Here's a rather odd splitting of hairs -- Time Magazine's "objective" reporter Joe Klein takes John McCain to task because Barack Obama has never said he'd talk with Ahmadinejad specifically, just Iran's leaders, which is to say Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Um, Joe, how is that better than talking to Ahmadinejad?

[From Joe Klein's Time.com blog] At a press conference here, I just asked John McCain about why he keeps talking about Obama's alleged willingness to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has no power over Iranian foreign policy, rather than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who does. He said that Ahmadinejad is the guy who represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations, which is a fair point. When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the "average American" thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn't get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, "But isn't it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?" Oh well... As I said below, there is a real debate lurking beneath all this bluster--whether we directly engage our adversaries, as we did during the cold war. McCain says no. Obama says yes. They should have it out in debate.
Again, nonsensical hair splitting.

Sure, technically, the Ayatollah and his Supreme Council (i.e., the Ayatollah and 11 mullahs) call all the shots. But Ahmadinejad, as McCain pointed out, is their boy, and he's hardly powerless.

In any event, this is irrelevant.

What is relevant is Klein's second point - that we "engaged" our adversaries during the Cold War. The thing is, Klein is backwards on his conclusions. Then again, reporters are often ignorant of history.

Many key points:

* Iran is not the Soviet Union. It is nowhere near as powerful or influential and thus it's a mistake to elevate them as such.

* We didn't have direct talks with the Soviets and Chinese because we wanted to. We did so because we had to. See point one.

* This isn't the Cold War. Under Nixon, we talked with China in large part to leverage them off of the Soviets. We correctly identified a weakness in their supposed Communist alliance. Thus, we didn't talk with our enemies out of anything but a strategy to undermine them, not because of some highbrow liberalism like Obama and company propose.

* Finally, Reagan didn't get elected, pick up the telephone and start talking to the Soviets, as our misinformed revisionist-history liberal friends keep stating. Indeed, Gorbachev wasn't even leader of the USSR when Reagan took office, Leonid Brezhnev was. Reagan met with Brezhnev with preconditions (namely, the US brazenly placed scores of Pershing II missiles in Europe), not without preconditions, as Barack Obama's own website claims he'd do with Iran (Obama's website: "Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.")

* It wasn't until Gorbachev took office that Reagan got anywhere with the Soviets, because the West recognized that Gorby was someone we could reason with. So even if one wants to elevate Iran to the status of the USSR (folly #1), neither the Ayatollah nor Ahmadinejad are anywhere near the reasonable guy that Gorby was (folly #2).

* At bare minimum, Reagan only talked with his enemies from a position of strength (did I mention the Pershing II missiles parked in Russia's back yard?). He likewise didn't fail to call a spade a spade. He reminded the Soviets at every turn of their cruelty - calling them the "Evil Empire," or telling them that "the march of freedom and democracy" would "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." I don't see any strength like that from Obama or Democrats in general. In fact, they go out of their multi-cultural, diversity-lovin', kumbayah way NOT to dare insult the Iranians. With the exception of far left Kool-Aid drinkers, the Obama camp looks whimpy to everyone, espeically to the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad.

In summary: Joe Klein needs to open up a frakin' history book, because his knowledge has been found lacking.

Labels: 2008, folly, foreign policy, mccain, media bias, Obama, Reagan, Russia

Shakespeare once wrote, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Protesting too much is exactly what faux-outraged Democrats are doing in response to a speech in which President Bush told the Israeli Knesset that, "We also believe that nations have a right to defend themselves and that no nation should ever be forced to negotiate with killers pledged to it's destruction." He referenced Neville Chamberlain, and that appeasement never worked with Nazis. That's it.

What's fascinating in all this is that Bush (1) made no mention of Barack Obama or any Democrat, and (2) simply repeated what American presidents have been saying about our Israeli relationship since Harry Truman more than 60 years ago.

That Democrats are so oddly defensive when no attack was made simply underscores that they are as weak in the face of autocracies from Burma to China to North Korea to Tehran as everyone suspects.

Labels: 2008, democrats, foreign policy, Israel, Obama, war on terror

Great commentary by Dan Henninger.

Among the Western intellectual classes in the U.S. and Europe, there is no idea more routinely mocked than George Bush's proposition that what the world needs today is more democracies. Much of this has to do with the Iraq war and the apparently bottomless, neurotic antipathy to Mr. Bush. But make no mistake: The steady stream of pushback against "exporting democracy" as quixotic or inappropriate has gone far toward throwing out the democratic baby with the Bush bathwater.

Tectonic plates in motion don't distinguish between democracies and autocracies, but the record shows that getting hit by an earthquake or cyclone in an authoritarian government is a high-risk proposition for the survivors.

Communist China's Tangshan earthquake of 1976 was the 20th century's most devastating, killing 255,000. (All data here from U.S. Geological Survey.) Managua under the Somoza dictatorship in 1972: at least 5,000 dead and most of the city destroyed.

Mexico City's 1985 earthquake under the one-party PRI government killed 9,500 according to government estimates, but the toll is believed to have been much higher. Soviet Armenia 1988: 25,000 dead. In 2003 an earthquake in mullahfied Iran destroyed the ancient city of Bam and killed at least 31,000.

Common to all is that their governments never held real elections. In such places, after nature kills people, delay and incompetence kill the rest. Set aside idealism and the flowery rhetoric that must accompany a statement like the 2002 Bush Doctrine. The bottom line is accountability. In democracies, even poor or imperfect ones, public pressure, even outrage, pushes elected officials to act. In nondemocracies, the politicians don't give a damn because they don't have to.

Bureaucracies anywhere are lumpen, but in nondemocracies their sloth can be lethal. Their political masters, in office in perpetuity, are often corrupt, and so too are they. This, not poverty, is mainly why buildings like the Juyuan Middle School collapsed this week. In Bam just five years ago, many died because they were trapped beneath crude houses. Cement up to code isn't that expensive.

Bad people and bad cement exist everywhere. When they kill people in a democracy, the pressure of public outrage calls for heads to roll. After the fiasco of Hurricane Katrina, the head of FEMA went to the block, George Bush's approval rating collapsed and has never recovered. Arguably, one can divide the Bush presidency's status to before and after Katrina.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who saw his fill running Doctors Without Borders, suggested last week that disaster aid to Burma's government would be ripped off. Paul Wolfowitz, a democracy-addicted neocon, came to the World Bank arguing that authoritarian corruption was at the center of many developing-nation horrors. The Bank's bureaucracy drove him out. One wonders how many shoddy buildings their corrupt borrowers have tossed together.

Labels: Economics, Foreign Aid, foreign policy, government

In 1977, Jimmy Carter told Americans to get over their "inordinate fear of communism." This year, expect to be told to get over your "inordinate fear" of terrorism.

Among politicians, the case is still being made sotto voce. When Barack Obama lists the "common threats of the 21st century" as "nuclear weapons and terrorism, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease," the suggestion is that Islamist terrorism is one of many problems, and not, as John McCain insists, the "transcendent issue of our time."

Among policy experts, however, the argument is being stated more baldly. "The fear of terrorism has reached the bogeyman threshold," writes Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist formerly with the CIA. His new book, "Leaderless Jihad," is worth reading if only because it makes the best of a bad case.

This case has been made before. "Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism," wrote Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official, in a New York Times op-ed. "They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal. They are likely to think that the United States is the most popular target of terrorists. And they almost certainly have the impression that extremist Islamic groups cause most terrorism. None of these beliefs are based in fact."

Unfortunately for Mr. Johnson, his op-ed appeared in July 2001, two months and a day before 9/11. Mr. Sageman is a more sophisticated observer. He takes the terrorist threat seriously and understands that the U.S. is the chief target. He rubbishes most of the pop-sociological explanations for terrorism, including poverty, sexual frustration and so on. And he argues that, having mainly vanquished the old al Qaeda in Afghanistan, we are now faced with a "third generation" of jihadis who are disconnected from any kind of central organization and therefore harder to detect and thwart.

In Mr. Sageman's account, this third generation is mostly a byproduct of Muslim anger about the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "The sight of U.S. soldiers fighting Muslims around the world triggers moral outrage and inspires sympathizers to join the movement," he writes. "The sight of Muslims fighting back provides a heroic model to emulate." By erasing the U.S. footprint in Iraq, "demilitarizing" the fight against terrorism, working toward a settlement for the Palestinians and otherwise assuaging Muslim sensibilities while making terrorism "uncool," Mr. Sageman believes the air can slowly be let out of the jihadist balloon.

Implicit in this argument is the notion that, when it comes to fighting terrorism, doing less is more. As a political prescription, it fits nicely with the idea that the war in Iraq has only made our terrorism problem worse and that we can better address the threat as a criminal justice issue rather than as a "war" (as the U.S. mostly did during the Clinton administration). Mr. Sageman's one caveat is that we cannot allow terrorists to regain the territorial sanctuaries they enjoyed prior to 9/11.

That caveat, however, turns out to be broad enough to drive a truck bomb through. Mr. Sageman believes the third generation of jihadis only came into existence with the near-destruction of the first two, achieved by force of arms in Afghanistan and maintained by the presence of tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops in the country. He insists that the war in Afghanistan did not have a galvanizing effect on the third generation, and that the sanctuaries that still remain to Osama bin Laden in the Pakistan hinterland don't provide a particularly useful base for global jihad.

Really? Even before the U.S. toppled the Taliban, Yusuf Qaradawi, the most influential cleric in the Sunni world, took to the airwaves to insist that "Islamic law says that if a Muslim country is attacked, the other Muslim countries must help it, with their souls and their money, until it is liberated." As for the Pakistani sanctuaries, a National Intelligence Estimate from last summer noted that al Qaeda had "regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas, operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." Those capabilities are now making themselves felt through suicide terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

No doubt the invasion of Iraq did spur a younger generation of jihadis to new fits of apoplexy, particularly in Europe. Yet when Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Theo Van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, he was reacting to Mr. Van Gogh's film "Submission," which uncharitably depicts the treatment of women in Islam.

Similarly, when mobs burned down the Danish embassy in Beirut, the "rage" turned on a dozen or so offending cartoons. The threshold for jihadist violence, it turns out, falls below whatever levels are set by current U.S. foreign policy to include what used to be known as free speech.

Then, too, for all the anger over Iraq, it's curious that it is Europe -- with its hostility to the Bush administration and its longstanding Palestinian sympathies -- that has borne the brunt of "third generation" terror. Mr. Sageman's explanation rests on America's habits of assimilation and the greater economic opportunities for Muslims here. But that merely suggests that one solution to third generation terror lies in more accommodative labor market and immigration policies in Europe, not U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

On the contrary, if recent experience in Iraq demonstrates anything, it's that nothing is likelier to deter future terrorists than the defeat of existing ones. In letters captured by U.S. forces in Iraq late last year, al Qaeda "sheikhs" lament how the flow of foreign suicide bombers has dried up as the likelihood dims that their "martyrdom" will result in anyone's death other than their own. There is, said one of these sheikhs about his dwindling minions, "panic, fear and an unwillingness to fight" ever since U.S. and Iraqi troops went on the offensive.

Which brings us back to the 39th president. Two years after he expressed a merely ordinate fear of communism, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. "History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons," Mr. Carter said in his response. "But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease." Mr. Carter learned that the hard way. Let's hope Mr. Obama won't have to learn the same lesson, the same way.
-- Bret Stephens

Labels: foreign policy, Islamic extremism, war on terror

Bob Geldof -- musician/activist who co-founded Band Aid and Live Aid and was a 2006 and 2008 Nobel Peace Prize nominee for humanitarian efforts -- recently spent time with President Bush on his trip to Africa, and was given full access to the president. He just published in Time Magazine his interview-editorial of his time with the Pres

This is an awesome interview-editorial of the president, written by Bob Geldof, and Geldof comes off much like his friend Bono -- a liberal, but a classic liberal. Respectful. Polite. Reasonable. True to his leftist principles without insulting those he disagrees with. He's not angry. Not enraged like so many of the left wing have become.

Geldof and Bush: Diary From the Road

By Bob Geldof

I gave the president my book. He raised an eyebrow. "Who wrote this for ya, Geldof?" he said without looking up from the cover. Very dry. "Who will you get to read it for you, Mr. President?" I replied. No response.

The Most Powerful Man in the World studied the front cover. Geldof in Africa — " 'The international best seller.' You write that bit yourself?"

"That's right. It's called marketing. Something you obviously have no clue about or else I wouldn't have to be here telling people your Africa story."

It is some story. And I have always wondered why it was never told properly to the American people, who were paying for it. It was, for example, Bush who initiated the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) with cross-party support led by Senators John Kerry and Bill Frist. In 2003, only 50,000 Africans were on HIV antiretroviral drugs — and they had to pay for their own medicine. Today, 1.3 million are receiving medicines free of charge. The U.S. also contributes one-third of the money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which treats another 1.5 million. It contributes 50% of all food aid (though some critics find the mechanism of contribution controversial). On a seven-day trip through Africa, Bush announced a fantastic new $350 million fund for other neglected tropical diseases that can be easily eradicated; a program to distribute 5.2 million mosquito nets to Tanzanian kids; and contracts worth around $1.2 billion in Tanzania and Ghana from the Millennium Challenge Account, another initiative of the Bush Administration.

So why doesn't America know about this? "I tried to tell them. But the press weren't much interested," says Bush. It's half true. There are always a couple of lines in the State of the Union, but not enough so that anyone noticed, and the press really isn't interested. For them, like America itself, Africa is a continent of which little is known save the odd horror.

We sat in the large, wood-paneled conference room of Air Force One as she cruised the skies of the immense African continent below us. Gathered around the great oval table, I wondered how changed was the man who said in 2000 that Africa "doesn't fit into the national strategic interests, as far as I can see them."

"Hold on a minute. I said that in response to a military question. Condi! Canya get in here," the President shouts out the open door, leaning back in his chair. The Secretary of State, looking glamorous and fresh despite having been diverted to Kenya to articulate the U.S.'s concern over matters there before jetting back to Rwanda to join her boss, sits down. "Hi, Bob." "Hi, Condi." It's like being inside a living TV screen.

Bush asks whether she remembers the context of the 2000 question. She confirms it was regarding the U.S.'s military strategies inside Africa, but then 2000 was so long ago. Another universe. I ask him if it is the same today. "Yes, sir," he says. "Well, if America has no military interest in Africa, then what is Africom for?" I ask.

People in Africa are worried about this new, seemingly military command. I thought it was an inappropriate and knee-jerk U.S. militaristic response to clumsy Chinese mercantilism that could only end in tears for everyone concerned. (And so did many Africans, if the local press was anything to go by.)

"That's ridiculous," says Bush. "We're still working on it. We're trying to build a humanitarian mission that would train up soldiers for peace and security so that African nations are more capable of dealing with Africa's conflicts. You agree with that dontcha?" Indeed I do. The British intervention in Sierra Leone stopped and prevented a catastrophe, as did U.S. action in Liberia. Later, in public, Bush says, "I want to dispel the notion that all of a sudden America is bringing all kinds of military to Africa. It's simply not true ... That's baloney, or as we say in Texas — that's bull!" Trouble is, it sounds to me a lot like what the U.S. did in the early Vietnam years with the advisers who became something else. Mission creep, I think it's called.

"No, that won't happen," Bush insists. "We're still working on what exactly it'll be, but it will be a humanitarian mission, training in peace and security, conflict resolution ... It's a new concept and we want to get it right." He muses for a while on the U.S. and China, and their policies on Africa — Africans are increasingly resentful that the Chinese bring their own labor force and supplies with them. Then, in what I took to be a reference to the supposed Chinese influence over the cynical Khartoum regime, Bush adds, "One thing I will say: Human suffering should preempt commercial interest."

It's a wonderful sentence, and it comes in the wake of a visit to Rwanda's Genocide Memorial Center. The museum is built on the site of a still-being-filled open grave.
There are 250,000 individuals in that hole, tumbled together in an undifferentiated tangle of humanity. The President and First Lady were visibly shocked by the museum. "Evil does exist," Bush says in reaction to the 1994 massacres. "And in such a brutal form." He is not speechifying; he is horror-struck by the reality of ethnic madness. "Babies had their skulls smashed," he says, his mind violently regurgitating an image he has just witnessed. The sentence peters out, emptied of words to describe the ultimately incomprehensible.

Rwanda brings him back again to Darfur. In an interview with African journalists, Bush explained the difficulties there now that the "rebels" had broken up into ever-smaller factions, no longer representing their own clans but their own warlord interests. What should we do in this very 21st century asymmetric situation? Impose a wall of peacekeepers first, stop the massacre and rape, and begin negotiating? "The U.N. is so slow, but we must act," Bush says.

Action may very well be his wish, but because of the U.S.'s intervention elsewhere and his own preemptive philosophy, it is now unacceptable for the U.S. to engage unilaterally. By his own deeds, he has rendered U.S. action in Darfur impossible. As for the rest of the world, for all their oft-spoken pieties, they seem to be able to agree on precisely nothing. Meanwhile, the rape and killing continue, Khartoum plays its game of murder and we won't even pay for the helicopters that the U.N. forces need to protect themselves. Pathetic.

The Presidential Gig

Earlier, in his private lounge, which is just behind the bedroom with the twin beds with blue blankets, complete with Presidential Seal, we'd talked of personal stuff.
I'd been asking about the laundry arrangements. How do they get the presidential shirts, socks, undies, etc., done on this thing? I'm used to rock-'n'-roll tours where there's a washing machine and dryers set up backstage, but this is gigging on a whole other level. At least 20 military transporters haul presidential necessities around the planet. At our hotel in Ghana, the porter carrying my bag said they had thrown out all the other guests because "the President of the World was coming."

"Laundry, huh?" the President mused. "Y'know, I've never asked that. I usually just wear the same thing all day, but if I need to change, there's always a room I can go to. Laundry, huh? Is this the interview, Geldof? It's certainly a different technique!" He's showing me around because I've asked if I can get Air Force One stuff to bring home to the kids. "Hey guys, get Geldof the links and pins and stuff.

And the M&M's. Didja know I got my own presidential M&M's?" Wow. "Yeah, cool, right? They'll love 'em." They did. They're in a presidential box with his autograph on them. The Queen doesn't have that. Or the Pope. And I muse later from Car 25 in the 33-car motorcade that there are probably only three people in the world who can bring crowds like this out onto the street — the Queen, the Pope and the President of the United States, and only one's a politician. "Jed," the President says to the man doing the ironing between the twin beds. "How do we do the laundry on this thing?" "We use hotels, sir." Ah.

Nobody else gets beds. The exhausted secret-service guys, the secretaries of state, the chief of staff, the assistants and advisers and the press pool attempt a fitful sleep in the gray-and-beige reclining seats. Some give up the unequal struggle and order dinner. Not fantastic food, with decentish wine served by nicely uniformed, friendly waiters.

Up front we're knocking back Cokes. The First Lady, elegant and composed, is reading with her legs tucked under her on the L-shaped sofa. The President throws himself into a chair in front of me and sprawls comfortably, Texas-style. He asks about growing up in Dublin. "Was it poor then?" Very. "Huh. What'd your dad do? Your mom?" We went through it. "How'd you and Bono meet up? You knew each other back then? What's his real name?"

I don't know how, but eventually we arrive at the great unspoken. "See, I believe we're in an ideological struggle with extremism," says the President. "These people prey on the hopeless. Hopelessness breeds terrorism. That's why this trip is a mission undertaken with the deepest sense of humanity, because those other folks will just use vulnerable people for evil. Like in Iraq."

I don't want to go there. I have my views and they're at odds with his, and I don't want to spoil the interview or be rude in the face of his hospitality. "Ah, look Mr. President. I don't want to do this really. We'll get distracted and I'm here to do Africa with you." "OK, but we got rid of tyranny." It sounded like the television Bush. It sounded too justificatory, and he doesn't ever have to justify his Africa policy. This is the person who has quadrupled aid to the poorest people on the planet. I was more comfortable with that. But his expression asked for agreement and sympathy, and I couldn't provide either.

"Mr. President, please. There are things you've done I could never possibly agree with and there are things I've done in my life that you would disapprove of, too. And that would make your hospitality awkward. The cost has been too much. History will play itself out." "I think history will prove me right," he shoots back. "Who knows," I say.

It wasn't awkward. It wasn't uncomfortable. He is convinced, like Tony Blair, that he made the right decision. "I'm comfortable with that decision," he says. But he can't be. The laws of unintended consequences would determine that. At one point I suggest that he will never be given credit for good policies, like those here in Africa, because many people view him "as a walking crime against humanity." He looks very hurt by that. And I'm sorry I said it, because he's a very likable fellow.

"C'mon, let's move next door and let Laura alone." "I spoke to Blair about you before I came on the plane." "Tony Blair? What'd he say?" "He said you don't see color. To remember that you employed the first black secretaries of state, that your worldview had changed since you began, and that Condi was a big influence with regard to Africa." "So you were a big influence on me," he says to Condi. "I don't think so ..." "Nah, I've always been like this." "But now you sound like a hippy, for God's sake," I say. He laughs.

An Emotional Man

At a lunch for Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana, the President introduces the First Lady and Condi. Then he introduces me. It turns into a very funny Geldof roast. Finally, he says, "Anyway, he doesn't look it, but he's all right. And I'm not saying that to blow smoke up his rear just because he's doing some piece on me."

Thanks for the compliment, Mr. President. He makes the volunteers relaxed and easy with him. They introduce themselves. One woman tells how six months previously, she was bitten by a cobra and rushed to hospital. As she was passing out, she tells the President, "that little voice whispered to me, 'You'll be all right,' and I was." She pauses, and says meaningfully to him: "You know that little voice, I think?" "Not really," Bush says drily. "I've never been bitten by a cobra." As they tell their stories he refers to them as being among the best of America. "I like courage and compassion. We are a courageous and compassionate people." A middle-aged couple say they gave up their careers and home to come to Africa. "It's important to take risks for the things you believe in," says Bush. Then disarmingly, he says to the man, who lives in a village, "What's social life like here?" "What's social life anywhere at 59?" the man asks his President, who is 61. "Tell me about it," says Bush. "Bed at 6:30!"

I have always heard that Bush mangles language and I've laughed at the satires of his diction. He shrugs them off, but I think he's sensitive about it. He has some verbal tics, but in public and with me he speaks fluently and in wonderful aphorisms, like:

"Stop coming to Africa feeling guilty. Come with love and feeling confident for its future."

"When we see hunger we feed them. Not to spread our influence, but because they're hungry."

"U.S. solutions should not be imposed on African leaders."

"Africa has changed since I've become President. Not because of me, but because of African leaders."

Some of these thoughts, were they applied to Iraq, would have profound implications on the man's understanding of how the world functions. ("U.S. solutions should not be imposed on African leaders!")

Of course, it would be ridiculous to be the President of the U.S. and not change as a person or evolve in your understanding of the world. I suggest that his commitment to Africa has been revolutionary in its interest curve. "That's not true," he says. "In my second debate with Al Gore, I came out for debt cancellation and AIDS relief. I called AIDS a genocide. I felt and still do that it was unacceptable to stand by and let a generation be eradicated."

You forget that Bush has an M.B.A. He thinks like a businessman in terms of the bottom line. Results. Profit and loss. There is an empiricism to a lot of his furthest-reaching policies on Africa. Correctly, he's big on trade. "A 1% increase in trade from Africa," he says, "will mean more money than all the aid put together annually." He's proud that he twice reauthorized the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a modestly revolutionary Clinton Administration initiative that enabled previously heavily taxed exports to enter the U.S. tax-free. Even though oil still accounts for the vast amount of African exports to the U.S., the beneficial impact of AGOA on such places as the tiny country of Lesotho, and its growing textile industry, has been startling.

AGOA represents precisely the sort of coherent thinking that will change things for Africa. But we talk of how the little that Africa does export to other parts of the world is still greater than the amount that it trades within the continent. I say that's because there are more landlocked countries in Africa than anywhere else in the world. "So they can't get their stuff to market?" he asks quickly. "Exactly," I say. "You have to pay so many tariffs at each border that by the time you get to the coast, you're overpriced." "You gotta dismantle borders, then." He's curious and quick.

He is also, I feel, an emotional man. But sometimes he's a sentimentalist, and that's different. He is in love with America. Not the idea of America, but rather an inchoate notion of a space — a glorious metaphysical entity. But it is clear that since its mendacious beginnings, this war has thrown up a series of abuses that disgrace the U.S.'s central proposition. In the need to find morally neutralizing euphemisms to describe torture and abuse, the language itself became tortured and abused. Rendition, waterboarding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib — all are codes for what America is not. America has mortally compromised its own essential values of civil liberty while imposing its own idea of freedom on others who may not want it. The Bush regime has been divisive — but not in Africa. I read it has been incompetent — but not in Africa. It has created bitterness — but not here in Africa. Here, his administration has saved millions of lives.

"Guys like me always like to cut ribbons," Bush says mockingly at a ceremonial opening. But it's a dangerous modesty. Congress must still agree to fund the massive spending he's laid out for Africa, and most of it will come after he leaves the White House. It is vital that the new President continues with this policy. "Whoever is President," Bush says, "will understand Africa is in our nation's interest. They are wonderful people."

On Air Force One, Jendayi Frazer, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Bobby Pittman, the National Security Council adviser for Africa, and I stayed awake as the pitch night engulfed us, only punctuated by the giant orange gas flares on the Gulf of Guinea. We ate our popcorn, drank our Cokes and watched Batman Begins as the airspace was cleared for miles around us. America was flying through the warm African night and I was hitching a ride on her.

Labels: Economics, Foreign Aid, foreign policy

Bret Stephens has something to say about our so-called decline:

Marinating in 'Decline'
February 5, 2008; Page A16

In 1788, Massachusetts playwright Mercy Otis Warren took one look at the (unratified) U.S. Constitution and declared that "we shall soon see this country rushing into the extremes of confusion and violence." This, roughly, is the origin of American declinism -- and it's been downhill ever since.

A couple centuries later, an international relations theorist at Yale named Paul Kennedy sought to explain the decline of great powers in terms of a ratio between military commitments and economic resources. The Reagan military buildup and the deficits that went with it, he warned, had brought the United States to the point of "imperial overstretch." Not quite. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe and Japan (with no military burdens to speak of) entered a long period of economic stagnation, and the U.S. consolidated its position as the world's only true superpower.

Declinism is again in vogue. "America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order," writes Parag Khanna in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story titled, cheerfully, "Who Shrank the Superpower?" In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Fred Kaplan observes that "the United States can no longer take obeisance for granted." Mr. Kaplan's new book, "Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power," sounds just a bit derivative of Nancy Soderberg's "The Superpower Myth" (2005), Roger Burbach's "Imperial Overstretch" (2004) and Charles Kupchan's "The End of the American Era" (2003).

American "decline" is the foreign-policy equivalent of homelessness: The media only take note of it when a Republican is in the White House. Broadly speaking, declinists divide between those who merely accept America's supposed diminishment as a fact of life, and those who celebrate it as long overdue. As for the causes of decline, however, they tend to agree: declining (relative) economic muscle, due in large part to the rise of China; an overextended military bogged down needlessly in Iraq and endlessly in Afghanistan; the declining value of America's "brand" on account of Bush administration policies on detention, pre-emption, terrorism, global warming -- you name it.

Yet each of these assumptions collapses on a moment's inspection. In his 2006 book "Überpower," German writer Josef Joffe makes the following back-of-the-envelope calculation: "Assume that the Chinese economy keeps growing indefinitely at a rate of seven percent, the average of the past decade (for which history knows of no example). . . . At that rate, China's GDP would double every decade, reaching parity with today's United States ($12 trillion) in thirty years. But the U.S. economy is not frozen into immobility. By then, the United States, growing at its long-term rate of 2.5 percent, would stand at $25 trillion."

Now take military expenditures. Yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal for 2009, which includes $515.4 billion for the regular defense budget. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this would be the largest defense appropriation since World War II. Yet it amounts to about 4% of GDP, as compared to 14% during the Korean War, 9.5% during the Vietnam War and 6% in the Reagan administration. Throw in the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals, and total projected defense spending is still only 4.5% of GDP -- an easily afforded sum even by Prof. Kennedy's terms.

Finally there is the issue of our allegedly squandered prestige in the world. There is no doubt America's "popularity," as measured by various global opinion surveys, has fallen in recent years. What's striking, however, is how little of this has mattered in terms of the domestic political choices of other countries or the consequences for the U.S.

In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, nearly every government that joined President Bush's "coalition of the willing" -- Australia, Great Britain, Denmark and Japan -- was returned to power. France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder, the war's two most vocal opponents, were cashiered for two candidates who campaigned explicitly on a pro-American agenda. The same happened in South Korea, where the unapologetically anti-American President Roh Moo-hyun has been replaced by the unapologetically pro-American Lee Myung-bak. Italy's equally unapologetic pro-American Silvio Berlusconi seems set to return to office after a brief holiday.

None of this is to say that perceptions about America play a decisive role in the politics of most other countries. It is to say that anti-Americanism, like illegal immigration, is fool's gold politics. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel were not installed in office principally to mend relations with Washington. But to the extent that both seek to liberalize their economies, or strengthen NATO, or take a responsible position vis-a-vis Iran, it brings them closer to Washington's way of thinking.

Meanwhile, McDonald's -- the icon of everything anti-Americans detest about the U.S. -- is doing a booming business overseas even as sales in the U.S. flatlined last year. Another icon, Boeing, is having no trouble booking orders (meeting them is another matter) for its new 787 Dreamliner to such customers as Spain's AirEuropa and Bahrain's Gulf Air. The quintessentially American film, "National Treasure," has earned nearly half its gross revenue -- about $160 million -- in foreign ticket sales since its release in late December. So much for America's loss of "soft power."

Happily for Mr. Kaplan, I look forward to receiving his forthcoming book. I'll put it right up there on the shelf with another favorite: "19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots." I'm guessing it will fetch a price on eBay.

Labels: defending liberty, Economics, foreign policy

Here's an interesting contrast:

First, via Iran's state-run media (Islamic Republic News Assc.):

President: Women are most oppressed social class
Tehran, Feb 2, IRNA

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here Saturday that women are the most oppressed social class. Ahmadinejad told the First International Congress in Commemoration of Women Martyrs that throughout history women have been subject to injustice and crimes.

"Throughout history women have been subject to different forms of injustice and what we are witnessing today is a new form of the injustices," he added.
Blah, blah, blah... as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

And Iran, where punishment for adultry is the same as the punishment for murder... via the AFP:

Two Iranian sisters convicted of adultery face being stoned to death after the supreme court upheld the death sentences against them, the Etemad newspaper Monday quoted their lawyer as saying.

The two were found guilty of adultery -- a capital crime in Islamic Iran -- after the husband of one sister presented video evidence showing them in the company of other men while he was away.

"Branch 23 of the supreme court has confirmed the stoning sentence," said their lawyer, Jabbar Solati.

The penal court of Tehran province had already sentenced the sisters identified only as Zohreh, 27, and Azar (no age given) to stoning, the daily said. Solati explained that the two sisters had initially been tried for "illegal relations" and received 99 lashes. However in a second trial they were convicted of "adultery."

The pair admitted they were in the video presented by the husband but argued that there was no adultery as none of the footage showed them engaged in a sexual act with other men.

"There is no legal evidence whereby the judge could have the knowledge for issuing a stoning sentence," Solati said, adding that he had appealed to the state prosecutor. "The two sisters have been tried twice for one crime," Solati protested.

Under Iran's Islamic law adultery is theoretically punishable by stoning, although in late 2002 judiciary head Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi issued a writ suspending such executions.

However in July 2007, Jafar Kiani was stoned to death for adultery in a village in the northwestern province of Qazvin in a rare execution by stoning that provoked a wave of international outrage. Capital offences in Iran include murder, rape, armed robbery, serious drug trafficking and adultery. Iran currently makes more use of the death penalty -- almost always by hanging -- than any other country apart from China.
Ah, yes, China, another one of the multi-culturalists oft-cited model of systemic worthiness.

We're becoming more accepting of the Irans and Chinas and Russias because of their un-Jeffersonian mix of economic liberalization and totalitarinism, or what Fareed Zakaria termed "Illiberal Democracies."

Oddly enough, the very people who used to be so outraged by the lack of human rights by these countries now have become apologists of their practices by redefining them as "culture."

Labels: defending liberty, Economics, foreign policy, Iran

There are a lot of things about libertarianism that I like. Ron Paul seems to go way beyond the ideals of libertarianism, however, and begins to morph into a strange mix of David Duke racism and Pat Buchanan isolationism.

As James Kirchick's article on Paulism points out, it's easy to find things that one has in common with Ron Paul. Whether it be aversion to the IRS or perhaps one who feels that the war on drugs, poverty, etc., have done less to conquor them then to expand the role of government, there is often logic in true libertarianism.

However, as with any ideology, one can misprioritize lofty ideals for common sense. Here's an example.

Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of the institute's senior faculty, is a founder of the League of the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History , a pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul enthusiastically blurbed Woods's book, saying that it "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole." Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as the "War for Southern Independence" and attacks "Lincoln cultists"; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it was not).

In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, [Paul advisor Lew] Rockwell wrote to supporters, "We'll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it." Paul's newsletters have themselves repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued that "the right of secession should be ingrained in a free society" and that "there is nothing wrong with loosely banding together small units of government. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we too should consider it."
As you're reading it you wonder that if Paul can't back the American Civil War would there ever be any just war for his brand of government? That answer is obvious.

The act of secession took the lives of more Americans than in any war before or since. And people want to vote for a guy who's political advisors have it on their agenda?

Labels: foreign policy, Ron Paul, US Civil War

As historian Michael Oren observes in "Power, Faith and Fantasy," his history of America's 230-year involvement in the Middle East, as early as the 1790s "many Americans had grown dismayed with the country's Middle East policy of admonishing the [Barbary] pirates while simultaneously coddling them with bribes." It was precisely out of a desire to "trade with everybody" that the early American republic was forced to build a navy, and then to go to war, to defend its commercial interests, a pattern that held true in World War I and the Persian Gulf "Tanker War" of the 1980s.

These details of history pose a problem not just to Dr. [Ron] Paul's views of the Middle East, but to the intellectual architecture of libertarianism itself. Liberal societies are built on the belief in (and defense of) individual rights, but also on the overawing power of government to transform natural rights into civil ones. In the same way, trade between nations is only possible in the absence of robbers, pirates and other rogues. Whose job is it to get rid of them?

-- Bret Stephens

Labels: foreign policy, free markets, Ron Paul

Read the whole commentary, from Investors Business Daily .

United Nations: The U.N. voted 178-1 to hike its spending 10% next year to an all-time high of $4.2 billion. The lone standout in voting against the record rise in spending? The U.S., which again finds itself alone at the U.N.

The U.S. has tried for some time to rein in the runaway United Nations and its various extremist political factions and bureaucracies, but to no avail. Now, the U.S. has become an outcast in the very organization it founded and has funded for 60 years.

Last Saturday, the U.N. announced its "marathon talks" had resulted in a $4.17 billion basic budget — even though the U.S. dissented. By the way, our dissent is meaningless, since we're still obliged to pay just under a quarter of that budget, or roughly $922 million.

But we in fact pay much more than that each year.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, we spent more than $5 billion on the U.N. and related activities, ranging from food programs to peacekeeping. That's a rise of 67% during George Bush's first term alone. So much for stingy Americans.

Too bad we're not getting our money's worth. In fact, the U.N. has become such a massive, unwieldy, corrupt organization that, at this point, it seems beyond repair.
To list the U.N.'s multitudinous sins here would require something the size of a phone book. Suffice to say, in recent years the U.N. has been involved in a variety of policy debacles and outright crimes.

These include the oil-for-food scandal, the largest financial scandal ever; charges that U.N. peacekeepers abused and prostituted young girls in Africa and the Balkans; did nothing about the genocide of millions of people in Darfur and Rwanda; turned its back on democratic Taiwan in favor of communist China; allows Iran to expand its illicit nuclear enrichment program; and so on.

Why such a bad record? Part of the problem is the U.N., which was started after World War II with the best of humanitarian intentions, has been hijacked by a variety of left-wing and anti-Semitic agendas, pushed by an aggressive pack of anti-U.S. and anti-democratic nations that tend to vote as a bloc in the U.N.

According to Heritage Foundation fellow Brett Schaefer, these U.N. voting blocs include the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, and the Group of 77 developing nations (which has 130 members — not 77.) All these groups are, in fact, anti-American, anti-West and anti-free market.

"So, where the U.N. actually could have a role in advancing economic policies that enhanced freedom, that enhanced opportunity, that enhanced economic development," former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton recently explained, "the mind-set of the U.N. itself as played out in its conference rooms and corridors is actually exactly to the contrary."

The U.N., in short, has become a major way for nondemocratic, noncapitalist countries to siphon wealth from the wealthy countries — without doing anything that remotely looks like democratic, pro-market reform in their own countries.
The U.S. goes along mainly because there are many people out there — call them UNICEF-Americans — who actually believe the U.N.'s propaganda about saving "the children."

But, in fact, if you're a child in the Third World, you have righteous cause to curse the U.N. and the nongovernmental organizations it empowers to control your life. Where the U.N. goes, democracy doesn't necessarily follow. Nor does development.

Just look at the Palestinian problem, which has festered for more than a half a century due to the U.N.'s never-ending solicitude for the Arab world's hatred of the Jews.

Again in 2006, Israel topped the list of countries subjected to human rights criticism — not China, not Zimbabwe, not Venezuela, not North Korea, not Sudan, not Cuba, places where millions have been murdered, imprisoned and denied the most basic of human rights and freedoms. (The U.S., by the way, came in fourth.)

This sick fixation on Israel and the U.S. has ruined the U.N. Yet, in 2009, it's planning to hold its "Durban II" conference. The last conference of the type, held in the summer of 2001, was a monthlong hate-fest against both Israel and the U.S. Perhaps not coincidentally, just days after it ended the 9/11 attacks occurred.
We've had enough, thank you. The U.N. wastes billions each year, while corruption flourishes. It's time for the U.S. to pull out.

Let the tyrants and bureaucrats go home. Maybe we can form a new organization based on the 89 countries classified as "fully free" by the nonpartisan human rights group, Freedom House. That would give us almost half of the U.N.'s 192 current members — a good start for a new beginning.

Labels: Foreign Aid, foreign policy, taxes, UN Corruption

So the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), complied from 16 intelligence agencies, declares that they, "Judge with high confidence that in fall 2003 Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

A roundup of articles include:

U.S. report says Iran halted nuclear weapons program in 2003 (NY Times)

US: Iran Still Able to Develop Nukes (Associated Press)

U.S. Finds That Iran Halted Nuclear Arms Bid in 2003 (Washington Post)

And... my favorite... a Washington Post page-1 "news analysis" (read: opinion disguised as news) stating: "A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy"
A blow? Really? Is it?

Or... could it mean, if true -- and there's every reason to doubt, keep reading -- that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 had a lot to do with Iran halting its weapons program?

I mean, if Iran "halted a program" it means without doubt they (1) actually had a program to halt, (2) didn't halt it just for the heck of it, and (3) will likely start it back up once the international pressure decreases.

If... if... IF the NIE is true it can be reasonably argued that Iran had the same reaction to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as did Libya: They too had a nuclear weapons program which Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi officially revealed to the United Nations and ended in December 2003, in large part with thanks to Tony Blair's highlighting the writing on the wall to Mr. Qaddafi.

Now. Here's the rub. Just two years ago this same intelligence community released the 2005 NIE which declared that they "Assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that iran is immovable."

The NIE group, better known as the National Intelligence Council, was (apparently) wrong in 2002 when it famously quantified the amounts of WMD the United States could expect to find in Iraq, it barely mentioned Osama bin Laden and never even referenced the word "al Qaeda" in their 1997 and 1999 NIEs (the last produced before 9-11), it did not accurately assess development of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan prior to 1998, and apparently it was wrong two years ago, since, as Norman Podhoretz states, in this 2007 NIE, "they represent a 180-degree turn from the conclusions of the last NIE on Iran's nuclear program."

Thus, if the National Intelligence Council was wrong all those times why should we have confidence that they are right this time?

In other words it's difficult to say if one trusts Iran or our own intelligence community less. One wonders if other than great signal capabilities, satellite intelligence and other technological intelligence we have any spying ability (i.e., from human spies) at all.

Case in point, from the AP article above:

Some of the changes in the new report reflect the use of "open source" intelligence - public information from sources such as the news media and international organizations. An official said, for example, that photos taken at Iran's Natanz nuclear facility during U.N. inspections in 2002 were particularly useful in assessing the capabilities of the civilian uranium enrichment program.
Open sources? Great, so our federal intelligence capabilities are no different that that of you and I conducting Google Earth searches.

That doesn't leave one with much confidence in our intelligence community, does it?

But it may be that the very nature of the NIC group increases the liklihood of incompetence. Why? Because it's made up of 16 agencies who must first agree on common language prior to publication. This leads to a watered down, least common denominator of intelligence.

It's human nature: try to get 16 people (let alone agencies of people) to agree on anything and you'll generally have a fair percentage of them throw their hands in the air and collectively state "Fine! Say what you want I'm sick of arguing about it!"

So on that note, the best conclusion rests in five questions posed by Tom Joscelyn:

First, what intelligence is this assessment based upon?

Any student, or even casual observer, of the U.S. intelligence community knows that it has done a remarkably poor job of recruiting spies inside unfriendly regimes. For example, we had no meaningful spies inside Saddam's regime. That was at least part of the reason the U.S. intelligence community misjudged Saddam's WMD programs so badly. (Whatever came of Saddam's WMD, U.S. intelligence clearly did not know what was going on since the few sources it had were on the periphery of Saddam's regime.)

Reading the latest NIE does not provide, of course, any clues as to how the IC came to these conclusions. If the IC does have good sources inside the Iranian regime and its putative nuclear program, then quite naturally it would want to protect them. And we wouldn't expect to see any information about sources in a declassified "Key Judgments" such as this.

However, there are good reasons to suspect that the IC does not have good intelligence inside Iran. For example, both of the leading members (one Republican, one Democrat) of the House Intelligence Committee explained back in 2006 that we did not really know then what was going on inside Iran. And the Robb-Silberman Commission, which investigated what the IC knew about WMD programs around the world, found in 2005: "Across the board, the Intelligence Community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago."

Understandably, the Commission refrained from discussing the specifics of the intelligence community's infiltration, or lack thereof, of both the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. But it is a safe bet that the statement cited above applied in both cases.

Thus, we should not be confident, at all, that the IC has the type of intelligence that would allow it to make a definitive assessment one way or another. This is true no matter what conclusions the IC publishes. Who or what are the sources cited by IC? How do we know they are telling the truth? If they are members of the Iranian regime, have their so-called bona fides been established? Are they in a position to know what they claim to know? Do they have any motives to lie, or distort the truth? We should be mindful of all of these questions and more.

Second, what has changed since 2005?

As this latest NIE notes, its conclusions are at odds with what the IC believed in 2005. The last page of the declassified Key Judgments notes significant differences between what the IC believed in 2005 and what it is saying now. In 2005, the IC noted: "[We] assess with high confidence that Iran currently is determined to develop nuclear weapons despite its international obligations and international pressure, but we do not assess that Iran is immovable." Now the IC says, "…we do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons." So, in 2005 the IC was sure that Iran was determined to build a nuclear weapon and now it is not sure at all. This is a profound change in opinion and, at a minimum, does not inspire confidence that the IC can get this story right. After all, if the IC's judgments can change so drastically in two years time, why should we believe any of its pronouncements one way or the other?

What is the basis for this flip-flop? What has been learned in the meantime to warrant such an about-face?

Third, how did the IC draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?

In the very first footnote the authors of the NIE explain: "For the purposes of this Estimate, by 'nuclear weapons program' we mean Iran's nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran's declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."

So, is the IC then assuming that Iran's "declared civil work" is necessarily benign? One of the key issues with respect to Iran's "civilian" nuclear program is its capacity, with some tweaking here and there, to be used for military purposes. For example, according to the New York Times in early 2006, the IAEA concluded that there was evidence suggesting "links between Iran's ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles." Indeed, the authors of the NIE explicitly recognize the possibility of the civilian program being diverted for military uses:

Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran's civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications--some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.
So, then, the NIE's conclusions apply strictly to Iran's alleged halt of its military and clandestine programs. As we know, however, uranium enrichment is the most important component of developing the bomb and Iran indisputably has the capacity. (Again, with some tweaking, Iran can use its declared enrichment facilities at some point to make weapons-grade material.) But, this leads us to ask another simple question.

Fourth, how does the IC know that Iran has stopped its clandestine activities with respect to developing nuclear weapons?

Returning to the first footnote of the NIE's Key Judgments, the IC argues that, in 2003, Iran ceased its "nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work." How does the IC know that Iran did not continue working on "weapon design and weaponization" covertly?

Does it think that its sources are so good that they can rule out that possibility? Remember that Iran carried out much of its work on its nuclear program clandestinely for the better part of two decades. And some of these clandestine activities involved dealings with the AQ Khan network, the scope of which was not fully appreciated until it had already been doing business for years. How can the IC be sure that Iran's clandestine activities ceased in 2003?

Note that the IC argues that Iran supposedly gave up its covert uranium conversion and enrichment work. How does the IC know that? Are we to believe that the IC's penetration of Iran's intelligence services, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and other parties controlled by the mullahs is so iron-clad that it can know this with certainty? Furthermore, is it possible that Iran did not need to do said work covertly because it has been openly enriching uranium?

Fifth, how does the IC know what motivated Iran's alleged change in behavior?

The NIE claims that "Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure." How does the IC know what motivated Iran's alleged change in behavior? Did the Iranians tell someone? Is this coming from clandestine sources? Assuming for the moment that Iran really did halt its program, are we to believe that a substantial U.S.-led military presence in Afghanistan and in Iraq (or potential presence in Iraq, depending on when in 2003 this change supposedly occurred), had nothing to do with Iran's supposed decision? That is, are we to believe that U.S. led forces on Iran's eastern and western borders had nothing to do with Tehran's decision-making process?

We are left with a number of important questions. And without knowing the answers to these questions, the IC's opinions are best viewed with a skeptical eye.
Skeptical indeed!

Labels: CIA, foreign policy, intelligence, Iran, NIE, proliferation

Bill Roggio has a disturbing report about Nawaz Sharif:

With the return of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Pakistan, a dangerous new actor has now reentered Pakistani politics. ABC News's the Blotter reports that Sharif has accepted a bribe from none other than Osama bin Laden.

The report is based on the interrogation of one Ali Mohamed, who "served as a special projects coordinator for bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri in the mid-1990s." Based on the Blotter report, 'Mohamed was also in charge of selecting bin Laden's personal security team." This would be the Black Guard, and this posting along with the special projects coordinator position would place Mohamed at the heart of al Qaeda's inner working.

Mohamed, who is now in a U.S. prison for his role in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, has been cooperating with the FBI and providing them with a wealth of information on the inner workings of al Qaeda. Frmer FBI agent and ABC News consultant Jack Cloonan has questioned Mohamed over a period of years and believes the information he has provided to U.S. authorities is accurate.

Cloonan says that back in 1999 Mohamed told the FBI he arranged for a meeting between bin Laden and Sharif's representatives. Following that meeting, Mohamed told Cloonan he delivered $1 million to Sharif's representatives. Mohamed said the payoff was a tribute to Sharif for not cracking down on the Taliban as it flourished in Afghanistan and influenced the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, according to Cloonan.
Sharif, who was deposed by President Pervez Musharraf in a coup in 1999, is now being courted by Musharraf to serve as prime minister in a new coalition government. U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne W. Patterson is set to meet with Sharif today.

As the Blotter noted, rumors of Sharif's links to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden are not new. In 2005, Khalid Khawaja, a former Inter Services Intelligence operative, told Asia Times that Sharif and bin Laden met in Saudi Arabia in 1998. According to Khawaja, Sharif accepted cash to prevent the rise of political rival Benazir Bhutto.

After Gen Zia’s death in a plane crash (1988), elections were announced and there was a possibility that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led by Benazir Bhutto would win, which would be a great setback for the cause of the Afghan jihad against the USSR. The situation was discussed and all the mujahideen thought that they should play a role in blocking the PPP from winning the elections. I joined my former DG Hamid Gul and played a role in forming the then Islamic Democratic Alliance consisting of the Pakistan Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami. The PPP won the elections by a thin margin and faced a strong opposition.

Nawaz Sharif insisted that I arrange a direct meeting with the Osama, which I did in Saudi Arabia. Nawaz met thrice with Osama in Saudi Arabia...

Nawaz Sharif was looking for a Rs 500 million grant from Osama. Though Osama gave a comparatively smaller amount, the landmark thing he secured for Nawaz Sharif was a meeting with the (Saudi) royal family, which gave Nawaz Sharif a lot of political support, and it remained till he was dislodged (as premier) by Gen Pervez Musharraf (in a coup in 1999). Saudi Arabia arranged for his release and his safe exit to Saudi Arabia,” he told Asia Times online.
Sharif is denying any links to the Taliban or al Qaeda. "Let me be clear I have been condemning all sorts of terrorism, whether in Pakistan or outside Pakistan," Sharif told the Associated Press. "We are moderates, we follow moderation and nothing except moderation. Remarks are made by other countries without taking (into consideration) our cooperation that we have extended in the past. To me this is unreasonable and I am disappointed."

Labels: al qaeda, foreign policy, pakistan, proliferation, war on terror

The Hoover Institute's David Henderson has an interesting take on what to do with the Strategic Oil Reserve: sell it.

Henderson contends that the US government could have better influance over the price of oil and actually make a profit by balancing the oil price against the futures market. Pretty interesting.

For quite a while now, the spot price of oil -- that is, the price at which you can buy or sell oil for delivery today -- has been well above the futures price. The futures price is the price at which you can buy or sell oil for delivery at a specified time in the future. For example, on Friday, Nov. 9, the price on the New York Mercantile Exchange of light sweet crude oil for December delivery was $96.32 a barrel and the futures price for delivery in December 2008 was $87.60 -- $8.72 a barrel lower. This relatively unusual time structure of oil prices is called "backwardation."

...You can't, I can't, and oil companies can't, but there is one entity that, in a sense, can reverse arbitrage [buying oil from the future and selling it today]. That entity is the U.S. government. Why? Because the U.S. government is sitting on a large reserve of oil, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which now holds about 700 million barrels of oil. This is enough oil to provide about 10% of daily U.S. oil consumption for a year. And if the U.S. government got smart about selling the oil -- a big if -- it would make money for the Treasury and help consumers by bringing oil prices down. Moreover, the government could make even more money, with minimal risk to the economy, by selling the SPR oil altogether.


Imagine, for example, that the U.S. government began today to sell two million barrels a day and make up for the loss by buying today the same amount in the December 2008 futures market at $87.60. If it earned the spot price of $96.32 on each barrel and had a $1 per-barrel transactions cost, it would make $7.72 a barrel. The government would make daily profits of $15.44 million. If the differential in prices persisted, the feds would make $5.6 billion a year. This is chicken feed to the federal government but it would allow the feds to cut some tax that yields $5.6 billion. If the hated Alternative Minimum Tax is not reformed this calendar year, for example, it will capture about 20 million new victims. Reverse arbitrage would give these new victims an average relief of $280.

Of course, if the government did sell two million barrels a day, that would bring down the world price of oil; so the U.S. government would not benefit as much as I have estimated. But Americans as a whole would benefit. We import approximately 12 million barrels of our 20 million-barrel-a-day consumption. A two million barrel-per-day increase in the world oil supply, on top of the current world supply of 85 million barrels, is a 2.4% increase.

Assuming, as seems reasonable, a highly inelastic world demand for oil of about 0.2, this 2.4% increase would bring oil prices down by 12%, or about $12 a barrel, essentially wiping out the backwardation in oil prices and wiping out the gain to the U.S. Treasury. While oil producers would lose $12 a barrel, oil consumers would gain $12 a barrel. But it would not be a wash for Americans because the loss to U.S. oil producers would be only on their production, which is only 40% of U.S. consumption. So the net gain to the U.S. from a $12 per-barrel price drop would be $144 million a day (12 million of imports at $12 a barrel less) or $53 billion a year. Now that's real money.

SPR oil has been sold before. In 2000, when the spot price exceeded the futures price, the Clinton administration sold oil from the SPR, much too little, but still a step in the right direction.

There's an even more radical step the U.S. government should take that would benefit consumers also while benefiting the government. The government should sell the SPR oil and not replace it. If the government made even $80 a barrel on its 700 million barrels, it would make $56 billion, which is serious money even to the feds.

Many will argue that selling the reserve is a bad idea because then we would be unprotected from the vagaries of world oil markets. This is false. Speculators who anticipate future shortfalls would act in oil markets the way they do in wheat markets, buying oil in anticipation of higher future prices. This would dampen future price increases in oil markets, doing a big favor for future consumers. That's better than the federal government does, which, even as you read this, is stupidly buying $90 oil to fill the SPR.

Labels: Economics, foreign policy, Oil

Obama's blunder is best put by blogger Jason Smith: "I'm Not Naive on Foreign Policy… Watch Me Invade a Nuclear-Armed, Muslim Country!"

Indeed, even his Democratic opponents smell the blood in the water. Expect Clinton to weigh in shortly. Then again, she really doesn't have to. There's nothing she can say that will be more damaging than what Obama did to himself.

Fellow Democratic candidates aren't stopping short. They're slamming him for broadcasting his plans:

[WSJ] Clinton didn't immediately weigh in on today's speech, but New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cautioned that "we should address this problem with tough diplomacy with Gen. Musharraf first, leaving the military as a last resort. It is important to reach out to moderate Muslim states and allies to ensure we do not unnecessarily inflame the Muslim world."

Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wasn't so kind. "The way to deal with it is not to announce it, but to do it," the Delaware senator said at a National Press Club event. "The last thing you want to do is telegraph to the folks in Pakistan that we are about to violate their sovereignty, putting Musharraf in the position that makes it virtually impossible for him to do anything other than what he's done, basically cut a deal with the warlords on the border, to our great detriment."

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd said he wouldn't "declare my intentions for specific military action to the media in the context of a political campaign.'' He called it "dangerous and irresponsible to leave even the impression the U.S. would needlessly and publicly provoke a nuclear power.''
Clearly, Hillary Clinton's assessment that Obama was "naive" on foreign policy because he claimed he would meet any ol' dictator without conditions got under his skin.

She pushed his buttons and Obama responded like Pavlov's dog. Clearly the Obama camp didn't think this one through, and this blunder is probably the beginning of the end of the Obama campaign.

Labels: 2008, Clinton, folly, foreign policy, Obama

This excellent post by Victor Davis Hanson needs no further commentary...

A New Democratic Foreign Policy?

Ms. Edwards promising to swear off tangerines to stop global warming? (but not the private jets that most of the recent debaters arrived on). Sen. Obama eager to meet with everyone from Hugo Chavez to Castro to Bashar Assad, as if, like the NY-DC media, they too can be wooed and wowed with wit and panache? And as far as the candidates' new ideas on the Middle East?

We should be talking with Iran?—but we are. We should be working with moderate Palestinians? But we are. We should get the UN involved and 'regional neighbors', but we are. We should get out of Iraq? But the surge is intended to bulk up the Iraqis to do just that in time.

On the one hand the Democrats aren't offering much new about the old—except they mostly want to start leaving Iraq right now—while on the other, they are absolutely silent about the real dilemmas in our future: to what degree would they be willing to go into Pakistan to get al Qaeda, whom they assure us are growing and have been neglected by our war against them in Iraq? Exactly what programs—list them—would they shut down: wiretaps, Patriot Act, rendentions, Guantanamo? What exactly would they do if Iran continues to violate UN non-proliferation accords and heads to the next step of enrichment with more threats of Armaggedon?

In sum, what we are seeing is basically the outlines of a return to the world of 1993-2000, where we did little in response to terrorism other than in the context of utopian dialogue and refined diplomacy. For many Americans that may seem preferable to hitting the problem head-on in Afghanistan and Iraq—unless of course one believes that such a past policy was one of appeasement and its logical consequence was 9/11.

Labels: democrats, foreign policy

Promoting dialogue with and "engaging" illiberal regimes in North Korea, Venezuela and Iran seem to be all the bi-partisan rage these days.

Even the White House is following along! Envoys from the US, Iran and Iraq are meeting this week to discuss "restoring stability in Iraq."

And just why would Iran want that? Why wouldn't they want to promote the very instability they promote in Lebanon every time it moves toward democracy?

According to Peter Brookes US officials are doing so to "score some points - and breathing room" with European leftists, "those in Congress that worship at the altar of the Baker-Hamilton Report," and parts of "the U.S. domestic audience that favors at least some engagement with Iran."

I call it a fool's errand.

It's lipstick on a pig.

It's a Sysiphean task: taken from the Greeks, Sisyphus was forced by Zeus to eternally roll a boulder up a hill, which only slipped and rolled back down just before he reached the top.

Anyone who expects illiberal dictators to suddenly promote the values they don't even provide to their own populations will find the boulder rolling back over them.

At least the Bush administration is not pulling punches -- at least by today's summary of accounts via US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.

One cannot say the same of most Democratic presidential nominees.

Instead of a You Tube question about "talking with our enemies" and such Kumbayah nonsense, how about a reaction to how Hillary Clinton feels about Iranian police enforcing Islamic dress codes and rounding up women who defy them?

Speaking of that, some are accusing Mrs. Clinton of flip-flopping on the issue.

In April she stated she would "begin diplomatic discussions with those countries with whom we have differences," adding that "it is a terrible mistake for our president [Bush] to say he will not talk with bad people."

But last night she bashed Barack Obama because he said pretty much the same. Responding to Obama, Clinton chided, "Certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria, until we know better what the way forward would be."

Michael Goldfarb sums up Obama's position nicely:

Obama seems to think that once the threat posed by the U.S. is removed, Ahmadinehad and Assad will become responsible parters, and will take on the serious work of maintaining 'stability' in Iraq. His answer shows a Carter-like misperception--that if we just talk to our adversaries, we'll realize that we all want the same thing. Expect Obama to get hammered on this if he wins the Democratic nomination. (Looks like Senator Clinton won't wait for the general election to see him hammered.)
The Clintons are shrewd, and over time Obama will be exposed as an amateur attempting to play with professionals. She set him up good on this one. He followed her lead from April but today he -- not she -- looks silly.

Hillary's lesson to Obama: If you're going to flip-flop, make sure you flop on the correct position, and flop first before the rest of the pack.

Labels: 2008, democrats, foreign policy, Iran

Columnist Michael Ledeen asks if we be in a regional war, why not act like it?

Ledeen finds it curious that there has been no reaction to a recent speech in which Bush plays his hand and reiterates that he considers the war in Iraq to be just a piece of a regional effort to counter aggressive actions by Iran and Syria. Namely, he called out Iran for arming Iraqi insurgents with IEDs and using Hezbollah to quash democracy in Lebanon. Bush called out Syria for its support to Islamic Jihad and Hamas and allowing terrorists to pass into Iraq.

In short, the president sees that it is a regional war, as it has been from the beginning, just as our enemies in Damascus and Tehran publicly told us it would be, even before a single American soldier set foot in Iraq. The two biggest causes of casualties in Iraq are non-indigenous: suicide bombers and constantly improving explosive devices deployed in and alongside roads. Eighty to ninety percent of all suicide bombers are foreigners (mostly Saudis who are trained in Syria), not Iraqis, and the explosives have long been known to be of Iranian design to contain Iranian components, and often constructed in Iran (see the latest intelligence news about al Qaeda reconstituting in Iran).

... It follows that victory in this war requires the defeat of both the terrorists on the ground and the state sponsors, just as President Bush vowed shortly after 9/11, when he said we would not distinguish between the terrorists and the states that provided them with the wherewithal for their actions. Yet the president does not instruct his people to move against the Assads and the mullahs. Quite the contrary, in fact. Military officers have long been instructed to "take it easy" against Iranian forces and surrogates in Iraq, even though the leash has been loosened in recent months. And as Senator Lieberman has so bravely insisted, it is a mistake to permit such forces and surrogates safe haven in Iran and Syria, from which they are free to move against us and the brave Iraqi people. We should attack the terrorist training camps, and the manufacturing facilities for the terror bombs, which, by the way, are also deployed regionally. The first exemplars of the new generation of such bombs were used against Israelis in Gaza and then again in Lebanon.

Attacks against the terrorists are fully justifiable; they would be acts of legitimate self-defense. But they are the least we should be doing. The president constantly says that freedom is our most lethal weapon against the terror masters, and he is right. But then he permits himself to be gulled by those in his administration who shrink from the consequences of our announced policy, and promise him that diplomacy and a gradually escalating set of sanctions will bring the terror masters to heel. That human history knows no case where this strategy has succeeded is somehow not sufficient to show them the errors of their ways, which is a tribute to their hubris and their inability to see the world plain.

... Big wars require big strategies, and we do not have one. Yet. I believe the country would support one if the case were made clearly and honestly. Taking the war to our enemies in Damascus and Tehran does not require troops on the ground or bombs from the air, except in the limited cases of terrorist training camps and weapons factories. It requires, above all, two things: support for the democratic forces in Syria and Iran, and the will to confront our enemies. That will can be easily expressed, but no president has had the coherence and courage to do that. Iran has been at war with us for nearly thirty years, but no president has ever said we want an end to the terror regime in Tehran.

Labels: foreign policy, Iran, Iraq, syria, terrorism, war on terror

Boy, you know you've screwed up when even the Washinton Post editors - whom hardly could be accused of being cheerleaders for the Bush presidency - label you as a schmuck.

Pratfall in Damascus
Nancy Pelosi's foolish shuttle diplomacy

Thursday, April 5, 2007; A16

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that "Israel was ready to engage in peace talks" with Syria. What's more, she added, Mr. Assad was ready to "resume the peace process" as well. Having announced this seeming diplomatic breakthrough, Ms. Pelosi suggested that her Kissingerian shuttle diplomacy was just getting started. "We expressed our interest in using our good offices in promoting peace between Israel and Syria," she said.

Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message. "What was communicated to the U.S. House Speaker does not contain any change in the policies of Israel," said a statement quickly issued by the prime minister's office. In fact, Mr. Olmert told Ms. Pelosi that "a number of Senate and House members who recently visited Damascus received the impression that despite the declarations of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel." In other words, Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel's position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad's words were mere propaganda.

Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascus at a time when the administration -- rightly or wrongly -- has frozen high-level contacts with Syria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker's freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States. Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That's true enough -- but those other congressmen didn't try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. "We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

Labels: folly, foreign policy, pelosi, syria