what the increase would be. One Friday in November 1933, for example, Roosevelt told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that he thought the gold price ought to be raised 21 cents. Why that amount, Morgenthau asked. "Because it's three times seven," FDR replied.
Morgenthau later wrote that "if anybody knew how we set the gold price, through a combination of lucky numbers, etc., I think they would be frightened."
They were. The "Roosevelt Rally" flattened. The arbitrary quality of other initiatives reinforced concerns. The New Deal centerpiece, the National Recovery Administration, helped some businesses compete and criminalized others for the same behavior. Sometimes Roosevelt goaded federal prosecutors into harassing corporate executives. Other times, he schmoozed the same execs at the White House. In 1936, FDR pushed through deficit spending. In 1937, he was Mr. Budget Hawk.
Uncertain, markets froze. Businesses refused to hire or invest in equipment. Unemployment stayed stuck in the teens. The 'deal' part of the New Deal phrase was problematic; businesses didn't want individual favors, they wanted clear laws for all. Industrialist Ernest Weir summed up what his community was desperate for FDR to do: "Above all to make the program clear and then stick to it."
Today, uncertainty also chills. Questions abound over the future regulation of stocks and derivatives, over tax policy, over bailouts. All this makes it hard for the market to settle on equity or home prices. And Americans follow stories about names--Secretary Paulson, Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner--more than they do the news about the Fed or the Treasury.
Luckily, we are entering the optimal time for reducing uncertainty: a new president's first hundred days, with a majority to back him on the Hill. Obama might start by rebuilding key institutions: creating a super-Securities and Exchange Commission, a tough regulator with clear plans for overseeing stocks as well as those instruments that had been monitored unpredictably because of vague status. He should also halve corporate tax rates, currently some of the world's highest, and reduce the capital gains rate to 5 percent. Rewriting the Fed law to clarify it will make avoiding an Alan Greenspan bubble easier. Defining his infrastructure program clearly would have the effect of putting up a sign: Open for Business.
Some will say all that sounds politically impossible. Until recently, though, so did a trillion-dollar infrastructure project. A new hundred days spent making good laws will bring sturdy recovery. A hundred days spent making more deals will not.
Amity Shlaes is an adjunct fellow at AEI. She is the author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
The key problem facing Somalia is not one of security, but rather the vacuum in political leadership, says UN envoy
Paucity of political leadership at root of Somalia's problems, says UN envoy
UN, New York, Dec 31 2008 10:10AM
Somalia’s problems are driven by a lack of responsible political leadership, the top United Nations envoy to the Horn of Africa nation said today.
In a letter to the diaspora, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said that there is an “emerging consensus that ultimately your country’s problems stem from the absence of accountable and committed national leadership.”
The key problem facing Somalia – which has not had a functioning central government since 1991 – is not one of security, but rather the vacuum in political leadership, he wrote.
“I am confident that progress is being made towards a situation where responsible leadership will have friendly relations with its neighbours, and smooth integration into the international community.”
The envoy hailed the recent “peaceful resignation” of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. He also noted the relocation of the leaders of the opposition group known as the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) and delegates from the Joint Security Committee, comprising both the ARS and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), to the capital Mogadishu.
In June, the two sides signed a UN-facilitated peace accord, known as the Djibouti Agreement, under which they agreed to end their conflict and called on the UN to deploy an international stabilization force to the troubled nation.
The Djibouti process “has opened a new era in the history of your country,” Mr. Ould-Abdallah said, adding that it has also “given the opportunity to all Somalis to witness the activity of a vital generation that is committed to peace and stability.”
With women and the younger generation losing hope after witnessing two decades of power struggles in Somalia, he said it is time for leaders to “demonstrate their commitment to peace and the well-being of their country.”
2009 will be a busy year for Somalia, with the first few weeks seeing the preparations for the election of a new president, the formation of a government of national unity and an enlarged Parliament. The Representative wrote that he hopes to hold talks with the business community, as well as with former top military and police officials to seek their views on how to bolster security and rebuild the national army.
“Somalia is entering a new era,” he said, calling on the diaspora to “catch the train of history and mobilize all efforts to maintain solidarity among all brothers in order to recover the integrity, sovereignty and dignity of Somalia.”
UN, New York, Dec 31 2008 10:10AM
Somalia’s problems are driven by a lack of responsible political leadership, the top United Nations envoy to the Horn of Africa nation said today.
In a letter to the diaspora, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, said that there is an “emerging consensus that ultimately your country’s problems stem from the absence of accountable and committed national leadership.”
The key problem facing Somalia – which has not had a functioning central government since 1991 – is not one of security, but rather the vacuum in political leadership, he wrote.
“I am confident that progress is being made towards a situation where responsible leadership will have friendly relations with its neighbours, and smooth integration into the international community.”
The envoy hailed the recent “peaceful resignation” of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed. He also noted the relocation of the leaders of the opposition group known as the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) and delegates from the Joint Security Committee, comprising both the ARS and the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), to the capital Mogadishu.
In June, the two sides signed a UN-facilitated peace accord, known as the Djibouti Agreement, under which they agreed to end their conflict and called on the UN to deploy an international stabilization force to the troubled nation.
The Djibouti process “has opened a new era in the history of your country,” Mr. Ould-Abdallah said, adding that it has also “given the opportunity to all Somalis to witness the activity of a vital generation that is committed to peace and stability.”
With women and the younger generation losing hope after witnessing two decades of power struggles in Somalia, he said it is time for leaders to “demonstrate their commitment to peace and the well-being of their country.”
2009 will be a busy year for Somalia, with the first few weeks seeing the preparations for the election of a new president, the formation of a government of national unity and an enlarged Parliament. The Representative wrote that he hopes to hold talks with the business community, as well as with former top military and police officials to seek their views on how to bolster security and rebuild the national army.
“Somalia is entering a new era,” he said, calling on the diaspora to “catch the train of history and mobilize all efforts to maintain solidarity among all brothers in order to recover the integrity, sovereignty and dignity of Somalia.”
Gonzales Defends Role in Antiterror Policies
Gonzales Defends Role in Antiterror Policies. By Evan Perez
WSJ, Dec 31, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration.
Mr. Gonzales has been portrayed by critics both as unqualified for his position and instrumental in laying the groundwork for the administration's "war on terror." He was pilloried by Congress in a manner not usually directed toward cabinet officials.
"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.
During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that "for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."
His political problems started with the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, which grew into a firestorm that Mr. Gonzales said he never saw coming. In November of that year, Democrats had taken control of Congress and the power to conduct investigations of Bush administration policies.
His previous role of White House counsel put Mr. Gonzales at the heart of the administration's decision-making on issues relating to terrorism, making him an easier target than the president. Critics also said he allowed the Justice Department to become politicized through its hiring practices and prosecutions, favoring Republicans for plum positions and targeting Democrats for prosecution.
Mr. Gonzales fueled the fire by giving evasive answers to Congress, frequently responding "I don't recall."
Among other things, Mr. Gonzales said Tuesday that he didn't play a central role in drafting the widely criticized legal opinions that allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to use aggressive interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects and expanded the president's power to hold "unlawful combatants" and terrorism suspects indefinitely. He also said he told the truth to Congress about a classified eavesdropping program authorized by the president, and admitted to making mistakes in handling the U.S. attorney firings while maintaining that he made the right decisions. He says that while he bears responsibility as former Attorney General that "doesn't absolve other individuals of responsibility."
Mr. Gonzales, 53 years old, doesn't have a publisher for his book. He said he is writing it if only "for my sons, so at least they know the story."
The chapters on the Bush administration's surveillance program, which involved eavesdropping without court warrants, and other controversial aspects of his work, remain blank. That is in part because he remains under investigation regarding allegations of political meddling at the Justice Department.
The Harvard Law School graduate, onetime corporate lawyer and Texas judge also hasn't been able to land a job. He has delivered a few paid speeches, done some mediation work and plans to do some arbitration, but said law firms have been "skittish" about hiring him.
The biggest blow to Mr. Gonzales came during Senate testimony by James Comey, former deputy attorney general, who recounted dramatic details of a 2004 confrontation at the hospital bed of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Mr. Comey had refused to sign a reauthorization of a secret government program, believed to be the eavesdropping initiative. Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card, White House chief of staff at the time, drove to the hospital where Mr. Ashcroft was recovering from surgery to instead seek approval from him. Mr. Comey drove to the hospital to stop them. The episode highlighted a dispute between Justice and the White House over the surveillance program's legality.
In Tuesday's interview, Mr. Gonzales said Mr. Comey's characterization of the dispute was "one-sided and didn't have the right context," and gave the impression that he and Mr. Card were attempting to take advantage of Mr. Ashcroft. "I found Ashcroft as lucid as I've seen him at meetings in the White House," he said.
Mr. Gonzales was at a meeting in San Antonio the day of Mr. Comey's surprise testimony. "He didn't have the decency to notify anyone what he was about to testify," he said. "That was extremely disappointing." Mr. Comey declined to comment.
Mr. Gonzales also downplayed his role in formulating opinions that allowed the CIA to use aggressive interrogation methods, which included waterboarding. The memos have since been rescinded and replaced with opinions that explicitly call torture "abhorrent."
Mr. Gonzales said his role as White House counsel at the time was one among several administration lawyers who debated the opinions, but that in the end it was the Justice Department's call. John Yoo, the then-Justice official who had been assigned to draft the memos, had strong feelings and no one could have pressured him to write the memos a certain way, Mr. Gonzales said. Mr. Yoo didn't respond to a request for comment.
In one of his final acts before leaving office, Mr. Gonzales denied he was planning to quit, even though he had told the president of his intention to resign. Asked about the misleading comment Tuesday, he said: "At that point, I didn't care."
WSJ, Dec 31, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration.
Mr. Gonzales has been portrayed by critics both as unqualified for his position and instrumental in laying the groundwork for the administration's "war on terror." He was pilloried by Congress in a manner not usually directed toward cabinet officials.
"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.
During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that "for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."
His political problems started with the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, which grew into a firestorm that Mr. Gonzales said he never saw coming. In November of that year, Democrats had taken control of Congress and the power to conduct investigations of Bush administration policies.
His previous role of White House counsel put Mr. Gonzales at the heart of the administration's decision-making on issues relating to terrorism, making him an easier target than the president. Critics also said he allowed the Justice Department to become politicized through its hiring practices and prosecutions, favoring Republicans for plum positions and targeting Democrats for prosecution.
Mr. Gonzales fueled the fire by giving evasive answers to Congress, frequently responding "I don't recall."
Among other things, Mr. Gonzales said Tuesday that he didn't play a central role in drafting the widely criticized legal opinions that allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to use aggressive interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects and expanded the president's power to hold "unlawful combatants" and terrorism suspects indefinitely. He also said he told the truth to Congress about a classified eavesdropping program authorized by the president, and admitted to making mistakes in handling the U.S. attorney firings while maintaining that he made the right decisions. He says that while he bears responsibility as former Attorney General that "doesn't absolve other individuals of responsibility."
Mr. Gonzales, 53 years old, doesn't have a publisher for his book. He said he is writing it if only "for my sons, so at least they know the story."
The chapters on the Bush administration's surveillance program, which involved eavesdropping without court warrants, and other controversial aspects of his work, remain blank. That is in part because he remains under investigation regarding allegations of political meddling at the Justice Department.
The Harvard Law School graduate, onetime corporate lawyer and Texas judge also hasn't been able to land a job. He has delivered a few paid speeches, done some mediation work and plans to do some arbitration, but said law firms have been "skittish" about hiring him.
The biggest blow to Mr. Gonzales came during Senate testimony by James Comey, former deputy attorney general, who recounted dramatic details of a 2004 confrontation at the hospital bed of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Mr. Comey had refused to sign a reauthorization of a secret government program, believed to be the eavesdropping initiative. Mr. Gonzales and Andrew Card, White House chief of staff at the time, drove to the hospital where Mr. Ashcroft was recovering from surgery to instead seek approval from him. Mr. Comey drove to the hospital to stop them. The episode highlighted a dispute between Justice and the White House over the surveillance program's legality.
In Tuesday's interview, Mr. Gonzales said Mr. Comey's characterization of the dispute was "one-sided and didn't have the right context," and gave the impression that he and Mr. Card were attempting to take advantage of Mr. Ashcroft. "I found Ashcroft as lucid as I've seen him at meetings in the White House," he said.
Mr. Gonzales was at a meeting in San Antonio the day of Mr. Comey's surprise testimony. "He didn't have the decency to notify anyone what he was about to testify," he said. "That was extremely disappointing." Mr. Comey declined to comment.
Mr. Gonzales also downplayed his role in formulating opinions that allowed the CIA to use aggressive interrogation methods, which included waterboarding. The memos have since been rescinded and replaced with opinions that explicitly call torture "abhorrent."
Mr. Gonzales said his role as White House counsel at the time was one among several administration lawyers who debated the opinions, but that in the end it was the Justice Department's call. John Yoo, the then-Justice official who had been assigned to draft the memos, had strong feelings and no one could have pressured him to write the memos a certain way, Mr. Gonzales said. Mr. Yoo didn't respond to a request for comment.
In one of his final acts before leaving office, Mr. Gonzales denied he was planning to quit, even though he had told the president of his intention to resign. Asked about the misleading comment Tuesday, he said: "At that point, I didn't care."
The Kremlin's foreign policy priorities are determined by the changing ideology and the domestic political agenda of Russia's rulers
Russia's Woes Spell Trouble for the U.S. By Leon Aron
WSJ, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Russia faces a particularly nasty version of the global recession (at a minimum), and perhaps an economic "perfect storm." Regardless of how bad its economy gets, two broad political trends, each carrying profound implications for Russia's foreign policy and U.S.-Russian relations, are bound to emerge.
The first will be a growing dissatisfaction with the government, which may lead to a political crisis. The second will be a reactionary retrenchment: increased internal repression and more of its already troubling foreign policy. Managing the relationship with Moscow in the face of these trends is something President-elect Barack Obama and his administration should start thinking about now.
The size and depth of Russia's economic problems -- and thus the amount of political turbulence -- will depend primarily on two variables. The first is the ruble decline. The national currency is steadily depreciating and has reached an all-time low against the euro despite the central bank's having spent $161 billion on its defense since mid-September. The ruble's losing at least 25% to 30% of its value is a given; the key political issue is whether the weakening can be managed into a gradual decline, or whether the depreciation turns into a panicky flight from the currency. (Already last September Russians dumped around 160 billion rubles to buy $6 billion -- the highest demand for dollars since the aftermath of the 1998 financial crisis.)
The second factor is oil prices. Last year, oil revenues accounted for at least one-fifth of Russia's GDP and half of state revenues. At $40 a barrel, the state budget goes into a 3%-4% deficit. In the past eight years, the national economy has mirrored fluctuating oil prices. So the 7%-8% growth projected for 2008 will have to be cut at best to 1%-2% for 2009. Zero growth or contraction are distinct possibilities.
Such a predicament is most dangerous politically for a country whose population has become used to incomes increasing 8%-10% every year since 2000. Growing disappointment is sure to follow, first among the elites and then people at large.
Despite the reduction of the poverty rate to 14% from 20% in the last five years, tens of millions of Russians continue to live precariously: A recent poll found that 37% of all families have money enough only to cover food. Unemployment and inflation (already 14%, year-on-year, in November) may well push these people over the edge and into the streets.
Perilous for any regime, such disenchantment would be especially worrisome in a country where the legitimacy of the entire political structure appears to rest on the popularity of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose astronomic ratings stemmed largely from the relative economic prosperity he has presided over. This dangerously narrow legitimacy will be sorely tried in the coming months.
Forestalling or at least containing inevitable political consequences of the economic crisis is likely to be at the root of the other political tendency: an attempt by the Putin-led elite, coalesced around Gazprom, Rosneft, state corporations and the loyal industrial "oligarchs," to pre-empt challenges by beefing up the authoritarian "vertical of power." The rewriting of the constitution to give the president 12 consecutive years in office signals the implementation of this strategy. The amendment was overwhelmingly passed by both houses of the Federal Assembly within three weeks in November, ratified by all 83 regional parliaments in less than a month. President Dmitry Medvedev signed it into law yesterday.
One scenario bruited about in Moscow has Mr. Medvedev taking full responsibility for the crisis and resigning to free the Kremlin for the caretaker prime minister (Mr. Putin), soon to be re-elected president.
A bill introduced in the Duma on Dec. 12 expands the definition of treason, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to "taking action aimed at endangering the constitutional order, sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Russia. That same day the parliament approved the elimination of the right to jury trials for defendants charged with treason. The ruthlessness with which the riot police troops, the OMON, attacked protesters, journalists and bystanders in Vladivostok over the weekend of Dec. 20 may be a preview of things to come.
A reactionary crackdown will also mean the continuation and intensification of the already incessant and deafening propaganda portraying Russia as a "besieged fortress," surrounded by the U.S.-led enemies on the outside and undermined by the "fifth column" of the democratic political opposition within. In the words of one of the most astute independent columnists, the courageous Yulia Latyinina, the rabid anti-Americanism, which has become a linchpin of the regime's domestic political strategy, is likely to turn into a full-blown "hysteria."
The key lesson of George W. Bush's dealings with Russia is that the Kremlin's foreign policy priorities are determined by the changing ideology and the domestic political agenda of Russia's rulers to a far greater degree than by anything the U.S. does or does not do. (Which is why the U.S. exit from the antiballistic missile treaty was accepted with equanimity in 2002, while the intent to install a rudimentary antimissile system provoked Moscow's fury in 2007.) If reaction advances at home, the Kremlin will continue a truculent or outright aggressive foreign policy of resurgence and retribution, intended, among other things, to distract from and justify domestic repression. The recovery of geostrategic assets lost in the Soviet collapse will remain Moscow's overarching objective, especially in the territory of the former Soviet Union.
The Obama White House will have to navigate a difficult and narrow path in its relations with Moscow in 2009 between continuing to engage Moscow on the key issues of mutual concern (Iran, missile defense, nonproliferation, terrorism), on the one hand, and the broader strategic goal of assisting democratic stabilization in Russia.
But no matter what the Kremlin leaders and their propaganda stooges say in public, anything interpreted as approval or even a mere sign of respect by America, first and foremost by its president, is a huge boost to the government's domestic popularity and legitimacy. So the natural, almost protocol-dictated, inclination of the new administration to show good will must be balanced against firm support for the return to political and economic liberalization in Russia. Throwing diplomatic lifelines to a regime that refuses to choose such a path out of the crisis is not in America's -- and Russia's -- long-term interests.
Mr. Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2007" (AEI, 2007).
WSJ, Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Russia faces a particularly nasty version of the global recession (at a minimum), and perhaps an economic "perfect storm." Regardless of how bad its economy gets, two broad political trends, each carrying profound implications for Russia's foreign policy and U.S.-Russian relations, are bound to emerge.
The first will be a growing dissatisfaction with the government, which may lead to a political crisis. The second will be a reactionary retrenchment: increased internal repression and more of its already troubling foreign policy. Managing the relationship with Moscow in the face of these trends is something President-elect Barack Obama and his administration should start thinking about now.
The size and depth of Russia's economic problems -- and thus the amount of political turbulence -- will depend primarily on two variables. The first is the ruble decline. The national currency is steadily depreciating and has reached an all-time low against the euro despite the central bank's having spent $161 billion on its defense since mid-September. The ruble's losing at least 25% to 30% of its value is a given; the key political issue is whether the weakening can be managed into a gradual decline, or whether the depreciation turns into a panicky flight from the currency. (Already last September Russians dumped around 160 billion rubles to buy $6 billion -- the highest demand for dollars since the aftermath of the 1998 financial crisis.)
The second factor is oil prices. Last year, oil revenues accounted for at least one-fifth of Russia's GDP and half of state revenues. At $40 a barrel, the state budget goes into a 3%-4% deficit. In the past eight years, the national economy has mirrored fluctuating oil prices. So the 7%-8% growth projected for 2008 will have to be cut at best to 1%-2% for 2009. Zero growth or contraction are distinct possibilities.
Such a predicament is most dangerous politically for a country whose population has become used to incomes increasing 8%-10% every year since 2000. Growing disappointment is sure to follow, first among the elites and then people at large.
Despite the reduction of the poverty rate to 14% from 20% in the last five years, tens of millions of Russians continue to live precariously: A recent poll found that 37% of all families have money enough only to cover food. Unemployment and inflation (already 14%, year-on-year, in November) may well push these people over the edge and into the streets.
Perilous for any regime, such disenchantment would be especially worrisome in a country where the legitimacy of the entire political structure appears to rest on the popularity of one man, Vladimir Putin, whose astronomic ratings stemmed largely from the relative economic prosperity he has presided over. This dangerously narrow legitimacy will be sorely tried in the coming months.
Forestalling or at least containing inevitable political consequences of the economic crisis is likely to be at the root of the other political tendency: an attempt by the Putin-led elite, coalesced around Gazprom, Rosneft, state corporations and the loyal industrial "oligarchs," to pre-empt challenges by beefing up the authoritarian "vertical of power." The rewriting of the constitution to give the president 12 consecutive years in office signals the implementation of this strategy. The amendment was overwhelmingly passed by both houses of the Federal Assembly within three weeks in November, ratified by all 83 regional parliaments in less than a month. President Dmitry Medvedev signed it into law yesterday.
One scenario bruited about in Moscow has Mr. Medvedev taking full responsibility for the crisis and resigning to free the Kremlin for the caretaker prime minister (Mr. Putin), soon to be re-elected president.
A bill introduced in the Duma on Dec. 12 expands the definition of treason, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to "taking action aimed at endangering the constitutional order, sovereignty and territorial integrity" of Russia. That same day the parliament approved the elimination of the right to jury trials for defendants charged with treason. The ruthlessness with which the riot police troops, the OMON, attacked protesters, journalists and bystanders in Vladivostok over the weekend of Dec. 20 may be a preview of things to come.
A reactionary crackdown will also mean the continuation and intensification of the already incessant and deafening propaganda portraying Russia as a "besieged fortress," surrounded by the U.S.-led enemies on the outside and undermined by the "fifth column" of the democratic political opposition within. In the words of one of the most astute independent columnists, the courageous Yulia Latyinina, the rabid anti-Americanism, which has become a linchpin of the regime's domestic political strategy, is likely to turn into a full-blown "hysteria."
The key lesson of George W. Bush's dealings with Russia is that the Kremlin's foreign policy priorities are determined by the changing ideology and the domestic political agenda of Russia's rulers to a far greater degree than by anything the U.S. does or does not do. (Which is why the U.S. exit from the antiballistic missile treaty was accepted with equanimity in 2002, while the intent to install a rudimentary antimissile system provoked Moscow's fury in 2007.) If reaction advances at home, the Kremlin will continue a truculent or outright aggressive foreign policy of resurgence and retribution, intended, among other things, to distract from and justify domestic repression. The recovery of geostrategic assets lost in the Soviet collapse will remain Moscow's overarching objective, especially in the territory of the former Soviet Union.
The Obama White House will have to navigate a difficult and narrow path in its relations with Moscow in 2009 between continuing to engage Moscow on the key issues of mutual concern (Iran, missile defense, nonproliferation, terrorism), on the one hand, and the broader strategic goal of assisting democratic stabilization in Russia.
But no matter what the Kremlin leaders and their propaganda stooges say in public, anything interpreted as approval or even a mere sign of respect by America, first and foremost by its president, is a huge boost to the government's domestic popularity and legitimacy. So the natural, almost protocol-dictated, inclination of the new administration to show good will must be balanced against firm support for the return to political and economic liberalization in Russia. Throwing diplomatic lifelines to a regime that refuses to choose such a path out of the crisis is not in America's -- and Russia's -- long-term interests.
Mr. Aron is director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2007" (AEI, 2007).
CSIS: Turkish Politics in 2008
Turkey Update: Turkish Politics in 2008. By Bulent Aliriza
CSIS, Dec 24, 2008
The year had begun with the Justice and Development Party (JDP), which has been in office since November 2002, riding high after its second successive election victory in July 2007. However, with the invalidation by the Constitutional Court of its legislative move in February to lift the headscarf ban in universities and its ‘near death experience’ between March and July, when it faced and ultimately avoided closure by the Constitutional Court, the JDP appears to be less certain of its future direction.
While it continues to be the most popular Turkish political party according to every poll and reflects and reinforces growing religious sentiment in the country, the JDP seems effectively constrained from using its majority in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) to modify what it regards as the harsher aspects of secularism; most notably the restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf many of its supporters regard as discriminatory. Consequently, as 2008 comes to an end, Turkish politics may be entering one of its transitional phases after a relatively long period of stability and predictability.
CONFRONTATION AND ADJUSTMENT
In the 2007 elections, the JDP had taken full advantage of widespread resentment against the TGS warning to the JDP to refrain from electing Abdullah Gul to the presidency. The party had also been able to rely on a superior organization and grassroots operation as well as a charismatic leader with a populist touch. In addition, the JDP had benefited from the absence of effective leadership in the opposition and its inability to adjust to the changing political landscape. The Republican People’s Party (RPP), under its long-time leader Deniz Baykal, had shifted from propagating social democratic views to an uneasy combination of opposition to the European Union (EU) and the United States and vehement defense of secularism. The Nationalist Action Party (NAP), led by Devlet Bahceli, had failed to match Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ability to tap into the surge of nationalism.
The JDP had prudently avoided an open confrontation with the defenders of secularism throughout most of its first term. However, encouraged by obtaining almost half the votes cast in the elections and elevating Gul to the presidency, the JDP grasped at the thorny issue of the Islamic headscarf law. The move was understandable from the JDP’s point of view as the majority of Turkish women wear a headscarf; seventy per cent of Turks favor lifting the ban and members of the party face constant pressure from their wives and daughters as well as their supporters. Nevertheless, the action was portrayed by the JDP’s opponents as a threat to secularism. The legislation lifting the headscarf ban in universities was duly invalidated by the Constitutional Court and then cited as the central charge in the closure case brought against the JDP by the Prosecutor General.
The JDP was ultimately able to survive as only six of the eleven judges instead of the required seven voted for closure in July. However, while allowing the JDP to stay in office, all but one of the judges also concluded that the JDP had become ‘the center of anti secular activities.’ Consequently, in addition to undercutting the power of the JDP-dominated TGNA to legislate, the Constitutional Court restricted the party’s room for maneuver by laying the groundwork for a new case for future activities. Erdogan’s immediate reaction to the verdict was to once again deny the anti secularism charge. As a pragmatic politician, however, Erdogan surely recognized that the JDP had been put on notice.
In view of the tensions, which have often characterized the relationship between the JDP and the Turkish General Staff (TGS), it is noteworthy that the only member of the court with a military background voted against closure. This prompted speculation that a private deal was struck between Erdogan and incoming TGS Chief of Staff Ilker Basbug. Although it is impossible to verify such claims, the advantages for both sides in such an arrangement are nevertheless easy to perceive. Along with most of his colleagues, Erdogan regarded the TGS as the driving force behind the effort to close down the JDP and to ban him from politics. Consequently, going directly to Basbug to ward off the imminent danger may have made sense from his perspective. After all, Erdogan had enjoyed a relatively good working relationship in the first four years of his government with Chief of Staff Hilmi Ozkok and had then managed to establish a modus vivendi with his successor Yasar Buyukanit after a difficult beginning. For his part, having seen the JDP benefit electorally from the TGS demarche under Buyukanit in 2007, Basbug may have wanted to avoid a repeat performance by the JDP’s successor in another early election. It has also been suggested that he may have wanted limits on the scope of the current investigation into the so-called Ergenekon conspiracy in which two retired four-star generals have been detained in connection with an alleged plot against the JDP government.
To be sure, the rapid revival of the Islamists under the JDP banner after the ouster of the Islamist-led government in 1997 has created a dilemma for the TGS as the backbone of the secular system. While the TGS is perceptibly uncomfortable with the JDP government as the political manifestation of increased religiosity, it has been reluctant to directly confront a party with mass popular backing, as its unwillingness to follow up its memorandum against Gul’s presidential candidacy demonstrates. However, Kemalism, vigorously defended by the TGS, remains the official state ideology enshrined in the 1961 and 1982 constitutions. While modern Turkey may no longer conform to the strict principles of Kemalism, the JDP has not been willing to risk a direct challenge to the ideology. Notwithstanding the fact that the culmination of the current EU accession process would necessitate its subordination to elected officials, the TGS has also maintained influence far beyond purely national security issues and retained autonomy in administering itself without meaningful civilian oversight. Moreover, since the closure case, Erdogan has drawn perceptibly closer to the TGS, particularly on the critical issue of how to deal with the Kurdish issue and separatist terrorism. After the PKK attack on a military outpost led to unprecedented media criticism of the TGS for alleged negligence, Erdogan chose to back Basbug’s denunciations of newspapers which had previously been vociferous in their support of the JDP in its difficulties with the TGS.
Erdogan has tried to strike a balance between supporting a military response against PKK terrorism and the need for a political solution which he first publicly articulated in Diyarbakir in 2005. His strategy aimed at simultaneously undercutting the PKK and Kurdish politicians who defer to the PKK. He hoped that economic improvement in the southeast, coupled with electoral success against the Democratic Society Party (DSP) - which is currently confronting the threat of closure for Kurdish separatism like its predecessors - would lead the way to a solution of the Kurdish problem. However, Kurds have been voting for mainstream Turkish political parties as well as local Kurdish parties since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1950. They choose to vote for mainstream parties not only because Kurdish parties are banned but also because of the ten per cent national threshold for representation in the TGNA. At the same time, there is little tangible evidence that economic prosperity would eliminate the sense of ethnic grievance that is at the core of the conflict.
It has been difficult for Erdogan to blur ethnic divisions while backing a military solution to PKK terrorism and this is likely to affect his electoral ambitions in the southeast. His blunt declaration in November that there was only “One nation, one flag, one motherland and one state” disappointed many Kurds as he discovered when he recently revisited Diyarbakir. Ahmet Turk, the leader of the DSP, went so far as to claim that the JDP was “obliged to make a deal with the state in return for not being shut down and as part of the deal, the Prime Minister has changed his policy on the Kurdish issue.” It is also noteworthy that Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, the most prominent Kurdish figure in the party - who had met with Turk and other DSP parliamentarians shunned by Erdogan – has resigned from his post as Deputy Chairman of the JDP.
One of the strengths of the JDP has been its remarkable success in maintaining cohesion and avoiding the kind of splintering which has bedeviled ruling Turkish parties in the past. While Erdogan is still in firm control of a united party, there are indications that the JDP may no longer be immune to the laws of political gravity. The relationship between Erdogan and Gul - who served as prime minister during the JDP’s first three months in office before giving way to Erdogan – is showing undeniable signs of fray since Gul’s ascendancy to the presidency. Another of the JDP’s four original leaders, Abdullatif Sener, left in July to form a new party after complaining about the JDP’s lack of effectiveness in fighting corruption. The resignation of JDP Deputy Chairman Saban Disli in September 2008 following corruption allegations has underlined the JDP’s problems with an issue which it had used against its predecessors. It may be significant that Disli was forced out partly because of pressure from Bulent Arinc, the fourth of the original leaders and now effectively the second man in the JDP.
Erdogan has reacted strongly against reporting of corruption allegations in the Turkish media and intolerance of criticism has recently become a characteristic of the JDP. By directly attacking media owners while revoking the accreditation of critical journalists, Erdogan has effectively forced the media to exercise auto censorship. After having pushed through a series of liberal reforms to achieve its stated goal of beginning EU accession negotiations in October 2005, the JDP government now seems uncomfortable with some aspects of the more open society it helped to create. It may also be disinclined to incur the domestic costs associated with additional steps expected by the EU on civil liberties and such sensitive issues as the Kurds and Cyprus. The Constitutional Court case had briefly renewed the JDP’s interest in the EU and the reform process as it endeavored to garner international support for itself but it soon became clear that this was a tactical move designed to increase the external costs of closure. In a recent speech, for example, Erdogan complained bitterly about the EU demands on Cyprus and added: “We have completed the Copenhagen and Maastricht Criteria. Let us know if it is not going to work, then we will continue on our path and rename them as the Ankara and Istanbul Criteria.”
[...]
ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
[...]
LOOKING AHEAD
The JDP government faces a major test in the March 2009 municipal elections and there may be similarities between its position and that of the Motherland Party (MP) – the last party before the JDP to hold power on its own - twenty years ago. In March 1989, the MP under Turgut Ozal fared poorly in municipal elections after winning two successive parliamentary elections, subsequently lost power in the 1991 elections and never regained its position in Turkish politics. If the JDP fails to match the forty seven per cent vote it received in last year’s elections or loses one of the big municipalities, the result would undoubtedly be perceived as a failure. However, unlike Ozal who was challenged by the redoubtable Suleyman Demirel, the JDP is facing weak opposition and a poor electoral performance would be more a reflection of the negative impact of a worsening economic outlook than the success of the other parties. As the JDP’s rise to power was facilitated by the Turkish economic crisis of 2000-2001, it would be ironic if its decline was to be set in motion by the current global downturn and its impact on Turkey.
While the economic recovery continued, governing was relatively easy for the JDP. With the shrinking of the pie, the JDP government will inevitably find it more difficult to claim credit for its management of the economy and, consequently, to maintain its popularity. Although the end of JDP domination is not on the horizon, the RPP and the NAP are likely to benefit most from the gradual erosion of support for the ruling party despite their lack of effectiveness. However, the Contentment Party, which continued as the Islamist party after the defection of Erdogan and his colleagues in 2001, could also increase its share of the vote, while Kurdish voters drift away from the JDP in the main Turkish cities as well as in the southeast. The economic downturn will further test the unity and internal cohesion of the JDP, particularly after the demonstration of its powerlessness on the headscarf issue and its close brush with closure.
Erdogan’s economic preoccupations in 2009 may make it even less likely that he will take the steps required to accelerate the EU accession process. In fact, it now seems probable that the stalled EU process will come to a standstill next year without a breakthrough on Cyprus, with critical implications for Turkey’s efforts to modernize and to complete the process of integration in the Western community. Such a development would be particularly unfortunate in view of the uncertainties relating to the course of US-Turkish relations with a new American president. To be sure, the JDP government would maintain its high profile in international politics - recently capped by Turkey’s election to the Security Council - even without progress on the EU front. However, it would also have to cope with the negative implications for Turkish domestic politics as well as for the economy.
Erdogan will almost certainly continue in 2009 to promote Turkish nationalism, a seemingly permanent feature of Turkish politics which has recently been reinforced by the rise of anti-American and generally anti-Western sentiments. However, the JDP’s record in government of seeking accommodation with the US, the EU and the international financial community could leave the party vulnerable to a challenge from its nationalist flank. On the other hand, whatever the future has in store for the JDP, its ability to win successive parliamentary elections has underlined the growing and increasingly visible role of religiosity in Turkish politics, as the NAP’s advocacy of relaxation of the headscarf restrictions and the RPP’s recent willingness to welcome into its ranks women wearing Islamic dress also confirms. Nevertheless, as the JDP’s difficulties in government demonstrates, the rigidly secular system has only been forced to adjust in an ad hoc manner to the influence of religiosity and the current situation will remain inherently unstable without a hitherto elusive new national consensus.
Bulent Aliriza
Director
CSIS Turkey Project
CSIS, Dec 24, 2008
The year had begun with the Justice and Development Party (JDP), which has been in office since November 2002, riding high after its second successive election victory in July 2007. However, with the invalidation by the Constitutional Court of its legislative move in February to lift the headscarf ban in universities and its ‘near death experience’ between March and July, when it faced and ultimately avoided closure by the Constitutional Court, the JDP appears to be less certain of its future direction.
While it continues to be the most popular Turkish political party according to every poll and reflects and reinforces growing religious sentiment in the country, the JDP seems effectively constrained from using its majority in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) to modify what it regards as the harsher aspects of secularism; most notably the restrictions on wearing the Islamic headscarf many of its supporters regard as discriminatory. Consequently, as 2008 comes to an end, Turkish politics may be entering one of its transitional phases after a relatively long period of stability and predictability.
CONFRONTATION AND ADJUSTMENT
In the 2007 elections, the JDP had taken full advantage of widespread resentment against the TGS warning to the JDP to refrain from electing Abdullah Gul to the presidency. The party had also been able to rely on a superior organization and grassroots operation as well as a charismatic leader with a populist touch. In addition, the JDP had benefited from the absence of effective leadership in the opposition and its inability to adjust to the changing political landscape. The Republican People’s Party (RPP), under its long-time leader Deniz Baykal, had shifted from propagating social democratic views to an uneasy combination of opposition to the European Union (EU) and the United States and vehement defense of secularism. The Nationalist Action Party (NAP), led by Devlet Bahceli, had failed to match Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ability to tap into the surge of nationalism.
The JDP had prudently avoided an open confrontation with the defenders of secularism throughout most of its first term. However, encouraged by obtaining almost half the votes cast in the elections and elevating Gul to the presidency, the JDP grasped at the thorny issue of the Islamic headscarf law. The move was understandable from the JDP’s point of view as the majority of Turkish women wear a headscarf; seventy per cent of Turks favor lifting the ban and members of the party face constant pressure from their wives and daughters as well as their supporters. Nevertheless, the action was portrayed by the JDP’s opponents as a threat to secularism. The legislation lifting the headscarf ban in universities was duly invalidated by the Constitutional Court and then cited as the central charge in the closure case brought against the JDP by the Prosecutor General.
The JDP was ultimately able to survive as only six of the eleven judges instead of the required seven voted for closure in July. However, while allowing the JDP to stay in office, all but one of the judges also concluded that the JDP had become ‘the center of anti secular activities.’ Consequently, in addition to undercutting the power of the JDP-dominated TGNA to legislate, the Constitutional Court restricted the party’s room for maneuver by laying the groundwork for a new case for future activities. Erdogan’s immediate reaction to the verdict was to once again deny the anti secularism charge. As a pragmatic politician, however, Erdogan surely recognized that the JDP had been put on notice.
In view of the tensions, which have often characterized the relationship between the JDP and the Turkish General Staff (TGS), it is noteworthy that the only member of the court with a military background voted against closure. This prompted speculation that a private deal was struck between Erdogan and incoming TGS Chief of Staff Ilker Basbug. Although it is impossible to verify such claims, the advantages for both sides in such an arrangement are nevertheless easy to perceive. Along with most of his colleagues, Erdogan regarded the TGS as the driving force behind the effort to close down the JDP and to ban him from politics. Consequently, going directly to Basbug to ward off the imminent danger may have made sense from his perspective. After all, Erdogan had enjoyed a relatively good working relationship in the first four years of his government with Chief of Staff Hilmi Ozkok and had then managed to establish a modus vivendi with his successor Yasar Buyukanit after a difficult beginning. For his part, having seen the JDP benefit electorally from the TGS demarche under Buyukanit in 2007, Basbug may have wanted to avoid a repeat performance by the JDP’s successor in another early election. It has also been suggested that he may have wanted limits on the scope of the current investigation into the so-called Ergenekon conspiracy in which two retired four-star generals have been detained in connection with an alleged plot against the JDP government.
To be sure, the rapid revival of the Islamists under the JDP banner after the ouster of the Islamist-led government in 1997 has created a dilemma for the TGS as the backbone of the secular system. While the TGS is perceptibly uncomfortable with the JDP government as the political manifestation of increased religiosity, it has been reluctant to directly confront a party with mass popular backing, as its unwillingness to follow up its memorandum against Gul’s presidential candidacy demonstrates. However, Kemalism, vigorously defended by the TGS, remains the official state ideology enshrined in the 1961 and 1982 constitutions. While modern Turkey may no longer conform to the strict principles of Kemalism, the JDP has not been willing to risk a direct challenge to the ideology. Notwithstanding the fact that the culmination of the current EU accession process would necessitate its subordination to elected officials, the TGS has also maintained influence far beyond purely national security issues and retained autonomy in administering itself without meaningful civilian oversight. Moreover, since the closure case, Erdogan has drawn perceptibly closer to the TGS, particularly on the critical issue of how to deal with the Kurdish issue and separatist terrorism. After the PKK attack on a military outpost led to unprecedented media criticism of the TGS for alleged negligence, Erdogan chose to back Basbug’s denunciations of newspapers which had previously been vociferous in their support of the JDP in its difficulties with the TGS.
Erdogan has tried to strike a balance between supporting a military response against PKK terrorism and the need for a political solution which he first publicly articulated in Diyarbakir in 2005. His strategy aimed at simultaneously undercutting the PKK and Kurdish politicians who defer to the PKK. He hoped that economic improvement in the southeast, coupled with electoral success against the Democratic Society Party (DSP) - which is currently confronting the threat of closure for Kurdish separatism like its predecessors - would lead the way to a solution of the Kurdish problem. However, Kurds have been voting for mainstream Turkish political parties as well as local Kurdish parties since the introduction of multiparty democracy in 1950. They choose to vote for mainstream parties not only because Kurdish parties are banned but also because of the ten per cent national threshold for representation in the TGNA. At the same time, there is little tangible evidence that economic prosperity would eliminate the sense of ethnic grievance that is at the core of the conflict.
It has been difficult for Erdogan to blur ethnic divisions while backing a military solution to PKK terrorism and this is likely to affect his electoral ambitions in the southeast. His blunt declaration in November that there was only “One nation, one flag, one motherland and one state” disappointed many Kurds as he discovered when he recently revisited Diyarbakir. Ahmet Turk, the leader of the DSP, went so far as to claim that the JDP was “obliged to make a deal with the state in return for not being shut down and as part of the deal, the Prime Minister has changed his policy on the Kurdish issue.” It is also noteworthy that Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, the most prominent Kurdish figure in the party - who had met with Turk and other DSP parliamentarians shunned by Erdogan – has resigned from his post as Deputy Chairman of the JDP.
One of the strengths of the JDP has been its remarkable success in maintaining cohesion and avoiding the kind of splintering which has bedeviled ruling Turkish parties in the past. While Erdogan is still in firm control of a united party, there are indications that the JDP may no longer be immune to the laws of political gravity. The relationship between Erdogan and Gul - who served as prime minister during the JDP’s first three months in office before giving way to Erdogan – is showing undeniable signs of fray since Gul’s ascendancy to the presidency. Another of the JDP’s four original leaders, Abdullatif Sener, left in July to form a new party after complaining about the JDP’s lack of effectiveness in fighting corruption. The resignation of JDP Deputy Chairman Saban Disli in September 2008 following corruption allegations has underlined the JDP’s problems with an issue which it had used against its predecessors. It may be significant that Disli was forced out partly because of pressure from Bulent Arinc, the fourth of the original leaders and now effectively the second man in the JDP.
Erdogan has reacted strongly against reporting of corruption allegations in the Turkish media and intolerance of criticism has recently become a characteristic of the JDP. By directly attacking media owners while revoking the accreditation of critical journalists, Erdogan has effectively forced the media to exercise auto censorship. After having pushed through a series of liberal reforms to achieve its stated goal of beginning EU accession negotiations in October 2005, the JDP government now seems uncomfortable with some aspects of the more open society it helped to create. It may also be disinclined to incur the domestic costs associated with additional steps expected by the EU on civil liberties and such sensitive issues as the Kurds and Cyprus. The Constitutional Court case had briefly renewed the JDP’s interest in the EU and the reform process as it endeavored to garner international support for itself but it soon became clear that this was a tactical move designed to increase the external costs of closure. In a recent speech, for example, Erdogan complained bitterly about the EU demands on Cyprus and added: “We have completed the Copenhagen and Maastricht Criteria. Let us know if it is not going to work, then we will continue on our path and rename them as the Ankara and Istanbul Criteria.”
[...]
ECONOMIC DOWNTURN
[...]
LOOKING AHEAD
The JDP government faces a major test in the March 2009 municipal elections and there may be similarities between its position and that of the Motherland Party (MP) – the last party before the JDP to hold power on its own - twenty years ago. In March 1989, the MP under Turgut Ozal fared poorly in municipal elections after winning two successive parliamentary elections, subsequently lost power in the 1991 elections and never regained its position in Turkish politics. If the JDP fails to match the forty seven per cent vote it received in last year’s elections or loses one of the big municipalities, the result would undoubtedly be perceived as a failure. However, unlike Ozal who was challenged by the redoubtable Suleyman Demirel, the JDP is facing weak opposition and a poor electoral performance would be more a reflection of the negative impact of a worsening economic outlook than the success of the other parties. As the JDP’s rise to power was facilitated by the Turkish economic crisis of 2000-2001, it would be ironic if its decline was to be set in motion by the current global downturn and its impact on Turkey.
While the economic recovery continued, governing was relatively easy for the JDP. With the shrinking of the pie, the JDP government will inevitably find it more difficult to claim credit for its management of the economy and, consequently, to maintain its popularity. Although the end of JDP domination is not on the horizon, the RPP and the NAP are likely to benefit most from the gradual erosion of support for the ruling party despite their lack of effectiveness. However, the Contentment Party, which continued as the Islamist party after the defection of Erdogan and his colleagues in 2001, could also increase its share of the vote, while Kurdish voters drift away from the JDP in the main Turkish cities as well as in the southeast. The economic downturn will further test the unity and internal cohesion of the JDP, particularly after the demonstration of its powerlessness on the headscarf issue and its close brush with closure.
Erdogan’s economic preoccupations in 2009 may make it even less likely that he will take the steps required to accelerate the EU accession process. In fact, it now seems probable that the stalled EU process will come to a standstill next year without a breakthrough on Cyprus, with critical implications for Turkey’s efforts to modernize and to complete the process of integration in the Western community. Such a development would be particularly unfortunate in view of the uncertainties relating to the course of US-Turkish relations with a new American president. To be sure, the JDP government would maintain its high profile in international politics - recently capped by Turkey’s election to the Security Council - even without progress on the EU front. However, it would also have to cope with the negative implications for Turkish domestic politics as well as for the economy.
Erdogan will almost certainly continue in 2009 to promote Turkish nationalism, a seemingly permanent feature of Turkish politics which has recently been reinforced by the rise of anti-American and generally anti-Western sentiments. However, the JDP’s record in government of seeking accommodation with the US, the EU and the international financial community could leave the party vulnerable to a challenge from its nationalist flank. On the other hand, whatever the future has in store for the JDP, its ability to win successive parliamentary elections has underlined the growing and increasingly visible role of religiosity in Turkish politics, as the NAP’s advocacy of relaxation of the headscarf restrictions and the RPP’s recent willingness to welcome into its ranks women wearing Islamic dress also confirms. Nevertheless, as the JDP’s difficulties in government demonstrates, the rigidly secular system has only been forced to adjust in an ad hoc manner to the influence of religiosity and the current situation will remain inherently unstable without a hitherto elusive new national consensus.
Bulent Aliriza
Director
CSIS Turkey Project
Avery Dulles and the Death Penalty
Dulles and the Death Penalty, by Mark Tooley
Upholding the classical Catholic tradition about capital punishment.
The Weekly Standard, Dec 31, 2008, 12:00:00 AM
Seemingly none of the recent obituaries of Avery Dulles, a renowned theologian and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, has mentioned his crisp, theoretical defense of capital punishment. The Cardinal's careful explanation of his church's teaching responded to the popular impression of blanket Catholic opposition to the death penalty. Liberal Catholic politicians, even when opposing their church's stance on abortion, have sometimes boasted of their supposed conformity with Catholic teaching on capital punishment.
"Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty," Dulles told a symposium in 2002. "One could conceive of a situation where if justice were not done by executing an offender it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to."
Dulles emphasized that Pope John Paul II and the bishops in recent years have upheld the classical Catholic tradition about capital punishment, affirming its theoretical validity, while warning against its potential for "miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life."
[...]
While a student at Harvard in the 1930s, the younger Dulles became a believer in God after examining the intricate beauty of a blossoming tree. By 1940, he was converted to the "sublimity" of Catholic doctrine, almost certainly displeasing his ardently WASP father. After Avery Dulles' World War II service in the U.S. Navy, he became a Jesuit and was ordained into the priesthood in 1956. His nearly half century of teaching concluded with two decades at Fordham University. Pope John Paul II appointed him a Cardinal in 2001, in recognition of his vast theological and academic accomplishments, though Dulles had never served as a bishop, and was well past age 80.
The intellectual and spiritual range of Avery Dulles' writings, which continued well into his final year, at age 90, after he had lost his ability to speak, was enormous. He strove to conform to and explain Catholic teachings in a manner approachable by academics and novices alike. The then new Cardinal's 2001 explanation of Catholic teaching on capital punishment for First Things magazine was among his most notable.
Dulles observed that Scriptural support for the death penalty was consistent, starting with God's covenant with Noah: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image." The Mosaic code, obviously, ordained it for numerous offenses beyond murder. In the New Testament, he wrote, "the right of the State to put criminals to death seems to be taken for granted," including by Jesus. St. Paul, in Romans, apparently referenced the death penalty when he wrote that the magistrate who holds authority "does not bear the sword in vain; for he is the servant of God to execute His wrath on the wrongdoer."
Early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church were "virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment," Dulles wrote, including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and later, Thomas More and John Henry Newman. In the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent III affirmed: "The secular power can, without mortal sin, exercise judgment of blood, provided that it punishes with justice, not out of hatred, with prudence, not precipitation." Until 1969, the Vatican's penal code included the death penalty for attempted papal assassinations.
"The mounting opposition to the death penalty in Europe since the Enlightenment has gone hand in hand with a decline of faith in eternal life," Dulles observed. Capital punishment's demise in secularized countries seems tied to the "evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith."
Dulles insisted that Catholicism has "never advocated unqualified abolition of the death penalty." He recalled "no official statement from popes or bishops, whether in the past or in the present, that denies the right of the State to execute offenders at least in certain extreme cases." Catholic teaching has justified capital punishment "on the ground that the State does not act on its own authority but as the agent of God, who is supreme lord of life and death." Problematically, the modern state today is "generally viewed simply as an instrument of the will of the governed," Dulles wrote, so that the death penalty is commonly seen as vengeance by a self-assertive, angry society rather than a divine judgment on objective evil.
Unlike the church, whose main focus is mercy, the state's focus is justice, Dulles explained. "In a predominantly Christian society, however, the State should be encouraged to lean toward mercy provided that it does not thereby violate the demands of justice." State agents who administer executions can do so without hatred and with respect, knowing that "death is not the final evil," and hoping that the condemned will "attain eternal life with God."
Dulles quoted from Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, which declared "as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system," cases mandating execution "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." The Pope, with the church's bishops, have prudentially, but not infallibly, concluded that modern states, although retaining their right to execute the guilty, should largely avoid the practice, "if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment." Dulles concluded: "I personally support this position."
Exciting many critics who thought him too nuanced, Dulles responded that he was a theologian, not a crusader. "Whether and when to apply the death penalty cannot be properly made on the basis of abstract dogmatic considerations alone," he wrote. "Christian moral reasoning calls for a high degree of prudence."
Dulles' thoughtful treatment of capital punishment was typical of a very long life devoted to careful and thorough teaching in service to his church.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Upholding the classical Catholic tradition about capital punishment.
The Weekly Standard, Dec 31, 2008, 12:00:00 AM
Seemingly none of the recent obituaries of Avery Dulles, a renowned theologian and Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, has mentioned his crisp, theoretical defense of capital punishment. The Cardinal's careful explanation of his church's teaching responded to the popular impression of blanket Catholic opposition to the death penalty. Liberal Catholic politicians, even when opposing their church's stance on abortion, have sometimes boasted of their supposed conformity with Catholic teaching on capital punishment.
"Self-defense of society continues to justify the death penalty," Dulles told a symposium in 2002. "One could conceive of a situation where if justice were not done by executing an offender it would throw society into moral confusion," he said. "I don't know whether that requires any more than that it remain on the books, symbolically, that it be there for society to have recourse to."
Dulles emphasized that Pope John Paul II and the bishops in recent years have upheld the classical Catholic tradition about capital punishment, affirming its theoretical validity, while warning against its potential for "miscarriages of justice, the increase of vindictiveness, or disrespect for the value of innocent human life."
[...]
While a student at Harvard in the 1930s, the younger Dulles became a believer in God after examining the intricate beauty of a blossoming tree. By 1940, he was converted to the "sublimity" of Catholic doctrine, almost certainly displeasing his ardently WASP father. After Avery Dulles' World War II service in the U.S. Navy, he became a Jesuit and was ordained into the priesthood in 1956. His nearly half century of teaching concluded with two decades at Fordham University. Pope John Paul II appointed him a Cardinal in 2001, in recognition of his vast theological and academic accomplishments, though Dulles had never served as a bishop, and was well past age 80.
The intellectual and spiritual range of Avery Dulles' writings, which continued well into his final year, at age 90, after he had lost his ability to speak, was enormous. He strove to conform to and explain Catholic teachings in a manner approachable by academics and novices alike. The then new Cardinal's 2001 explanation of Catholic teaching on capital punishment for First Things magazine was among his most notable.
Dulles observed that Scriptural support for the death penalty was consistent, starting with God's covenant with Noah: "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image." The Mosaic code, obviously, ordained it for numerous offenses beyond murder. In the New Testament, he wrote, "the right of the State to put criminals to death seems to be taken for granted," including by Jesus. St. Paul, in Romans, apparently referenced the death penalty when he wrote that the magistrate who holds authority "does not bear the sword in vain; for he is the servant of God to execute His wrath on the wrongdoer."
Early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church were "virtually unanimous in their support for capital punishment," Dulles wrote, including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and later, Thomas More and John Henry Newman. In the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent III affirmed: "The secular power can, without mortal sin, exercise judgment of blood, provided that it punishes with justice, not out of hatred, with prudence, not precipitation." Until 1969, the Vatican's penal code included the death penalty for attempted papal assassinations.
"The mounting opposition to the death penalty in Europe since the Enlightenment has gone hand in hand with a decline of faith in eternal life," Dulles observed. Capital punishment's demise in secularized countries seems tied to the "evaporation of the sense of sin, guilt, and retributive justice, all of which are essential to biblical religion and Catholic faith."
Dulles insisted that Catholicism has "never advocated unqualified abolition of the death penalty." He recalled "no official statement from popes or bishops, whether in the past or in the present, that denies the right of the State to execute offenders at least in certain extreme cases." Catholic teaching has justified capital punishment "on the ground that the State does not act on its own authority but as the agent of God, who is supreme lord of life and death." Problematically, the modern state today is "generally viewed simply as an instrument of the will of the governed," Dulles wrote, so that the death penalty is commonly seen as vengeance by a self-assertive, angry society rather than a divine judgment on objective evil.
Unlike the church, whose main focus is mercy, the state's focus is justice, Dulles explained. "In a predominantly Christian society, however, the State should be encouraged to lean toward mercy provided that it does not thereby violate the demands of justice." State agents who administer executions can do so without hatred and with respect, knowing that "death is not the final evil," and hoping that the condemned will "attain eternal life with God."
Dulles quoted from Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, which declared "as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system," cases mandating execution "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent." The Pope, with the church's bishops, have prudentially, but not infallibly, concluded that modern states, although retaining their right to execute the guilty, should largely avoid the practice, "if the purposes of punishment can be equally well or better achieved by bloodless means, such as imprisonment." Dulles concluded: "I personally support this position."
Exciting many critics who thought him too nuanced, Dulles responded that he was a theologian, not a crusader. "Whether and when to apply the death penalty cannot be properly made on the basis of abstract dogmatic considerations alone," he wrote. "Christian moral reasoning calls for a high degree of prudence."
Dulles' thoughtful treatment of capital punishment was typical of a very long life devoted to careful and thorough teaching in service to his church.
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
Violence in Pakistan: Trend Analysis November 2008
Violence in Pakistan: Trend Analysis November 2008. By Alok Bansal and T. Khurshchev
IDSA, December 31, 2008
Even as the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and the terrorists’ linkages with Pakistan have refocused global attention on Pakistan, casualties of terrorist violence within Pakistan during November reduced significantly. Like in the last few months, there has been an increase in violence during November, though there was a more than 20 per cent reduction in the number of casualties. This commentary analyses the trend in terrorist violence in Pakistan during November 2008 based on media reports.
Though the number of terror related incidents increased from 346 in October to 372 in November 2008, the death toll dropped significantly for the second month in succession from 1081 in October to 804 in November. However, the number of security forces personnel killed in these incidents rose from 47 in October to 56 in November. The most significant reduction has been in FATA, where it appears as if the security forces have allowed the Taliban a free run in South and North Waziristan. Pakistan’s military operations were generally confined to Bajaur Agency and neighbouring Mohmand Agency. Although aerial attacks by allied forces continued during the month, they were more focussed and mostly hit terrorists with little collateral damage. Towards the end of the month there were ethnic riots in Karachi, where Pakhtoons and Mohajirs clashed violently, paralysing large parts of the city.
Full report at http://www.idsa.in/publications/stratcomments/BansalKhurshchev311208.pdf
IDSA, December 31, 2008
Even as the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and the terrorists’ linkages with Pakistan have refocused global attention on Pakistan, casualties of terrorist violence within Pakistan during November reduced significantly. Like in the last few months, there has been an increase in violence during November, though there was a more than 20 per cent reduction in the number of casualties. This commentary analyses the trend in terrorist violence in Pakistan during November 2008 based on media reports.
Though the number of terror related incidents increased from 346 in October to 372 in November 2008, the death toll dropped significantly for the second month in succession from 1081 in October to 804 in November. However, the number of security forces personnel killed in these incidents rose from 47 in October to 56 in November. The most significant reduction has been in FATA, where it appears as if the security forces have allowed the Taliban a free run in South and North Waziristan. Pakistan’s military operations were generally confined to Bajaur Agency and neighbouring Mohmand Agency. Although aerial attacks by allied forces continued during the month, they were more focussed and mostly hit terrorists with little collateral damage. Towards the end of the month there were ethnic riots in Karachi, where Pakhtoons and Mohajirs clashed violently, paralysing large parts of the city.
Full report at http://www.idsa.in/publications/stratcomments/BansalKhurshchev311208.pdf
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
2009: The US Contributes $85 Million for Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees
The United States Contributes $85 Million for Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees
Media Note
State Dept., Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
December 30, 2008
The United States Contributes $85 Million for Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees
The United States announces its plan to contribute $85 million to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) for its 2009 appeals. Of the $85 million announced today, $25 million will go to UNRWA’s Emergency Appeal for the West Bank and Gaza; $60 million to UNRWA’s General Fund.
Through this contribution to the Emergency Appeal for the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian refugees, who comprise 70 percent of the population in Gaza and 30 percent in the West Bank, will receive urgently needed food, medicines, and other critical humanitarian assistance. The contribution to UNRWA’s General Fund will support the provision of basic and vocational education, primary health care, and relief and social services to more than 4.6 million registered Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
The United States reiterates its deep concern about the escalating violence in Gaza and commends UNRWA’s important work meeting the emergency needs of civilians in Gaza at this very difficult time. We hold Hamas fully responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence. We call on all concerned to protect innocent lives and to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza, by facilitating necessary access into Gaza for UNRWA and other humanitarian organizations. We also encourage other states to provide urgently needed funding to UNRWA and other international organizations providing lifesaving care to civilians in Gaza.
The United States is UNRWA’s largest bilateral donor, and contributed $184.68 million to UNRWA towards its 2008 Appeals, including $99.87 million for UNRWA’s General Fund and $84.81 million for its emergency appeals for Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The United States plans to provide additional funding for UNRWA's 2009 appeals in the future.
2008/1105
Released on December 30, 2008
Media Note
State Dept., Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
December 30, 2008
The United States Contributes $85 Million for Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees
The United States announces its plan to contribute $85 million to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) for its 2009 appeals. Of the $85 million announced today, $25 million will go to UNRWA’s Emergency Appeal for the West Bank and Gaza; $60 million to UNRWA’s General Fund.
Through this contribution to the Emergency Appeal for the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian refugees, who comprise 70 percent of the population in Gaza and 30 percent in the West Bank, will receive urgently needed food, medicines, and other critical humanitarian assistance. The contribution to UNRWA’s General Fund will support the provision of basic and vocational education, primary health care, and relief and social services to more than 4.6 million registered Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
The United States reiterates its deep concern about the escalating violence in Gaza and commends UNRWA’s important work meeting the emergency needs of civilians in Gaza at this very difficult time. We hold Hamas fully responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence. We call on all concerned to protect innocent lives and to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza, by facilitating necessary access into Gaza for UNRWA and other humanitarian organizations. We also encourage other states to provide urgently needed funding to UNRWA and other international organizations providing lifesaving care to civilians in Gaza.
The United States is UNRWA’s largest bilateral donor, and contributed $184.68 million to UNRWA towards its 2008 Appeals, including $99.87 million for UNRWA’s General Fund and $84.81 million for its emergency appeals for Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. The United States plans to provide additional funding for UNRWA's 2009 appeals in the future.
2008/1105
Released on December 30, 2008
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