I am not suggesting Republicans will actually stand by these professed principles
but should they and this is deemed racially appealing only to white voters then I would rather see Republicans go down the drain because they embraced our nation's roots for surely our nation will go down the drain if we continue to pursue Obama's current policies - both foreign and domestic.
Either way, we seem destined for decline because our growing non-Caucasian numbers are poorly educated and far more interested in dependency. Furthermore, do not underestimate the negative impact of domestic radical Islamists. Though their numbers are currently small they are learning how to subvert our democracy using the very tools that make us a democracy. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Lebanon continues to slide into Iran's orbit as Obama's foreign policy stitches come undone.
When passivity fails retreat to realism.
Our Middle East policy towards Iran resembles a mud slide heading towards disaster.
Every time we and Europe dithered, obviously it made the consequences of strong action against Iran more unlikely. Now we have placed ourselves in an untenable position that will cost us dearly - likely starting with the loss of the entire Middle East. (See 2, 2a, 2b and 2c below.)
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A further way to engage in mud slide policy is redefine aberrant and/or illegal behaviour or embrace the new reality by lowering your standards. (See 3 below.)
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A day late and a dollar short? (See 4 below.)
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Has China renounced its policy of caution? (See 5 below.)
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What all of the above seems to boil down to, unless sanctions work and the current Iranian regime is overthrown, is Obama is prepared to allow Iran to gain nuclear status. He certainly has no intention of doing anything against N Korea other than parading some ships far off China's shores and he is not going to accomplish much by way of securing Afghanistan despite contrary claims.
Obama will continue to work for a Palestinian state and demand concessions from Israel.
His administration will continue to frisk and x ray American air travelers, allow civilian trials of terrorists and press forward on government usurpation of our health care.
Additionally he will continue to run up huge deficits, blame Republicans for intransigence and keep playing cards from his populist deck.
While all of this is happening I suspect unemployment will remain relatively high and quite high considering the length of the recovery phase, The Fed will work their magic seeking to drive interest rates down as well as the dollar with it unless the Euro collapses and allows the dollar to get off the hook.
Russia's economy is likely to strengthen and their boldness will increase as well.
The only problem with this scenario is that it is a linear extrapolation of the current picture and usually something unforeseen comes along to knock any forecast into a cocked hat.
Stay tuned, I suspect the worst may yet lie ahead.
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Dick
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1)The GOP and Race
By Ron Lipsman
An op-ed piece in the November 10 issue of the Wall Street Journal entitled "The GOP‘s Racial Challenge" has been troubling me since I read it. The author, Zolton Hajnal, a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego, makes a veiled charge that the Republican Party's strategy for winning elections is inherently racist. But let's allow Professor Hajnal to speak for himself.
Lost in the GOP's euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.
Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters ...
The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.
Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities - the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who [sic] they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote...
Republicans thus face a real dilemma. They may be able to gain over the short term by continuing their current strategy of ignoring or attacking minorities. But that is short-sighted.
Over the long term - as white voters become a smaller and smaller fraction of the electorate ... any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.
Hajnal's charge is "veiled" because he doesn't come right out and accuse the Republicans of adopting a blatantly racist strategy. But his implication is clear -- even though he never identifies any specific Republican policy or platform that should appeal solely to whites while alienating blacks, Latinos, or Asians. It's almost as if just being a Republican puts anti-minority strands into one's DNA, and according to Hajnal, Republicans had better shed that strand if they wish to remain electorally viable. The charge is a canard -- and reprehensible. I am surprised that the WSJ published the piece.
Furthermore, Hajnal has, apparently without realizing it, advanced an opinion that is demeaning and condescending to America's non-white citizens. For exactly what were the policies and platforms that garnered victory for so many Republican candidates in the just-concluded election? The Democrats (from Obama down) won't acknowledge them -- likely because they do not comprehend the election's meaning -- but the Republican positions that the electorate found appealing were the following:
•Government spending is out of control; the gargantuan federal deficit is a mortal threat to our economy -- indeed, to the Republic -- and it must be brought under control.
•Governmental intervention in the people's lives -- via excessive regulation, high taxes, and radical (judicial and bureaucratic) social engineering -- is far beyond acceptable and must be reversed.
•Government bailouts, union favoritism, crony capitalism, and creeping socialism are also threats to our society and must cease.
•The denigration of America's role in the world (e.g., the denial of American exceptionalism) by the president and other Democratic leaders is unacceptable, fundamentally contrary to the people's belief in America as a force for good in the world, and insulting to our history.
Now what in heaven's name does any of that have to do with the race or ethnicity of an individual who subscribes to -- or refutes -- those views? Nothing! If it is indeed true that such views are adopted by a higher percentage of whites than by any non-white community, then that would be sorry testimony to the fact that too many of our minority citizens would have succumbed -- through generations of brainwashing -- to the siren songs of government handouts, victim advocacy, and a laissez-faire culture. One of the minority communities that has succumbed is the Jewish community (78% for Obama in 2008). (Full disclosure: I am a member of that community, although I like to think that I have been inoculated.) The last time I looked, most of the Jews in America were white.
Contrary to Hajnal's assertion, the GOP has no racial challenge. The challenge belongs to America's minority communities and to the remnant in America who have an appreciation for the United States' historic greatness and a devotion to maintaining the freedom that allowed that greatness to emerge. The challenge for the latter is to expand their appreciation and devotion to all segments of the American populace; the challenge for the former is to shed the blinders that have kept them tethered to a statist, collectivist philosophy and to recognize that, while very far from perfect, the GOP has a much better chance than the Democrats of restoring the American commitment to personal freedom, free enterprise, traditional culture, and economic prosperity.
1a)Ending Tax Demagoguery
By Andrew Foy, MD
The argument continues in Washington over whether or not to extend the Bush tax cuts to Americans making over $250K per year. Besides maligning these earners as "the rich" and making the same tired appeal to identity politics, the Democrats' position is that extending tax cuts for this income class would leave hundreds of billions of dollars of unrealized taxable income on the table over the next decade. The Republicans' position is to block all tax increases, including those on high earners, so as not to hamper our fragile economic recovery. While this position has merit, it is receiving a lukewarm response from the public. Instead, Republicans who rode the tide of Tea Party sentiment into Washington should stand on first principles in opposing tax hikes on the minority at the behest of the majority by appealing to a sense of national unity as well as America's founding principles of "liberty and justice for all."
In The Federalist No. 10, Madison warned:
The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet, there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice.
The preservation of justice requires that all citizens be treated equally under the law and protected from the arbitrary action of government. "To break the principle of equal treatment under the law," writes Friedrich Hayek, "inevitably opens the floodgates to arbitrariness." According to Thomas Sowell, "once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented you are putting your own rights in jeopardy -- quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go."
The most practical taxation policy consistent with the preservation of individual rights and equal justice is one where all citizens are taxed at the same percentage rate. However, the present debate revolves around raising taxes on one group, who already pay a higher tax rate, to spare another. Nothing could be more arbitrary. Therefore, Republicans should take control of this issue and force Democrats to acknowledge that if the deficit situation is so bad that it requires immediate action, then in the name of fairness and equal justice, one of three things must happen: government spending must be cut dramatically, taxes must be raised dramatically across the board, or we must employ some combination of the two -- but only if it involves across the board tax increases. Only then can the country begin to have a serious discussion on whether our current level of spending is justified. However, to allow spending to go on at its current level by paying for it on the backs of the minority is a slippery and dangerous slope -- one that almost assures that government spending will continue to spiral out of control with disastrous consequences.
In 2009, total federal and local government spending in the United States totaled $6,143.7B ($55K per worker), or 43% of GDP -- approximately 20% larger than most estimates of the optimum size of government, or the size of government that maximizes economic growth. As the figure shows, the size of the United States government has been growing consistently over the last seventy years, a trend that has spanned both Republican and Democrat regimes.
Figure 1. Total government spending (including Federal, State, and Local) as a percentage of GDP from 1909 - 2009
Overall government spending in the United States has not been this high, as a percentage of economic output, since World War Two. However, unlike that period where spending was driven by massive wartime outlays that decreased quickly after the war ended, the current spending is being driven by structural entitlement programs that show no prospects for decline. How to address the problem of government spending in the face of ballooning federal deficits that threaten America's financial solvency will be the major policy issue over the next decade.
In response, we should expect the left to offer more of the same solutions -- to appeal to identify politics by advocating tax increases on "the rich," who will be continually redefined down in a fruitless quest to find more tax revenue as the great mass of citizens in society shrug. Republicans, on the other hand, should stand for America's constitutional principles of liberty and equality for all citizens as problems on the horizon undoubtedly test our nation's resolve. Whether we can go on as a constitutional republic or instead sink to the level of just another democratic social welfare state, where the rights of the individual are sacrificed to the whims of the majority, will depend on how we respond to this all-important fiscal policy issue. The Republicans must draw a line in the sand now based on first principles -- and not some naïvely wonkish appeal to imagined economic growth -- because the current debate over extending the Bush tax cuts is only a prelude to a much larger battle to come.
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2)Hariri walks into the Iranian web abandoned by US, Israel, Saudi Arabia
Lebanese PM and Iranian President Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri begins a suicidal trip to the Iranian capital Saturday, Nov. 27, to the accompaniment of falling Western holdings across the Middle East, military analysts report. Finding the US, Israel and the Arab world unwilling to rescue him from Syria and Iran he, like Samson in Philistine captivity, decided to take them with him when he is crushed by Hizballah.
During his two-day stay in Tehran, a month after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned up in Beirut, Hariri will give more ground – as he did in his cap-in-hand interviews with Syrian President Bashar Assad. But he has no illusions he can save himself from being pushed out by a puppet regime.
Nothing Hariri can do now will stop Hizballah seizing control of Beirut and other strategic regions of the country including the Lebanese-Syrian border crossings in early December to prevent the Special Lebanese Tribunal indicting the Shiite radicals for complicity in his father's assassination five years ago.
The Lebanese prime minister's uncharacteristic verbal onslaughts on Israel will not help him - any more than his declared refusal, as an Arab League member, to join the radical axis led by Tehran Hizballah and Turkey or sign a military treaty that would violate UN sanctions against Iran.
Military sources point out that Lebanon's membership of the Arab Leaguehas no bearing on whether or not it falls into the clutches of Iran, Hizballah and fellow-member Syria, because the League is politically and militarily toothless. In fact, some of its members believe non-Arab Iran and Turkey should be invited to join and the body expanded into a Muslim League for a concerted fight against Israel.
The anti-Israel element dominated Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Erdogan's call in Beirut, Wednesday, Nov. 13 for the establishment of a global Islamic bloc. Ankara, he said, would not stand aside in any new conflicts between Lebanon and Israel, or Israel and the Palestinian Hamas government of the Gaza Strip.
It was the first time that Erdogan had explicitly committed Turkey's armed forces to intervening in a war against Israel and its Defense Forces.
Although this pledge and other hostile steps consistently chip away at Israel's military supremacy, Washington and Jerusalem have not found the words to say or the action to pursue in response. They seem to be treating a succession of setbacks inflicted by Middle East radicals as occurring far away on a distant planet.
Their limpness will lead to three potential consequences:
1. The Obama administration is letting things slide in Lebanon because it cannot cope with that crisis while deciding what to do about the Korean clash of arms. There, too, Washington is showing military weakness and turning to China for help. But on Dec. 5, when the six powers and Iran sit down for nuclear talks, the Americans will find a delegation representing a regime much empowered by Its success in dominating Lebanon instead of debilitated by sanctions as expected.
2. Israel has mislaid its teeth most of all because of the breach between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration on the terms for reviving talks with the Palestinians. It widens every time he says he is waiting for a letter of guarantee from Washington before he asks the cabinet to approve a three-month freeze on West Bank settlement construction - knowing full well the administration does not plan sending one any time soon.
Secondly, the Israeli public is too caught up in lurid disclosures of sex and corruption scandals in high places to pay attention to much else. Departing Military Intelligence Chief Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin's comment about Israel's deterrent strength Nov. 23, in the past tense would normally have made news headlines. Not these days.
Yadlin was not the first to voice concern about Israel's shrinking military edge over its enemies. Uzi Rubin, one of the heads of Israel's missile industry and a father of the Arrow missile interceptor, has warned: "The enemy has achieved aerial supremacy without even having aircraft." He spoke of Syria and Hizballah being allowed to pile up 1,500 surface missiles with guidance systems which are pointed at Tel Aviv.
3. Saudi Arabia, which stepped up as a responsible moderate Arab force capable of saving Western influence in Lebanon, opted out of this role when King Abdullah left the scene and travelled to New York for surgery.
It now turns out that the Saudi ploy led by the king's son Prince Abdulaziz Bin Abdullah for defusing the Lebanese crisis by enlisting Syria was cynically exploited by Damascus, Tehran and Hizballah. It gave them extra time to perfect their conspiracy for bringing Lebanon to heel.
Finding himself defending Lebanon alone at the barricades, Hariri threw in the sponge and decided to fly to Tehran and bow to his fate.
2a) U.S. military chief: Engagement on Iran must be realistic
U.S. Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen prefers dialogue with Iran, believing that a military strike would only delay, not halt, its nuclear plans.
By Reuters
The United States needs to be realistic about its efforts to engage Iran, whose leaders are lying about Tehran's nuclear program and are on a path to building nuclear weapons, the top U.S. military officer said.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in comments released on Friday that the U.S. military has been thinking about military options on Iran "for a significant period of time" but added that diplomacy remained the focus of U.S. efforts.
"I still think it's important we focus on the dialogue, we focus on the engagement, but also do it in a realistic way that looks at whether Iran is actually going to tell the truth, actually engage and actually do anything," Mullen said in an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria due to air on Sunday.
Iran has agreed to meet with a representative of the six big powers over its uranium enrichment drive, but diplomats and analysts see little chance of a breakthrough in the long-running dispute.
Still, U.S. officials, including Mullen, have warned that a military strike will only delay, not halt, Iran's nuclear program and say convincing Tehran to abandon its nuclear program is the only viable long-term solution.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates went further last week, warning a strike would also unite the divided country and saying sanctions were biting harder than expected.
The West believes that Iran aims to use its uranium enrichment program to build atomic weapons, which Iran denies. Both Israel and the United States have said all options remain on the table to deal with its nuclear ambitions, a position Mullen reaffirmed to CNN.
Asked whether he believed Tehran's vows that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes, Mullen said: "I don't believe it for a second."
"In fact, the information and intelligence that I've seen speak very specifically to the contrary," he said.
"Iran is still very much on a path to be able to develop nuclear weapons, including weaponizing them, putting them on a missile and being able to use them."
2b)Iran: Bushehr nuclear power plant has been fueled up
'We hope the Bushehr power plant will be connected to the country's national power grid within the next one or two months,' says Iranian vice president.
By The Associated Press
Iran's nuclear chief said Saturday the country's first nuclear power plant has been loaded up with fuel required for it to go on line, an incremental step bringing Iran closer to nuclear-generated electricity.
Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi said it will take another month or two before the 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor at Bushehr begins pumping electricity to Iranian cities.
Bushehr is not part of Iran's nuclear program that is a serious concern to the West, which suspects Tehran of trying to produce an atomic bomb. Iran has been slapped with four rounds of UN sanctions because of its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a potential pathway to weapons making that is the source of the contention with the West.
Iran denies the charges, saying its nuclear program is geared toward generating electricity and nuclear medical radioisotopes needed to treat patients.
"We sealed the lid of the reactor without any propaganda and fuss," Salehi was quoted as saying by the Fars semi-official news agency. "All fuel assemblies have been loaded into the core of the reactor."
The fueling up started in August. Now that it's completed, Salehi said all that remains to be done is to wait for the water inside the reactor's core to gradually reach a desired temperature, after which a series of tests need to be carried out.
"We hope the Bushehr power plant will be connected to the country's national power grid within the next one or two months," Salehi added.
Iran began loading the Russian-built Bushehr with low-enriched uranium fuel in August. At the time, Salehi said the fueling up would take place over two weeks and that the plant could produce electricity by late November.
However, last month he announced a delay in Bushehr's start up, saying it was the result of a small leak in a storage pool where the plant's fuel was being held - and not a computer worm that was found on the laptops of several plant employees.
Iranian officials say they have vigorously battled the Stuxnet computer worm, which they suspect is part of a covert plot by the West to damage Iran's nuclear program.
Salehi again insisted this week that the computer worm has not affected Iran's nuclear program.
2c) The Mideast's next generation of politicians
By David Ignatius
A political succession is beginning in the Middle East in which a generation of generally pro-American leaders is giving way to a group whose attitudes and loyalties are less certain. This transition comes at a time when U.S. power in the region is perceived to be weakening.
The process of change can be seen, in different forms, in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iraq - traditionally the three most powerful nations in the Arab world. All three are vexed by the machinations of a revolutionary Iran and by al-Qaeda militants, both of which encourage opposition to the ruling elites.
The first transition has already begun in Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and historically the most pro-American of the Arab regimes. The headlines last week were about King Abdullah's visit to the United States for treatment of a slipped disc, and the return to Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Sultan, the defense minister. It was a sign of change that the travels of these aging royals were announced in the normally secretive kingdom.
But the real Saudi news was that Abdullah's son Miteb has been appointed head of the National Guard, one of the country's top military positions. That marked a transfer of power to what's known as the "third generation," the grandsons of the founding King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. An earlier hint was the appointment of Prince Mansour bin Miteb, the son of the minister of municipalities, to succeed his father.
Saudi analysts say these changes appear to be establishing a pattern for succession: that sons will succeed fathers in the Cabinet positions assigned in a long-ago power-sharing deal. A likely instance would be the appointment of Mohammed bin Nayef, the highly regarded Saudi chief of counterterrorism, to succeed his father, Prince Nayef, as minister of the interior when Nayef moves up to become the next crown prince.
This succession scheme provides a measure of order, but it masks the tensions that are present within the royal family over which way the kingdom should lean, in regional and global conflicts.
The succession in Egypt turns on the age and health of President Hosni Mubarak, who has led the country since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. Mubarak has proved to be a solid bulwark against Muslim fundamentalists - at the cost of Egypt's stillborn democratic reforms. The transition paradigm in this region is exemplified by the expectation that Mubarak will be succeeded by his son Gamal. With tight controls on the opposition, the Mubaraks' National Democratic Party is expected to win easily in the parliamentary elections starting Sunday.
This father-to-son process was also evident in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, Hafez. It took the young president several years to consolidate control, but he has done so cleverly and ruthlessly, and he is now one of the stronger Arab leaders of his generation - someone who regularly thumbs his nose at the United States and gets away with it.
A less fortunate son is Lebanon's Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose father, Rafiq, was assassinated shortly after leaving that job in 2005. The coming month - when a U.N. investigative tribunal is expected to indict members of the powerful Syrian-backed Hezbollah militia for Rafiq's murder - will test whether a son's need for vengeance can surmount regional realpolitik. In this Shakespearean drama, don't bet on Hamlet.
Iraq is also in the midst of a political transition, and that's the hardest to predict. In this case, the ailing parent who's about to depart the scene is not a person but a nation - the United States. Since invading Iraq in 2003 and shattering its old power structure, U.S. forces there have been in loco parentis. But that's ending, with the formation of a coalition government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Vice President Biden explained to a small group of journalists last week at the White House how he helped midwife the new government. But though it includes all the major political factions, it's as fragile as Iraqi politics itself. And Biden said explicitly, in answer to a question, that if this weak center doesn't hold and the country slips back into civil war, the United States isn't coming to the rescue.
What's ahead? As the coalition deal was being reached, Iranian operatives are said by an Arab intelligence source to have circulated an order to kill former prime minister Ayad Allawi and other members of his Iraqiya Party. But don't expect Uncle Sam to solve the problem. You're on your own, kids.
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3)Is Illegal Immigration Moral?
By Victor Davis Hanson
We know illegal immigration is no longer really unlawful, but is it moral?
Usually Americans debate the fiscal costs of illegal immigration. Supporters of open borders rightly remind us that illegal immigrants pay sales taxes. Often their payroll-tax contributions are not later tapped by Social Security payouts.
Opponents counter that illegal immigrants are more likely to end up on state assistance, are less likely to report cash income, and cost the state more through the duplicate issuing of services and documents in both English and Spanish. Such to-and-fro talking points are endless.
So is the debate over beneficiaries of illegal immigration. Are profit-minded employers villains who want cheap labor in lieu of hiring more expensive Americans? Or is the culprit a cynical Mexican government that counts on billions of dollars in remittances from its expatriate poor that it otherwise ignored?
Or is the engine that drives illegal immigration the American middle class? Why should millions of suburbanites assume that, like 18th-century French aristocrats, they should have imported labor to clean their homes, manicure their lawns and watch over their kids?
Or is the catalyst the self-interested professional Latino lobby in politics and academia that sees a steady stream of impoverished Latin American nationals as a permanent victimized constituency, empowering and showcasing elite self-appointed spokesmen such as themselves?
Or is the real advocate the Democratic Party that wishes to remake the electoral map of the American Southwest by ensuring larger future pools of natural supporters? Again, the debate over who benefits and why is never-ending.
But what is often left out of the equation is the moral dimension of illegal immigration. We see the issue too often reduced to caricature, involving a noble, impoverished victim without much free will and subject to cosmic forces of sinister oppression. But everyone makes free choices that affect others. So ponder the ethics of a guest arriving in a host country knowingly against its sovereign protocols and laws.
First, there is the larger effect on the sanctity of a legal system. If a guest ignores the law -- and thereby often must keep breaking more laws -- should citizens also have the right to similarly pick and choose which statutes they find worthy of honoring and which are too bothersome? Once it is deemed moral for the impoverished to cross a border without a passport, could not the same arguments of social justice be used for the poor of any status not to report earned income or even file a 1040 form?
Second, what is the effect of mass illegal immigration on impoverished U.S. citizens? Does anyone care? When 10 million to 15 million aliens are here illegally, where is the leverage for the American working poor to bargain with employers? If it is deemed ethical to grant in-state tuition discounts to illegal-immigrant students, is it equally ethical to charge three times as much for out-of-state, financially needy American students -- whose federal government usually offers billions to subsidize state colleges and universities? If foreign nationals are afforded more entitlements, are there fewer for U.S. citizens?
Third, consider the moral ramifications on legal immigration -- the traditional great strength of the American nation. What are we to tell the legal immigrant from Oaxaca who got a green card at some cost and trouble, or who, once legally in the United States, went through the lengthy and expensive process of acquiring citizenship? Was he a dupe to dutifully follow our laws?
And given the current precedent, if a million soon-to-be-impoverished Greeks, 2 million fleeing North Koreans, or 5 million starving Somalis were to enter the United States illegally and en masse, could anyone object to their unlawful entry and residence? If so, on what legal, practical or moral grounds?
Fourth, examine the morality of remittances. It is deemed noble to send billions of dollars back to families and friends struggling in Latin America. But how is such a considerable loss of income made up? Are American taxpayers supposed to step in to subsidize increased social services so that illegal immigrants can afford to send billions of dollars back across the border? What is the morality of that equation in times of recession? Shouldn't illegal immigrants at least try to buy health insurance before sending cash back to Mexico?
The debate over illegal immigration is too often confined to costs and benefits. But ultimately it is a complicated moral issue -- and one often ignored by all too many moralists.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
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4)Editor's Notes: Running out of time
By DAVID HOROVITZ
Sanctions on Iran are starting to bite, but not hard enough yet to force the regime to rethink its nuclear drive. Where does that leave Israel?
In July 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the dissolution of the Management and Planning Organization of Iran, a 60-year-old, largely independent government body that had been responsible for much of the country’s economic oversight.
The MPO used to prepare the national budget, draw up longterm development plans and oversee their implementation.
It worked on a province-byprovince basis and was, according to expert accounts, a highly competent system of national economic management.
Ahmadinejad tore it down the better to directly control his country’s economy. He set up his own budgetary planning body and centralized additional economic powers under his authority.
The result has been dismal – Neanderthal management, as it was summed up to me by one of several experts with whom I’ve spoken in recent days.
While Ahmadinejad is still emphatically secondary to Iran’s supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in terms of overall power, he is undoubtedly a key economic player, and his policies are lousy.
His insistence on maintaining an overvalued rial, apparently for reasons of national prestige, is harming exports.
His low interest rate policies have caused heavy damage to the nation’s banking system.
Unemployment is officially hovering in the 13 percent range and inflation at about 10%, though unofficial estimates suggest the true figures in both cases may be twice as bad. Unsustainably high subsidies mean, for instance, that Iran is among the cheapest places on earth to fill up your car with gas – just five or six dollars a tank. And because those levels of subsidy simply cannot be maintained, the president is replacing them with cash handouts, which in turn are proving ever-more expensive and hard to sustain.
All this is unfolding in a climate of intensifying, though far from hermetic, international sanctions. No Western oil companies are active in Iran, there is inadequate technical assistance to maintain extraction, and oil and gas production are down. Financial sanctions have sent the cost of doing business soaring, and exports are being hit.
What is striking about Ahmadinejad’s economic leadership, according to the various experts with whom I’ve spoken, is that he is not strategically confronting those sanctions, not managing the resources at his disposal to most effectively minimize their impact.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made headlines 10 days ago when, in a direct riposte to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s demands for a “credible threat of military action” to back up the sanctions effort, he argued that military strikes could only offer a “short-term solution” that would merely render Iran’s nuclear drive “deeper and more covert.”
Less noticed here was Gates’s assessment that the sanctions have “bitten much harder” than the Iranian leadership had anticipated and his striking revelation that “We even have some evidence that Khamenei now is beginning to wonder if Ahmadinejad is lying to him about the impact of the sanctions on the economy, and whether he is getting the straight scoop in terms of how much trouble the economy really is in.”
The experts I’ve spoken to all agree that the sanctions are indeed starting to hurt. Recent measures are said to have significantly affected the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the all-powerful military conglomerate which, via its various tentacles, reportedly controls as much as a third of the Iranian economy. As well as overseeing the nuclear program, missile defense and national security, the IRGC is also responsible for building the oil industry’s infrastructure, for mining activities vital to the nuclear program, telecommunications, even farming, employing a vast work force.
And its room for economic and commercial maneuver is said to be increasingly constrained.
Israel is understood to have been impressed by the extent of EU sanctions enforcement.
Russia’s decision not to go through with the sale of S-300 missile defense systems is also recognized as a significant shift.
When a regime that uses cash to grease the wheels and stay in power is facing dwindling financial reserves and is presiding over an inefficient, mismanaged economy, the consequences are clear. It has to rely increasingly on coercion. And it is losing popularity.
As yet, however, the international squeeze is far from universal and the sanctions are not devastating.
There is concern at China’s capacity to fill any vacuum and meet any need created by other countries’ suspension of commercial partnerships. There is dismay that India is still providing a highly significant proportion of Iran’s refined oil requirements.
And there is widespread agreement, uniting Israel and the other key international players pushing the sanctions effort, that for all the economic distress, there is absolutely no sign at present of Iran changing course.
To the central question, Will Iran abandon its nuclear weapons drive as a result of sanctions?, the answer for now is an emphatic no. To the subordinate question, Will Iran slow or suspend its nuclear weapons drive as a result of sanctions?, the answer for now is sadly no as well.
As Netanyahu told the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in New Orleans, “We have yet to see any signs that the tyrants of Teheran are reconsidering their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
IT GETS worse.
Fiendish computer viruses might be wreaking all kinds of havoc within the Iranian nuclear program. Centrifuge operations might be stalling intermittently. Bizarre accidents might continue to occur.
Nevertheless, should the Iranians choose to do so, the experts believe that, within six months, they could “break out” and become a member of the nuclear club. That is not to say that, within six months, they could definitely weaponize – fashion a nuclear warhead and fit it to an effective delivery system.
Rather, they could enrich their stocks of low-enriched uranium to create a nuclear device and test it – a test that would be immediately picked up by international monitors and hailed by Iran as proof that it had now gone beyond the point of no return.
Will Iran choose to do so? Nobody claims to have a definitive answer to that question.
But there is widespread dismay at Iran’s apparent sense of emboldenment, and I encountered no little criticism of the role of the United States – under both president George W. Bush and President Barack Obama – in encouraging that Iranian confidence.
Time and again, I was told that the Iranian regime is pragmatic. That it is not suicidal.
That among the prime motivations for its nuclear quest is the desire to ensure that it will not be vulnerable to what happened in Iraq – to its speedy demise at the hands of outside interventionist forces. That when it truly feared the US was heading its way, between 2003 and 2005, it froze its nuclear program.
But Iran has watched trifling North Korea – throwing its weight around again this week – ignore warnings of international hellfire and expose the US as a paper tiger. And it delighted in the fact that Obama recognized Ahmadinejad’s election victory 17 months ago, essentially legitimizing a regime that the US hadn’t recognized for the previous three decades, and doing so precisely when the Iranian people were staging their most determined effort to date to break free of it.
The bottom line: Two years ago, the Iranians were wondering whether the US and/or Israel might seek to intervene militarily to stop them. Now, they believe that the US is out of the equation.
Israel thinks so too. The view here is that opposition in the US to a military strike at Iran extends far beyond the Democratic administration and deep into Republican ranks as well. The US doesn’t want to attack, I was told, and that includes much of the political Right. Gates’s thinking – that military intervention would only unify the Iranian people behind their currently unpopular government and its nuclear quest, and that it could not cause a long-term collapse of the program – is supplement by the wider regional argument that it will bring Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims closer together in opposition to the West, legitimize Iran’s claims that the West cannot be trusted and must be confronted, and spark much-intensified nuclear weapons programs throughout the Middle East.
The US wants to build deterrence, I was told. The US wants to replicate the conditions of mutual assured destruction that kept America and the Soviet Union just the right side of sanity during the Cold War. The trouble is, this is not the Cold War, and the Islamists are not the Communists.
SO WHERE does that leave Israel? The short answer is ambivalent. The slightly longer answer is extraordinarily worried, and ambivalent.
Israel mistrusts the Iranians more than the Americans do, maybe because it understands them better. It still believes in the potential for sanctions to force at least a suspension of the nuclear program if the regime feels its hold on power is disintegrating. But it knows that, as things stand, Iran is closing in on the bomb faster than the sanctions are forcing a rethink.
Israel regards a nuclear Iran, under this regime, as a monumental threat, a catastrophe, a devastating change. An Iran unbound would be an extreme danger to us, to the region, to the world. Iran regards itself as one of the world’s great nations, and certainly as the rightful leader of the Islamic world, and a nuclear capacity would give the regime far greater capacity to advance its ambitions.
With its own oil reserves depleting, it would also be more capable of imposing itself on weaker oil-producing neighbors; its evident interest in muscling-in on Bahrain is a mild harbinger of what might follow.
Netanyahu has placed Israel at the forefront of the international chorus of alarm, in contrast to Ariel Sharon, who preferred to work behind-the-scenes in alerting the international community to the scale of the danger.
Netanyahu has drawn parallels between the ayatollahs and the Nazis, and rightly notes that we did not gather the majority of the Jewish nation to this historic sliver of land after the horrors of the Holocaust only to be rendered vulnerable again, 70 years later, to another regime’s genocidal ambitions.
And yet there are many highly influential voices in Israel that urge a return to the lower profile. Let’s put ourselves in the background again, they say. Don’t lead the global struggle, or we’ll turn ourselves into the first target.
Some of these men of influence claim, like Gates, to detect cracks in the regime, including between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
They see the first faint signs that Iranian public thinking on the nuclear issue is becoming more nuanced as the economy sinks. There is still overwhelming support for Iran’s right to nuclear energy, but not necessarily, if this is the economic cost, for its need for nuclear weaponry.
These Israeli voices argue that, since the regime seeks the bomb primarily to ensure its survival rather than primarily to destroy Israel, then – however implausible this sounds – the challenge for the international community, in the upside down world of diplomacy, is to construct a framework in which the regime would feel that by backing down on nukes it would be “enhancing its survivability.”
As things stand, to get into regime’s head, it regards defying international will as giving it more power and leverage, while capitulating to pressure would likely presage more demands, more concessions and ultimately its demise. This echoes the Gates approach: “The only long-term solution to avoiding an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest.”
FOR NOW, the widely (though not universally) held assessment here is that the regime would likely not fire at Israel if it got the bomb, and would not supply a non-state actor either, for fear of bringing the entire international community violently down upon its head. And while the preparation of all necessary potential military measures is deemed essential, Israeli military intervention is not currently regarded as advisable.
The Washington-based Politico website reported on Wednesday, indeed, that “Some Israeli officials say the country’s fingers are off the hair-trigger that would launch a strike on the Iranian nuclear program” and referred to “the apparent willingness of the Israelis to postpone a demand for confrontation by months – at least.”
Echoing former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s somewhat incoherent talk of things we know, things we don’t know, things we know we don’t know, and things we don’t know we don’t know, Israel thinks it doesn’t know where a not-insignificant proportion of the Iranian nuclear program is located. And Israel worries that there are other facilities that it doesn’t know it doesn’t know about.
In a best-case scenario, if Israel destroyed the majority of the Iranian nuclear program – the part it knows it knows about – Iran has the expertise and the capacity to rebuild, and would be back where it is today in three to five years.
Politico quoted Yossi Kuperwasser, the deputy director-general of Moshe Ya’alon’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, to underline the contention that Israeli fingers are off the hair-trigger for now: “Everybody understands that you have to give some time for the sanctions to bear their full fruit.”
Indeed Ya’alon himself, along with fellow septet ministers Dan Meridor and Ehud Barak, not to mention Netanyahu, have all publicly indicated that they support giving sanctions more time, while The Jerusalem Post reported last month that Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry is even preparing policy options for the “day after” Iran passes the nuclear threshold, in a “first admission that the government is giving serious thought to adjusting to a reality where Israel is no longer, according to foreign sources, the sole nuclear power in the region.”
For his part, the current chief of staff, Lt.- Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, it is believed, cautions against military intervention as things stand.
Whatever their thinking, it is a safe bet that the entire Israeli leadership would be mightily relieved if they were spared the fateful decision. If, that is, the sanctions regime were ratcheted up further and more widely imposed, if the Iranian economy nosedived further, and if the Iranian regime – or a desperate Iranian public – concluded that the country was being devastated by its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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5) China Confronts the World
By Jonathan Fenby
After he launched China on to a market-led course in 1978, Deng Xiaoping counseled caution in international relations. China should, he advised, keep a low profile while enriching itself and not alarm the countries whose markets for its exports would replace deficient domestic demand.
Hu Jintao and his leadership colleagues must have decided that the time has come to shed such caution. China not only adopts a higher global profile, but is increasingly ready to take positions that earn the world's disapproval, be it on the valuation of its currency or its support for regimes in Sudan, Iran and Burma. And now that more muscular approach by Beijing confronts the Obama administration's drive to reassert Washington's interest in Asia.
This could provide a testing experience for both sides of the so-called G2, a concept that has never really taken off if only because of the rocky path of Sino-US relations since President Barack Obama's visit to the People's Republic a year ago. The flashpoints are evident. Hillary Clinton's assertion that freedom of navigation in the South China Sea runs straight up against China's claim to sovereignty over the waters to its south. Washington's growing closeness to India, including backing New Delhi's claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council is not to Beijing's taste. The US-Japan relationship remains a constant source of concern for China. The same goes for US-South Korean links. US arms sales to Taiwan rile Chinese leaders who insist that the island is part of the People's Republic.
During three months just spent in Beijing, I was struck repeatedly by the sharp tone adopted towards the US not only by ideologues and media propagandists, but by senior economists who insist that failure of American economic policy is responsible for the world's ills. The fact that the US Federal Reserve's new bout of quantitative easing, or QE2, went down like a lead balloon at the G20 summit in Seoul showed that China is not short of allies.
A researcher with a think tank attached to the Commerce Ministry, Mei Xinyu, summed up the dismissive Chinese view of the US in China Daily this month: "The US' top financial officials need to shift their people's attention from the country's struggling economy to cover up their incompetence and blame China for everything that is going wrong in their country."
Moving into conspiracy theory, the op-ed article concluded that, by attacking China, finance officials in Washington foster speculative opportunities for Wall Street firms which then offer them big jobs after they leave government office.
Ahead of the G20 meeting, China rejected the US plan as harking back to the days of planned economies - nice irony coming from the last major state ruled by a Communist Party, one that just unveiled its latest Five-Year Plan. At a Beijing conference, the governor of China's Central Bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, spoke of being ready to deal with the wash of money unleashed by QE2 as if he were a doctor preparing for a troublesome affliction.
Vice-Minister of Finance Zhu Guangyao used a pre-G20 briefing to say that China would query renewed US quantitative easing in Seoul, adding, "We hope the US can realize its responsibility and duty on the revival of the global economy." China's line of currency defense goes as follows: If one adds the 3 percent appreciation China is ready to allow and its consumer price index, exceeding 4 percent at a time of zero inflation in the West, the real appreciation is significant and as much as can be expected while the nation faces manifold domestic challenges.
Cooperation over global warming seems at a dead end. China still values investments by companies such as Intel, yet promotion of domestic companies in its stimulus package and an increasingly tough regulatory climate for foreign firms complicate a business relationship that has flourished since the 1980s. As the mainland moves up the technological and value chain under its next Five-Year Plan, trade tensions are set to rise.
China trade was once all about cheap exports. But if Chinese development goes to plan, import substitution for big-ticket items will become the order of the day. In a little noticed development this month, China unveiled a prototype of a 150-seat airliner due to go into service by 2016, complicating Boeing's sales to the world's second biggest market for commercial aircraft, not to mention the impact on Airbus.
On the other side of the Pacific, tougher rhetoric from the White House and Treasury as the US finds itself under political pressure at home and increasingly bereft of economic allies abroad does not point to a benign future with Washington and Beijing working together for the benefit of the world at large. Speaking at a European Central bank conference in Frankfurt on November 19, US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke hit back at Chinese criticism, noting that "currency undervaluation by surplus countries is inhibiting needed international adjustment and creating spillover effects that would not exist if exchange rates better reflected market fundamentals."
Hu's visit to Washington in January will be the touchstone. In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Secretary of State Clinton said that China's current policies in the region were designed to test other nations and insisted that Beijing should abide by international law. The problem is that the law is extremely vague on key points of conflict, notably the sovereignty of rocky islands that may sit on top of large energy reserves.
The US-China spat has greater resonance because of the way Washington backed Japan in the row over the detained Chinese trawler and the flurry over China's decision to halt exports of rare-earth minerals to Japan. A survey by the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun published in mid-November found that 87 percent considered China to be untrustworthy and that 90 percent thought relations between the two countries were bad. A simultaneous poll by China's Oriental Outlook Weekly, run by the state news agency, found similar figures on views of Japan held by Chinese. On top of this Vietnam, with US approval, declared its port at Cam Ranh Bay open for foreign naval ships and, to Beijing's displeasure, hosted the US aircraft carrier George Washington.
If the relationship continues its downward spiral, Hu's visit risks turning into a confrontation. If only for domestic political reasons, Obama may well feel he must show that he can stand up to China for instance, by slapping duties on selected imports, resisting Beijing's maritime claims goods or holding China to account on its environmental record. Hu, due to stand down as Chinese leader in late 2012, has no wish to leave office remembered as the man who caved in to the US.
Such a stand-off is dangerous for both countries - and the world. It could lead to damaging protectionism. Depicting China as an enemy may be an attractive electoral gambit for an administration that feels need to display its muscles. Beijing will respond in kind. High-level and dispassionate statesmanship is required, with each party giving some ground and trying to scale down the currency rhetoric while engaging in serious discussion on common approaches to environmental measures. Whether either party has the wherewithal remains in question. On their performances so far, one can only remain pessimistic.
Jonathan Fenby is China director of the research service Trusted Sources and author of the Penguin History of Modern China.
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