Does Ethanol Save Consumers Money at the Pump? By Marlo Lewis
Planet Gore/NRO, Monday, February 09, 2009
Excerpts:
That’s what the corn and ethanol lobbies claim. In fact, filling up with ethanol is a big fat money-loser, as you can see for yourself by visiting www.fueleconomy.gov, a website jointly administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy (DOE). Once you’re there, click on “Flex-Fuel Vehicles,” then click on “Fuel Economy Information for Flex-Fuel Vehicles,” and then click on “Go.”EPA and DOE compare the average annual cost of using regular gasoline and E-85 (motor fuel blended with 85 percent ethanol) for 90 different flex-fuel models. In every case, regardless of make or model, fueling the vehicle with E-85 costs more than gasoline—lots more.Consider a few examples:
[table removed]
The other neat thing about this site is that it compares the annual carbon footprint of using E-85 versus regular gasoline for each vehicle. In every case, ethanol has a lower carbon footprint (emits fewer annual tons of CO2). This is controversial in light of research (see here and here) indicating that ethanol is a net contributor to greenhouse gas emissions when you take into account emissions from fertilizer used to grow corn and the carbon released from forests and soils as corn cultivation expands into previously unfarmed areas.
Nonetheless, even if one eschews a lifecycle analysis and considers only the direct emissions released by burning equal volumes of gasoline and ethanol, the cost per ton of CO2 avoided by using E-85 is ridiculously expensive.
Consider the Nisan Titan 4WD. According EPA and DOE, using regular gasoline, the Titan emits 13.1 tons of CO2 per year; using E-85, it emits 11.1 tons of CO2 per year. So fueling the Titan with E-85 instead of gasoline reduces the vehicle’s annual CO2 emissions by 2 tons. However, the E-85 costs $2,259 more, which means the per-ton cost of reducing CO2 by using E-85 instead of gasoline is $1,129.50. That's a dozen times more costly than the “social cost of carbon” (how much damage each ton of CO2 allegedly does) as estimated by Richard Tol, perhaps the world's leading climate economist, in a major literature review.
For additional perspective, the Energy Information Administration estimated that emission permits under the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) would cost $16.88 per ton in 2012, $29.88 in 2020, and $61.01 in 2030. So the per-ton cost of reducing CO2 emissions by switching your Nisan Titan from gasoline to E-85 is between 18 and 66 times more costly than emission permits under Lieberman-Warner, a bill the U.S. Senate did not see fit to pass.
Although EPA and DOE established fueleconomy.gov partly to promote flex-fuel vehicles and E-85, the information they provide demolishes claims that ethanol reduces pain at the pump and provides a cost-effective antidote to global warming.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Paul Krugman's Nostalgianomics: Economic Policies, Social Norms, and Income Inequality
Paul Krugman's Nostalgianomics: Economic Policies, Social Norms, and Income Inequality. By Brink Lindsey
Cato, February 9, 2009
What accounts for the rise in income inequality since the 1970s? According to most economists, the answer lies in structural changes in the economy— in particular, technological changes that have raised the demand for highly skilled workers and thereby boosted their pay. Opposing this prevailing view, however, is Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. According to Krugman and a group of like-minded scholars, structural explanations of inequality are inadequate. They argue instead that changes in economic policies and social norms have played a major role in the widening of the income distribution.
Krugman and company have a point. For the quarter century or so after World War II, incomes were much more compressed than they are today. Since then, American society has experienced major changes in both political economy and cultural values. And both economic logic and empirical evidence provide reasons for concluding that those changes have helped to restrain low-end income growth while accelerating growth at the top of the income scale.
However, Krugman and his colleagues offer a highly selective and misleading account of the relevant changes. Looking back at the early postwar decades, they cherry-pick the historical record in a way that allows them to portray that time as an enlightened period of well-designed economic policies and healthy social norms. Such a rosy-colored view of the past fails as objective historical analysis. Instead, it amounts to ideologically motivated nostalgia.
Once those bygone policies and norms are seen in their totality, it should be clear that nostalgia for them is misplaced. The political economy of the early postwar decades, while it generated impressive results under the peculiar conditions of the time, is totally unsuited to serve as a model for 21st-century policymakers. And as to the social attitudes and values that undergirded that political economy, it is frankly astonishing that self-described progressives could find them attractive.
Full report here.
Cato, February 9, 2009
What accounts for the rise in income inequality since the 1970s? According to most economists, the answer lies in structural changes in the economy— in particular, technological changes that have raised the demand for highly skilled workers and thereby boosted their pay. Opposing this prevailing view, however, is Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics. According to Krugman and a group of like-minded scholars, structural explanations of inequality are inadequate. They argue instead that changes in economic policies and social norms have played a major role in the widening of the income distribution.
Krugman and company have a point. For the quarter century or so after World War II, incomes were much more compressed than they are today. Since then, American society has experienced major changes in both political economy and cultural values. And both economic logic and empirical evidence provide reasons for concluding that those changes have helped to restrain low-end income growth while accelerating growth at the top of the income scale.
However, Krugman and his colleagues offer a highly selective and misleading account of the relevant changes. Looking back at the early postwar decades, they cherry-pick the historical record in a way that allows them to portray that time as an enlightened period of well-designed economic policies and healthy social norms. Such a rosy-colored view of the past fails as objective historical analysis. Instead, it amounts to ideologically motivated nostalgia.
Once those bygone policies and norms are seen in their totality, it should be clear that nostalgia for them is misplaced. The political economy of the early postwar decades, while it generated impressive results under the peculiar conditions of the time, is totally unsuited to serve as a model for 21st-century policymakers. And as to the social attitudes and values that undergirded that political economy, it is frankly astonishing that self-described progressives could find them attractive.
Full report here.
FDA, foodborne illness outbreaks and inspections
Tilting at Food Safety Windmills, by Greg Conko
Openmarket/AEI, February 09, 2009 @ 11:05 am
The papers have been filled the past few weeks with stories about the recent peanut contamination problem. And, as this article from today’s New York Times, and this from Saturday’s Washington Post, indicate, the conventional wisdom is that America’s “food safety net” is badly frayed due to Bush Administration cut-backs in FDA spending. As is typical, the problem isn’t so simple.
Unfortunately, as long as the world’s food production system continues to be highly decentralized and fragmented, there will continue to be foodborne illness outbreaks like the most recent salmonella contamination problem and the E. coli contamination outbreaks seen in the past few years. The trouble, of course, is that food is, by and large, grown outside in dirt, and microbial contamination is a fact of life. Measures can and should be taken by food producers, processors, and packagers to identify contamination where it occurs and remove it from the food chain. But, with over a billion meals consumed in the United States every day, there is not enough money in the world to meaningfully increase inspections of the hundreds of thousands of facilities that produce, process, and sell food in the United States.
Currently, there is no requirement for FDA to inspect any one food production facility on a regular basis, and many facilities go years between inspections. FDA sets its own priorities based on the types of food products and production activities involved, by trying to determine where the likeliest risks lie. That, say the critics, is the root of the problem. FDA needs the financial and personnel resources to inspect every food production facility in the country (as well as foreign facilities that export to the U.S.) on a regular basis.
But will this really do anything productive? In short, the answer is “no.” The proposed Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009 would expand FDA’s authority substantially, requiring additional money for agency personnel and more frequent inspections. How frequent? Not less than once every 4 years. So, even after this massive influx of taxpayer cash, the best we can expect is that most food production facilities will now be inspected once every four years instead of once every decade. Does anyone really think that’s going to help? Of course not — no thinking person could. Instead, this is designed to make us all feel that the government is “doing something,” while taking more money out of the productive economy and funnelling it to Washington.
If recent stories are true -– that operators of the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia willfully failed to remove contaminated product from its shipments and did not clean equipment after contamination was identified –- it is hard to imagine that a doubling or tripling of inspections could have prevented this tragedy. News accounts indicate that Peanut Corporation executives actually identified the presence of salmonella in various products and PUT THEM ON THE MARKET ANYWAY.
Fortunately, this kind of conscious cheating is rare in a country like the United States. But, in order to help deter it, penalties for such willful misconduct must be beefed up (so to speak). I’m not suggesting we start executing food plant operators or safety inspectors found to be willfully negligent, as China has been doing recently. Though, for acts that serious, serious penalties are warranted. The penalties for knowingly putting contaminated foodstuffs into commerce need to be more than simple slaps on the wrist.
Finally, it’s worth repeating that we can never realistically eliminate all foodborne illness. The shear size and scope of the problem –- that is, bacteria and viruses are all around us all the time -– means that we must recognize there are diminishing marginal gains to be had from increased spending on food safety. Not that we should accept defeat, but that at some point we have to recognize that diverting more and more public resources to combating an intractable problem means having fewer resources to spend on other things -– like health care, education, occupational safety, etc. -– that could increase safety by a far greater amount.
On the other hand, there are a handful of regulatory changes that could both help the private sector combat foodborne illness while also lower the cost of food safety. For example, food irradiation is a safe and effective technology for killing or denaturing bacteria and viruses in and on foods, such as meat and poultry, grains, and even some fruits and vegetables. But, a variety of regulatory restrictions on the use of irradiation (as well as mandatory labeling that seems designed to scare consumers away from irradiated foods) make it uneconomical for food processors to use irradiation in the United States on a wide-scale basis. The most innovative breakthroughs in food biotechnology are rarely ever tested because the regulation of biotech plants and animals are too costly. And the more recent panic about nanotechnology, combined with burgeoning regulation in that field, could strangle in the crib some of the most innovative efforts to improve food safety.
Thus, FDA, USDA, and EPA -– the same regulatory agencies charged with ensuring that the American food supply is safe -– are actually contributing to lower safety by creating and maintaining poorly thought out rules regarding technology regulation. It ought to serve as a cautionary note that, in trying to make changes that will improve food safety, we need to be conscious that some well-intentioned efforts can actually make us less safe.
Openmarket/AEI, February 09, 2009 @ 11:05 am
The papers have been filled the past few weeks with stories about the recent peanut contamination problem. And, as this article from today’s New York Times, and this from Saturday’s Washington Post, indicate, the conventional wisdom is that America’s “food safety net” is badly frayed due to Bush Administration cut-backs in FDA spending. As is typical, the problem isn’t so simple.
Unfortunately, as long as the world’s food production system continues to be highly decentralized and fragmented, there will continue to be foodborne illness outbreaks like the most recent salmonella contamination problem and the E. coli contamination outbreaks seen in the past few years. The trouble, of course, is that food is, by and large, grown outside in dirt, and microbial contamination is a fact of life. Measures can and should be taken by food producers, processors, and packagers to identify contamination where it occurs and remove it from the food chain. But, with over a billion meals consumed in the United States every day, there is not enough money in the world to meaningfully increase inspections of the hundreds of thousands of facilities that produce, process, and sell food in the United States.
Currently, there is no requirement for FDA to inspect any one food production facility on a regular basis, and many facilities go years between inspections. FDA sets its own priorities based on the types of food products and production activities involved, by trying to determine where the likeliest risks lie. That, say the critics, is the root of the problem. FDA needs the financial and personnel resources to inspect every food production facility in the country (as well as foreign facilities that export to the U.S.) on a regular basis.
But will this really do anything productive? In short, the answer is “no.” The proposed Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009 would expand FDA’s authority substantially, requiring additional money for agency personnel and more frequent inspections. How frequent? Not less than once every 4 years. So, even after this massive influx of taxpayer cash, the best we can expect is that most food production facilities will now be inspected once every four years instead of once every decade. Does anyone really think that’s going to help? Of course not — no thinking person could. Instead, this is designed to make us all feel that the government is “doing something,” while taking more money out of the productive economy and funnelling it to Washington.
If recent stories are true -– that operators of the Peanut Corporation plant in Georgia willfully failed to remove contaminated product from its shipments and did not clean equipment after contamination was identified –- it is hard to imagine that a doubling or tripling of inspections could have prevented this tragedy. News accounts indicate that Peanut Corporation executives actually identified the presence of salmonella in various products and PUT THEM ON THE MARKET ANYWAY.
Fortunately, this kind of conscious cheating is rare in a country like the United States. But, in order to help deter it, penalties for such willful misconduct must be beefed up (so to speak). I’m not suggesting we start executing food plant operators or safety inspectors found to be willfully negligent, as China has been doing recently. Though, for acts that serious, serious penalties are warranted. The penalties for knowingly putting contaminated foodstuffs into commerce need to be more than simple slaps on the wrist.
Finally, it’s worth repeating that we can never realistically eliminate all foodborne illness. The shear size and scope of the problem –- that is, bacteria and viruses are all around us all the time -– means that we must recognize there are diminishing marginal gains to be had from increased spending on food safety. Not that we should accept defeat, but that at some point we have to recognize that diverting more and more public resources to combating an intractable problem means having fewer resources to spend on other things -– like health care, education, occupational safety, etc. -– that could increase safety by a far greater amount.
On the other hand, there are a handful of regulatory changes that could both help the private sector combat foodborne illness while also lower the cost of food safety. For example, food irradiation is a safe and effective technology for killing or denaturing bacteria and viruses in and on foods, such as meat and poultry, grains, and even some fruits and vegetables. But, a variety of regulatory restrictions on the use of irradiation (as well as mandatory labeling that seems designed to scare consumers away from irradiated foods) make it uneconomical for food processors to use irradiation in the United States on a wide-scale basis. The most innovative breakthroughs in food biotechnology are rarely ever tested because the regulation of biotech plants and animals are too costly. And the more recent panic about nanotechnology, combined with burgeoning regulation in that field, could strangle in the crib some of the most innovative efforts to improve food safety.
Thus, FDA, USDA, and EPA -– the same regulatory agencies charged with ensuring that the American food supply is safe -– are actually contributing to lower safety by creating and maintaining poorly thought out rules regarding technology regulation. It ought to serve as a cautionary note that, in trying to make changes that will improve food safety, we need to be conscious that some well-intentioned efforts can actually make us less safe.
DOE Award Results in Several Patents, Potential Increased Coal Recovery
DOE Award Results in Several Patents, Potential Increased Coal Recovery
Energy Dept, February 9, 2009
Technology Addresses Economic, Environmental Waste Impoundment Issues
Washington, D.C. — A $13 million cooperative effort with the Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) over the past seven years has resulted in the successful demonstration of a novel technology that addresses a problem plaguing coal operators and environmentalists alike: separating fine coal particles from water and their ultimate use as a significant energy resource.
Researchers at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, Va., have developed and patented an advanced technology called a hyperbaric centrifuge that can successfully remove water from very fine coal slurries. During recent prototype tests at Arch Coal Company’s Cardinal plant in Logan County, W.Va., the technology reduced the moisture to a level that the waste coal can now be marketed commercially. The result is significant to the energy consumer in that U.S. coal producers each year discard large amounts of moisture-laden coal fines that can potentially be salvaged for energy use while simultaneously cleaning up the environment.
"We are heartened by the success of Virginia Tech’s technology because it represents a major step forward in clean coal separation technology while addressing environmental concerns associated with waste coal impoundments," said Dr. Victor K. Der, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. "The continued success and application of this technology holds promise for converting millions of tons of 'lost' energy into a valuable resource for the U.S. energy consumer."
Virginia Tech received the award from NETL as part of the Office of Fossil Energy's Hydrogen and Fuels program. Virginia Tech used the grant to develop the prototype centrifuge, evaluate its operation and design, and demonstrate it at coal-cleaning plants in Virginia, Alabama, and West Virginia. Several other technologies were also developed as part of the $13 million cooperative research effort.
Virginia Tech's Center for Advanced Separation Technologies (CAST) tested the centrifuge at three operating plants, including the most recent test at the Arch Coal plant, where waste coal slurry went through the centrifuge at a rate of 30 gallons per minute and was dewatered to 13-19 percent moisture with coal recovery greater than 97 percent. Virginia Tech, in conjunction with West Virginia University, formed CAST in 2001 under the sponsorship of NETL to develop advanced separation technologies.
The prototype unit tested at the Cardinal plant was constructed by Decanter Machine Company, Johnson City, Tenn., as part of a license agreement with Virginia Tech. Based on the successful test result, the company is currently building a full-size commercial unit with a capacity of 600 gallons per minute. Virginia Tech holds a U.S. patent on the technology, as well as international patents in seven countries.
Dr. Roe-Hoan Yoon, the lead developer of the technology at Virginia Tech, explains that the centrifuge applies a combination of air pressure and centrifugal force to successfully reduce significant levels of moisture in fine coal. He said that the idea came from basic research.
The success of the hyperbaric centrifuge is significant in the overall scheme of clean coal research in that the high moisture content of fine coal waste forces coal producers to discard the waste in storage areas called waste impoundments. Estimates indicate that these impoundments nationwide hold about 2 billion tons of fine coal in abandoned ponds and an additional 500 million to 800 million tons in active ponds. Technology that can recover these wastes would produce valuable resources to our Nation's energy supplies.
Removing moisture from very fine coal particles left over from the coal preparation process has been difficult in the past. Conventional methods such as thermal dryers or mechanical dewatering have either been too costly or have been unable to dewater ultrafine coal particles (0.1 millimeters or less). The hyperbaric centrifuge has successfully addressed those issues.
Virginia Tech researchers explain that the centrifuge, when combined with another Virginia Tech–developed clean coal technology called Microcel(TM), can remove both ash and water from the fine coal discarded at impoundments. These technologies will not only help coal producers minimize waste generation, but will also create small businesses recovering coal from existing waste impoundments.
Energy Dept, February 9, 2009
Technology Addresses Economic, Environmental Waste Impoundment Issues
Washington, D.C. — A $13 million cooperative effort with the Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) over the past seven years has resulted in the successful demonstration of a novel technology that addresses a problem plaguing coal operators and environmentalists alike: separating fine coal particles from water and their ultimate use as a significant energy resource.
Researchers at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg, Va., have developed and patented an advanced technology called a hyperbaric centrifuge that can successfully remove water from very fine coal slurries. During recent prototype tests at Arch Coal Company’s Cardinal plant in Logan County, W.Va., the technology reduced the moisture to a level that the waste coal can now be marketed commercially. The result is significant to the energy consumer in that U.S. coal producers each year discard large amounts of moisture-laden coal fines that can potentially be salvaged for energy use while simultaneously cleaning up the environment.
"We are heartened by the success of Virginia Tech’s technology because it represents a major step forward in clean coal separation technology while addressing environmental concerns associated with waste coal impoundments," said Dr. Victor K. Der, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy. "The continued success and application of this technology holds promise for converting millions of tons of 'lost' energy into a valuable resource for the U.S. energy consumer."
Virginia Tech received the award from NETL as part of the Office of Fossil Energy's Hydrogen and Fuels program. Virginia Tech used the grant to develop the prototype centrifuge, evaluate its operation and design, and demonstrate it at coal-cleaning plants in Virginia, Alabama, and West Virginia. Several other technologies were also developed as part of the $13 million cooperative research effort.
Virginia Tech's Center for Advanced Separation Technologies (CAST) tested the centrifuge at three operating plants, including the most recent test at the Arch Coal plant, where waste coal slurry went through the centrifuge at a rate of 30 gallons per minute and was dewatered to 13-19 percent moisture with coal recovery greater than 97 percent. Virginia Tech, in conjunction with West Virginia University, formed CAST in 2001 under the sponsorship of NETL to develop advanced separation technologies.
The prototype unit tested at the Cardinal plant was constructed by Decanter Machine Company, Johnson City, Tenn., as part of a license agreement with Virginia Tech. Based on the successful test result, the company is currently building a full-size commercial unit with a capacity of 600 gallons per minute. Virginia Tech holds a U.S. patent on the technology, as well as international patents in seven countries.
Dr. Roe-Hoan Yoon, the lead developer of the technology at Virginia Tech, explains that the centrifuge applies a combination of air pressure and centrifugal force to successfully reduce significant levels of moisture in fine coal. He said that the idea came from basic research.
The success of the hyperbaric centrifuge is significant in the overall scheme of clean coal research in that the high moisture content of fine coal waste forces coal producers to discard the waste in storage areas called waste impoundments. Estimates indicate that these impoundments nationwide hold about 2 billion tons of fine coal in abandoned ponds and an additional 500 million to 800 million tons in active ponds. Technology that can recover these wastes would produce valuable resources to our Nation's energy supplies.
Removing moisture from very fine coal particles left over from the coal preparation process has been difficult in the past. Conventional methods such as thermal dryers or mechanical dewatering have either been too costly or have been unable to dewater ultrafine coal particles (0.1 millimeters or less). The hyperbaric centrifuge has successfully addressed those issues.
Virginia Tech researchers explain that the centrifuge, when combined with another Virginia Tech–developed clean coal technology called Microcel(TM), can remove both ash and water from the fine coal discarded at impoundments. These technologies will not only help coal producers minimize waste generation, but will also create small businesses recovering coal from existing waste impoundments.
Conservative views on Biden's Munich Speech: Obama Administration Foreign Policy Projects Weakness and Confusion
Biden's Munich Speech: Obama Administration Foreign Policy Projects Weakness and Confusion. By Nile Gardiner, Ph.D.
Heritage, Feb 9, 2009
Full text w/references here
In a major speech at the February 7 Munich Security Conference,[1] Vice President Joe Biden outlined the Obama Administration's foreign policy vision for the first time on the world stage. It was an address designed to reach out to leaders in both Europe and the Middle East, "on behalf of a new Administration determined to set a new tone in Washington, and in America's relations around the world."
Biden's speech should be viewed as one of the weakest projections of U.S. leadership on foreign soil in recent memory. The message was confused, apologetic, over-conciliatory, and remarkably lacking in substance and detail. It was the kind of speech, heavy in platitudes and diplo-speak, that could easily have been given by a continental European bureaucrat nestled in Brussels, Paris, or Berlin. It was not the voice of the most powerful nation on earth.
The Vice President went to great lengths in his speech to avoid offending America's enemies, such as Iran and Hamas, or her strategic competitors, such as Russia. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the world was largely at peace rather than facing the threat of global terrorism or a dangerous rogue regime aggressively seeking nuclear weapons capability.
Biden's remarks touched on several key areas, from Iran to NATO reform--all of which gave major cause for concern--and left critical questions unanswered.
Iran
The Vice President confirmed the new Administration's willingness to enter into direct negotiations with the Islamist regime in Tehran.
In essence, Biden offered a quid pro quo deal with Iran--the kind the European Union has offered for several years with absolutely nothing to show for it except spectacular failure. Such a deal is based on the naïve premise that the Iranian theocracy is a normal state actor that plays by the rules of diplomacy and can be negotiated with. What was missing in Biden's remarks was any explicit statement of consequences--actions ranging from tougher economic and military sanctions or the use of force against Iran's nuclear facilities--that could be inflicted on the dictatorial government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the ruling mullahs if they do not comply. There was no appeal to European Union countries such as Germany to tighten their own sanctions on Tehran or calls for Russia and China to strengthen U.N. Security Council sanctions.
Missile Defense
The Vice President stated that the United States "will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective." However, Biden gave no pledge to press ahead with a third-site missile defense system in Eastern and Central Europe, sowing the seeds of further confusion in Poland and the Czech Republic, two key U.S. allies who have agreed to participate in the defense system by hosting missile interceptors and early warning radar. In addition, National Security Adviser James Jones confirmed in an interview with the British Observer newspaper that plans for third-site defenses had been "put on ice," a decision that, accord to according to a senior NATO official, is a clear overture to Moscow.[2]
Russia
Aside from a refusal to recognize the breakaway Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, there was little evidence in Biden's speech that the Obama Administration intends to adopt a tough line toward Russian aggression in its "Near Abroad" or attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbors in the Caucasus as well as Eastern Europe. Significantly, Biden made no mention of U.S. support for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in the NATO Membership Action Plan or Russia's brutal invasion of Georgia last summer.
The willingness of the Obama team to bring Moscow into its negotiations over Third Site sets a dangerous precedent and is a clear signal that the Russians may be given a bigger say over NATO expansion plans. As Biden put it in his speech, "the last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance--it is time to reset the button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should work together." Strategically, it would be both naïve and risky for the new Administration to turn a blind eye toward an increasingly belligerent and nationalist Moscow that is actively flexing its muscles in Europe and across the globe.
NATO
While reiterating the importance of the NATO alliance and the need for its renewal in the 21st century, the Vice President supports policies that will undermine the organization and weaken American influence within it. In Munich, Biden backed the full reintegration of France into "NATO structures," and French officers are reportedly in line to take two senior alliance command positions: Allied Command Transformation and Joint Command Lisbon.[3] Biden also made it clear in his Munich address that the United States will "support the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, (and) a fundamentally stronger NATO-EU partnership."
These changes would give Paris (and its key ally Berlin) an extraordinary degree of power and influence within the organization, out of all proportion to its minimal military role in alliance operations. Such a move would ultimately shift power away from Washington and London and toward continental Europe, undoubtedly paving the way for the development of a Franco-German driven European Union defense identity within NATO.
Afghanistan
Biden identified the war in Afghanistan as a top foreign policy priority for the Obama Administration, calling for close cooperation with America's allies in Europe as well as the government of Pakistan. The Vice President, however, avoided the thorny issue of many European nations' failure to pull their weight in the conflict, an oversight that projected weakness and an unwillingness to challenge European complacency and indifference.
Despite all the fashionable rhetoric in European capitals about Iraq being a distraction to the war against the Taliban, on the battlefields of Afghanistan over two-thirds of the more than 50,000 troops serving as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force are from the English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. These nations have also taken 85 percent of the casualties. Britain has more troops (8,900) in the country than all the other major European Union powers combined, many of which, like Germany, cower under dozens of "caveats" aimed at keeping their soldiers out of harm's way.
War on Terrorism
Significantly absent from the Vice President's address was any reference to the war on terrorism or the need for the United States and its allies to be prepared for a long hard battle against Islamist terrorism. Biden spoke in soft terms of "a shared struggle against extremism" and of "a small number of violent extremists [who] are beyond the call of reason," as well as the need to seek with the Muslim world "a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect." There was no indication given of the sheer scale of the global fight against al-Qaeda and its allies. Al-Qaeda is mentioned just once in Biden's speech, and only within the context of Afghanistan.
The Vice President also avoided directly mentioning terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel. There were no words of support for Israel's recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza, suggesting a significant shift away from open support for Israel by the new U.S. Administration.
Biden also chose to ignore altogether the extraordinary success of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Iraq through the surge and the huge improvement in security in the previously war-torn country that enabled the overwhelmingly peaceful Iraqi provincial elections to take place at the end of January.
A Celebration of Soft Power
Vice President Biden delivered what was in essence a quintessentially European-style speech on German soil. It was an address that tried to be all things to all people, lacking in concrete policy prescriptions and cloaked in vague statements designed to cause minimal offense in foreign capitals, including those of America's worst enemies. Biden's address was above all a celebration of "soft power," cynically re-branded by the Obama Administration as "smart power."
American leadership is not a popularity contest but the hard-nosed projection of U.S. interests. Rather than projecting strength and decisiveness internationally, the new Administration's approach to foreign policy appears muddled and incoherent. Biden's words revealed a foreign policy with a dangerously soft underbelly, one that will quickly be exploited by America's opponents on the world stage.
Washington must stand up to the Iranian nuclear threat, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the global menace of al-Qaeda, and Russian intimidation in Europe with strength, resolve, and conviction. A foreign policy capable of meeting such challenges must include a willingness to wield maximum force where necessary, deploy a comprehensive missile shield in Europe, and increase military spending in the defense of the United States and the free world.
Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., is director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage, Feb 9, 2009
Full text w/references here
In a major speech at the February 7 Munich Security Conference,[1] Vice President Joe Biden outlined the Obama Administration's foreign policy vision for the first time on the world stage. It was an address designed to reach out to leaders in both Europe and the Middle East, "on behalf of a new Administration determined to set a new tone in Washington, and in America's relations around the world."
Biden's speech should be viewed as one of the weakest projections of U.S. leadership on foreign soil in recent memory. The message was confused, apologetic, over-conciliatory, and remarkably lacking in substance and detail. It was the kind of speech, heavy in platitudes and diplo-speak, that could easily have been given by a continental European bureaucrat nestled in Brussels, Paris, or Berlin. It was not the voice of the most powerful nation on earth.
The Vice President went to great lengths in his speech to avoid offending America's enemies, such as Iran and Hamas, or her strategic competitors, such as Russia. One could have been forgiven for thinking that the world was largely at peace rather than facing the threat of global terrorism or a dangerous rogue regime aggressively seeking nuclear weapons capability.
Biden's remarks touched on several key areas, from Iran to NATO reform--all of which gave major cause for concern--and left critical questions unanswered.
Iran
The Vice President confirmed the new Administration's willingness to enter into direct negotiations with the Islamist regime in Tehran.
In essence, Biden offered a quid pro quo deal with Iran--the kind the European Union has offered for several years with absolutely nothing to show for it except spectacular failure. Such a deal is based on the naïve premise that the Iranian theocracy is a normal state actor that plays by the rules of diplomacy and can be negotiated with. What was missing in Biden's remarks was any explicit statement of consequences--actions ranging from tougher economic and military sanctions or the use of force against Iran's nuclear facilities--that could be inflicted on the dictatorial government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the ruling mullahs if they do not comply. There was no appeal to European Union countries such as Germany to tighten their own sanctions on Tehran or calls for Russia and China to strengthen U.N. Security Council sanctions.
Missile Defense
The Vice President stated that the United States "will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven to work and cost effective." However, Biden gave no pledge to press ahead with a third-site missile defense system in Eastern and Central Europe, sowing the seeds of further confusion in Poland and the Czech Republic, two key U.S. allies who have agreed to participate in the defense system by hosting missile interceptors and early warning radar. In addition, National Security Adviser James Jones confirmed in an interview with the British Observer newspaper that plans for third-site defenses had been "put on ice," a decision that, accord to according to a senior NATO official, is a clear overture to Moscow.[2]
Russia
Aside from a refusal to recognize the breakaway Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, there was little evidence in Biden's speech that the Obama Administration intends to adopt a tough line toward Russian aggression in its "Near Abroad" or attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbors in the Caucasus as well as Eastern Europe. Significantly, Biden made no mention of U.S. support for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in the NATO Membership Action Plan or Russia's brutal invasion of Georgia last summer.
The willingness of the Obama team to bring Moscow into its negotiations over Third Site sets a dangerous precedent and is a clear signal that the Russians may be given a bigger say over NATO expansion plans. As Biden put it in his speech, "the last few years have seen a dangerous drift in relations between Russia and the members of our Alliance--it is time to reset the button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should work together." Strategically, it would be both naïve and risky for the new Administration to turn a blind eye toward an increasingly belligerent and nationalist Moscow that is actively flexing its muscles in Europe and across the globe.
NATO
While reiterating the importance of the NATO alliance and the need for its renewal in the 21st century, the Vice President supports policies that will undermine the organization and weaken American influence within it. In Munich, Biden backed the full reintegration of France into "NATO structures," and French officers are reportedly in line to take two senior alliance command positions: Allied Command Transformation and Joint Command Lisbon.[3] Biden also made it clear in his Munich address that the United States will "support the further strengthening of European defense, an increased role for the European Union in preserving peace and security, (and) a fundamentally stronger NATO-EU partnership."
These changes would give Paris (and its key ally Berlin) an extraordinary degree of power and influence within the organization, out of all proportion to its minimal military role in alliance operations. Such a move would ultimately shift power away from Washington and London and toward continental Europe, undoubtedly paving the way for the development of a Franco-German driven European Union defense identity within NATO.
Afghanistan
Biden identified the war in Afghanistan as a top foreign policy priority for the Obama Administration, calling for close cooperation with America's allies in Europe as well as the government of Pakistan. The Vice President, however, avoided the thorny issue of many European nations' failure to pull their weight in the conflict, an oversight that projected weakness and an unwillingness to challenge European complacency and indifference.
Despite all the fashionable rhetoric in European capitals about Iraq being a distraction to the war against the Taliban, on the battlefields of Afghanistan over two-thirds of the more than 50,000 troops serving as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force are from the English-speaking countries of the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia. These nations have also taken 85 percent of the casualties. Britain has more troops (8,900) in the country than all the other major European Union powers combined, many of which, like Germany, cower under dozens of "caveats" aimed at keeping their soldiers out of harm's way.
War on Terrorism
Significantly absent from the Vice President's address was any reference to the war on terrorism or the need for the United States and its allies to be prepared for a long hard battle against Islamist terrorism. Biden spoke in soft terms of "a shared struggle against extremism" and of "a small number of violent extremists [who] are beyond the call of reason," as well as the need to seek with the Muslim world "a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect." There was no indication given of the sheer scale of the global fight against al-Qaeda and its allies. Al-Qaeda is mentioned just once in Biden's speech, and only within the context of Afghanistan.
The Vice President also avoided directly mentioning terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel. There were no words of support for Israel's recent offensive against Hamas in Gaza, suggesting a significant shift away from open support for Israel by the new U.S. Administration.
Biden also chose to ignore altogether the extraordinary success of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Iraq through the surge and the huge improvement in security in the previously war-torn country that enabled the overwhelmingly peaceful Iraqi provincial elections to take place at the end of January.
A Celebration of Soft Power
Vice President Biden delivered what was in essence a quintessentially European-style speech on German soil. It was an address that tried to be all things to all people, lacking in concrete policy prescriptions and cloaked in vague statements designed to cause minimal offense in foreign capitals, including those of America's worst enemies. Biden's address was above all a celebration of "soft power," cynically re-branded by the Obama Administration as "smart power."
American leadership is not a popularity contest but the hard-nosed projection of U.S. interests. Rather than projecting strength and decisiveness internationally, the new Administration's approach to foreign policy appears muddled and incoherent. Biden's words revealed a foreign policy with a dangerously soft underbelly, one that will quickly be exploited by America's opponents on the world stage.
Washington must stand up to the Iranian nuclear threat, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the global menace of al-Qaeda, and Russian intimidation in Europe with strength, resolve, and conviction. A foreign policy capable of meeting such challenges must include a willingness to wield maximum force where necessary, deploy a comprehensive missile shield in Europe, and increase military spending in the defense of the United States and the free world.
Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., is director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
Nick Cohen, The Observer, on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism
A right hook to the left, by Nick Cohen
The Observer, Sunday, February 8, 2009
It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share. Few of Goldberg's contemporaries will grant him the same courtesy. He lives in a western culture where "smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident in the truth of their ill-informed opinions" accuse him of being "a fascist and a Nazi" simply because he is a conservative. Meanwhile, the heart-throb-savant George Clooney can assert that "the liberal movement morally has stood on the right side".
Behind the insults and the self-righteousness is the assumption that politics runs on a continuum from far left to far right; that if David Cameron were to keep moving rightwards, he would end up a Nazi. Goldberg sets out to knock down this false paradigm and show that much of what Americans call liberalism, and we call leftism, has its origins in fascism.
I say "knock down", but that is too mild a phrase. Liberal Fascism is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal. The title comes from HG Wells, the most strenuous intellectual advocate of totalitarianism on the early-20th-century British left. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti," he told the Oxford Union in 1932, "for enlightened Nazis. The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. The Fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition of a far grander scale."
Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.
I agree that all totalitarianisms are essentially the same, and that far leftists combined with far rightists in the 1920s and 1930s and are doing so again now. But I had difficulties with Goldberg's concept of totalitarian unity. Communists killed different people to fascists. If you were a peasant farmer in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they allowed you to live - as long as you did not cross them. Marxism was the greatest disaster the 20th-century peasantry endured. Death by execution or in a manmade famine could await, regardless of whether you kept your nose out of politics. While Goldberg's definition of fascism as the "right wing of the socialist movement" is true in as far as it goes, it does not explain the selectiveness of the rival terrors.
In America, flustered liberal critics have had far greater difficulty with the notion that they and their predecessors are the inheritors of ideas that began in the fascist movement. Goldberg certainly leaves them little left to be proud of as he provides an alternative history of an America that Simon Schama lacks the intellectual courage to confront.
He begins with Woodrow Wilson and shows that before Mussolini came to power, a Democratic president imposed a militarised state. When America entered the First World War, the progressives of the day used the conflict as an excuse to arrest dissidents, close newspapers and recruit tens of thousands of neighbourhood spies.
Wilson began the overlap between progressive and fascistic politics, which continued for the rest of the 20th century. Avant-garde Nazi philosophers - Heidegger, Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt - are venerated by nominal leftists in the postmodern universities, who love their contempt for traditional morality and standards of truth. Nazism was the first example of modern identity politics. All that mattered was whether you were German, Slav or Jew.
Beginning with the Black Panthers, multiculturalism has also placed racial and religious identity above all else and beyond the reach of rational argument. Fascism was a pagan movement, whose mystic tropes are repeated by new age healers, vegetarians and greens.
I could go on and Goldberg does go on. By the end, I began to weary not of his argument, but of his habit of protesting too much. Repeatedly he insists that he does not want to allege that, for instance, Hillary Clinton's admittedly sinister desire for the state to take the place of the family makes her a totalitarian, merely that her ideas come from the totalitarian movement.
But he clearly does want to be able to accuse the Clintons of fascism and his disavowals lack conviction. Like the leftists who abuse him, he is in danger of shouting "fascist" so often that he will miss the real thing when it appears. And miss, too, the better side of his enemies. I dug out George Clooney's full quote - which Goldberg doesn't give - and discovered that the reason he thought that liberals had been on "the right side" was that they had "thought that blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and women should be able to vote, McCarthy was wrong, Vietnam was a mistake". For all the undoubted crimes of the left, is that not at least a plea of mitigation?
Liberal Fascism is a bracing and stylish examination of political history. That it is being published at a time when Goldberg's free market has failed and big government and charismatic presidents are on their way back in no way invalidates his work. Hard times test intellectuals and, for all its occasional false notes, Goldberg's case survives.
The Observer, Sunday, February 8, 2009
It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share. Few of Goldberg's contemporaries will grant him the same courtesy. He lives in a western culture where "smug, liberal know-nothings, sublimely confident in the truth of their ill-informed opinions" accuse him of being "a fascist and a Nazi" simply because he is a conservative. Meanwhile, the heart-throb-savant George Clooney can assert that "the liberal movement morally has stood on the right side".
Behind the insults and the self-righteousness is the assumption that politics runs on a continuum from far left to far right; that if David Cameron were to keep moving rightwards, he would end up a Nazi. Goldberg sets out to knock down this false paradigm and show that much of what Americans call liberalism, and we call leftism, has its origins in fascism.
I say "knock down", but that is too mild a phrase. Liberal Fascism is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal. The title comes from HG Wells, the most strenuous intellectual advocate of totalitarianism on the early-20th-century British left. "I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti," he told the Oxford Union in 1932, "for enlightened Nazis. The world is sick of parliamentary democracy. The Fascist party is Italy. The Communist is Russia. The Fascists of liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition of a far grander scale."
Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.
I agree that all totalitarianisms are essentially the same, and that far leftists combined with far rightists in the 1920s and 1930s and are doing so again now. But I had difficulties with Goldberg's concept of totalitarian unity. Communists killed different people to fascists. If you were a peasant farmer in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy or Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they allowed you to live - as long as you did not cross them. Marxism was the greatest disaster the 20th-century peasantry endured. Death by execution or in a manmade famine could await, regardless of whether you kept your nose out of politics. While Goldberg's definition of fascism as the "right wing of the socialist movement" is true in as far as it goes, it does not explain the selectiveness of the rival terrors.
In America, flustered liberal critics have had far greater difficulty with the notion that they and their predecessors are the inheritors of ideas that began in the fascist movement. Goldberg certainly leaves them little left to be proud of as he provides an alternative history of an America that Simon Schama lacks the intellectual courage to confront.
He begins with Woodrow Wilson and shows that before Mussolini came to power, a Democratic president imposed a militarised state. When America entered the First World War, the progressives of the day used the conflict as an excuse to arrest dissidents, close newspapers and recruit tens of thousands of neighbourhood spies.
Wilson began the overlap between progressive and fascistic politics, which continued for the rest of the 20th century. Avant-garde Nazi philosophers - Heidegger, Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt - are venerated by nominal leftists in the postmodern universities, who love their contempt for traditional morality and standards of truth. Nazism was the first example of modern identity politics. All that mattered was whether you were German, Slav or Jew.
Beginning with the Black Panthers, multiculturalism has also placed racial and religious identity above all else and beyond the reach of rational argument. Fascism was a pagan movement, whose mystic tropes are repeated by new age healers, vegetarians and greens.
I could go on and Goldberg does go on. By the end, I began to weary not of his argument, but of his habit of protesting too much. Repeatedly he insists that he does not want to allege that, for instance, Hillary Clinton's admittedly sinister desire for the state to take the place of the family makes her a totalitarian, merely that her ideas come from the totalitarian movement.
But he clearly does want to be able to accuse the Clintons of fascism and his disavowals lack conviction. Like the leftists who abuse him, he is in danger of shouting "fascist" so often that he will miss the real thing when it appears. And miss, too, the better side of his enemies. I dug out George Clooney's full quote - which Goldberg doesn't give - and discovered that the reason he thought that liberals had been on "the right side" was that they had "thought that blacks should be allowed to sit at the front of the bus and women should be able to vote, McCarthy was wrong, Vietnam was a mistake". For all the undoubted crimes of the left, is that not at least a plea of mitigation?
Liberal Fascism is a bracing and stylish examination of political history. That it is being published at a time when Goldberg's free market has failed and big government and charismatic presidents are on their way back in no way invalidates his work. Hard times test intellectuals and, for all its occasional false notes, Goldberg's case survives.
Partisanship and Extremism
Partisanship and Extremism, by Henry Farrell
Cato Unbound, February 6, 2009 @ 10:19 am
I applaud Nancy Rosenblum’s effort to rehabilitate partisanship. My major regret is that I didn’t know about her book sooner. I’ve just had an [1] essay published which defends partisanship, and which would have been better if it had been informed by her work.
My response will focus on how Rosenblum’s arguments apply to the role of political blogs. Blogs have a dubious reputation among pundits and political commentators, precisely because of their vigorous and unrelenting partisanship. The historical complaints that Rosenblum documents are all well and alive in the debate over blogs’ depraving influence. David Brooks’ [2] NYTcolumn attacking leftwing blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is an especially striking example:
Rosenblum suggests that this broad animus against partisanship descends from early twentieth century Progressives’ detestation for party machines. This led to a vaunting of political “independence” and a corresponding distaste for strong partisanship. She argues that these implicit biases also afflict the arguments of contemporary political theorists such as James Fishkin (also participating in this seminar), who prize political deliberation.
Again, blogs provide an interesting test case. Fishkin [4] harks back to a Madisonian vision of politics that he suggests has been corroded by political parties more interested in winning elections than in thoughtful deliberation. He seeks to structure deliberation so as to minimize what he sees as disruptive partisan extremism and maximize the potential for disinterested discussion. Blogs are anathematic to this vision of politics. Bloggers are typically at least as interested in winning the argument as in discerning the truth. The empirical evidence that [5] political bloggers and [6] blog readers are sharply divided along partisan lines is emphatic.
However, as Rosenblum suggests, partisan argument of the kind that blogs engage in can play a valuable democratic role. They help structure a “system of conflict” in which “discordant values, opinions, issues, and policies” are “identified, selected, and refined.” As I argued a couple of years back in the Boston Review:
Chait is being critical, but from Rosenblum’s perspective, he’s paying bloggers a backhanded class of a compliment. Rosenblum argues that one of the key benefits of partisanship is that it provides a more inclusive and encompassing vision of politics than single issue groups ever could. That said, it may be that he’s paying too much of a compliment. Blogs may not be partisan in exactly the ways that Rosenblum prizes. More on this later.
One could extend Rosenblum’s arguments about the benefits of partisanship for political argument to less directly political fora too. Partisanship may also usefully help mobilize individuals to participate in a broader public sphere of debate and argument. The canonical example of a thriving “public sphere,” according to deliberation theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, was the coffee house society of eighteenth-century London. Yet as historian [8] Brian Cowan has argued, this sphere of purportedly civilized debate was “born out of the practical exigencies of partisan political conflict.” So too the modern political blogosphere, which not only has political consequences, but is also opening up a broader set of conversations about politics. Indeed, today’s bloggers are arguably more “civil” than their seventeenth and eighteenth century counterparts:
So partisanship is a feature of blogs, not a bug. Furthermore, Rosenblum’s account of partisanship might be extended to criticize parties in a way that isn’t too far removed from leftwing “netroots” bloggers’ critique of the Democratic Party. More specifically, I think Rosenblum’s claims suggest that partisanship can be used as a metric to evaluate the democratic contribution of parties.
Bringing this out explicitly might help elucidate an earlier debate about this book between [9] Rosenblum and [10] Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia University. Melissa argues that the internal openness of parties to debate and to input from “citizen partisans” is a key factor determining whether partisanship will have the benign effects that Rosenblum argues. Rosenblum, while recognizing that this is a legitimate concern, argues that grassroots participation is not the only means through which partisan deliberation takes place, and seems to imply that lack of openness is only a substantial problem in extreme cases (where parties are captured by small sectional interest groups, or when groups are systematically excluded from participation in politics).
I think that Melissa’s case that parties should be more open to “citizen partisans” is stronger than Rosenblum suggests. If parties are laudable because of their potential for creatively reimagining the disputes that structure politics, than we have a way to evaluate how parties measure up to their partisan role. Parties that refuse to engage in such creativity, and instead accept the system as it is (even if they are systematically disadvantaged by it), are falling down on their job. And there is good reason to believe that party leaders (who are those who have done well in the system as it is) are more likely to be inclined towards this kind of small-c conservatism than are grassroots activists, and thus more likely to be in need of correction.
This, for example, was the basis of the “netroots” leftwing bloggers’ critique of the Democratic Party — that a supine leadership had succumbed to a corrupt form of bipartisanship in which they were simply unwilling to vigorously oppose Republicans and try to build a new partisan coalition. There is good reason to suspect that this critique was for the most part correct.
Of course, this kind of capture is a problem that can never be resolved permanently. As Alessandro Pizzorno argues, the best we can hope for is a cycle in which yesterday’s reformers, if successful, are likely to become tomorrow’s establishment to be challenged in turn again. But relatively “open” parties, precisely because they are more subject to this cycle, are more likely to be ones in which reformers can periodically seize control, and hence to fulfill their democratic vocation than closed ones.
All this said, Rosenblum’s arguments perhaps provide the basis for an interesting critique of political bloggers and blog readers; that they aren’t partisan enough. This would surely be a first in contemporary debate. As I hinted in my discussion of Chait above, bloggers and blog readers may not always be partisan in the ways that Rosenblum describes. Sometimes, they appear more like what she terms “extremists,” whom she criticizes for political hubris. I don’t think that this potential criticism sticks (although I do think that somewhat related kinds of criticism might), because I don’t think that extremism, as Rosenblum defines it, is as normatively objectionable as she suggests it is.
Rosenblum’s critique of extremism is only referred to in passing in her essay, although it is developed at length in her book. She draws a sharp distinction between partisanship and political extremism, arguing that extremism isn’t the opposite of centrism, but rather an absence of the kinds of accommodating democratic values that partisans possess. Extremists “disdain compromise” and are unconcerned with outcomes. They adopt utterly unyielding positions in politics. This is in contrast to partisans, whom Rosenblum sees as being inclined towards inclusiveness, accommodation, and seeking to persuade a majority of the rightness of their position. Rosenblum describes extremism as hubristic, morally reprehensible, tyrannical, and despotic.
I suspect that bloggers and blog readers may sometimes be singleminded in the sense that Rosenblum suggests. While bloggers and blog readers are clearly partisan, recent evidence indicates that they also are much more ideologically coherent than earlier work (including my own) would suggest, and very likely ideologically single minded on a limited number of key issues.
A good example is torture. The Obama administration and Democratic Party leaders are adopting an eminently partisan (in Rosenblum’s sense of the word) position on torture — while seeking to outlaw it, they are also apparently pursuing compromise by failing to pursue indictments for officials and government agents who authorized torture and carried it out in 2000–2008, so as to build a broader political coalition. Many leftwing bloggers, in contrast, are adopting an uncompromising and “extremist” position arguing that compromise on torture is utterly wrong, and that failing to pursue torturers effectively legitimizes political actions that are utterly illegitimate. Leftwing bloggers’ unyieldingness on issues such as torture and the Iraq war goes together with partisan accommodationism on other issues, but isn’t tempered by it. While these bloggers might readily support an economically centrist candidate for a red-state Congressional district, I would be startled if they ever supported an apologist for torture.
So are these “extremist” bloggers morally reprehensible because they aren’t open to compromise on issues such as torture? I would suggest not, for two reasons. One (which I suspect Rosenblum might accept) is that on some fundamental issues, democratic accommodation should take second place to the basic values of a just society. The ethic of partisanship, however beneficial, is surely a second order value rather than a first order one, and may reasonably be violated under some conditions. Here, while liberalism may require us not to hold unconsidered values, I am not at all sure that it requires us to be ready to seek compromise on values or issues that we hold to be foundational for any even marginally decent political system.
The other is that uncompromisingness can sometimes have specifically democratic virtues too, even apart from the underlying values that it represents. Even if it is not intended as an act of persuasion, it may serve to persuade others. The sincerity and tenacity with which people hold to a position, even when it is not politically expedient or carries serious costs, may be a convincing reason for others to consider whether this position, however unpopular, has merit. One woman’s unreasonable obduracy may be another woman’s bearing witness. As Rosenblum herself acknowledges, “extremism” is one of the most serious accusations that one can make against a political actor or set of actors. I personally would prefer if it were only used to refer to actors who are not prepared to accept democratic norms in any meaningful way.
Now of course this isn’t to say that bloggers (or others) shouldn’t be criticized — I think that Max Weber’s account of political responsibility (which is a kissing cousin of Rosenblum’s arguments about the ethic of partisanship) provides a useful basis for critique. But since I am over my word limit, it may be best to leave that to another post or comment.
Full article w/references here.
Cato Unbound, February 6, 2009 @ 10:19 am
I applaud Nancy Rosenblum’s effort to rehabilitate partisanship. My major regret is that I didn’t know about her book sooner. I’ve just had an [1] essay published which defends partisanship, and which would have been better if it had been informed by her work.
My response will focus on how Rosenblum’s arguments apply to the role of political blogs. Blogs have a dubious reputation among pundits and political commentators, precisely because of their vigorous and unrelenting partisanship. The historical complaints that Rosenblum documents are all well and alive in the debate over blogs’ depraving influence. David Brooks’ [2] NYTcolumn attacking leftwing blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is an especially striking example:
The Keyboard Kingpin, a.k.a. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, sits at his computer, fires up his Web site, Daily Kos, and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.The reader who is able to look past Brooks’ extraordinary metaphors (when confronted with squadrons of rabid, venom-unleashing command-lambs, mere [3] fascist octopi must surely slither away in embarrassment) will see all the traditional tropes of anti-partisanship that Rosenblum identifies — lack of independence, mindlessness, vague intimations of authoritarian control, and corrupt clandestine relationships.
Rosenblum suggests that this broad animus against partisanship descends from early twentieth century Progressives’ detestation for party machines. This led to a vaunting of political “independence” and a corresponding distaste for strong partisanship. She argues that these implicit biases also afflict the arguments of contemporary political theorists such as James Fishkin (also participating in this seminar), who prize political deliberation.
Again, blogs provide an interesting test case. Fishkin [4] harks back to a Madisonian vision of politics that he suggests has been corroded by political parties more interested in winning elections than in thoughtful deliberation. He seeks to structure deliberation so as to minimize what he sees as disruptive partisan extremism and maximize the potential for disinterested discussion. Blogs are anathematic to this vision of politics. Bloggers are typically at least as interested in winning the argument as in discerning the truth. The empirical evidence that [5] political bloggers and [6] blog readers are sharply divided along partisan lines is emphatic.
However, as Rosenblum suggests, partisan argument of the kind that blogs engage in can play a valuable democratic role. They help structure a “system of conflict” in which “discordant values, opinions, issues, and policies” are “identified, selected, and refined.” As I argued a couple of years back in the Boston Review:
Exactly because the blogosphere involves clashes between strongly divergentI could have added, as [7] Jonathan Chait does, that bloggers reshape political debate along specifically partisan lines.
opinions, it is beginning to affect other spheres of political debate. The
blogosphere serves as a crucible in which politically useful and interesting
interpretations of important issues are forged and tested. Bloggers’ ability to
take up a new political issue, toss different interpretations back and forth
among themselves, point out flaws, and arrive at final viewpoints makes them a
highly valuable resource for political professionals and commentators in search
of novel and salient ways of framing issues.
The netroots are scornful of single-issue liberal groups — or, really, any
liberals at all who are not wholly dedicated to the cause of Democratic victory
… The netroots’ dream is of a liberal army of grassroots activists, pundits,
policy wonks, and politicians all marching more or less in lockstep.
Chait is being critical, but from Rosenblum’s perspective, he’s paying bloggers a backhanded class of a compliment. Rosenblum argues that one of the key benefits of partisanship is that it provides a more inclusive and encompassing vision of politics than single issue groups ever could. That said, it may be that he’s paying too much of a compliment. Blogs may not be partisan in exactly the ways that Rosenblum prizes. More on this later.
One could extend Rosenblum’s arguments about the benefits of partisanship for political argument to less directly political fora too. Partisanship may also usefully help mobilize individuals to participate in a broader public sphere of debate and argument. The canonical example of a thriving “public sphere,” according to deliberation theorists such as Jurgen Habermas, was the coffee house society of eighteenth-century London. Yet as historian [8] Brian Cowan has argued, this sphere of purportedly civilized debate was “born out of the practical exigencies of partisan political conflict.” So too the modern political blogosphere, which not only has political consequences, but is also opening up a broader set of conversations about politics. Indeed, today’s bloggers are arguably more “civil” than their seventeenth and eighteenth century counterparts:
In the course of a heated debate in the Amsterdam Coffeehouse in 1683, the whig
provocateur Titus Oates was struck several times over the head with a cane by
one of his opponents. Oates could not retaliate in kind, and so he responded by
throwing his dish of hot coffee in the eyes of his assailant.
So partisanship is a feature of blogs, not a bug. Furthermore, Rosenblum’s account of partisanship might be extended to criticize parties in a way that isn’t too far removed from leftwing “netroots” bloggers’ critique of the Democratic Party. More specifically, I think Rosenblum’s claims suggest that partisanship can be used as a metric to evaluate the democratic contribution of parties.
Bringing this out explicitly might help elucidate an earlier debate about this book between [9] Rosenblum and [10] Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia University. Melissa argues that the internal openness of parties to debate and to input from “citizen partisans” is a key factor determining whether partisanship will have the benign effects that Rosenblum argues. Rosenblum, while recognizing that this is a legitimate concern, argues that grassroots participation is not the only means through which partisan deliberation takes place, and seems to imply that lack of openness is only a substantial problem in extreme cases (where parties are captured by small sectional interest groups, or when groups are systematically excluded from participation in politics).
I think that Melissa’s case that parties should be more open to “citizen partisans” is stronger than Rosenblum suggests. If parties are laudable because of their potential for creatively reimagining the disputes that structure politics, than we have a way to evaluate how parties measure up to their partisan role. Parties that refuse to engage in such creativity, and instead accept the system as it is (even if they are systematically disadvantaged by it), are falling down on their job. And there is good reason to believe that party leaders (who are those who have done well in the system as it is) are more likely to be inclined towards this kind of small-c conservatism than are grassroots activists, and thus more likely to be in need of correction.
This, for example, was the basis of the “netroots” leftwing bloggers’ critique of the Democratic Party — that a supine leadership had succumbed to a corrupt form of bipartisanship in which they were simply unwilling to vigorously oppose Republicans and try to build a new partisan coalition. There is good reason to suspect that this critique was for the most part correct.
Of course, this kind of capture is a problem that can never be resolved permanently. As Alessandro Pizzorno argues, the best we can hope for is a cycle in which yesterday’s reformers, if successful, are likely to become tomorrow’s establishment to be challenged in turn again. But relatively “open” parties, precisely because they are more subject to this cycle, are more likely to be ones in which reformers can periodically seize control, and hence to fulfill their democratic vocation than closed ones.
All this said, Rosenblum’s arguments perhaps provide the basis for an interesting critique of political bloggers and blog readers; that they aren’t partisan enough. This would surely be a first in contemporary debate. As I hinted in my discussion of Chait above, bloggers and blog readers may not always be partisan in the ways that Rosenblum describes. Sometimes, they appear more like what she terms “extremists,” whom she criticizes for political hubris. I don’t think that this potential criticism sticks (although I do think that somewhat related kinds of criticism might), because I don’t think that extremism, as Rosenblum defines it, is as normatively objectionable as she suggests it is.
Rosenblum’s critique of extremism is only referred to in passing in her essay, although it is developed at length in her book. She draws a sharp distinction between partisanship and political extremism, arguing that extremism isn’t the opposite of centrism, but rather an absence of the kinds of accommodating democratic values that partisans possess. Extremists “disdain compromise” and are unconcerned with outcomes. They adopt utterly unyielding positions in politics. This is in contrast to partisans, whom Rosenblum sees as being inclined towards inclusiveness, accommodation, and seeking to persuade a majority of the rightness of their position. Rosenblum describes extremism as hubristic, morally reprehensible, tyrannical, and despotic.
I suspect that bloggers and blog readers may sometimes be singleminded in the sense that Rosenblum suggests. While bloggers and blog readers are clearly partisan, recent evidence indicates that they also are much more ideologically coherent than earlier work (including my own) would suggest, and very likely ideologically single minded on a limited number of key issues.
A good example is torture. The Obama administration and Democratic Party leaders are adopting an eminently partisan (in Rosenblum’s sense of the word) position on torture — while seeking to outlaw it, they are also apparently pursuing compromise by failing to pursue indictments for officials and government agents who authorized torture and carried it out in 2000–2008, so as to build a broader political coalition. Many leftwing bloggers, in contrast, are adopting an uncompromising and “extremist” position arguing that compromise on torture is utterly wrong, and that failing to pursue torturers effectively legitimizes political actions that are utterly illegitimate. Leftwing bloggers’ unyieldingness on issues such as torture and the Iraq war goes together with partisan accommodationism on other issues, but isn’t tempered by it. While these bloggers might readily support an economically centrist candidate for a red-state Congressional district, I would be startled if they ever supported an apologist for torture.
So are these “extremist” bloggers morally reprehensible because they aren’t open to compromise on issues such as torture? I would suggest not, for two reasons. One (which I suspect Rosenblum might accept) is that on some fundamental issues, democratic accommodation should take second place to the basic values of a just society. The ethic of partisanship, however beneficial, is surely a second order value rather than a first order one, and may reasonably be violated under some conditions. Here, while liberalism may require us not to hold unconsidered values, I am not at all sure that it requires us to be ready to seek compromise on values or issues that we hold to be foundational for any even marginally decent political system.
The other is that uncompromisingness can sometimes have specifically democratic virtues too, even apart from the underlying values that it represents. Even if it is not intended as an act of persuasion, it may serve to persuade others. The sincerity and tenacity with which people hold to a position, even when it is not politically expedient or carries serious costs, may be a convincing reason for others to consider whether this position, however unpopular, has merit. One woman’s unreasonable obduracy may be another woman’s bearing witness. As Rosenblum herself acknowledges, “extremism” is one of the most serious accusations that one can make against a political actor or set of actors. I personally would prefer if it were only used to refer to actors who are not prepared to accept democratic norms in any meaningful way.
Now of course this isn’t to say that bloggers (or others) shouldn’t be criticized — I think that Max Weber’s account of political responsibility (which is a kissing cousin of Rosenblum’s arguments about the ethic of partisanship) provides a useful basis for critique. But since I am over my word limit, it may be best to leave that to another post or comment.
Full article w/references here.
University Partnership Aims to Fight HIV/AIDS More Effectively
University Partnership Aims to Fight HIV/AIDS More Effectively. By Erika Gebel
Gates Foundation grant supports joint effort by Johns Hopkins, Makerere
Baltimore — A new partnership between universities in the United States and Africa aims to be an agent for change in improving health outcomes for those afflicted with HIV-related diseases.
With help from a $4.97 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, seeks to enhance research and improve health in Uganda and East Africa.
There are 33 million existing cases of HIV/AIDS worldwide and that number is growing by millions each year, according to the World Health Organization. In 2007 alone, AIDS took the lives of 2 million people; 1.5 million of the victims lived in Africa.
To combat this growing epidemic, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), initially passed in 2003 and then reauthorized in 2008 for an additional five years, has provided $18.8 billion for the fight against AIDS. It is the largest commitment by any nation in history against a single disease. (See “Bush’s Successful HIV/AIDS Program Looks to Next Five Years.”)
Universities, corporations and private foundations in the United States also are joining in the battle against AIDS through funding and research programs.
Makerere University, established in 1922, is one of Africa’s oldest universities. It has 30,000 undergraduate and 3,000 postgraduate students. Through international collaborations with a number of institutions — including a 25-year relationship with Johns Hopkins — Makerere has established itself as a global center for research, especially concerning HIV-related health outcomes.
Makerere University has also made community outreach a central part of its mission.
“Makerere has a very active place in Uganda. They are very progressive,” said Dr. David Peters, an associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “At Makerere, they don’t just sit in ivory towers. There are very few institutions that want to think that way.”
Peters, along with George Pariyo, head of the Department of Health Policy, Planning, and Management at the Makerere University School of Public Health, leads the study.
On December 1, Makerere University established a College of Health Sciences as a semi-autonomous unit within the university. The college houses the School of Biomedical Sciences, the School of Public Health, the School of Medicine and the School of Allied Health Sciences.
This change in structure demonstrated to Peters that the place was ripe for other changes he hopes will come as a part of the new funding.
“With this grant,” Peters said, “we want to plan how to, in the future, make the Makerere College of Health Sciences a leader, with a focus on improving health outcomes.”
INITIAL STEPS
The project is still in its infancy. The initial phase, scheduled to last two years, includes a needs assessment that will be followed by development and implementation of a strategic plan over the following eight years as a joint enterprise between an advisory panel (made up of deans from each school in Makerere’s College of Health Sciences and Johns Hopkins faculty) and an advisory council drawn from Ugandan government and civil society.
Ground work and data gathering for the project’s needs assessment phase will be accomplished by teams made up largely of students and led by Makerere faculty members and support personnel from Johns Hopkins, according to Peters.
Peters said part of the team’s work will involve evaluating the community-based health training currently in Uganda and determining how the university might promote local health initiatives involving HIV most effectively. The team also plans to test innovative strategies, such as a voucher system, to see if the university can influence Uganda’s health systems.
Another aim is identifying how the university can support implementation of research-based health programs. A few years ago, researchers from Makerere University led a study that found circumcision could reduce the risk of acquiring an HIV infection by 48 percent. Peters wants to know how such research could influence policies that could improve the health of Ugandans.
Some research arising from the initiative could be used in scholarly articles, but Peters emphasized new information will have multiple uses.
“The audience isn’t always scientists,” he said. “You may want to put policy briefs in places read by policymakers. We plan to have a range of products.”
After identifying Uganda’s health needs and coming up with a plan to meet them, Peters is optimistic that Makerere University will expand its capacity to improve health outcomes in Uganda and East Africa.
“So it’s very much ‘Stay tuned,’” Peters said. “We have a lot to learn about what it means to be a change agent.”
Gates Foundation grant supports joint effort by Johns Hopkins, Makerere
Baltimore — A new partnership between universities in the United States and Africa aims to be an agent for change in improving health outcomes for those afflicted with HIV-related diseases.
With help from a $4.97 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, seeks to enhance research and improve health in Uganda and East Africa.
There are 33 million existing cases of HIV/AIDS worldwide and that number is growing by millions each year, according to the World Health Organization. In 2007 alone, AIDS took the lives of 2 million people; 1.5 million of the victims lived in Africa.
To combat this growing epidemic, the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), initially passed in 2003 and then reauthorized in 2008 for an additional five years, has provided $18.8 billion for the fight against AIDS. It is the largest commitment by any nation in history against a single disease. (See “Bush’s Successful HIV/AIDS Program Looks to Next Five Years.”)
Universities, corporations and private foundations in the United States also are joining in the battle against AIDS through funding and research programs.
Makerere University, established in 1922, is one of Africa’s oldest universities. It has 30,000 undergraduate and 3,000 postgraduate students. Through international collaborations with a number of institutions — including a 25-year relationship with Johns Hopkins — Makerere has established itself as a global center for research, especially concerning HIV-related health outcomes.
Makerere University has also made community outreach a central part of its mission.
“Makerere has a very active place in Uganda. They are very progressive,” said Dr. David Peters, an associate professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “At Makerere, they don’t just sit in ivory towers. There are very few institutions that want to think that way.”
Peters, along with George Pariyo, head of the Department of Health Policy, Planning, and Management at the Makerere University School of Public Health, leads the study.
On December 1, Makerere University established a College of Health Sciences as a semi-autonomous unit within the university. The college houses the School of Biomedical Sciences, the School of Public Health, the School of Medicine and the School of Allied Health Sciences.
This change in structure demonstrated to Peters that the place was ripe for other changes he hopes will come as a part of the new funding.
“With this grant,” Peters said, “we want to plan how to, in the future, make the Makerere College of Health Sciences a leader, with a focus on improving health outcomes.”
INITIAL STEPS
The project is still in its infancy. The initial phase, scheduled to last two years, includes a needs assessment that will be followed by development and implementation of a strategic plan over the following eight years as a joint enterprise between an advisory panel (made up of deans from each school in Makerere’s College of Health Sciences and Johns Hopkins faculty) and an advisory council drawn from Ugandan government and civil society.
Ground work and data gathering for the project’s needs assessment phase will be accomplished by teams made up largely of students and led by Makerere faculty members and support personnel from Johns Hopkins, according to Peters.
Peters said part of the team’s work will involve evaluating the community-based health training currently in Uganda and determining how the university might promote local health initiatives involving HIV most effectively. The team also plans to test innovative strategies, such as a voucher system, to see if the university can influence Uganda’s health systems.
Another aim is identifying how the university can support implementation of research-based health programs. A few years ago, researchers from Makerere University led a study that found circumcision could reduce the risk of acquiring an HIV infection by 48 percent. Peters wants to know how such research could influence policies that could improve the health of Ugandans.
Some research arising from the initiative could be used in scholarly articles, but Peters emphasized new information will have multiple uses.
“The audience isn’t always scientists,” he said. “You may want to put policy briefs in places read by policymakers. We plan to have a range of products.”
After identifying Uganda’s health needs and coming up with a plan to meet them, Peters is optimistic that Makerere University will expand its capacity to improve health outcomes in Uganda and East Africa.
“So it’s very much ‘Stay tuned,’” Peters said. “We have a lot to learn about what it means to be a change agent.”
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Excited with capital E! - White House social secretary is stylish, focused
White House social secretary is stylish, focused. By By Lola Ogunnaike, CNN Entertainment Correspondent
CNN, Feb 08, 2009
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Every Sunday after an interminable 90 minutes at our family church in Washington, my parents would drive the family (me, baby brother and sis) past the White House as we headed back to our modest home in the suburbs of northern Virginia.
In my younger years, it was the perfect panacea after a morning spent praying and singing hymns about lambs and lepers.
As I grew older and more cynical, I wanted little to do with the White House jaunts. I longed for something a little edgier.
"Can we please drive through Georgetown?" I'd ask, with attitude to spare.
Checking out boutiques like Commander Salamander and Up Against the Wall, with their baggy jeans and Doc Martens boots, had become my idea of a fun-filled Sunday afternoon.
Flash forward more than a decade, and I'm actually making my way into the White House. And to my utter surprise I'm actually excited - excited with a capital E.
By now I've worked as a reporter at the New York Daily News and The New York Times, written for every publication from Rolling Stone to Elle magazine, attended every major event in Manhattan.
None of that was a match for the armed guards, the meticulously manicured grounds, and the 55,000 square feet of space that greeted me as I walked into the White House.
I was there to meet with Desirée Rogers, the White House's first African-American social secretary. As she strode into the room for our interview, I couldn't help but notice her impeccable style and her youthful face. Not a wrinkle on her 49-year-old face. And I was this close.
In articles she has been variously described as no-nonsense and focused. All true. This was her first television interview. Some answers sounded scripted. Others sounded like they could have casually been served over crust-free sandwiches and ice tea.
We talked about the family dog (it will arrive in the spring, she said) and her first days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ("I used to get lost a lot," she said, smiling).
She wants to make the White House accessible to all Americans. Why shouldn't Jane the waitress have a chance to mix it up with Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy?
After nearly an hour, Rogers and I parted ways. She already has 14 events under her designer belt and she is in the throes of planning dozens more. I left her in her East Wing office to fret over seating charts and stemware.
I asked my colleagues Ethel Bass and Daria Shelton to capture as many magical moments as their digital cameras would hold. For me, the White House will never look the same.
CNN, Feb 08, 2009
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Every Sunday after an interminable 90 minutes at our family church in Washington, my parents would drive the family (me, baby brother and sis) past the White House as we headed back to our modest home in the suburbs of northern Virginia.
In my younger years, it was the perfect panacea after a morning spent praying and singing hymns about lambs and lepers.
As I grew older and more cynical, I wanted little to do with the White House jaunts. I longed for something a little edgier.
"Can we please drive through Georgetown?" I'd ask, with attitude to spare.
Checking out boutiques like Commander Salamander and Up Against the Wall, with their baggy jeans and Doc Martens boots, had become my idea of a fun-filled Sunday afternoon.
Flash forward more than a decade, and I'm actually making my way into the White House. And to my utter surprise I'm actually excited - excited with a capital E.
By now I've worked as a reporter at the New York Daily News and The New York Times, written for every publication from Rolling Stone to Elle magazine, attended every major event in Manhattan.
None of that was a match for the armed guards, the meticulously manicured grounds, and the 55,000 square feet of space that greeted me as I walked into the White House.
I was there to meet with Desirée Rogers, the White House's first African-American social secretary. As she strode into the room for our interview, I couldn't help but notice her impeccable style and her youthful face. Not a wrinkle on her 49-year-old face. And I was this close.
In articles she has been variously described as no-nonsense and focused. All true. This was her first television interview. Some answers sounded scripted. Others sounded like they could have casually been served over crust-free sandwiches and ice tea.
We talked about the family dog (it will arrive in the spring, she said) and her first days at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ("I used to get lost a lot," she said, smiling).
She wants to make the White House accessible to all Americans. Why shouldn't Jane the waitress have a chance to mix it up with Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy?
After nearly an hour, Rogers and I parted ways. She already has 14 events under her designer belt and she is in the throes of planning dozens more. I left her in her East Wing office to fret over seating charts and stemware.
I asked my colleagues Ethel Bass and Daria Shelton to capture as many magical moments as their digital cameras would hold. For me, the White House will never look the same.
Zurich voters abolish tax breaks for rich foreigners
Zurich voters abolish tax breaks for rich foreigners
February 08, 2009, 20:43 CET
(GENEVA) - Voters in the region of Zurich, the home of Swiss banking, sprang a surprise on Sunday by deciding to abolish tax breaks for rich foreigners living there, including showbusiness and sports stars.
Some 52.9 percent of voters -- more than 216,000 people -- backed an initiative launched by the left-wing Alternative List to abolish "tax privileges for foreign millionaires" in the canton.
It was the first time that the group had won a referendum in Zurich, the home of Switzerland's secretive and rather more conservative banking and finance establishment.
The result obliges cantonal authorities to change local tax laws.
The tax break has helped lure dozens of international sports, entertainment and business celebrities to Switzerland. In Zurich, 137 people benefitted from the deal in 2006, the Swiss news agency ATS reported.
In several cantons, wealthy foreigners have the opportunity to negotiate a confidential tax fee with local authorities based on their expenditure, instead of paying income tax, provided they do not work in Switzerland.
However, the practice has often triggered a storm of controversy in the home countries of some of the celebrities, amid accusations of tax dodging.
Unease has also grown in Switzerland recently, not least because some of their own stars -- such as tennis star Roger Federer -- could not enjoy the same deal.
Famous foreign residents in Zurich have included US singer Tina Turner and Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
Other celebrities residing in Switzerland last year included a brace of motor racing champions, such as Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikonnen, Michael Schumacher and Sebastien Loeb, singers Shania Twain and James Blunt, as well as tycoons.
After arguing that the tax privilege was unfair, the Alternative List said it hoped the outcome would send a signal to the rest of Switzerland.
February 08, 2009, 20:43 CET
(GENEVA) - Voters in the region of Zurich, the home of Swiss banking, sprang a surprise on Sunday by deciding to abolish tax breaks for rich foreigners living there, including showbusiness and sports stars.
Some 52.9 percent of voters -- more than 216,000 people -- backed an initiative launched by the left-wing Alternative List to abolish "tax privileges for foreign millionaires" in the canton.
It was the first time that the group had won a referendum in Zurich, the home of Switzerland's secretive and rather more conservative banking and finance establishment.
The result obliges cantonal authorities to change local tax laws.
The tax break has helped lure dozens of international sports, entertainment and business celebrities to Switzerland. In Zurich, 137 people benefitted from the deal in 2006, the Swiss news agency ATS reported.
In several cantons, wealthy foreigners have the opportunity to negotiate a confidential tax fee with local authorities based on their expenditure, instead of paying income tax, provided they do not work in Switzerland.
However, the practice has often triggered a storm of controversy in the home countries of some of the celebrities, amid accusations of tax dodging.
Unease has also grown in Switzerland recently, not least because some of their own stars -- such as tennis star Roger Federer -- could not enjoy the same deal.
Famous foreign residents in Zurich have included US singer Tina Turner and Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg.
Other celebrities residing in Switzerland last year included a brace of motor racing champions, such as Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikonnen, Michael Schumacher and Sebastien Loeb, singers Shania Twain and James Blunt, as well as tycoons.
After arguing that the tax privilege was unfair, the Alternative List said it hoped the outcome would send a signal to the rest of Switzerland.
Bonuses are getting a bad rap, but they're an important and useful part of the financial services industry
Greed Is Good, by Roy C Smith
Wall Street bonuses are getting a bad rap, but they're an important and useful part of the financial services industry. Taking them away could hamper the economic comeback.
WSJ, Feb 07, 2009
Wall Street bonuses are getting a bad rap, but they're an important and useful part of the financial services industry. Taking them away could hamper the economic comeback.
1973 was a terrible year on Wall Street. An unexpected crisis in the Middle East led to a quadrupling of oil prices and a serious global economic recession. The president was in serious trouble with Watergate. The S&P 500 index dropped 50% (after 23 years of rising markets), and much of Wall Street fell deeply into the red. There were no profits, and therefore no bonuses.
I was a 35-year-old, nonpartner investment banker then and was horrified to learn that my annual take-home pay would be limited to my small salary, which accounted for about a quarter of my previous year's income. Fortunately the partners decided to pay a small bonus out of their capital that year to help employees like me get by. The next year was no better. Several colleagues with good prospects left the firm and the industry for good. We learned that strong pay-for-performance compensation incentives could cut both ways.
Many wondered if that was still the case last week, when New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an estimate that the "securities industry" paid its New York City employees bonuses of $18 billion in 2008, leading to a public outcry. Lost in the denunciations were the powerful benefits of the bonus system, which helped make the U.S. the global leader in financial services for decades. Bonuses are an important and necessary part of the fast-moving, high-pressure industry, and its employees flourish with strong performance incentives.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of how bonuses are paid that is further inflaming public opinion. The system has become more complex than most people know, and involves forms of bonuses that are not entirely discretionary.
The anger at Wall Street only grew at the news that Merrill Lynch, after reporting $15 billion of losses, had rushed to pay $4 billion in bonuses on the eve of its merger with Bank of America. Because Merrill Lynch and Bank of America were receiving substantial government funds to keep them afloat, the subject became part of the public business. The idea that the banks had paid out taxpayers' funds in undeserved bonuses to employees, together with a leaked report of John Thain's spending $1 million to redecorate his office, understandably provoked a blast of public outrage against Wall Street. The issue was so hot that President Barack Obama interrupted his duties to call the bonuses "shameful" and the "height of irresponsibility." Then, on Wednesday, he announced a new set of rules for those seeking "exceptional" assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the future that would limit cash compensation to $500,000 and restrict severance pay and frills, perks and boondoggles.
In the excitement some of the facts got mixed up. Mr. DiNapoli's estimate included many firms that were not involved with the bailout, and only a few that were. Merrill's actions were approved by its board early in December and consented to by Bank of America. But the basic point is that, despite the dreadful year that Wall Street experienced in 2008, some questionable bonuses were paid to already well-off employees, and that set off the outrage.
Many Americans believe that any bonuses for top executives paid by rescued banks would constitute "excess compensation," a phrase used by Mr. Obama. But no Wall Street CEO taking federal money received a bonus in 2008, and the same was true for most of their senior colleagues. Not only did those responsible receive no bonuses, the value of the stock in their companies paid to them as part of prior-year bonuses dropped by 70% or more, leaving them, collectively, with billions of dollars of unrealized losses.
That's pay for performance, isn't it?
"Wall Street" has always been the quintessential, if ill-defined, symbol of American capitalism. In reality, Wall Street today includes many large banks, investment groups and other institutions, some not even located in the U.S. It has become a euphemism for the global capital markets industry -- one in which the combined market value of all stocks and bonds outstanding in the world topped $140 trillion at the end of 2007. Well less than half of the value of this combined market value is represented by American securities, but American banks lead the world in its origination and distribution. Wall Street is one of America's great export industries.
The market thrives on locating new opportunities, providing innovation and a willingness to take risks. It is also, regrettably, subject to what the economist John Maynard Keynes called "animal spirits," the psychological factors that make markets irrational when going up or down. For example, America has enjoyed a bonus it didn't deserve in its free-wheeling participation in the housing market, before it became a bubble. Despite great efforts by regulators to manage systemic risk, there have been market failures. The causes of the current market failure, which is the real object of the public anger, go well beyond the Wall Street compensation system -- but compensation has been one of them.
The capital-markets industry operates in a very sophisticated and competitive environment, one that responds best to strong performance incentives. People who flourish in this environment are those who want to be paid and advanced based on their individual and their team's performance, and are willing to take the risk that they might be displaced by someone better or that mistakes or downturns may cause them to be laid off or their firms to fail. Indeed, since 1970, 28 major banks or investment banks have failed or been taken up into mergers, and thousands have come and gone into the industry without making much money. Those that have survived the changing fortunes of the industry have done very well -- so well, in fact, that they appear to have become symbolic of greedy and reckless behavior.
The Wall Street compensation system has evolved from the 1970s, when most of the firms were private partnerships, owned by partners who paid out a designated share of the firm's profits to nonpartner employees while dividing up the rest for themselves. The nonpartners had to earn their keep every year, but the partners' percentage ownerships in the firms were also reset every year or two. On the whole, everyone's performance was continuously evaluated and rewarded or penalized. The system provided great incentives to create profits, but also, because the partners' own money was involved, to avoid great risk.
The industry became much more competitive when commercial banks were allowed into it. The competition tended to commoditize the basic fee businesses, and drove firms more deeply into trading. As improving technologies created great arrays of new instruments to be traded, the partnerships went public to gain access to larger funding sources, and to spread out the risks of the business. As they did so, each firm tried to maintain its partnership "culture" and compensation system as best it could, but it was difficult to do so.
In time there was significant erosion of the simple principles of the partnership days. Compensation for top managers followed the trend into excess set by other public companies. Competition for talent made recruitment and retention more difficult and thus tilted negotiating power further in favor of stars. Henry Paulson, when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs, once remarked that Wall Street was like other businesses, where 80% of the profits were provided by 20% of the people, but the 20% changed a lot from year to year and market to market. You had to pay everyone well because you never knew what next year would bring, and because there was always someone trying to poach your best trained people, whom you didn't want to lose even if they were not superstars. Consequently, bonuses in general became more automatic and less tied to superior performance. Compensation became the industry's largest expense, accounting for about 50% of net revenues. Warren Buffett, when he was an investor in Salomon Brothers in the late 1980s, once noted that he wasn't sure why anyone wanted to be an investor in a business where management took out half the revenues before shareholders got anything. But he recently invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, so he must have gotten over the problem.
As firms became part of large, conglomerate financial institutions, the sense of being a part of a special cohort of similarly acculturated colleagues was lost, and the performance of shares and options in giant multi-line holding companies rarely correlated with an individual's idea of his own performance over time. Nevertheless, the system as a whole worked reasonably well for years in providing rewards for success and penalties for failures, and still works even in difficult markets such as this one.
At junior levels, bonuses tend to be based on how well the individual is seen to be developing. As employees progress, their compensation is based less on individual performance and more on their role as a manager or team leader. For all professional employees the annual bonus represents a very large amount of the person's take-home pay. At the middle levels, bonuses are set after firm-wide, interdepartmental negotiation sessions that attempt to allocate the firm's compensation pool based on a combination of performance and potential.
Roy C. Smith, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business, is a former partner of Goldman Sachs.
Wall Street bonuses are getting a bad rap, but they're an important and useful part of the financial services industry. Taking them away could hamper the economic comeback.
WSJ, Feb 07, 2009
Wall Street bonuses are getting a bad rap, but they're an important and useful part of the financial services industry. Taking them away could hamper the economic comeback.
1973 was a terrible year on Wall Street. An unexpected crisis in the Middle East led to a quadrupling of oil prices and a serious global economic recession. The president was in serious trouble with Watergate. The S&P 500 index dropped 50% (after 23 years of rising markets), and much of Wall Street fell deeply into the red. There were no profits, and therefore no bonuses.
I was a 35-year-old, nonpartner investment banker then and was horrified to learn that my annual take-home pay would be limited to my small salary, which accounted for about a quarter of my previous year's income. Fortunately the partners decided to pay a small bonus out of their capital that year to help employees like me get by. The next year was no better. Several colleagues with good prospects left the firm and the industry for good. We learned that strong pay-for-performance compensation incentives could cut both ways.
Many wondered if that was still the case last week, when New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an estimate that the "securities industry" paid its New York City employees bonuses of $18 billion in 2008, leading to a public outcry. Lost in the denunciations were the powerful benefits of the bonus system, which helped make the U.S. the global leader in financial services for decades. Bonuses are an important and necessary part of the fast-moving, high-pressure industry, and its employees flourish with strong performance incentives.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of how bonuses are paid that is further inflaming public opinion. The system has become more complex than most people know, and involves forms of bonuses that are not entirely discretionary.
The anger at Wall Street only grew at the news that Merrill Lynch, after reporting $15 billion of losses, had rushed to pay $4 billion in bonuses on the eve of its merger with Bank of America. Because Merrill Lynch and Bank of America were receiving substantial government funds to keep them afloat, the subject became part of the public business. The idea that the banks had paid out taxpayers' funds in undeserved bonuses to employees, together with a leaked report of John Thain's spending $1 million to redecorate his office, understandably provoked a blast of public outrage against Wall Street. The issue was so hot that President Barack Obama interrupted his duties to call the bonuses "shameful" and the "height of irresponsibility." Then, on Wednesday, he announced a new set of rules for those seeking "exceptional" assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the future that would limit cash compensation to $500,000 and restrict severance pay and frills, perks and boondoggles.
In the excitement some of the facts got mixed up. Mr. DiNapoli's estimate included many firms that were not involved with the bailout, and only a few that were. Merrill's actions were approved by its board early in December and consented to by Bank of America. But the basic point is that, despite the dreadful year that Wall Street experienced in 2008, some questionable bonuses were paid to already well-off employees, and that set off the outrage.
Many Americans believe that any bonuses for top executives paid by rescued banks would constitute "excess compensation," a phrase used by Mr. Obama. But no Wall Street CEO taking federal money received a bonus in 2008, and the same was true for most of their senior colleagues. Not only did those responsible receive no bonuses, the value of the stock in their companies paid to them as part of prior-year bonuses dropped by 70% or more, leaving them, collectively, with billions of dollars of unrealized losses.
That's pay for performance, isn't it?
"Wall Street" has always been the quintessential, if ill-defined, symbol of American capitalism. In reality, Wall Street today includes many large banks, investment groups and other institutions, some not even located in the U.S. It has become a euphemism for the global capital markets industry -- one in which the combined market value of all stocks and bonds outstanding in the world topped $140 trillion at the end of 2007. Well less than half of the value of this combined market value is represented by American securities, but American banks lead the world in its origination and distribution. Wall Street is one of America's great export industries.
The market thrives on locating new opportunities, providing innovation and a willingness to take risks. It is also, regrettably, subject to what the economist John Maynard Keynes called "animal spirits," the psychological factors that make markets irrational when going up or down. For example, America has enjoyed a bonus it didn't deserve in its free-wheeling participation in the housing market, before it became a bubble. Despite great efforts by regulators to manage systemic risk, there have been market failures. The causes of the current market failure, which is the real object of the public anger, go well beyond the Wall Street compensation system -- but compensation has been one of them.
The capital-markets industry operates in a very sophisticated and competitive environment, one that responds best to strong performance incentives. People who flourish in this environment are those who want to be paid and advanced based on their individual and their team's performance, and are willing to take the risk that they might be displaced by someone better or that mistakes or downturns may cause them to be laid off or their firms to fail. Indeed, since 1970, 28 major banks or investment banks have failed or been taken up into mergers, and thousands have come and gone into the industry without making much money. Those that have survived the changing fortunes of the industry have done very well -- so well, in fact, that they appear to have become symbolic of greedy and reckless behavior.
The Wall Street compensation system has evolved from the 1970s, when most of the firms were private partnerships, owned by partners who paid out a designated share of the firm's profits to nonpartner employees while dividing up the rest for themselves. The nonpartners had to earn their keep every year, but the partners' percentage ownerships in the firms were also reset every year or two. On the whole, everyone's performance was continuously evaluated and rewarded or penalized. The system provided great incentives to create profits, but also, because the partners' own money was involved, to avoid great risk.
The industry became much more competitive when commercial banks were allowed into it. The competition tended to commoditize the basic fee businesses, and drove firms more deeply into trading. As improving technologies created great arrays of new instruments to be traded, the partnerships went public to gain access to larger funding sources, and to spread out the risks of the business. As they did so, each firm tried to maintain its partnership "culture" and compensation system as best it could, but it was difficult to do so.
In time there was significant erosion of the simple principles of the partnership days. Compensation for top managers followed the trend into excess set by other public companies. Competition for talent made recruitment and retention more difficult and thus tilted negotiating power further in favor of stars. Henry Paulson, when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs, once remarked that Wall Street was like other businesses, where 80% of the profits were provided by 20% of the people, but the 20% changed a lot from year to year and market to market. You had to pay everyone well because you never knew what next year would bring, and because there was always someone trying to poach your best trained people, whom you didn't want to lose even if they were not superstars. Consequently, bonuses in general became more automatic and less tied to superior performance. Compensation became the industry's largest expense, accounting for about 50% of net revenues. Warren Buffett, when he was an investor in Salomon Brothers in the late 1980s, once noted that he wasn't sure why anyone wanted to be an investor in a business where management took out half the revenues before shareholders got anything. But he recently invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, so he must have gotten over the problem.
As firms became part of large, conglomerate financial institutions, the sense of being a part of a special cohort of similarly acculturated colleagues was lost, and the performance of shares and options in giant multi-line holding companies rarely correlated with an individual's idea of his own performance over time. Nevertheless, the system as a whole worked reasonably well for years in providing rewards for success and penalties for failures, and still works even in difficult markets such as this one.
At junior levels, bonuses tend to be based on how well the individual is seen to be developing. As employees progress, their compensation is based less on individual performance and more on their role as a manager or team leader. For all professional employees the annual bonus represents a very large amount of the person's take-home pay. At the middle levels, bonuses are set after firm-wide, interdepartmental negotiation sessions that attempt to allocate the firm's compensation pool based on a combination of performance and potential.
Roy C. Smith, a professor of finance at New York University's Stern School of Business, is a former partner of Goldman Sachs.
Iraq combat could outlast Obama's term
Iraq combat could outlast Obama's term, by Mike Allen
Politico, Feb 08, 2009
Thomas E. Ricks, the nation’s best-known defense correspondent, writes in a book out this week that many Iraq veterans believe the U.S. is likely to have “soldiers in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 – which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”
That would mean American forces would remain in danger past President Obama’s terms, into his second term if he wins reelection or the 45th presidency if he doesn’t.
Ricks, author of the bestselling “Fiasco,” offers that grim forecast in a new book being published Tuesday, “The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008” (394 pages, The Penguin Press, $27.95).
A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, Ricks also predicts that President Obama and his generals “eventually will settle on what one Obama adviser calls ‘a sustainable presence’ – and that that smaller force will be in Iraq for many years.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press on Sunday, Ricks told moderator David Gregory that “a lot of people back here incorrectly think the war is over.”
“What I say in this book is that we may be only halfway through this thing,” Ricks said. “This year we're in now, '09, is going to be, I think, a, a surprisingly tough year. You've got a series of elections in Iraq. Meanwhile, you've got American troops declining. … We're doing the easy troop withdrawals now, but down the road you start taking them out of areas that aren't so secure, that aren't so safe, that you're, that you're worried about.
“So they're going to be holding national elections in Iraq just when we have fewer troops there. And finally, none of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve have been solved. All of the basic issues facing Iraq are still there.”
The Washington Post is running two days of excerpts under the rubric “The Generals’ Insurgency.” Sunday’s first installment starred Army Gen. Roy Odierno, who in September succeeded Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and formerly oversaw day-to-day operations under Petraeus.
The book is supposed to be under a strict sales embargo, but Politico obtained a copy at a Washington-area bookstore on Saturday night.
Here are conversation-driving excerpts that did not appear in The Post:
--“THE LONG WAR … No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends, it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 – which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict. … In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”
--“Even as security improved in Iraq in 2008, I found myself consistently saddened by the war, not just by its obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans, but also by the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted it. Yet I also came to believe that we can’t leave. … [A] smaller but long-term U.S. military presence is probably the best case scenario. … Nor, at the end of many more years of struggle, is the outcome likely to be something Americans recognize as victory.”
--“A FRAYED MILITARY … The last few years have seen soldiers burning out after repeated tours of duty in the war, with high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder among combat veterans. Rates of suicide and divorce have been increasing. Officers and sergeants are leaving in greater numbers. … The quality of recruits also has been dropping … The Army could be quite unforgiving of the missteps of younger soldiers, but enormously understanding when it came to much larger mistakes by generals. Captains were subjected to rigorous after-action reviews, but generals, inexplicably, were treated with kid gloves.”
--“OBAMA’S WAR (Fall 2008) … Just before the election, Odierno said in my interview with him that one of the points he would make to the new president would be ‘the importance of us leaving with honor and justice. … For the military it’s extremely important because of all the sacrifice and time and, in fact, how we’ve all adjusted and adapted.’ … Like Clinton, Obama also would face the prospect of a de facto alliance between the military and congressional Republicans to stop him from making any major changes. My bet is that Obama and his generals eventually will settle on what one Obama adviser calls ‘a sustainable presence’ – and that that smaller force will be in Iraq for many years.”
--“[A] major destabilizing factor in Iraq in 2009 will be the smaller size of the American military presence. Counterintuitively, the effects of drawing down troops will become more pronounced with the passage of time. … As more soldiers are withdrawn and the U.S. presence falls below pre-surge levels, the pullouts will become riskier. … In sum, the first year of Obama’s war promises to be tougher for America’s leaders and military than was the last year of Bush’s war.”
--“OBAMA IN IRAQ … He arrived in late July … [I]n this meeting, according to two participants, [Obama and Petraeus] concentrated on their differences – at least when Obama was permitted to interrupt the lecture. … Obama made it clear that his job as president would be to look at the larger picture – an assertion that likely insulted Petraeus, who justly prides himself on his ability to do just that. … Obama left people in Iraq with the sense he would be flexible and consider conditions on the ground and would be able to adjust his 16-month timetable if he saw the need.”
Politico, Feb 08, 2009
Thomas E. Ricks, the nation’s best-known defense correspondent, writes in a book out this week that many Iraq veterans believe the U.S. is likely to have “soldiers in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 – which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict.”
That would mean American forces would remain in danger past President Obama’s terms, into his second term if he wins reelection or the 45th presidency if he doesn’t.
Ricks, author of the bestselling “Fiasco,” offers that grim forecast in a new book being published Tuesday, “The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008” (394 pages, The Penguin Press, $27.95).
A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, Ricks also predicts that President Obama and his generals “eventually will settle on what one Obama adviser calls ‘a sustainable presence’ – and that that smaller force will be in Iraq for many years.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press on Sunday, Ricks told moderator David Gregory that “a lot of people back here incorrectly think the war is over.”
“What I say in this book is that we may be only halfway through this thing,” Ricks said. “This year we're in now, '09, is going to be, I think, a, a surprisingly tough year. You've got a series of elections in Iraq. Meanwhile, you've got American troops declining. … We're doing the easy troop withdrawals now, but down the road you start taking them out of areas that aren't so secure, that aren't so safe, that you're, that you're worried about.
“So they're going to be holding national elections in Iraq just when we have fewer troops there. And finally, none of the basic problems that the surge was meant to solve have been solved. All of the basic issues facing Iraq are still there.”
The Washington Post is running two days of excerpts under the rubric “The Generals’ Insurgency.” Sunday’s first installment starred Army Gen. Roy Odierno, who in September succeeded Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and formerly oversaw day-to-day operations under Petraeus.
The book is supposed to be under a strict sales embargo, but Politico obtained a copy at a Washington-area bookstore on Saturday night.
Here are conversation-driving excerpts that did not appear in The Post:
--“THE LONG WAR … No matter how the U.S. war in Iraq ends, it appears that today we may be only halfway through it. That is, the quiet consensus emerging among many people who have served in Iraq is that we likely will have American soldiers in combat in Iraq until at least 2015 – which would put us now at about the midpoint of the conflict. … In other words, the events for which the Iraq war will be remembered probably have not yet happened.”
--“Even as security improved in Iraq in 2008, I found myself consistently saddened by the war, not just by its obvious costs to Iraqis and Americans, but also by the incompetence and profligacy with which the Bush administration conducted it. Yet I also came to believe that we can’t leave. … [A] smaller but long-term U.S. military presence is probably the best case scenario. … Nor, at the end of many more years of struggle, is the outcome likely to be something Americans recognize as victory.”
--“A FRAYED MILITARY … The last few years have seen soldiers burning out after repeated tours of duty in the war, with high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder among combat veterans. Rates of suicide and divorce have been increasing. Officers and sergeants are leaving in greater numbers. … The quality of recruits also has been dropping … The Army could be quite unforgiving of the missteps of younger soldiers, but enormously understanding when it came to much larger mistakes by generals. Captains were subjected to rigorous after-action reviews, but generals, inexplicably, were treated with kid gloves.”
--“OBAMA’S WAR (Fall 2008) … Just before the election, Odierno said in my interview with him that one of the points he would make to the new president would be ‘the importance of us leaving with honor and justice. … For the military it’s extremely important because of all the sacrifice and time and, in fact, how we’ve all adjusted and adapted.’ … Like Clinton, Obama also would face the prospect of a de facto alliance between the military and congressional Republicans to stop him from making any major changes. My bet is that Obama and his generals eventually will settle on what one Obama adviser calls ‘a sustainable presence’ – and that that smaller force will be in Iraq for many years.”
--“[A] major destabilizing factor in Iraq in 2009 will be the smaller size of the American military presence. Counterintuitively, the effects of drawing down troops will become more pronounced with the passage of time. … As more soldiers are withdrawn and the U.S. presence falls below pre-surge levels, the pullouts will become riskier. … In sum, the first year of Obama’s war promises to be tougher for America’s leaders and military than was the last year of Bush’s war.”
--“OBAMA IN IRAQ … He arrived in late July … [I]n this meeting, according to two participants, [Obama and Petraeus] concentrated on their differences – at least when Obama was permitted to interrupt the lecture. … Obama made it clear that his job as president would be to look at the larger picture – an assertion that likely insulted Petraeus, who justly prides himself on his ability to do just that. … Obama left people in Iraq with the sense he would be flexible and consider conditions on the ground and would be able to adjust his 16-month timetable if he saw the need.”
In Defense of Thailand's Democracy
In Defense of Thailand's Democracy, by Walter Lohman
Heritage, February 6, 2009
Over the last couple of months, one of America's two treaty allies in Southeast Asia turned the page on a period of intense political instability. And it did so democratically. Americans should take a moment to acknowledge Thailand as a member in good standing of the democratic club that is America's system of alliances in East Asia and the Pacific.
Reminders of an Undemocratic, Unstable Past
The most recent chapter of Thai political history began a little more than two years ago. On September 19, 2006, the military staged a coup to unseat and essentially exile Thailand's elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Despite 14 years of uninterrupted democratic governance, global perceptions of a Thailand beset with chronic political instability quickly returned.
The unelected military-backed government exacerbated negative perceptions by mangling the Thai economy. And where the new government was widely expected to outperform the previous administration--dealing with the southern Islamist insurgency--it failed.
Then, at the end of 2007, after absorbing a coup, suffering under a year of inept government, and approving a new constitution designed to deflate the powers of the prime minister, new elections returned to government proxies for Thaksin and his disbanded Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT). Thailand appeared to pick up right where it left off in September 2006: Political strife dominated 2008; two prime ministers were forced from power; protests escalated to the point of shutting down Bangkok's airports; and the economy dragged through the year.
A Welcome Turn of Events
As 2008 drew to a close, pressure for another coup grew. But then something positive happened: Democracy provided a channel for government to change hands. Was the transfer of power pretty? No. Did it involve political trade-offs? Certainly. But expediency--as well as opacity--in democratic politics is a matter of degree, not kind.
In a parliamentary system, legitimate change in government is possible without proximate appeal to general elections. The Democrat party pulled enough sitting MPs away from the latest iteration of a Thaksin-based party and its coalition partners to form a new government under the leadership of opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva.
Critics point to the messiness of the process and nefarious connections among Thai royalty, military, politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. Political intrigue makes for good copy. But in an environment as prone to rumor as Bangkok, and with so much at stake, it is important to separate out the facts.
First, it is a matter of public record that army commander General Anupong Paochinda urged the prime minister to resign. Second, it is a fact that in October, the queen attended the funeral of a protester killed in a clash with police. Both were very powerful gestures in Thai politics. But they do not amount to a coup. Nor do they explain the formation of the new Democrat government, or the Democrats' victories in subsequent by-elections. Disillusionment with the Thaksin-proxies in the electorate and factional cracks in his party base were already present and growing; pulling them apart did not require a mastermind general.
In 2006, the United States was right to insist that Thailand return to democratic rule as quickly as possible. Even when some argued that the United States's geopolitical position in the region would suffer as a result of the pressure--China being all the willing to step into the gap--the Bush Administration remained focused on the longer term. It suspended more than $29 million in assistance to Thailand, including financing for military hardware and training for Thai officers. At the same time, however, the Administration maintained regular diplomatic contact with the Thais and preserved some of the most critical areas of the relationship, including military exercises and vital counterterrorism cooperation.
In 2006, the Thai military unwisely aborted a political process that would have eventually resolved the crisis without intervention. There are a great many variables involved in comparing September 2006 with December 2008: Thaksin's role, the bungling of his military appointed successors, a new constitution, a changing electorate, and civil society fatigue. But, essentially, the events of the last few months in Thailand prove that coup is not an inevitable feature of Thai politics and that democracy is stability's partner, not its enemy.
The Road Ahead
The Thai Democrat Party has a considerable amount of work to do. The new prime minister must find a way to reach across the political spectrum in Bangkok and elsewhere to heal the yawning divide. The perception that his ascension to power is purely the product of political maneuvering is refutable, but it will prove corrosive over time. There is also a significant element of anti-democratic class exceptionalism among the forces that brought him to power. And there is resistance outside of Bangkok to his Oxford-educated persona. He will have to take both issues head-on. But ultimately these are matters for Thais to resolve.
Indeed, Americans have their own work to do. Thailand was a key ally of the United States during the Cold War. Thais by the thousands fought side by side with Americans in Korea and in Vietnam. Thailand also contributed non-combat troops to the American-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan and has served as a critical logistics node in the movement of American forces around the globe.
But the Thais, as much as any power in the region, pay close attention to geopolitical trends. During World War II, Thai Prime Minister and strongman Phibunsongkhram famously asked one of his commanders, "Which side do you think will lose this war? That side is our enemy." And he began to hedge his early bets on the Japanese.
Today it is China's rise that is the most striking fact of life in East Asia. And its rise is not unwelcome in Thailand. This is not necessarily a bad thing: China is an important economic partner for both the U.S. and its Asia-Pacific allies. America cannot ask our allies to recuse themselves from the opportunity China offers any more than it can refrain from reaping the benefits itself.
What the United States can do, however, is be absolutely clear about its long-term commitment to the region. It should intensify its economic engagement, not retreat from it. This means embracing free trade agreements. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific now has a core around which to develop--the Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership (TPP)--free trade negotiations underway between eight Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member economies. A bilateral U.S.-Thai free-trade agreement was left on the table in 2006. America should dust it off and get negotiations moving again with an eye toward not only completing a first-rate agreement but including the Thais in the broader TPP.
On the diplomatic, military side, the U.S. should make clear that it has no intention of compromising its predominance in Asia. Such clarity demands a level of defense spending that will belie Asian suspicions of an American superpower in decline. It also means participating in the region's diplomatic life. This year's Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum is being held in Thailand. Prior to the last few years, the U.S. secretary of state's attendance was a given. Once again becoming a reliable ASEAN participant in the year America's Thai allies host will be well-noted in the region. President Obama should also resurrect plans for a full-fledged U.S.-ASEAN leaders' summit, an idea abruptly cancelled by President Bush in 2007, and schedule it in Thailand during this year's ASEAN leaders' meetings.
Reinforcing the Alliance
America's allies are the foundation of its commitment to Asia. These allies make policy formulation easier when they stay true to their democratic values. When one of the allies strays, the U.S. should help bring it back to its senses, as President Bush sought to do with Thailand. By the same token, when one demonstrates a commitment to the alliance's mutual values, America should use the occasion to reinforce the relationship. It is good to have Thailand in the club.
Walter Lohman is Director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage, February 6, 2009
Over the last couple of months, one of America's two treaty allies in Southeast Asia turned the page on a period of intense political instability. And it did so democratically. Americans should take a moment to acknowledge Thailand as a member in good standing of the democratic club that is America's system of alliances in East Asia and the Pacific.
Reminders of an Undemocratic, Unstable Past
The most recent chapter of Thai political history began a little more than two years ago. On September 19, 2006, the military staged a coup to unseat and essentially exile Thailand's elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Despite 14 years of uninterrupted democratic governance, global perceptions of a Thailand beset with chronic political instability quickly returned.
The unelected military-backed government exacerbated negative perceptions by mangling the Thai economy. And where the new government was widely expected to outperform the previous administration--dealing with the southern Islamist insurgency--it failed.
Then, at the end of 2007, after absorbing a coup, suffering under a year of inept government, and approving a new constitution designed to deflate the powers of the prime minister, new elections returned to government proxies for Thaksin and his disbanded Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT). Thailand appeared to pick up right where it left off in September 2006: Political strife dominated 2008; two prime ministers were forced from power; protests escalated to the point of shutting down Bangkok's airports; and the economy dragged through the year.
A Welcome Turn of Events
As 2008 drew to a close, pressure for another coup grew. But then something positive happened: Democracy provided a channel for government to change hands. Was the transfer of power pretty? No. Did it involve political trade-offs? Certainly. But expediency--as well as opacity--in democratic politics is a matter of degree, not kind.
In a parliamentary system, legitimate change in government is possible without proximate appeal to general elections. The Democrat party pulled enough sitting MPs away from the latest iteration of a Thaksin-based party and its coalition partners to form a new government under the leadership of opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva.
Critics point to the messiness of the process and nefarious connections among Thai royalty, military, politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. Political intrigue makes for good copy. But in an environment as prone to rumor as Bangkok, and with so much at stake, it is important to separate out the facts.
First, it is a matter of public record that army commander General Anupong Paochinda urged the prime minister to resign. Second, it is a fact that in October, the queen attended the funeral of a protester killed in a clash with police. Both were very powerful gestures in Thai politics. But they do not amount to a coup. Nor do they explain the formation of the new Democrat government, or the Democrats' victories in subsequent by-elections. Disillusionment with the Thaksin-proxies in the electorate and factional cracks in his party base were already present and growing; pulling them apart did not require a mastermind general.
In 2006, the United States was right to insist that Thailand return to democratic rule as quickly as possible. Even when some argued that the United States's geopolitical position in the region would suffer as a result of the pressure--China being all the willing to step into the gap--the Bush Administration remained focused on the longer term. It suspended more than $29 million in assistance to Thailand, including financing for military hardware and training for Thai officers. At the same time, however, the Administration maintained regular diplomatic contact with the Thais and preserved some of the most critical areas of the relationship, including military exercises and vital counterterrorism cooperation.
In 2006, the Thai military unwisely aborted a political process that would have eventually resolved the crisis without intervention. There are a great many variables involved in comparing September 2006 with December 2008: Thaksin's role, the bungling of his military appointed successors, a new constitution, a changing electorate, and civil society fatigue. But, essentially, the events of the last few months in Thailand prove that coup is not an inevitable feature of Thai politics and that democracy is stability's partner, not its enemy.
The Road Ahead
The Thai Democrat Party has a considerable amount of work to do. The new prime minister must find a way to reach across the political spectrum in Bangkok and elsewhere to heal the yawning divide. The perception that his ascension to power is purely the product of political maneuvering is refutable, but it will prove corrosive over time. There is also a significant element of anti-democratic class exceptionalism among the forces that brought him to power. And there is resistance outside of Bangkok to his Oxford-educated persona. He will have to take both issues head-on. But ultimately these are matters for Thais to resolve.
Indeed, Americans have their own work to do. Thailand was a key ally of the United States during the Cold War. Thais by the thousands fought side by side with Americans in Korea and in Vietnam. Thailand also contributed non-combat troops to the American-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan and has served as a critical logistics node in the movement of American forces around the globe.
But the Thais, as much as any power in the region, pay close attention to geopolitical trends. During World War II, Thai Prime Minister and strongman Phibunsongkhram famously asked one of his commanders, "Which side do you think will lose this war? That side is our enemy." And he began to hedge his early bets on the Japanese.
Today it is China's rise that is the most striking fact of life in East Asia. And its rise is not unwelcome in Thailand. This is not necessarily a bad thing: China is an important economic partner for both the U.S. and its Asia-Pacific allies. America cannot ask our allies to recuse themselves from the opportunity China offers any more than it can refrain from reaping the benefits itself.
What the United States can do, however, is be absolutely clear about its long-term commitment to the region. It should intensify its economic engagement, not retreat from it. This means embracing free trade agreements. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific now has a core around which to develop--the Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership (TPP)--free trade negotiations underway between eight Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member economies. A bilateral U.S.-Thai free-trade agreement was left on the table in 2006. America should dust it off and get negotiations moving again with an eye toward not only completing a first-rate agreement but including the Thais in the broader TPP.
On the diplomatic, military side, the U.S. should make clear that it has no intention of compromising its predominance in Asia. Such clarity demands a level of defense spending that will belie Asian suspicions of an American superpower in decline. It also means participating in the region's diplomatic life. This year's Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum is being held in Thailand. Prior to the last few years, the U.S. secretary of state's attendance was a given. Once again becoming a reliable ASEAN participant in the year America's Thai allies host will be well-noted in the region. President Obama should also resurrect plans for a full-fledged U.S.-ASEAN leaders' summit, an idea abruptly cancelled by President Bush in 2007, and schedule it in Thailand during this year's ASEAN leaders' meetings.
Reinforcing the Alliance
America's allies are the foundation of its commitment to Asia. These allies make policy formulation easier when they stay true to their democratic values. When one of the allies strays, the U.S. should help bring it back to its senses, as President Bush sought to do with Thailand. By the same token, when one demonstrates a commitment to the alliance's mutual values, America should use the occasion to reinforce the relationship. It is good to have Thailand in the club.
Walter Lohman is Director of the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.
Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them
The Dissenter Who Changed the War. By Thomas E. Ricks
As the No. 2 Commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them
The Washington Post, Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
Full set or articles w/key documents here
Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.
A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers -- intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi "MAMs" (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. "I thought we had beaten this thing," he would later recall.
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a "surge" of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.
The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.
In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn't see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren't doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem," Abizaid emphasized.
This account of the military's internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials conducted in 2007 and 2008. In many cases, the interviews were embargoed for use until 2009.
Odierno's role has not been previously reported, and he remains a controversial figure because of his first tour in Iraq, when the tactics he employed violated many of the counterinsurgency principles he would later embrace.
Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer, concluded that the approach that many U.S. commanders used in the early days of the Iraq war effectively made them recruiters for the insurgency, and he was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno's division. "Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some -- the 4th ID is the negative example -- are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib," Herrington wrote in a 2003 report to Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq.
Odierno was determined to operate differently on his second tour of duty, but he will not talk about how his transformation occurred. "I think everyone's changed," he said, brushing aside the question in one of a series of interviews in Iraq over the past two years. "We've all learned."
But one impetus, Odierno agreed, was the severe wounding of his son in August 2004. Lt. Anthony Odierno, then in the 1st Cavalry Division, had been leading a patrol near Baghdad's airport when a rocket-propelled grenade punched through the door of his Humvee, severing his left arm.
"It didn't affect me as a military officer, I mean that," Odierno said one evening in Baghdad much later. "It affected me as a person. I hold no grudges. My son and I talked a lot about this. He was doing what he wanted to do, and liked what he was doing."
But he said it did deepen his determination. "I was going to see this through -- I felt an obligation to see this through. That drives me, frankly. I feel an obligation to mothers and fathers. Maybe I understand it better because it happened to me."
The most important factor in his change in thinking, however, was probably his growing belief, as he prepared to redeploy to Iraq, that the United States was heading toward defeat.
'THE STRATEGY HAS GOT TO CHANGE'
The General Fears That His Commanders' Plan Will Lead to Failure.
As the newly designated second in command in Iraq, Odierno was given a clear understanding of the scenario that Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his military superiors expected to play out: The United States would begin drawing down its forces in Iraq, cutting the number of combat troops in 2007 by as much as a third.
His responsibilities were equally clear: moving U.S. forces outside all major cities and establishing a handful of bigger bases along key roads leading into Iraq, deploying U.S. forces to the country's borders to limit outside influence, speeding up the transition to Iraqi security forces, and letting Iraqis handle fighting in the cities.
But the more the general and his team considered this plan, they less they liked it. They feared that it got ahead of the Iraqis' ability to do the job and thus, in keeping with the American pattern in Iraq since 2003, was likely to amount to one more rush to failure.
Odierno was "very nervous" about the course of U.S. strategy, he recalled. He decided to formally oppose any additional troop cuts. He wasn't even thinking about an increase, because, he said, "I didn't think I could get more."
He and a small group of advisers decided on a course almost the opposite of the plan given them. Instead of moving out of the cities, they would deploy more forces into them. Instead of consolidating their base structure, they would establish scores of smaller outposts. Nor would they withdraw to the borders. And most emphatically, they would slow, not accelerate, the transition to Iraqi forces.
Odierno realized that to take all those steps, he would need more troops -- and before long, it was clear to subordinates that Odierno was at odds with Casey, his commanding officer. "Casey fought it all the way," recalled Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, then Odierno's chief of staff.
In an interview last year, Casey seemed puzzled when told that Odierno had grave doubts about the direction of the war back in late 2006. "Ray never came to me and said, 'Look, I think you've got to do something fundamentally different here,' " he said.
But to their subordinates, the disagreement was obvious. "We would backbrief one general and get one set of guidances, and then brief the other and get a different set," remembered a senior Army planner in Iraq.
In Washington, Keane had his own doubts about U.S. policy and was not shy about expressing them. More influential in retirement than most generals in active service, he allied himself with Odierno, advising him to ask for five new brigades. But when Odierno raised that number with Casey, his commander dismissed the notion. "He said, 'You can do it with two brigades,' " Odierno recalled. "I said, 'I don't know.' "
Plotting with Odierno, Keane bypassed the Pentagon and called the White House, which he had already been lobbying for a troop surge. "Just think about what's going to happen," he told national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "You are not going to be effective in bringing down the violence with only two additional brigades, therefore you will call for an additional brigade three separate times, each time because we do not have sufficient troops. The media will be all over you for failing three more times. Meanwhile, the president is going to bite this bullet; he should only bite it once. He shouldn't bite it one time and then three more times."
Throughout that fall, Keane recalled, he had "a continuous dialogue" with Odierno. "He knows he needs more troops; he knows the strategy has got to change. His problem is General Casey."
In Baghdad, Odierno tasked his planners with considering how they would use the additional troops. "We have to secure the population, first thing," he told them. "We have to get back out into Baghdad."
They thought they really needed about eight brigades, but they knew that no more than five would be possible and that it would take months to get them all to Iraq.
The Joint Chiefs backed Casey. But after the Democratic victory in that November's congressional elections, Bush fired Rumsfeld, replacing him with former CIA director Robert M. Gates, who brought a skeptical view of how the Iraq war had been managed. And on Dec. 19, the day after Gates was sworn in, Bush acknowledged that "we're not winning, we're not losing" in Iraq -- a striking turnaround from his previously positive formulations.
Shortly thereafter, Gates and Pace, the Joint Chiefs head, left for Iraq. In Baghdad they met with Abizaid of Central Command, Casey and Odierno. The first two generals were at loggerheads with Odierno, the newer, younger and junior officer pushing hard for more troops. Gates listened without indicating which way he was leaning.
Gates later had breakfast with some young soldiers. "Never mind all the generals standing around," he began, according to a tape recording of the meeting, which reporters did not attend. He found far more agreement in the ranks on the need for more manpower.
On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, disappeared into his mobile home in the plane's belly with Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades.
"The surge really began the day that Gates visited," Odierno later concluded.
'DON'T TRY TO DO TOO MUCH'
The Military Transforms Its Mind-Set Along With Its Tactics.
Once it was decided that the troop buildup would have five brigades, Odierno laid down some key principles to his planners and commanders.
First, the strategy wouldn't be just about Baghdad -- a decision influenced by heeding the experience of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's generals. American analysts, studying Hussein's deployment of Republican Guard troops in 2002 and 2003 west and south of the capital, had assumed that the move was made to reduce the ability of commanders to launch a coup. No, the Iraqi generals told them: The elite troops were kept there, rather than in Baghdad, because that was where the trouble was.
So while the first two American brigades of the surge went into the capital, the next three went mainly into areas around the city. Ultimately, the surge forces were divided about evenly between Baghdad and its outskirts.
The second principle, Odierno said: Don't make a move unless your presence is sustainable, and once you take an area, don't leave it uncovered. "Don't give up terrain," he ordered his commanders. "Don't try to do too much." This tactical patience was consistent with the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the thinking of its author, who arrived in Baghdad in February as Odierno's commanding officer.
Odierno and Petraeus made an odd pair: Odierno, at 6 feet 5 inches and 245 pounds, is eight inches taller and 90 pounds heavier than Petraeus. Odierno's most noticeable physical trait is his bulk topped by his bald, bulletlike head. Petraeus is small and slightly buck-toothed. The nimble Petraeus is as much a diplomat as a soldier, while the hulking Odierno always seemed inclined to use firepower. Odierno is emotional, the type of general who will bear-hug a colonel having a hard day. Petraeus is cool to the point of being remote.
During their first tours, in 2003-2004, the two generals commanded divisions in adjacent areas -- Odierno with the 4th Infantry Division headquartered in Tikrit, and Petraeus with the 101st Airborne north of him in Mosul. But they had run their divisions very differently, with Odierno inclined to use the closed fist and Petraeus the open hand.
The guidance Odierno gave his subordinates during his second tour underscored just how much he had changed. His "key message" at one meeting, according to an internal Army summary, was that "planners must understand the environment and develop plans from an environmental perspective [instead of] an enemy situation perspective."
This was classic counterinsurgency thinking, almost the opposite of the strategy that Odierno and most of the Army had taken in Iraq in 2003-2004, when they emphasized a kill-and-capture approach.
"General Odierno has experienced an awakening," said Herrington, the retired intelligence officer who in 2003 wrote the report highly critical of the general. "I've now completely revised my impression of him."
The change in tactics and the increase in troops were not the only reasons that the security situation in Iraq would improve in the following months. By the time the surge began, the ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias had largely been completed. In addition, Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric, declared a cease-fire later in 2007. Most important, Petraeus that year decided to put large parts of the Sunni insurgency on the U.S. payroll, essentially paying them to stop fighting.
In a recent interview, Odierno expressed surprise that a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, published just as Odierno took command in Iraq, credited White House aides and others in Washington with developing the surge. From Odierno's perspective -- and that of many other senior officers in Iraq -- the new strategy had been more or less conceived and executed by himself in Baghdad, with some crucial coaching from Keane in Washington.
"We thought we needed it, and we asked for it and we got it," he said, referring to the strategy. "You know, General Petraeus and I think . . . I did it here, [and] he picked it up. That's how we see it. And so it's very interesting when people back there see it very differently."
Of course, Odierno said, ultimately Bush had to make the policy decision, and some White House aides encouraged that step. But, he continued, "they had nothing to do with developing" the way it was done. "Where to go, what [the soldiers] would do. I mean, I know I made all those decisions."
Odierno's focus is now the future -- and trying to influence the decisions of the new administration.
While he believes the surge has achieved some important tactical success, Odierno appeared uncertain of its long-term impact, specifically whether the improved security has created the breathing space for Iraqi leaders to foster reconciliation among the nation's warring factions -- the strategy's long-term political goal.
As 2008 proceeded, not only were some top Iraqi officials not seizing the opportunity, some were regressing, Odierno worried one day last November as he sat in the Green Zone office he had inherited from Petraeus.
"What we're finding is that as Iraq has become more secure, they've . . . moved backwards, in some cases, to their hard-line positions, whether it be a Kurdish position, an Arab position, a Sunni position, a Shi'a position, a Da'wa position, an ISCI position" -- the last two being the major Shiite parties.
Obama is likely to find Odierno and other generals arguing passionately that to come close to meeting his commitment to keeping U.S. troops safe, keeping Iraq edging toward stability and maintaining the pressure on extremists, he will need a relatively large force to remain in Iraq for may years.
When asked what sort of U.S. military presence he expected in Iraq around 2014 or 2015 -- well after Obama's first term -- Odierno said, "I would like to see a . . . force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000," with many troops training Iraqi forces and others conducting combat operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq and its allies.
One of the points he would stress to the new commander in chief, Odierno said, would be "the importance of us leaving with honor and justice. "
"For the military, he added, "it's extremely important because of all the sacrifice and time and, in fact, how we've all adjusted and adapted."
As the No. 2 Commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them
The Washington Post, Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page A01
Full set or articles w/key documents here
Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.
A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers -- intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi "MAMs" (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. "I thought we had beaten this thing," he would later recall.
Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."
So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.
Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.
Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a "surge" of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.
The most prominent advocates of maintaining that commitment are the two generals who implemented the surge and changed the direction of the war: Odierno and David H. Petraeus, who replaced Casey in 2007 as the top U.S. commander in Iraq and became the figure most identified with the new strategy. But if Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, was the public face of the troop buildup, he was only its adoptive parent. It was Odierno, since September the U.S. commander in Iraq, who was the surge's true father.
In arguing for an increase in U.S. forces in Iraq, Odierno went up against the collective powers at the top of the military establishment. As late as December 2006, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was privately telling his colleagues that he didn't see that 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could do anything that 140,000 weren't doing. The month before, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, then head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing that he and every general he had asked opposed sending more U.S. forces to Iraq. "I do not believe that more American troops right now is the solution to the problem," Abizaid emphasized.
This account of the military's internal struggle over the direction of the Iraq war is based on dozens of interviews with Odierno, Petraeus and other U.S. officials conducted in 2007 and 2008. In many cases, the interviews were embargoed for use until 2009.
Odierno's role has not been previously reported, and he remains a controversial figure because of his first tour in Iraq, when the tactics he employed violated many of the counterinsurgency principles he would later embrace.
Retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a veteran intelligence officer, concluded that the approach that many U.S. commanders used in the early days of the Iraq war effectively made them recruiters for the insurgency, and he was especially bothered by the actions of Odierno's division. "Some divisions are conducting operations with rigorous detention criteria, while some -- the 4th ID is the negative example -- are sweeping up large numbers of people and dumping them at the door of Abu Ghraib," Herrington wrote in a 2003 report to Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq.
Odierno was determined to operate differently on his second tour of duty, but he will not talk about how his transformation occurred. "I think everyone's changed," he said, brushing aside the question in one of a series of interviews in Iraq over the past two years. "We've all learned."
But one impetus, Odierno agreed, was the severe wounding of his son in August 2004. Lt. Anthony Odierno, then in the 1st Cavalry Division, had been leading a patrol near Baghdad's airport when a rocket-propelled grenade punched through the door of his Humvee, severing his left arm.
"It didn't affect me as a military officer, I mean that," Odierno said one evening in Baghdad much later. "It affected me as a person. I hold no grudges. My son and I talked a lot about this. He was doing what he wanted to do, and liked what he was doing."
But he said it did deepen his determination. "I was going to see this through -- I felt an obligation to see this through. That drives me, frankly. I feel an obligation to mothers and fathers. Maybe I understand it better because it happened to me."
The most important factor in his change in thinking, however, was probably his growing belief, as he prepared to redeploy to Iraq, that the United States was heading toward defeat.
'THE STRATEGY HAS GOT TO CHANGE'
The General Fears That His Commanders' Plan Will Lead to Failure.
As the newly designated second in command in Iraq, Odierno was given a clear understanding of the scenario that Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his military superiors expected to play out: The United States would begin drawing down its forces in Iraq, cutting the number of combat troops in 2007 by as much as a third.
His responsibilities were equally clear: moving U.S. forces outside all major cities and establishing a handful of bigger bases along key roads leading into Iraq, deploying U.S. forces to the country's borders to limit outside influence, speeding up the transition to Iraqi security forces, and letting Iraqis handle fighting in the cities.
But the more the general and his team considered this plan, they less they liked it. They feared that it got ahead of the Iraqis' ability to do the job and thus, in keeping with the American pattern in Iraq since 2003, was likely to amount to one more rush to failure.
Odierno was "very nervous" about the course of U.S. strategy, he recalled. He decided to formally oppose any additional troop cuts. He wasn't even thinking about an increase, because, he said, "I didn't think I could get more."
He and a small group of advisers decided on a course almost the opposite of the plan given them. Instead of moving out of the cities, they would deploy more forces into them. Instead of consolidating their base structure, they would establish scores of smaller outposts. Nor would they withdraw to the borders. And most emphatically, they would slow, not accelerate, the transition to Iraqi forces.
Odierno realized that to take all those steps, he would need more troops -- and before long, it was clear to subordinates that Odierno was at odds with Casey, his commanding officer. "Casey fought it all the way," recalled Brig. Gen. Joe Anderson, then Odierno's chief of staff.
In an interview last year, Casey seemed puzzled when told that Odierno had grave doubts about the direction of the war back in late 2006. "Ray never came to me and said, 'Look, I think you've got to do something fundamentally different here,' " he said.
But to their subordinates, the disagreement was obvious. "We would backbrief one general and get one set of guidances, and then brief the other and get a different set," remembered a senior Army planner in Iraq.
In Washington, Keane had his own doubts about U.S. policy and was not shy about expressing them. More influential in retirement than most generals in active service, he allied himself with Odierno, advising him to ask for five new brigades. But when Odierno raised that number with Casey, his commander dismissed the notion. "He said, 'You can do it with two brigades,' " Odierno recalled. "I said, 'I don't know.' "
Plotting with Odierno, Keane bypassed the Pentagon and called the White House, which he had already been lobbying for a troop surge. "Just think about what's going to happen," he told national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. "You are not going to be effective in bringing down the violence with only two additional brigades, therefore you will call for an additional brigade three separate times, each time because we do not have sufficient troops. The media will be all over you for failing three more times. Meanwhile, the president is going to bite this bullet; he should only bite it once. He shouldn't bite it one time and then three more times."
Throughout that fall, Keane recalled, he had "a continuous dialogue" with Odierno. "He knows he needs more troops; he knows the strategy has got to change. His problem is General Casey."
In Baghdad, Odierno tasked his planners with considering how they would use the additional troops. "We have to secure the population, first thing," he told them. "We have to get back out into Baghdad."
They thought they really needed about eight brigades, but they knew that no more than five would be possible and that it would take months to get them all to Iraq.
The Joint Chiefs backed Casey. But after the Democratic victory in that November's congressional elections, Bush fired Rumsfeld, replacing him with former CIA director Robert M. Gates, who brought a skeptical view of how the Iraq war had been managed. And on Dec. 19, the day after Gates was sworn in, Bush acknowledged that "we're not winning, we're not losing" in Iraq -- a striking turnaround from his previously positive formulations.
Shortly thereafter, Gates and Pace, the Joint Chiefs head, left for Iraq. In Baghdad they met with Abizaid of Central Command, Casey and Odierno. The first two generals were at loggerheads with Odierno, the newer, younger and junior officer pushing hard for more troops. Gates listened without indicating which way he was leaning.
Gates later had breakfast with some young soldiers. "Never mind all the generals standing around," he began, according to a tape recording of the meeting, which reporters did not attend. He found far more agreement in the ranks on the need for more manpower.
On the long flight home to Washington in a C-17 military cargo jet, Gates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, disappeared into his mobile home in the plane's belly with Pace and a bottle of California cabernet sauvignon. A few days later, Odierno got the word: Gates wants you to have all five brigades.
"The surge really began the day that Gates visited," Odierno later concluded.
'DON'T TRY TO DO TOO MUCH'
The Military Transforms Its Mind-Set Along With Its Tactics.
Once it was decided that the troop buildup would have five brigades, Odierno laid down some key principles to his planners and commanders.
First, the strategy wouldn't be just about Baghdad -- a decision influenced by heeding the experience of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's generals. American analysts, studying Hussein's deployment of Republican Guard troops in 2002 and 2003 west and south of the capital, had assumed that the move was made to reduce the ability of commanders to launch a coup. No, the Iraqi generals told them: The elite troops were kept there, rather than in Baghdad, because that was where the trouble was.
So while the first two American brigades of the surge went into the capital, the next three went mainly into areas around the city. Ultimately, the surge forces were divided about evenly between Baghdad and its outskirts.
The second principle, Odierno said: Don't make a move unless your presence is sustainable, and once you take an area, don't leave it uncovered. "Don't give up terrain," he ordered his commanders. "Don't try to do too much." This tactical patience was consistent with the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the thinking of its author, who arrived in Baghdad in February as Odierno's commanding officer.
Odierno and Petraeus made an odd pair: Odierno, at 6 feet 5 inches and 245 pounds, is eight inches taller and 90 pounds heavier than Petraeus. Odierno's most noticeable physical trait is his bulk topped by his bald, bulletlike head. Petraeus is small and slightly buck-toothed. The nimble Petraeus is as much a diplomat as a soldier, while the hulking Odierno always seemed inclined to use firepower. Odierno is emotional, the type of general who will bear-hug a colonel having a hard day. Petraeus is cool to the point of being remote.
During their first tours, in 2003-2004, the two generals commanded divisions in adjacent areas -- Odierno with the 4th Infantry Division headquartered in Tikrit, and Petraeus with the 101st Airborne north of him in Mosul. But they had run their divisions very differently, with Odierno inclined to use the closed fist and Petraeus the open hand.
The guidance Odierno gave his subordinates during his second tour underscored just how much he had changed. His "key message" at one meeting, according to an internal Army summary, was that "planners must understand the environment and develop plans from an environmental perspective [instead of] an enemy situation perspective."
This was classic counterinsurgency thinking, almost the opposite of the strategy that Odierno and most of the Army had taken in Iraq in 2003-2004, when they emphasized a kill-and-capture approach.
"General Odierno has experienced an awakening," said Herrington, the retired intelligence officer who in 2003 wrote the report highly critical of the general. "I've now completely revised my impression of him."
The change in tactics and the increase in troops were not the only reasons that the security situation in Iraq would improve in the following months. By the time the surge began, the ethnic cleansing by Shiite militias had largely been completed. In addition, Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric, declared a cease-fire later in 2007. Most important, Petraeus that year decided to put large parts of the Sunni insurgency on the U.S. payroll, essentially paying them to stop fighting.
In a recent interview, Odierno expressed surprise that a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, published just as Odierno took command in Iraq, credited White House aides and others in Washington with developing the surge. From Odierno's perspective -- and that of many other senior officers in Iraq -- the new strategy had been more or less conceived and executed by himself in Baghdad, with some crucial coaching from Keane in Washington.
"We thought we needed it, and we asked for it and we got it," he said, referring to the strategy. "You know, General Petraeus and I think . . . I did it here, [and] he picked it up. That's how we see it. And so it's very interesting when people back there see it very differently."
Of course, Odierno said, ultimately Bush had to make the policy decision, and some White House aides encouraged that step. But, he continued, "they had nothing to do with developing" the way it was done. "Where to go, what [the soldiers] would do. I mean, I know I made all those decisions."
Odierno's focus is now the future -- and trying to influence the decisions of the new administration.
While he believes the surge has achieved some important tactical success, Odierno appeared uncertain of its long-term impact, specifically whether the improved security has created the breathing space for Iraqi leaders to foster reconciliation among the nation's warring factions -- the strategy's long-term political goal.
As 2008 proceeded, not only were some top Iraqi officials not seizing the opportunity, some were regressing, Odierno worried one day last November as he sat in the Green Zone office he had inherited from Petraeus.
"What we're finding is that as Iraq has become more secure, they've . . . moved backwards, in some cases, to their hard-line positions, whether it be a Kurdish position, an Arab position, a Sunni position, a Shi'a position, a Da'wa position, an ISCI position" -- the last two being the major Shiite parties.
Obama is likely to find Odierno and other generals arguing passionately that to come close to meeting his commitment to keeping U.S. troops safe, keeping Iraq edging toward stability and maintaining the pressure on extremists, he will need a relatively large force to remain in Iraq for may years.
When asked what sort of U.S. military presence he expected in Iraq around 2014 or 2015 -- well after Obama's first term -- Odierno said, "I would like to see a . . . force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000," with many troops training Iraqi forces and others conducting combat operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq and its allies.
One of the points he would stress to the new commander in chief, Odierno said, would be "the importance of us leaving with honor and justice. "
"For the military, he added, "it's extremely important because of all the sacrifice and time and, in fact, how we've all adjusted and adapted."
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