Obama is doing a good job of destroying American jobs according to Matthew Slaughter.
What Slaughter writes is obvious and is just more evidence of how ignorant our ideological president is when it comes to economics. (See 2 below.)
Why Democrats have come to love unions. It means bigger government. (See 3 below.)
I just got this Internet Warning from Pelosi's husband:
If you get an email titled "Nude photo of Nancy Pelosi."
DON’T OPEN IT!!! It contains a nude photo of Nancy Pelosi.
As I pointed out in a previous memo the current administration has staffed itself with a bunch of so-called Ivy League 'brains' but few if any have practical business experience and sense. We have a college faculty running the country. (See 4 below.)
How Israel plans to attack Iran according to Egyptian sources.
I have been told it would not be unusual if Israel landed some shock troops and the brigade might be the same that was involved in Entebee. (See 5 below.)
Assad, believing a war is coming, is laying the foundation so the world can blame Israel. Again, I repeat, the Goldstone Report has given Israel the opportunity to act as it wishes knowing that it will never get a fair hearing in the court of world opinion and/or the U.N. (See 6 below.)
Obama on the horns of another dilemma - yes, according to this analyst. (See 7 below.)
THE ECONOMIST has a debate between David Boaz vs. Elaine Kamarck, on whether Obama has failed or succeeded to date. (See 8 below.)
Obama's spending suggests he is on steroids. (See 8a below.)
Some medical advice from a friend, fellow memo reader and a far out liberal but this advice is worthwhile. (See 9 below.)
Dick
1)Is Obama Ready to Be President? Leading a coalition against untimely tax hikes could revive his presidency.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR
President Obama needs a "win" for the economy, and for himself. An easy and constructive victory would be to join a growing number of House Democrats in calling for extension of the Bush tax cuts.
That the economy doesn't need tax hikes on job creators and investors hanging over it right now should be obvious, so let's skip to the political benefits for the president. Leading a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats to ward off the danger wouldn't just be "bipartisan," wouldn't just serve as a writ of divorce from the Pelosi left, but also would show Mr. Obama's leadership being tempered by realism, to do what is doable.
Mr. Obama would have to withstand the hot breath of MoveOn types who'd castigate him over what Democrats lazily deride as tax cuts for the rich. He'd have to withstand a simple-minded media dwelling on the fact that bankers would keep a bigger share of their bonuses.
He'd pay a price for his unwise rhetoric of late, not to mention his short-sighted political decision to run against the bank bailout that his own administration authored and that will be remembered as his finest hour. (The rejoinder for Republicans has been just too easy: Tim Geithner.)
He'd also have to pay a price for his implausible and belated deficit hawkery, as in Monday's announcement that nipped a few dimes from the budget on grounds that programs are cuttable only if they aren't succeeding in their aims—never mind whether those aims meet a cost-benefit test. Thus a program delivering ice-cream sandwiches to Eskimos is a good one by Obama standards as long as Eskimos are receiving ice-cream sandwiches.
Forget all that: The case for tax cuts as deficit-fighting has never been more valid, since getting the tax base growing is the only way to escape an even bigger fiscal and monetary crisis. Workers who are out of jobs over time become unemployable; plant and equipment depreciate and never contribute to the tax rolls again. Mr. Obama can easily and consistently argue that we need to go for growth above all.
But his steepest learning curve has been getting rid of the copybook approach to defining his agenda—sadly still evident in last week's State of the Union. The country has big problems—it always has big problems. It never doesn't have big problems. But the idea that he has to throw solutions on the table to everything at once is just what we've seen: a formula for irrelevance, a strategy to turn himself into a punch line.
Big problems—health care, energy—don't have to be solved with big solutions, and frequently aren't solvable at all in the sense that Mr. Obama keeps yakking about. But if you pick your battles intelligently, don't care who gets the credit, and launch some of your key bombing runs below the radar, a president can productively reshape the terrain on which problems can evolve.
A brief digression on health care is in order here: Our much maligned political system, even as it has done many unhelpful things in recent decades, has also done things to reshape the terrain in useful ways—by introducing health savings accounts, by injecting dollops of means-testing into Medicare, by enacting the otherwise egregious Medicare drug benefit as a subsidy to purchase private insurance.
Those efforts to reshape the terrain that Mr. Obama so blindly wasted and ignored go back to the 1998 Breaux Medicare commission; they go back to the 1993 Senate Finance hearings that explored how tax policy stokes cost-insensitive health care (an insight that all assumed would be fundamental to ClintonCare until the president's wife got her hands on the portfolio). They also go back to 2008, when Mr. Obama's opponent John McCain bravely called for ending the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.
A quick and ideologically unembarrassed demonstration of bipartisan action to save the economy from untimely tax hikes would brace up the country's confidence in Mr. Obama and his approach to governing. When and if he returns to trying to help America with its long-running health-care policy woes, assuming he hasn't permanently spoiled the soup, he would come back as a different president.
He would come back as a president who understands there was a terrain in place that mattered before he came along. He would come back as a president who understands that elements of consensus have been forming for a long time that he should respect. He would come back as a president free of the notion that he is a special personage liberated from the grounding realities that other presidents have recognized and adapted to.
2)How to Destroy American Jobs. Obama's proposals for increasing the tax burden on U.S.-based multinationals would harm our most dynamic companies
By MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER
Deep in the president's budget released Monday—in Table S-8 on page 161—appear a set of proposals headed "Reform U.S. International Tax System." If these proposals are enacted, U.S.-based multinational firms will face $122.2 billion in tax increases over the next decade. This is a natural follow-up to President Obama's sweeping plan announced last May entitled "Leveling the Playing Field: Curbing Tax Havens and Removing Tax Incentives for Shifting Jobs Overseas."
The fundamental assumption behind these proposals is that U.S. multinationals expand abroad only to "export" jobs out of the country. Thus, taxing their foreign operations more would boost tax revenues here and create desperately needed U.S. jobs.
This is simply wrong. These tax increases would not create American jobs, they would destroy them.
Academic research, including most recently by Harvard's Mihir Desai and Fritz Foley and University of Michigan's James Hines, has consistently found that expansion abroad by U.S. multinationals tends to support jobs based in the U.S. More investment and employment abroad is strongly associated with more investment and employment in American parent companies.
When parent firms based in the U.S. hire workers in their foreign affiliates, the skills and occupations of these workers are often complementary; they aren't substitutes. More hiring abroad stimulates more U.S. hiring. For example, as Wal-Mart has opened stores abroad, it has created hundreds of U.S. jobs for workers to coordinate the distribution of goods world-wide. The expansion of these foreign affiliates—whether to serve foreign customers, or to save costs—also expands the overall scale of multinationals.
Expanding abroad also allows firms to refine their scope of activities. For example, exporting routine production means that employees in the U.S. can focus on higher value-added tasks such as R&D, marketing and general management.
The total impact of this process is much richer than an overly simplistic story of exporting jobs. But the ultimate proof lies in the empirical evidence.
Consider total employment spanning 1988 through 2007 (the most recent year of data available from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis). Over that time, employment in affiliates rose by 5.3 million—to 11.7 million from 6.4 million. Over that same period, employment in U.S. parent companies increased by nearly as much—4.3 million—to 22 million from 17.7 million. Indeed, research repeatedly shows that foreign-affiliate expansion tends to expand U.S. parent activity.
For many global firms there is no inherent substitutability between foreign and U.S. operations. Rather, there is an inherent complementarity. For example, even as IBM has been expanding abroad, last year it announced the location of a new service-delivery center in Dubuque, Iowa, where the company expects to create 1,300 new jobs and invest more than $800 million over the next 10 years.
This is true in manufacturing, too. Procter & Gamble calculates that one in five of its U.S. jobs—and two in five in Ohio—depend directly on its global business.
Compared to the rest of the world, U.S. corporate tax rates are sky-high and our system of corporate taxation is highly complex. The current U.S. federal statutory corporate tax rate of 35% is the highest among all 30 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, far above the OECD average of about 23%. Raise the international tax burden on U.S. multinationals by limiting foreign-tax credits, for example, and you will further reduce their ability to compete abroad. This, in turn, will reduce employment and investment in U.S parent companies.
Making it harder for U.S. multinationals to create U.S. jobs would be bad policy at any time. But it would be especially detrimental now because of how dramatically the private sector of the U.S. economy has contracted in the face of this recession.
Since the slowdown began in December 2007, private-sector payrolls have fallen precipitously. Today there are 2.4 million fewer private-sector jobs than 10 years ago. Moreover, in all four quarters of 2009, gross private-sector investment fell so low that it did not even cover depreciation. For the first time since at least 1947, the U.S. private capital stock shrank throughout an entire year.
The major policy challenge facing the U.S. today is not just to create jobs, but to create high-paying private-sector jobs linked to investment and trade.
Which firms can create these jobs? U.S.-based multinationals. They—along with similarly performing U.S. affiliates of foreign-based multinationals—have long been among the strongest companies in the U.S. economy.
These two groups of firms accounted for the majority of the post-1995 acceleration in U.S. productivity growth, the foundation of rising standards of living for everyone. They tend to create high-paying jobs—27.5 million in 2007.
Consider that in 2007, the average compensation per worker in these multinational firms was $65,248—about 20% above the average for all other jobs in the U.S. economy. These firms undertook $665.5 billion in capital investment, which constituted 40.6% of all private-sector nonresidential investment. They exported $731 billion in goods, 62.7% of all U.S. goods exports. And these firms also conducted $240.2 billion in research and development, a remarkable 89.2% of all U.S. private-sector R&D.
To climb out of the recession, we need to create millions of the kinds of jobs that U.S. multinationals tend to create. Economic policy on all fronts should be encouraging job growth by these firms. The proposed international-tax reforms do precisely the opposite.
International trade and investment policies are especially important to these firms. Passing the already negotiated trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea—and stopping trade barriers against key partners like China—are critical to increasing U.S. exports and related investment and jobs. If we are going to achieve the president's State of the Union aspiration to "double our exports over the next five years," we need to start now.
To help close looming fiscal deficits, the nation needs spending restraint and pro-growth sources of tax revenue. But Monday's proposals are far from that. These tax increases would destroy jobs in some of America's most dynamic companies.
Mr. Slaughter is associate dean and professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2005 to 2007 he served as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
3)The Public-Union Ascendancy: Government union members now outnumber private for the first time.
It's now official: In 2009 the number of unionized workers who work for the government surpassed those in the private economy for the first time. This milestone explains a lot about modern American politics, in particular the paradox that union clout with Democrats has increased even as fewer workers belong to unions overall.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently that 51.4% of America's 15.4 million union members, or about 7.91 million workers, were employed by the government in 2009. As recently as 1980, there were more than twice as many private as public union members. But private union membership has continued to decline, even as unions have organized more public employees. The nearby chart shows the historical trend.
.Overall unionism keeps declining, however, with the loss of 771,000 union jobs amid last year's recession. Only one in eight workers (12.3%) now belongs to a union, with private union employment hitting a record low of 7.2% of all jobs, down from 7.6% in 2008. Only one in 13 U.S. workers in the private economy pays union dues. In government, by contrast, the union employee share rose to 37.4% from 36.8% the year before.
In private industries, union workers are subject to the vagaries of the marketplace and economic growth. Thus in 2009 10.1% of private union jobs were eliminated, which was more than twice the 4.4% rate of overall private job losses. On the other hand, government unions offer what is close to lifetime job security and benefits, subject only to gross dereliction of duty. Once a city or state's workers are organized by a union, the jobs almost never go away.
This means government is the main playing field of modern unionism, which explains why the AFL-CIO and SEIU have become advocates for higher taxes and government expansion in cities, states and Washington. Unions once saw their main task as negotiating a bigger share of an individual firm's profits. Now the movement's main goal is securing a larger share of the overall private economy's wealth, which means pitting government employees against middle-class taxpayers.
And as union membership has grown in government, so has union clout in pushing politicians (especially but not solely Democrats) for higher wages and benefits. This is why labor chiefs Andy Stern (SEIU) and Rich Trumka (AFL-CIO) could order Democrats to exempt unions from ObamaCare's tax increase on high-cost health insurance plans. To the extent Democrats have become the party of government, they have become ever more beholden to public unions.
The problem for democracy is that this creates a self-reinforcing cycle of higher spending and taxes. The unions help elect politicians, who repay the unions with more pay and benefits and dues-paying members, who in turn help to re-elect those politicians.
The political scientists Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo recently wrote in the Weekly Standard about the 2006 example of former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine shouting to a rally of 10,000 public workers that "We will fight for a fair contract." Mr. Corzine was supposed to be on the other side of the bargaining table representing taxpayers, not labor.
From time to time, usually requiring a fiscal crisis, middle-class taxpayers in the private economy will revolt enough to check this vicious political cycle. (See Scott Brown.) But sooner or later, the unions regain their political advantage because taxpayers have other concerns while unions have the most to gain or lose.
This is why most Democrats once opposed public-sector unionism. Such 20th-century liberal heroes as New York Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt believed fervently in industrial unions. But they believed public employees had a special social obligation and could too easily exploit their monopoly position. How right they were.
As we can see from the desperate economic and fiscal woes of California, New Jersey, New York and other states with dominant public unions, this has become a major problem for the U.S. economy and small-d democratic governance. It may be the single biggest problem. The agenda for American political reform needs to include the breaking of public unionism's power to capture an ever-larger share of private income.
4)Ivy League Critical Mass
By John Kelly
"One man's meat is another man's poison," as the saying goes. Let me explain a most striking case in point. Last year at about this time, David Brooks of the New York Times anticipated an enormous intellectual dividend for our country. After cataloguing the Obama administration's numerous Ivy League J.D.s and Ph.D.s, and with no mention of their real-world experience, he went on to write:
Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.
While Mr. Brooks was pleased to finally see intellectual meat on the Washington bone, many others were dismayed to see this Ivory Tower culture reaching critical mass in our government. Brooks's comment was an instance of arrogance acknowledging itself. More realistic people were concerned at seeing an inexperienced, extremely nonrepresentational elite about to pilot the powerful federal government.
If Mr. Brooks felt it suitable to render such a smug assessment with so little apparent evidence, then I feel it necessary to offer a contrary assessment.
The suggestion that a seasoned and well-balanced administrator having a Ph.D. or a J.D. may be well-suited to govern would seem inarguably correct. Yet these administrators probably constitute the most culturally remote and least experienced presidential administration in history.
Source: [Redstate] [Blog.american] [Conservapedia] Originally From a J.P. Morgan research report
The country needs more than a narrowly focused intellectual dividend. Take away this administration's heap o' sheepskin and you have a group of people lacking the qualifications to do anything other than mouth obscure intentions and display self-esteem. Note that those are traits shared, according to a Scientific American article, by many inhabiting our country's finer penal institutions. Source material for this wisecrack provides food for serious thought.
The very fact, as that article stated, that degreed sociologists and psychologists had erroneously assumed that criminals have general low self-esteem is an indicator that the former depended heavily on pure speculation. The moat surrounding their intellectual castle was deep and wide. Criminals and their counselors may have long known answers to questions Ph.D.s have only recently bothered to ask.
If Obama's administration had felt their deficiency of practical experience, they would have gone about slowly and cautiously gaining it during their first year's apprenticeship. To the contrary, they have attempted to move mountains of legislation at lighting speed. They obviously value practical experience less than their education and ideology.
Ask yourself this: Would you be a passenger on a plane piloted by someone with an aerospace Ph.D. but no practical flying experience? Or would you rather be a passenger on a plane piloted by someone having extensive flying experience but no Ph.D.?
Government depends heavily on academic testimony and research for informed decision-making. The contemporary American university, academics' home turf, is the fountainhead of politically correct thought. P.C. has become like a physical constant, as is gravity. It is balanced into every academic discussion.
Climategate revealed "researchers discussing how to manipulate historical temperature data." This is a glaring example of the willingness of academics to falsify data and propagate unproven assumptions. Progressive agendas figure heavily in the funding pursuits of academic science. While presenting opposing arguments is essential to scientific inquiry, "scheming to muzzle their critics" isn't.
Larry Summers, leading economist, Harvard president, and himself a victim of academic ridicule, advised academics going into government, "If you cannot offer a better critique of your proposal than your opponent, you have not examined it carefully enough." Has the traditional need for self-scrutiny been replaced by misrepresentation of fact and opponent ridicule? Present-day academics have culled their intellectual opposition to the point of extinction.
Perhaps the ultimate example of academics' tyranny was the expulsion by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of their director, Dr. James Watson. The Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA stated politically incorrect yet verifiable test results concerning the human I.Q. His talk to the London Science Museum was soon canceled.
The business world has been invaded by academia via the MBA. Those marketing the degree have attempted to replace the school of hard knocks with a certificate. Looking at MBA success rates, McGill University professor Henry Mintzberg took "a list of Harvard Business School superstars ... tracked the performance of the 19 corporate chief executives on that list ... Ten were outright failures ... another four had questionable records at best. Five out of the 19 seemed to do fine."
As Werner Patels of Agoravox.com puts it, "Being able to run a business requires, first and foremost, good common sense and life experience. No school or executive MBA program can ever teach or replace that."
University professors, consciously or unconsciously, tend to mold students into their own image. Gospel for the academic progressive is this: "If it is good to use men as they are," Rousseau writes, "it is much better to transform them into what one intends them to be." Duke professor Michael Gillespie said of students that after attending "four years of college, they are 40 percent more liberal than their parents." Without natural, real-world incentives, universities expose conservative students to grade reduction and the possible denial of credit and credentials.
Contrived or appropriate, the politically leftward-leaning university is commonplace. Disproportions exist at Berkeley, where "Democrats outnumber[ed] Republicans on the faculty by a ratio of nine to one," and at the "University of Colorado, where the number of registered Democrats on the faculty exceeded the registered Republicans by thirty-one to one."
The butcher, the baker, and the computer chip-maker -- each project their characteristic worldviews. Academics do likewise. The natural tendency of academics in government may be to transfer the modus operandi of their native institution to governance, leading them to insist rather than request, demand rather than serve, and scold rather than listen. Citizens may be seen as undergraduates, who when becoming too noisy and contrary can be threatened with demotions and fines.
Back in 1975, U.C. Berkeley physicist Charles Schwartz wrote Academics in Government and Industry. In it, he states, "It is told that 800 years ago, at the University of Bologna in Italy, professors had to obtain permission from their students and had to post bond in order to leave town on private business." Schwartz was then worried that a big corporation might pay a Ph.D. chemist to tell Congress that their new product is safe when it really isn't. In 2010, something worse may have come to pass.
Last year, an Obama brand package of academic goods was delivered to the voting public. Now voters seem to have found that those goods came with instructions they are reluctant to follow. Voters, like customers, expect service. What Obama delivered was something different. The voters are expected, even to the point of fines and jail time, to serve government rather than be served by it. Says Charles Schwartz, "I do not imagine the university as an ivory tower; it should be interactive, it should serve society."
Our government is based on Natural Law. We as Americans insist to be allowed to live as we are. Employ academics as teachers of theory and tools of research, not as authorities.
5)Egyptian sources: Israel prepares to strike Iran from Gulf and N. Iraq
Arab voices were fanning Middle East war fever Wednesday night, Feb. 3. Military sources report not only are Syrian leaders beating war drums - Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem said in Damascus: "Israelis, do not test the power of Syria since you know the war will move into your cities" - but Egyptian military sources have put out information purporting to outline Israel's preparations to strike Iran.
They report the Israeli Navy together with the US Fifth Fleet have for some weeks been charting Persian Gulf waters and Iranian shorelines in preparation for attacks by Israeli naval and special operations forces.
IDF intelligence and special forces officers, they also say, have been marking out routes for their air and ground forces to drive into Iran and hit Iranian nuclear installations.
According to these Egyptian sources, Saudi Arabia has demanded clarifications from Washington about reported US-assisted Israeli preparations to strike Iran and asks why Riyadh and the Gulf Arab governments have not been notified. The Saudis added that several Gulf intelligence and naval units had tracked Israeli movements and gathered documentary evidence.
Some of this information was leaked in Cairo Wednesday night to Shorouk, a publication which Egyptian intelligence often uses as an outlet for information held to be credible. Shorouk was first out with the story of the Israeli Air Force attack on Iranian arms convoys in Sudan in January 2009.
6)Assad: Israel pushing region towards war
By Roee Nahmias
Syrian president meets with Spanish foreign minister in Damascus, tells him Jewish state 'is not serious about achieving peace and all facts point to it being the one pushing the region towards war.' PM's Office says remarks 'unfortunate'
Syrian President Bashar Assad on Wednesday accused Israel of “pushing the region towards war”. During a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos in Damascus, Assad said that the Jewish state "is not serious about achieving peace”.
The SANA news agency reported that the two officials spoke of regional issues and the “standstill peace process”. Assad told Moratinos, whose country is the current EU president, that “Israel is not serious about achieving peace and all facts point to it being the one pushing the region towards war and not peace”.
Moratinos arrived in Syria after a visit in Israel, during which he addressed the Herzilya Conference. He said the Jewish state did not appear to want war.
"I came from Israel. I didn't hear any noise of drums of war. I heard drums of peace," he said.
7)The Gulf States in the Shadow of Iran:Iranian Ambitions
by Patrick Knapp
The Obama administration is caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it has welcomed the Gulf Security Dialogue (GSD) as a chance to further "mutual interests" with Persian Gulf states, but, on the other, it has sought pragmatic engagement with the Islamic Republic—the greatest threat to gulf security. Michael Knights, a Persian Gulf expert at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted in September that the "rapid advances" of the military forces of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were the result of the dialogue. He predicts that they "may eclipse Iranian capabilities in the gulf within ten years."[1] Yet the GSD's initiatives are inadequate and need a foreign policy that stresses relationships and ideals. If policy within the gulf is to be dominated by short-term pragmatic demands, it may turn out to have unwanted consequences for other alliances in the region. That in turn could well have a negative impact on the United States.
In 2007, Iran signaled its extraterritorial ambitions by capturing fifteen British sailors in Iraqi waters and holding them for nearly two weeks. One of the British marines is seen in footage from Iran's Al-Alam television network, April 1, 2007. Iran claimed the sailor was pointing to a map of the Persian Gulf to indicate where the captured British ship allegedly crossed into Iranian waters.
Twenty percent of the oil traded in the world flows through the Strait of Hormuz every day.[2] Although U.S. politicians may dislike allowing oil to shape foreign policy, control of the strait is no matter of indifference. Closing the strait would cut the gulf's oil traffic in half. Some argue that even discussing such a possibility gives Iran leverage. But that is hypothetical. The real leverage that the Islamic Republic would have if it controlled the strait would be disastrous for the region and the West. The United States needs to wrest back control of the region.
The Gulf Security Dialogue
As the Islamic Republic spreads its influence, its immediate hinterland across the gulf is becoming increasingly vulnerable. The gulf is vital to Western oil supplies. When a regime that is utterly dedicated to the destruction of all Western influence and the elimination of the state of Israel has nuclear warheads in its reach, the Western powers need to do something quickly. Doing something means developing policies between the United States on the one hand and the six countries that form the Gulf Cooperation Council on the other.
The principal mechanism through which all seven parties can engage in discussions about security, arms sales, and other relevant issues is the Gulf Security Dialogue, launched in 2006. The GSD was designed to provide a framework within which the United States and its allies can engage in six areas: (1) GCC defense capabilities and interoperability; (2) regional security issues; (3) counter-proliferation; (4) counterterrorism and internal security; (5) critical infrastructure protection; and (6) commitments to Iraq. The question is: Does the Gulf Security Dialogue provide sufficient strength and protection to those most immediately faced with the Iranian threat?
Iran Moves into the Gulf
Iranian assertiveness in the Persian Gulf continues to vex the United States and its regional allies. In 1988, as the U.S. Navy escorted commercial traffic through the gulf, an Iranian-laid minefield struck the USS Samuel B. Roberts and wounded ten sailors. The United States retaliated with Operation Praying Mantis, which overwhelmed Iran's naval and coastal facilities.[3] In 2004, Iran's deputy oil minister accused Qatar of producing more than "her right share" from a natural gas field shared with Iran.[4] Three years later, Hossein Shariatmadari, head of the government's flagship publication Kayhan Daily and an appointee of Iranian supreme leader 'Ali Khamenei, wrote that Bahrain was more a province of Iran than an independent country.[5] The theme has persisted in Iranian discourse. Just this past February, for example, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, the influential former speaker of the Iranian parliament, repeated Iran's claim to sovereignty over Bahrain.[6]
In 2007, Iran signaled its extraterritorial ambitions by capturing fifteen British sailors in Iraqi waters and holding them for nearly two weeks. Bringing back memories of the capture of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the mass hostage taking that followed, this was also intended to show Iran's heedlessness of international law and its penchant for the humiliation of its enemies.
In January and April of 2008, incidents between U.S. ships and Iranian speedboats highlighted Iran's asymmetric threat to maritime security.[7] In July of 2008, Iran opened a maritime office on the Abu Musa islands, which the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contested. In September of the same year, Iran assigned the 20,000-man Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) navy rather than the less confrontational regular navy to Persian Gulf defense and opened a new naval base on the strategic Strait of Hormuz the following month. It has since upgraded its Assalouyeh naval base, establishing "an impenetrable line of defense at the entrance to the Sea of Oman," according to an Iranian admiral.[8]
The IRGC navy alone has more than forty light patrol boats and ten guided missile patrol boats. The regular navy has five mine vessels, six submarines, and twenty-six support ships.[9] Last September it added to its mostly outdated fleet of five major surface combatants by launching the homemade Sina class warship. The mix of past aggression and current military buildup gives weight to an Iranian foreign ministry official's explanation of how Iran would respond to a U.S. attack: "Ballistic missiles would be fired in masses against targets in Arab gulf states and Israel."[10] In June 2009, Mohamed El-Baradei, former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, summarized the unspoken message Iran would like to send the region: "Don't mess with us; we can have nuclear weapons if we want it."[11]
Defending the Persian Gulf
Concern about Persian Gulf security spans administrations. The U.S. Navy enhanced its presence in the gulf in 1970 during Britain's withdrawal from the region. Throughout the 1970s, Washington relied on the "twin pillars" of Iran and Saudi Arabia to police the Persian Gulf and check the pan-Arabism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. But it was only in 1987, when the U.S. Navy launched Operation Earnest Will to reflag Kuwaiti tankers traversing the Strait of Hormuz, that the United States used direct military force to protect the gulf.[12] Three years later, the United States responded to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with a massive buildup of forces.
In the wake of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and the liberation of Kuwait, Washington ditched its old "balance of power game"[13] for dual containment, an attempt to isolate and weaken economically the aggressive regimes in Iran and Iraq. The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf rose through the 1990s as Iraqi president Saddam Hussein defied U.N. Security Council resolutions, and the Islamic Republic used proxy groups to threaten regional security. In 1995, the U.S. Navy assigned its Fifth Fleet to the naval support activity base in Bahrain—a base which it had used in one capacity or another for a half century. By 2003, the United States share of the Persian Gulf's arms supplier market reached an unprecedented high.[14] The 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq raised the U.S. partnership with the GCC states to a new level. Qatar continues to host a regional headquarters for U.S. Central Command,[15] and Kuwait enables the Pentagon both to base and transit troops through the country.[16]
This may give the impression of secure alliances and strong collaboration, but the truth is that the GCC states are vulnerable. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, none have strategic depth. Their armies are small: Iran's army has a total manpower of more than 540,000 compared to a combined GCC total of 176,500.[17] While Iraq today is no longer a military threat, Kuwait's 1990 capitulation in the face of an Iraqi invasion in less than a day underscores the difficulty any GCC state would have against a determined onslaught. Nuclear armament could enable Tehran to "dictate oil policy" and "embolden extremist groups," according to Tariq Khaitous, a Middle East security expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.[18]
President Bill Clinton's 1999 Cooperative Defense Initiative (CDI) was an effort to minimize these weaknesses by increasing defense integration and information sharing between GCC states, Egypt, and Jordan. It proposed enhancing active and passive defenses by promoting bilateral and multilateral initiatives. The CDI identified Iraq and Iran as major threats to the region and emphasized vulnerabilities to ground invasions, missile strikes, and chemical or biological attacks.[19] With the CDI's prodding, all six GCC states signed a joint defense pact in December 2000.[20] Yet cost concerns and differences in threat perception limited the follow-through. Even after Saddam's removal, pledges to triple the joint-force's troop strength and develop shared early warning systems have remained unfulfilled.
On May 12, 2006, the State Department announced that Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs John Hillen was to visit the Persian Gulf "to discuss regional security and defense cooperation with friends in the region."[21] This marked the beginning of the U.S.-GCC Gulf Security Dialogue, which Hillen characterized as "defensive, defensive, defensive."[22] Talks between U.S. and GCC security officials continued the following October when the United States led naval exercises in the Persian Gulf with Bahrain's unprecedented participation.[23] That November, Hillen said the dialogue was "not part of any big picture reexamination of the Middle East strategy." Rather, it was a revamped commitment to "missile defense" and "boosting the capabilities of U.S. allies."[24]
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has defined the six pillars of the Gulf Security Dialogue as defense cooperation, rehabilitation of Iraq, regional stability, energy infrastructure security, counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism.[25] These pillars renew the Clinton Cooperative Defense Initiative's goals, such as improving missile defense and systems integration. But more importantly, they put the talks into a post-9/11, post-Saddam context in which Iran—with its nuclear program and support for terrorists—is seen as the main threat to gulf security. Even if Iranian missiles and terrorist attacks are not aimed directly at the gulf states, their destabilizing threat to the Middle East as a whole is unsettling enough. As Iran's regional aggression grows, so does the need to strengthen the GSD's pillars.
The Dialogue Becomes Reality
Signs of the Gulf Security Dialogue's implementation came in early 2007 when the Bush administration announced it would send a second U.S. aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf, extend the deployment of Patriot antimissile batteries in Kuwait and Qatar, and increase intelligence sharing with the Persian Gulf states.[26] Annual multilateral exercises in the spring of 2007 offered an opportunity to put the GSD's goals of interoperability and information-sharing into action. These included the world's largest mine countermeasure exercise (Arabian Gauntlet in Bahrain) and a missile defense operation with full GCC participation (Eagle Resolve in Qatar). These exercises fit Secretary Gates's vision of the GSD as "a strategic framework designed to enhance and strengthen regional security."[27]
As part of the GSD, President George W. Bush's administration announced US$20 billion in arms deals for the Persian Gulf states in July 2007,[28] a huge upgrade given that the total value of U.S.-delivered arms and services to GCC states had been $72 billion between 1981 and 2006.[29] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised the proposal, saying that "the United States is determined to assure our allies that we are going to be reliable in helping them to meet their security needs."[30] In the following months, Saudi Arabia ordered more than $1 billion in vehicles and radar equipment, and Kuwait bought over $1.3 billion worth of Patriot advanced capability (PAC-3) air defense missiles.[31] In 2008, the United Arab Emirates ordered a $7 billion missile defense system never before sold to another country.[32] Together, such sales give the GCC an edge against Iran.[33]
However, delivery of much of this equipment is still pending. The Arms Export Control Act requires the president to notify Congress thirty days before finalizing arms deals and allows Congress to block deals up until the point of delivery. In addition to its PAC-3 order, Kuwait is awaiting three L-110-30 aircraft (commercial versions of the C-130 Hercules), thousands of radio frequency missiles, and related training and services. Meanwhile, the delivery of the UAE's missile defense system may not be complete until 2015.[34] Seeking to block the proposed sale of 900 satellite-guided joint direct attack munitions kits to Saudi Arabia, Senator Charles Schumer said in May 2008, "To most Americans, a well-armed Saudi Arabia is far less important than a reasonable price for gasoline, heating oil, and all other products upon which oil is based."[35]
The collective nature of the dialogue is also important because these arms sales are wasteful if Washington does not use its political capital to demand interoperable systems and joint-training programs. Three years into the Gulf Security Dialogue, there are signs that joint defense cooperation is taking root. In June, Gates praised "the unprecedented cooperation between the nations of the gulf."[36] Indeed, GCC states are pursuing shared early warning and active defense systems, increasing membership in U.S.-backed nonproliferation efforts such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, signing energy memoranda of understanding, and building on joint exercises like January's joint combined security exercise in Kuwait.[37]
Another key component of the dialogue is psychological. The Bush administration used the Gulf Security Dialogue "to convey the U.S. commitment to the peace and security of our GCC allies as well as encourage regional partners to take the steps necessary to address regional challenges."[38] Reinforcing U.S. commitment to defense of the GCC would cement alliances and give the regional Arab leaders the security to side with the United States. As President Bush explained in his 2008 state of the union address, "We will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf."[39] These vital interests are collective. Just as Bush declared a free Iraq to be "a friend of America, a partner in fighting terror, and a source of stability in a dangerous part of the world,"[40] so too is a GCC united against Iranian schemes on the Persian Gulf.
Such moral clarity helps dispel the competitive monarchies' natural aversion to defense cooperation. Al-Ubeid air base in Qatar and its logistics hub in Kuwait, for example, are crucial for operations in Iraq but would not exist if their host states did not sense a U.S. commitment to solidarity against mutual threats. Bilateral arms deals, too, are precursors to multilateral cooperation: "We sell stuff to build relationships," said Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, head of the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.[41] As Iran increasingly meddles in the region, trust-building between the United States and its GCC allies grows even more important.
Gulf Security under Barack Obama
President Barack Obama made the cornerstone of his Middle East policy the promise of "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect" and "a new partnership" in the Middle East.[42] But Secretary Gates's June 2009 message to GCC defense ministers suggested that the Pentagon does not plan to make any significant changes to the Gulf Security Dialogue. Instead, Gates reiterated U.S. commitments to its vital founding pillars of interoperability, regional stability, energy security, counter-proliferation, and counterterrorism.[43] The U.S. continues its annual exercises in the Persian Gulf, but compared to France—which opened a military base in the UAE on May 26, 2009,[44] and will open an officer academy in Doha in 2011[45]—its commitment to expanding such programs has its limits. Under President Obama, the Department of Defense has announced arms sales to Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia totaling more than $4 billion.[46] Yet President Obama's undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, former Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, signed a 2008 House resolution disapproving of the proposed sale of joint direct attack munitions kits to Saudi Arabia due to concerns over that state's oil policy. It is not clear whether the Obama administration can push such Gulf Security Dialogue sales through Congress even with the Democratic Party's large majority.
Nor is it clear whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's July 22, 2009 proposal to extend a U.S. "defense umbrella" over the Persian Gulf states[47] signifies a shift away from the Bush administration's desire to see the GCC states able to maintain a more autonomous collective military capability. In 2007, for example, Gates argued that "the most important military component in the war on terror" was "how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern their own countries."[48] Nevertheless, Secretary Clinton's proposal has taken pressure off GCC states to cooperate with a June proposal by senior U.S. military officers for a U.S.-GCC agreement on integrated air and missile defense.[49]
The 2010 quadrennial defense review (QDR) may signal further changes in the U.S. commitment to Persian Gulf security. While the 2006 QDR called for a shift "from a peacetime tempo to a wartime sense of urgency,"[50] a Department of Defense fact sheet on the 2010 review emphasizes a "balance of efforts and resources."[51] The review's point person, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, questioned GSD arms deals in 2007, saying that "it comes at a time when Sunni and Shi'a tensions in the region are higher than they've been in years. It comes at a time when the U.S. is in the midst of a war [in Iraq] where it's having trouble getting the support it needs from its regional allies."[52] In reality, these arms deals have spurred the GCC to help in Iraq. In July of 2008, William Burns, undersecretary for political affairs, praised the "new support and cooperation from [Iraq's] Arab neighbors," attributing it to "the readiness of the Iraqi government and security forces to confront Iranian-backed groups."[53] Indeed, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE have recently opened embassies in Baghdad.[54]
Flournoy also warned in April 2009 of a need for "pragmatism" in the face of what she calls "very difficult choices" when it comes to evaluating strategic risk. "In a world in which resources are limited," she said, "particularly in economic crisis, we have to be very specific about how we do this."[55] Such concerns echo the rationale behind the Obama administration's defense budget cuts. While Bush's 2008 budget allocated $188 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations specifically for wartime costs, Obama's 2009 budget allocated only $140 billion.[56] Recession-induced belt-tightening does not explain all the cuts. While the administration believes the economy will gradually recover, the projected wartime supplemental budget gradually drops to $50 billion by 2011. Meanwhile, to pay for increased domestic spending, the Obama administration plans to reduce the military budget from its current 3.8 percent share of gross domestic product to less than 3.3 percent by 2014.[57] This has already required cuts to missile defense spending and F-22 aircraft production.[58] Whatever the justifications for Obama's recent decision not to proceed with missile defense systems in Poland, it is tempting for U.S. allies to perceive it as more evidence of Washington's fading dedication to defense. These decisions send a conflicting message not only to the Persian Gulf states, which depend on a strong U.S. military for security, but also to the Islamic Republic.
The Obama administration's decision to engage the Islamic Republic may also undercut the Gulf Security Dialogue's containment initiatives. While it has upheld some of the tough policies of previous administrations towards Iran—such as weapons proliferation executive orders and economic sanctions—the Obama administration is unique in its eagerness for bilateral and multilateral talks. While Bush insisted that negotiations could only follow Iran's suspension of uranium enrichment, Obama has offered to reward talks to Iran "without preconditions."[59] Last May, Obama approved a Bush-brokered 123 agreement to prevent the UAE from enriching its own uranium but has not taken a clear stance against Iranian enrichment. Even after Iran's bloody suppression of post-election protests in June 2009, Obama sent a delegation to meet with officials of the republic last September for multilateral talks with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States) and Germany.[60] While the talks secured an Iranian promise to allow inspection of the newly-discovered uranium enrichment plant in Qom and to outsource some uranium enrichment to Russia and France,[61] these capitulations do not mark a change in Iranian behavior but rather an effort to slow international momentum against Iran's nuclear program. Engagement has not quelled the Islamic Republic's revolutionary zeal.
The Obama administration used the U.N. General Assembly and the meetings of the Group of Twenty (G-20) finance ministers and central bank governors in September to reassess engagement with Iran. It may resort to economic strategies at the end of the year, such as the "crippling sanctions" that Secretary Clinton threatened in April. Yet any diplomatic engagement that does not occur alongside military strategies will be ineffective and will lead Persian Gulf allies to question the value of further cooperation with Washington. The 2007 national intelligence estimate, for example, said that Iran had temporarily given up its nuclear program in 2003. The change in Iranian behavior occurred alongside the use of U.S. force in the Persian Gulf and was not the result of diplomacy alone.
Similarly, the United States's relative success since 2007 in stabilizing Iraq comes after commanders combined a new counterinsurgency doctrine with a troop surge. The June 30 "anti-surge," which confines U.S. troops to their bases, has so far proved unsettling to Iraq's Persian Gulf neighbors. Violence has flared amid Kurdish-Arab tensions in Iraq's north. Attacks in Baghdad killed 147 people on October 25, 2009—the city's deadliest day in more than two years.[62] Meanwhile Al-Qaeda has reemerged in Kuwait where authorities on August 11, 2009, foiled a terror plot against a U.S. base and oil infrastructure.[63]
As the Obama administration pursues engagement and lightens the U.S. footprint in the region, the Islamic Republic has maintained an anti-U.S. foreign policy and continues on a steady path of militarization; during his first term, President Ahmadinejad filled two-thirds of his cabinet ministry posts with former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel or members of the Basij auxiliary paramilitary force.[64] In an indirect endorsement of Ahmadinejad's reelection in 2009, Supreme Leader Khamenei urged Iranians "not to vote for those who by bowing their heads to foreigners do away with our honor."[65] The IRGC stretched the limits of its apolitical mandate by mobilizing pro-Ahmadinejad voters before the election and beating down protesters afterward. Ahmadinejad has interpreted his reelection as a green light to his aggressive foreign policy. His defense ministry appointee is Ahmad Vahidi, the former Qods Force chief of the Revolutionary Guards wanted by Interpol for the murder of eight-five people in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Ahmadinejad also appointed former IRGC leader Hojjat al-Eslam Heydar Moslehi to the intelligence ministry, and Brigadier General Mostafa Mohammad Najjar to the interior ministry. Meanwhile in Iraq, the IRGC's Qods Force continues to supply improvised explosive devices and explosively formed penetrators—the more expensive explosives that fling special football-size copper slugs through armored vehicles at 2,000 meters per second—to Shi'i militias targeting Americans.[66] Finally, Iran's ever-progressing nuclear program appears little deterred by Undersecretary Tauscher's June 30 threat regarding arms control "to hold accountable those that violate their obligations and commitments."[67] Ahmadinejad's reelection only reinforced these trends. In his September U.N. address (made while reports were still trickling out of Iran of election protesters being tortured and raped), Ahmadinejad blamed the United States and its allies "for spreading war, bloodshed, aggression, terror, and intimidation in the whole region."[68]
U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf should recognize that outreach to Iran since the "unclench your fist" inaugural address has failed. Iran has ignored Obama's diplomatic plea for the Islamic Republic to join "the community of nations."[69] Meanwhile, Tehran has capitalized on the June 30, 2009 U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq: On July 16, an Iranian-backed militia killed three U.S. soldiers in Basra with an Iranian-made rocket.[70] Even though the Obama administration chose not to intervene on behalf of human rights protesters after the June presidential elections, on August 23, 2009, Iran's parliament voted to approve $20 million for exposing human rights abuses in the United States.[71] Iran has interpreted U.S. engagement attempts as desperation: Ahmadinejad's short-lived first vice president and current chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Masha'i, said in August that due to Ahmadinejad's "historic" world popularity, "the international community has no choice but to cooperate" with the regime.[72] Finally, as Washington cashes in a peace dividend, Iranian-made missiles and machine guns are landing in the hands of Yemen's Shi'i rebels. In a reference to Tehran, Yemeni information minister Hasan Ahmad al-Lawzi recently said, "There are religious authorities that are trying to interfere in the affairs of our country."[73]
Conclusions
U.S. commitment to Persian Gulf security is important because it gives the gulf states the confidence and ability to resist Iranian intimidation. Without this commitment, the Persian Gulf states would accommodate the Islamic Republic. Iran's nuclear program and military ambitions would benefit from such a capitulation as it would give Tehran more access to the region's energy resources and would take pressure off the regime's weapons-trafficking efforts. U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf should continue the Bush administration's successful efforts to strengthen the region's security. Winning the trust of these vulnerable Persian Gulf states requires not only a commitment to arms sales and joint military exercises but also a broader foreign policy that values long-term relationships over shortsighted attempts at "mutual respect" with declared enemies such as Iran.
Washington should use the Gulf Security Dialogue to counter Iran's regional ambitions. To this end, the dialogue has indeed made important inroads, especially in coordinating interoperable defense and augmenting the Persian Gulf's arms edge. In April 2008, Bahrain and Kuwait signed their first bilateral security accord. In July 2008, the Department of Defense notified Congress of the possibility of the first GSD-related defense sale to Qatar. But the future success of the dialogue depends on the Persian Gulf's perception of U.S. strategy in the rest of the region. If the Persian Gulf states suspect White House realism will sacrifice their defense on the altar of a deal with Tehran, they may decide they have no choice but to make accommodation with the Islamic Republic, a tendency that ultimately may undercut the U.S. ability to maintain a presence in the region.
Indeed, such accommodation is already occurring. The UAE and Qatar were quick to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his reelection victory,[74] and Oman's sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said traveled to Iran in August.[75] Qatar's emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani discussed ways to expand economic cooperation with Iran with Tehran's ambassador to Qatar on August 27, 2009, the day after Iran's envoy to Bahrain called on the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council states to stop "employing foreign forces."[76] The New York Times reported in May that Oman and the UAE increasingly rely on "mutual interest" trade with Iran, which is "an important political and economic ally that is too powerful and too potentially dangerous to ignore, let alone antagonize."[77] Iran's talk of "indigenizing" regional security shows signs of appealing, especially in Qatar. [78] In Bahrain, too, an eagerness to bow to growing Iranian power has taken the shape of bilateral energy agreements.[79]
As the Obama administration's experiment with engagement has shown, the Gulf Security Dialogue is a necessary but insufficient measure for countering Iranian aggression. The dialogue is ineffective when conciliatory U.S. gestures towards Iran contradict it. President Obama got it right at his inauguration when he said America must fight its enemies "not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions." Among these convictions is that "our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint."[80]
This is the spirit of the dialogue. The United States cannot negotiate sturdy alliances through barter and concession. It must earn them by denying "mutual respect" to the enemies of America's democratic ideals and standing by those who desire a new way forward.
Patrick Knapp is a second lieutenant in the Minnesota Army National Guard. He is currently attending the Military Intelligence Officer Basic Course at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
[1] Michael Knights, "Changing Military Balance in the Gulf," Realclearworld.com, Sept. 15, 2009.
[2] Abdullah Toukan and Anthony Cordesman, "GCC-Iran: Operational Analysis of AIR, SAM and TBM Forces," Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., Aug. 20, 2009.
[3] "Operation Praying Mantis," Global Security.org, accessed Oct. 5, 2009.
[4] Kenneth Katzman, "Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., May 19, 2009, p. 26.
[5] Kayhan (Tehran), July 9, 2007 .
[6] BBC Persian, Feb. 16, 2009.
[7] Anthony H. Cordesman, "Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Broader Strategic Context," Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., Dec. 5, 2008, p. 38.
[8] Tehran Times, Oct. 30, 2008.
[9] Cordesman, "Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction," p. 15.
[10] Marine Corps Times, June 25, 2007.
[11] The CNN Wire, June 19, 2009.
[12] "Operation Earnest Will," GlobalSecurity.org, accessed Oct. 12, 2009.
[13] Martin Indyk, quoted in Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 261.
[14] Anthony H. Cordesman. "Conventional Armed Forces in the Gulf," Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., June 23, 2008, p. 37.
[15] "Strengthen Relationships," U.S. Central Command, excerpts from testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington, D.C., May 3, 2007.
[16] BBC News, Feb. 19, 2009.
[17] Cordesman, "Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction," p. 15.
[18] Tariq Khaitous, "Arab Reactions to a Nuclear Armed Iran," Policy Focus #94, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, June 2009, p. 23.
[19] Jim Garamone, "Cooperative Defense Initiative Seeks to Save Lives," American Forces Press Service, Apr. 10, 2000.
[20] "Regional Overview and Contributions of Key Allies," A Report to the United States Congress by the Secretary of Defense (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, Mar. 2001), accessed Oct. 14, 2009.
[21] "Assistant Secretary Hillen to Travel to Persian Gulf Region," U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2006.
[22] Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2006.
[23] Simon Henderson, "Naval Exercises off Bahrain: Preventing Proliferation between North Korea and Iran," PolicyWatch, no. 1157, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2006.
[24] John Hillen, quoted in Kenneth Katzman, "Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., July 17, 2007, p. 33.
[25] "U.S.-Kuwait Gulf Security Dialogue Joint Statement," U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., May 22, 2007.
[26] Katzman, "Iran: US Concerns and Policy Responses," May 19, 2009, p. 41.
[27] Robert Gates, Manama dialogue speech, Manama, Bahrain, Dec. 8, 2007.
[28] Rachel Stohl, "United States Re-emerges as Leading Arms Supplier to the Developing World," Center for Defense Information, Washington, D.C., Dec. 30, 2008.
[29] Christopher M. Blanchard and Richard F. Grimmett, "The Gulf Security Dialogue and Related Arms Sale Proposals," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., Oct. 8, 2008, p. 1.
[30] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, July 31, 2007.
[31] Kenneth Katzman, "Kuwait: Security, Reform, and U.S. Policy," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., May 20, 2009, p. 6.
[32] Katzman, "Iran: US Concerns and Policy Responses," May 19, 2009, p. 42.
[33] Ibid.
[34] SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Aug. 17, 2009.
[35] Charles Schumer, "Statements on introduced bills and joint resolutions," introducing S. J. Res. 32, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., May 13, 2008.
[36] Robert Gates, speech to U.S. Central Command Gulf States chiefs of defense, Washington, D.C., June 24, 2009.
[37] Agence France-Presse, Apr. 27, 2009.
[38] "U.S.-U.A.E. Gulf Security Dialogue," U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., Mar. 11, 2008.
[39] George W. Bush, "State of the Union Address," Jan. 28, 2008.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Reuters, June 17, 2009.
[42] Barack Obama, "Inaugural Address," Jan. 20, 2009; idem, interview, Al-Arabiya (Dubai), Jan. 27, 2009.
[43] Gates, speech to U.S. Central Command, June 24, 2009.
[44] BBC News, May 26, 2009.
[45] Gulf Times (Dubai), Sept. 10, 2007.
[46] "Kuwait—Technical/Logistics Support for F/A-18 Aircraft," Defense Security Cooperation Agency, Washington, D.C., July 7, 2009; "Kuwait—Upgrade Desert Warrior Fire Control System with GITS II," Defense Security Cooperation Agency, July 10, 2009.
[47] The New York Times, July 22, 2009.
[48] Robert Gates, speech to the Association of the United States Army, www.Army.mil, Oct. 10, 2007.
[49] The National (Abu Dhabi), June 30, 2009.
[50] "Quadrennial Defense Review Report," U.S. Department of Defense, Feb. 6, 2006, p. xi.
[51] "2010 QDR Terms of Reference Fact Sheet," U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., Apr. 27, 2009.
[52] National Public Radio, July 31, 2007.
[53] William J. Burns, testimony before the House Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, D.C., July 9, 2008.
[54] Asharq al-Awsat (London), June 11, 2008.
[55] U.S. News and World Report, May 4, 2009.
[56] Thomas Donnelly, "Indefensible," The Weekly Standard, Mar. 9, 2009.
[57] Edwin J. Feulner, "Spending Spree and Cutting Defense Don't Add Up," America at Risk Memo, Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C., July 20, 2009.
[58] FOX News, Apr. 6, 2009.
[59] Barack Obama, speech, Cairo University, White House press office, June 4, 2009.
[60] Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, Washington, D.C., White House press office, June 26, 2009.
[61] BBC News, Oct. 2, 2009.
[62] CBS News, Oct. 25, 2009; Army Times, Oct. 25, 2009.
[63] American Forces Press Service (Washington, D.C.), Aug. 11, 2009.
[64] Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh, "Iran's Hidden Revolution," The New York Times," June 16, 2009.
[65] Fars News Agency (Tehran), May 18, 2009.
[66] Marisa Cochrane, "Iran's Hard Power Influence in Iraq," IranTracker, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., Apr. 10, 2009.
[67] Ellen Tauscher, remarks to U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence symposium, U.S. Department of State, Omaha, Neb., July 30, 2009.
[68] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, full text of speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Salem (Ore.) News, Sept. 23, 2009; Bloomberg.com, Sept. 24, 2009.
[69] BBC World News America, Mar. 20, 2009.
[70] CBS News, July 17, 2009.
[71] The Washington Post, Aug. 24, 2009.
[72] PressTV (Tehran), Aug. 25, 2009.
[73] Chris Harnisch, "A Critical War in a Fragile Country: Yemen's Battle with the Shiite al-Houthi Rebels," IranTracker, Aug. 31, 2009.
[74] Emirates News Agency, June 14, 2009; State of Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2009; Tehran Times, June 15, 2009.
[75] Oman Daily Observer, Aug. 12, 2009.
[76] Fars News Agency, Aug. 26, 2009.
[77] The New York Times, May 16, 2009.
[78] Tariq Khaitous, "Arab Reactions to a Nuclear Armed Iran," Policy Focus #94, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D.C., June 2009, p. 23.
[79] Kenneth Katzman, "Bahrain: Reform, Security, and U.S. Policy," Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C., June 1, 2009.
8)Robert Guest Few politicians, in my lifetime, have raised such hopes. When I covered his presidential campaign, I met legions of supporters who told me that Barack Obama would remake America and solve a surprising number of their personal problems.
Measured against the expectations of his most ardent fans—the kind of people who bought pictures of him riding a unicorn—Mr Obama's presidency has been a failure. But in this debate we will use a more reasonable yardstick.
Have his actions revived the economy or hobbled it? Has he made America safer? Will he ever succeed in pushing through his big domestic reforms, such as health-care and energy? And if so, will they do more good than harm?
David Boaz, a libertarian from the Cato Institute, argues that President Obama is failing because he tried to do too much. Mr Boaz berates him for not grasping how inefficiently government works, or how little tolerance Americans have for its expansion. He frets that Mr Obama is adding debt, taxes and regulations to the burdens already endured by business. And he observes that the more voters see of his agenda, they less they like it.
Elaine Kamarck of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard disagrees. She notes that unlike some of his predecessors, Mr Obama exhibits no scandalous personal failings. As a man, he is held in high respect. She concedes that the Democrats' "obsession" with health reform is not shared by the public, and reckons it has distracted Mr Obama from his "robust economic agenda". But she sees him learning and adapting. After listening to Mr Obama's state-of-the-union address, she predicts that he will focus on jobs, regain the public's trust and win re-election in 2012.
Our two debaters have made a spirited opening. I hope that in later statements they will dig deeper into domestic policy (perhaps addressing some of my questions above), and touch on foreign policy, too. How much does it matter that foreigners like Mr Obama more than George Bush? How dangerous are the concessions he has made to trade protectionists in Congress? How deftly is he dealing with Pakistan, Iran and China?
Let the argument begin. Thoughts?
David Boaz The editors make it too easy when they remind us that in claiming the Democratic nomination in June 2008 Barack Obama declared that "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless … when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal … when we ended a war, and secured our nation, and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth." It truly would take a Messiah to fulfil such soaring promises.
But part of President Obama's problem may be that he tried to fulfil too many of them, with no sense of the limits of the state's efficacy or the public's tolerance for expanded government. The claims of some of his advocates in 2008 that no one could spend 12 years at the University of Chicago without absorbing some sense of the benefits of markets, the limits of government and the hard lessons of the 20th century now seem as off-base as Ben Stein's buy recommendation on Merrill Lynch in late 2007.
On 20 January 2009, the day of Obama's inauguration, the Washington Post wrote, "The federal government itself is a far more potent instrument, in its breadth and depth of command over national life, than it has ever been before." President Obama has never quite thanked President Bush for the new powers he inherited, but he has certainly used them.
Bush raised the federal budget by more than $1.5 trillion. He bequeathed to Obama a FY2009 deficit of about $1.3 trillion, which Obama proceeded to increase with his "stimulus" bill, an earmark-heavy omnibus appropriations bill, Cash for Clunkers and more. But more than spending, he seemed bent on using a crisis atmosphere ("You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Rahm Emanuel) to amass more money and power in Washington. He proposed to bring the key health-care and energy industries under the direction of the federal government. He sought to tell financial companies how they could invest and what they could pay. I don't think he really wanted to nationalise the automobile companies; it's just that, as Uncle Duke said of the pension fund, the automobile industry was just sitting there. So he snatched it up, and he and Congress started imposing political rules: build "clean cars" rather than cars that consumers want to buy, don't build them in China, don't buy palladium from the cheapest overseas sources, use unionised trucking companies, keep inefficient dealerships open—and make enough profits to pay the taxpayers back.
His Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would use previously unknown powers to regulate greenhouse gases. His Labor Department plans to push through 90 rules and regulations in 2010 that would strengthen unions and add costs to employers. He sought to give more regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve, as a reward for causing the bubble and financial collapse. He has proposed various schemes to encourage more lending to homebuyers with insufficient credit, which were just those that combined with easy money to create the housing collapse in the first place. His top advisers "flipped through the tax code, looking for ideas" on taxes to raise, reported the Wall Street Journal.
In many ways, of course, Obama has just doubled down on George W. Bush's policies of bailouts, takeovers, expanded Fed powers and nationalisations. Some of the opposition to him reflects the public's sense that we've been piling up spending and debt for over a year now, so he is being punished for his predecessor's mistakes. But Bush or Obama, these policies take us in the wrong direction. After a crisis brought on by cheap money and distortionary subsidies, he is doing more of the same. In a recession he is adding debt, taxes and regulation to the burdens already felt by business.
The policies themselves are bad enough. The lobbying frenzy created by all this money on the table is not healthy for our politics. And the uncertainty created by this ambitious and protean agenda retards recovery. From last January ("growing anxiety on Wall Street about what the government would do next", New York Times) to this month ("The people that have money are sitting in kind of a cocoon—they're not making decisions because they're concerned about what's coming down in terms of taxation and vindictiveness against the wealthy," Denver Post), we see employers and investors worrying about what Washington might do next.
And now the voters are turning against this sweeping agenda that seeks to make America a European welfare state. Obama came into office on a wave of good feeling, with 69% expressing approval and only 12% expressing disapproval. Now his ratings are below 50%. Obama's approval rating fell 21 points during his first year in office, the largest first-year decline for any president since Gallup began tracking presidential approval ratings in the 1930s. Approval by independent voters has fallen from 62% to 45%. And even young people are leaving: The Politico/Insider Advantage poll showed Scott Brown leading among voters under 30 by 61% against 30%. In contrast, the 2008 exit poll showed 18-29-year-olds in Massachusetts voting for Obama 78-20.
Worse, the voters aren't just grumbling. They have switched parties in New Jersey, Virginia and even deep-blue Massachusetts. Congressional Democrats are scurrying for the exits, and even Vice-President Biden's son has decided to take a pass on the 2010 Senate race.
Worse yet for Obama, voters are not just reacting to the continuing economic weakness or engaging in fickle channel-changing. They are increasingly opposed to his plans to "remake this great nation". The longer Congress debates the health-care bill, the less voters like it. In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll 53% said they disapprove of the federal government's expanded role in the efforts to fix the nation's economy, 60% disapprove of the government's financial help to banks and other lending institutions and 65% disapprove of the government's ownership stake in General Motors.
It is not just specific policies. The director of Pew Research says that "anti-government sentiment, which had been building for years, was heightened by the financial bailout and stimulus program". In a January Washington Post-ABC News poll, Americans said they prefer "smaller government and fewer services" to "larger government with more services" by 58% to 38%. Since Obama won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin of support for smaller government has increased in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points. Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, the highest number since October 1994.
When your policies aren't working, the voters have noticed and your transformative ideological agenda is moving broad public opinion in the other direction, it's safe to say you're failing.Thoughts?
Elaine Kamarck Barack Obama is not failing. Failure in American politics is not subtle or nuanced, it is marked by a swift and deadly movement of public opinion from the political to the personal. At this stage in his presidency Harry Truman's approval ratings were low and falling and he was the butt of jokes about his mid-west roots, his poker games and his cronies. One of many popular jokes went: "What would Roosevelt do if he were alive? What would Truman do if he were alive?" Truman suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1946 midterms but he still managed to pass the Marshall Plan and win re-election in 1948.
Many other presidents have found themselves in much more serious situations than Obama finds himself in now. He and his wife Michelle retain great personal respect. People like him and wish him well. They think that he shares their values. He has not been saddled with any of the demeaning scandals that plagued Bill Clinton's presidency. He does not suffer from a character problem. Quite the contrary. The young people who voted for him in such large numbers are perplexed by his troubles but they are by no means ready to abandon him. His political troubles have not turned into personal troubles. This is critical. Personal failings and foibles fix themselves like glue in the minds of the public. Once a politician is regularly pilloried in the monologues of the late-night television comics he or she finds it nearly impossible to change the negative image. Unlike personal failings, political and governmental failings can be fixed.
The fix began in the State of the Union address. I carefully watched the clock. It took 40 minutes for him to even mention the words "health care." And in the 40 minutes before that he talked of nothing but the economy and jobs. The State of the Union was a recalibration of his presidency that will limit his losses in the midterm elections to within the normal range and guarantee his re-election.
Obama's first-year troubles were entirely predictable. In fact, in November 2008, my colleague William Galston and I did exactly that. In a long article titled "Change You Can Believe in Needs a Government You Can Trust", we reviewed the decades of data from the American public showing a severe and persistent lack of trust in the federal government. This lack of trust is an especially difficult problem for a Democratic president with an activist and progressive agenda. Trust, we wrote, "shapes the limits of political possibilities. When trust is high policy makers may reasonably hope to enact and implement federal solutions to our most pressing problems. When trust is low as it is today and has been for much of the past few decades, policy makers face more constraints."
It is understandable that both Obama and the Democratic leadership would ignore this and choose to interpret their stunning victories in 2008 as a repudiation of decades of scepticism about the government's ability to get things done right. But that they did, with results that were entirely predictable on two fronts.
As unemployment grew, trust in the capacity of the stimulus bill to create jobs shrank. This was exacerbated by both the content and the rhetoric of the bill. While the bill "saved jobs" especially in the public sectors of states that received stimulus money, it did little to "create" jobs for the millions of private-sector people out of a job. Added to that was the problem of rescuing banks that then refused to lend, and added to that was the end of year bonuses given to bankers. In the first year the president seemed to have forgotten, at least rhetorically, one of his most popular campaign pledges, the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, an idea ideally suited to a period of high and persistent unemployment. Also lost in the first year was the idea of reforming bank regulations and creating a consumer protection organisation that would prevent the predatory lending practices that contributed to the housing bubble and then to its bust. And finally, with an astonishing number of American homeowners "under water" (owing more on their mortgages than their houses were worth), the anaemic performance of the government's mortgage assistance programmes added to the impression that the stimulus didn't work and that the president didn't care.
The biggest culprit in this lack of focus was, of course, health care. Because universal health care is the last stone in the social safety net edifice created by Franklin Roosevelt, it has been, for decades, an obsession of the Democratic Party's elite. Unfortunately for them, this obsession has never been shared by the public. Hillary Clinton's attempts at health-care reform met a bitter end and current attempts are faring no better. Beginning in April 2009 and up until the present there have been more than 100 national polls conducted on health-care reform and the vast preponderance of those polls showed that Americans were against the reform efforts. In the last month opposition to health-care reform is in double digits in five separate polls. For two full decades now health care has been a casualty of American scepticism about government. When push comes to shove they just don't believe that the government can improve things.
Nonetheless, in the set of presidential problems these are easy problems to fix. Obama has a fairly robust economic agenda—he just allowed it to be pushed to the side by health care. The public sent him a strong and early message in the comely persona of the newly elected senator from Massachusetts: talk about jobs. Congress will pass a jobs bill. Obama's pivot will be decisive and graceful. Forty minutes on the economy: two minutes on health care. That is about right. He need not abandon health care, just take it on in some smaller, confidence-building steps. While he objected to those who would advise him to go slow on all the things in his agenda, he got the most important message when he said, "We face a deficit of trust—deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years." This is not a man who will fail. This is a man who will learn and thrive. Thoughts?
8a)Orange County Editorial: Obama's budget like Bush-era spending on
President Barack Obama's budget proposal, including the much-touted so-called freeze on nondefense domestic discretionary spending – to begin next year, brings to mind one of the confessions St. Augustine made in his landmark book of confessions. As he was wrestling with the implications of becoming a fully believing Christian, Augustine said that he sometimes prayed the following:
Lord, grant me chastity – but not just yet.
Actually, the evidence from the 10-year projections – budgets traditionally include long-term forecasts even though they almost always underestimate spending growth – suggests that President Obama is not interested in fiscal chastity at all – not this year, not next year, not for years to come. The federal deficit is projected to approach $1.6 trillion this year, decline to "only" $1.3 trillion in 2011, and stay at around $1 trillion or slightly less each year for the rest of the decade. The total addition to the national debt over the next 10 years is projected to be $8.5 trillion.
The president made much in his State of the Union address of a proposal to freeze nondefense domestic discretionary spending – but not this year, because we're just starting to pull out of the recession. In truth, however, the projected savings from the freeze – perhaps $15 billion next year and a bit more over the following two years – are a drop in the bucket compared with the ongoing deficits. And since Congress has the final word on spending levels, it's unlikely the freeze would be instituted, anyway.
And as Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for Bloomberg News, told us, "Having a weak recovery is a lame excuse for not having a long-term plan to address deficits." For example, Mr. Hassett said that a plan to gradually reduce over the next 50 years the projected growth in Social Security benefits could be implemented in such a way as to have no impact on this year's budget but a significant impact on projected future deficits.
To be sure, the president did endorse a bill, defeated in the Senate, to establish a deficit-reduction commission empowered – rather like the military base-closing commissions begun a couple of decades ago – to come back with a long-term plan that Congress could approve or defeat, but would not be able to change. The commission he plans to establish by executive order would have no such teeth – it will only be able to make recommendations and, perhaps, inspire public pressure.
In his budget message the president still stressed the spending increases of the previous administration. It is true that the Bush administration increased spending dramatically and irresponsibly. But the Obama administration so far is like the Bush administration on steroids when it comes to spending.
9)Heart Attacks and warm water.
This is a very good article. Not only about the warm water after your meal, but about Heart Attacks. The Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals, not cold water, maybe it is time we adopt their drinking habitwhile eating.
For those who like to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you. It is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down the digestion. Once this 'sludge' reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.
Common Symptoms Of Heart Attack...
A serious note about heart attacks - You should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting . Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line.
You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nauseaand intense sweating are also common symptoms. 60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up.. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.
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