In a previous memo I suggested it would be wise and constructive if Ryan and Cantor, among others, were allowed to become the new voices and faces of the Republican Party.
This assumes many of the "Old Bulls" would be amenable. That is where the rub enters the picture. Politicians, like all humans, have egos and those who rise in fame and importance have egos that grow commensurately. Many also have historical knowledge and abilities that remain very useful and critical and give them leverage. Time will tell whether Republicans are serious about solving our nation's problems or are more interested in occupying fancy offices, receiving pandering media attention and being in the limelight.
Furthermore, Republicans have a President to deal with who philosophically is not on the same page in many instances but wants to get re-elected at any cost and has proven he is willing to swallow hard, ie. hiring of his new Chief of Staff and the firing of his dubious press secretary. (See 1 below.)
Obama is street smart and does not want to be the first black rejected president. The mid term election was his wake up call and now he must row between the ominous rocks of his Far Left and the more benign cliffs of middle Americans.
The visual contrast of Ryan and Cantor contrasted against Pelosi and Reid are telling. Ryan and Cantor are young, sincere and verbally in command whereas Pelosi and Reid come across as disingenuous hacks, ie. which they truly are. Obama is slick and a proven untrustworthy flip flopper.
Let the fun begin.
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Bernanke on the job market outlook - it will take five more years to improve and then many will have to be retrained if they are still able to work. (See 2 below.)
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Once again we have evidence of a combination of a Palestinian lie, Israeli Leftists buying into it and then selling to a media quick to print anything negative when it comes to Israel.
Caroline Glick comments. (See 3 below.)
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Hitchens on Blair. (See 4 below.)
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According to Krauthammer, fight they will but now over something different. (See 5 below.)
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Only in D.C. can an incompetent, paid $172,000/year, be considered underpaid. (See 6 below.)
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It is an old Liberal trick, ie. spend and spend, break the bank then ask the Pentagon to pay for it through cuts in defense.
I predicted this only a few memos ago while also acknowledging the military is prone to wasteful spending because generally the army with the most and best wins.
Yes, the Pentagon is probably one of the most wasteful bureaucracies in D.C., bloated staff etc. However, constantly asking them to buy equipment, then changing the technical demands along the way to procurement and finally cutting back on the numbers at the time of manufacturing, imposed by the politicians, is part of the cost overrun problem as well. (See 7 below.)
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George Friedman on where we have been and are now going. (See 8 below.)
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Finally, this was sent to me by a friend and fellow memo reader who has his own reservations about its conclusions. One might decide Sennels has his own biased agenda. For anyone who read about Lester Jeeter in Erskine Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" it might not seem so distant.
You decide and have a great weekend. (See 9 below.)
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Dick
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1)Chief of staff pick just another cog in the Daley machine
By John Kass
As President Barack Obama knighted Chicago's William Daley as his new chief of staff — and kept the Daley machine in control of the executive branch of our federal government — I couldn't help thinking of the good old days.
Back when I would fondly recount the legend of Obama of Chicago.
Not the political spin that Obama was some kind of reformer promising a different, cleaner kind of politics. But the true mythic history, Obama as a thin, silky creature of the Daleys, eagerly trotting behind them along the Chicago Way:
And lo, the Daley women found the infant Barack floating in a reed basket along the banks of the Chicago River. And they lifted the crying babe from the river, and nurtured and wrapped him in swaddling clothes. They watched him grow to manhood, where he performed great miracles.
Soon he was ready to transcend the broken politics of the past, just as long as it was in Washington, and not in Chicago, where the Daleys eat and play.
Watching Billy and Barack do their thing Thursday, I developed a strange urge to sit in a great leather wing chair, put my feet up on an ottoman, pour out a fistful of 18-year-old single-malt scotch, and light a big maduro cigar.
Ahhhh. It tastes like … vindication.
"He possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created and how to grow our economy," said Obama. "And, needless to say, Bill also has a smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works. You might say it is a genetic trait."
Genetic trait?
Pardon me, Mr. President, but it's not a trait, exactly. It's more like a reason for being.
Not everyone was amused. Bill's brother, Mayor Richard Daley, became upset when pesky reporters dared ask him whether Bill's ascendency smacked of "the Chicago Way."
They suggested to the mayor that "the Chicago Way" carried a negative connotation. He just hates that.
"What do you mean, negative?" the mayor sneered. "Go to New York. Go to Washington. Go to Texas. Go to California. What 'Way'?' This is all your writing."
Thanks for being a loyal reader, Mayor Daley.
Yet what is truly amusing about the Bill Daley story is the reaction of the Washington media.
They seem quite desperate to paint the Billy appointment as something it is not. They want it to be a symbolic move, one of Daley bringing Obama closer to the political center.
It's a neat construction, quite explainable and reasonable, the kind of thing spinners put together and feed feeble-minded reporters on background, so that a favorable consensus may be reached.
And once a consensus is reached, those who adopt it become zealots intent on hunting down the stray heretics.
"Using Chicago's early history as bare-knuckled politics and back-room dealmaking is a favored tactic among those outside the region seeking to tarnish the reputations of local Illinois political leaders who rise to the national stage," admonished the Christian Science Monitor, offering up my column as evidence of such heresy.
Early history? You mean like Thursday, when the federal grand jury indicted the former business partner of the mayor's son over that city sewer contract deal?
The Daley boys are adept and skillful and ruthless in the pursuit of power and treasure. The family has controlled Chicago and Cook County for more than half a century. The Daleys are without doubt the best politicians on the planet.
Obama knows this. And because he wants to get re-elected in 2012, he'll keep the Daleys around him.
The mayor's mouthpiece, media merlin David Axelrod, once again will be shaping Obama's message and image for the campaign. And Billy and Rich are easing former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel into the mayor's job.
It might look like coincidence. But there's nothing coincidental about the Daleys. They're not fools. They're not dreamers. They're planners.
Yet what's often left out of the official account of the Billy ascendency is his role as media manager. For decades now, Billy's been playing the role of background source to many establishment media types.
It's a role he might well continue to play even as Obama's major-domo.
A politician acting as a reliable source over years gets a break. And given the early coverage — and the beltway media's historic reluctance to let readers in on the political back story of those who move to Washington — it looks like Billy will be getting a break for quite some time.
Washington reporters hoping to maintain favor with the Chicago gatekeeper would be advised to stay away from the following topics while researching the glowing puff pieces to come.
Don't ask about Billy at Fannie Mae and his little buddy Rahm at Freddie Mac in the 1990s, or how that huge SBC deal went through in Illinois in 2003 when Billy was SBC president.
Don't ask about those meetings back in Chicago, in the early 1990s, when Billy and family adviser Tim Degnan and others helped create those City Hall patronage armies — which were later involved in illegal hiring — to keep Rich Daley in power and elect allies like Emanuel to Congress.
And for Pete's sake, never ask about the Chicago Way.
Just stick to the script as Obama begins the 2012 campaign with Billy and Dave and Rahm and Rich behind him.
It's all about moving to the center. It's all about moving to the center. It's all about …
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2)Fed Chief Bernanke: Jobs Market Will Need Five More Years to Recover
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said the decline in the unemployment rate is likely to be slow even with a pickup in U.S. growth this year, signaling no change in the central bank’s monetary stimulus.
At the pace of improvement projected by Fed officials, “it could take four to five more years for the job market to normalize fully,” Bernanke said today in prepared testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. Bernanke also stepped up the urgency of his call for a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit, saying “prompt adoption” of one could have economic benefits in the long and short run.
The Fed chief is defending his unorthodox program of buying $600 billion of Treasurys through June to meet the Fed’s mandates for full employment and stable prices. He spoke an hour after the Labor Department reported that employers added 103,000 workers to payrolls last month, less than the 150,000 gain forecast by economists in a Bloomberg survey.
“It’s about what we expected,” Bernanke said of the jobs report during a question-and-answer period. “If we continue at this pace, we’re not going to see sustained declines in the unemployment rate.” His prepared testimony was submitted before the Labor Department data were released.
Stocks fluctuated after the jobs report and the testimony. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index slipped 0.2 percent to 1,271.16 at 10:54 a.m. in New York after rising as much as 0.2 percent. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.37 percent from 3.40 percent late yesterday.
‘Credible’ Plan
Bernanke urged the lawmakers to draw up a “credible” fiscal plan to address issues that he said are long-term in nature, saying that “strong” actions are needed to control the nation’s debt.
Today’s Labor Department report also showed the jobless rate fell to 9.4 percent from 9.8 percent, reflecting gains in jobs and fewer people in the labor force.
“In a situation in which unemployment is high and expected to remain so and inflation is unusually low,” the Federal Open Market Committee “would normally respond by reducing its target for the federal funds rate,” Bernanke said in his first public remarks on Capitol Hill since September.
Instead, with the rate close to zero since December 2008, the Fed is buying securities in an effort to keep market borrowing costs low, he said, building on the first round of $1.7 trillion in debt purchases that “appeared to be successful in influencing longer-term interest rates, raising the prices of equities and other assets, and improving credit conditions more broadly, thereby helping stabilize the economy and support the recovery.”
Treasury Yields
Without referring to the rise in Treasury yields since the November decision to expand stimulus, Bernanke said in a footnote that “longer-term interest rates are also influenced by market expectations of the future path for short-term interest rates, which in turn depend on the outlook for the economy and so for the target federal funds rate.”
Bernanke, 57, met privately in November with Senate Banking Committee members to defuse criticism of the easing, saying the plan will spur job growth while not impairing the Fed’s ability to control inflation.
Allies in Congress
Bernanke lost allies in Congress last month with the retirement of senators including New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg, formerly the senior Republican on the budget panel, and Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd, who led the banking committee for four years. Republicans took control of the House and narrowed Democrats’ Senate majority in the midterm elections.
Republican leaders have criticized the stimulus. Since its Nov. 3 approval by Bernanke and his colleagues, stocks have risen, the dollar has strengthened and U.S. economic indicators have improved.
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, then the minority leader, and three other Republicans voiced “deep concerns” in a Nov. 17 letter to Bernanke about a policy that they said may undermine the dollar and create asset price bubbles.
In December, former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC said chances had increased of a 5 percent pace of U.S. growth in late 2011. The central bank will probably stop at $600 billion in purchases instead of raising the total to $1 trillion, he said.
‘Inevitable Changes’
Bernanke said that the longer lawmakers wait to deal with the federal budget deficit, “the greater the risks and the more wrenching the inevitable changes to the budget will be.”
“By contrast, the prompt adoption of a credible program to reduce future deficits would not only enhance economic growth and stability in the long run, but could also yield substantial near-term benefits in terms of lower long-term interest rates and increased consumer and business confidence,” Bernanke said.
Republicans have promised to seek cuts to reduce a budget deficit that may widen to $1.34 trillion for fiscal 2011, Credit Suisse Group AG strategists estimated on Dec. 7, a day after the president announced a deal with Republicans on extending Bush- era tax rates. The shortfalls were $1.29 trillion in fiscal 2010 and $1.42 trillion in fiscal 2009.
In October, Bernanke gave one of his most detailed prescriptions for reducing the deficit, urging lawmakers to consider adopting rules that limit federal spending or debt to help put the U.S. on a more sustainable fiscal path.
Extending Tax Cuts
In July, Bernanke told lawmakers that extending at least some of the tax cuts beyond last month would help strengthen a U.S. economy still in need of stimulus and recommended offsetting the move with increased revenue or lower spending.
The U.S. economy probably expanded at a 2.5 percent pace in the fourth quarter, according to the median estimate of 65 analysts in a Bloomberg News survey last month. That compares with 2.6 percent in the third quarter and 1.7 percent in the three months through June.
“The pace of economic recovery seems likely to be moderately stronger in 2011 than it was in 2010,” Bernanke said.
Reports yesterday showed that the best holiday shopping season in five years lost luster after sales at U.S. retailers including Gap Inc. and Target Corp. fell short of analysts’ projections. Sales at stores open more than a year rose 3.2 percent in December, according to Retail Metrics Inc. That compared with the 3.5 percent average of estimates compiled by the firm and a 5.5 percent increase in November.
The Federal Open Market Committee next meets Jan. 25-26, when four regional Fed presidents are scheduled to rotate into voting slots for the year: Chicago’s Charles Evans, Richard Fisher of Dallas, Narayana Kocherlakota of Minnesota and Philadelphia’s Charles Plosser.
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2)When Israeli leftists turn against their country with horrendous lies, the world media is only happy to disseminate them
By Caroline B. Glick
On Sunday December 19, the self-proclaimed "Israeli human rights" group B'tselem disseminated a shocking story to the local and international media. B'tselem claimed that the previous day Palestinian shepherd Samir Bani Fadel was peacefully herding his sheep when he was set upon by a mob of Israeli settlers. He alleged that these kippah-clad Israelis drove up in a car and chased him away. Then they torched the pasture and burned 12 pregnant ewes alive and badly burned five others. B'tselem furnished reporters with graphic photos of the dead sheep.
While the media published the account without a shred of suspicion, the police found Fadel's account hard to believe. Observant Jews neither drive nor light fires on Saturdays.
And indeed, when questioned by police investigators, Fadel admitted he made the whole attack up. He accidentally killed his herd himself when he set fire to a pile of bramble. Too embarrassed to admit his mistake, he decided to blame the Jews and become a local hero. B'tselem was only too happy to spread his lies.
On January 3, Channel 2 aired a video produced by B'tselem. The video purported to show residents of Yitzhar -- a community in Samaria — throwing rocks at Palestinians from the neighboring village Bureen for no reason whatsoever. Channel 2 presented the footage as further proof — if anyone needed it -- that the Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem are a bunch of lawless, hate-filled, violent fanatics.
Unfortunately for B'tselem and Channel 2, Yitzhar residents also own a video camera. And they also filmed the event. The Samaria Regional Council released the video to the media on Tuesday.
The Yitzhar video exposes the B'tselem video as a complete fraud. As it happened, on Monday afternoon a group of Palestinians joined by Israelis and/or foreigners descended on Yitzhar and attacked its residents with bricks and rocks of all sizes. Among the assailants was the cameraman who shot the footage presented on Channel 2. Not only did the videographer — who has blond hair — participate in the violent assault on Yitzhar. He staged the incident by alternately throwing rocks, filming, and directing his fellow attackers where to throw their rocks.
The Jews of Yitzhar only began throwing rocks to fend off their attackers.
This past Saturday the Palestinians' invented what has all the trappings of a new blood libel against Israel.
Every Friday Israeli anti-Zionist activists, Palestinian Authority employees, and foreign anti-Israel groups join forces at Bil'in. Together they attack IDF soldiers guarding construction of the separation barrier adjacent to Bil'in village.
Saturday, the PA claimed that Jawaher Abu-Rahmeh, a woman from Bil'in died from tear gas inhalation at the previous day's riot. The PA's chief negotiator Saeb Erekat claimed that her death was an IDF war crime.
Erekat of course, has not distinguished himself as a paragon of truthfulness. To the contrary. He has a long track record of spreading lies about Israel on the international stage. In just one notable example, in April 2002, Erekat claimed in multiple television appearances that the IDF killed more than 500 people at Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield. He also claimed that the IDF buried some 300 people in mass graves.
The UN later reported that during the pitched battle in Jenin refugee camp, 52 Palestinians were killed. 23 IDF soldiers were killed in the battle.
Despite Erekat's rich history of lies, B'tselem's Executive Director Jessica Montell joined his bandwagon immediately. As NGO Monitor documented, in a Twitter post on Saturday, Montell wrote, "Sad start to the year. Jawaher Abu Rahmeh died this morning after inhaling tear gas yesterday in Bil'in demonstration."
Her claim was echoed in similar statements from her fellow Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups. Anarchists Against the Wall, Yesh Din, Gush Shalom, Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, and attorney Michel Sfard who is associated with Yesh Din, Al Haq and Breaking the Silence all alleged that the IDF murdered Abu Rahmah with tear gas.
As luck would have it though, eyewitnesses say that Abu Rahma didn't even participate in the weekly riot. Ilham Abu Rahma, her 19 year old cousin and neighbor told Britain's Independent that deceased was at home when the riot took place.
For its part, the IDF has reported that the medical information it received about Abu Rahma's death are not consistent with death through overexposure to tear gas. During her hospitalization, Abu Rahma received an unusual mix of drugs that is usually only administered to treat poisoning, drug overdose or leukemia. The IDF also revealed that Abu Rahma had been recently hospitalized at a Palestinian hospital.
The easiest way to determine what caused Abu Rahma's death would of course have been to perform an autopsy. The IDF asked for one to be performed. But the PA refused the request and instead buried her in record time.
The sad truth is that a case can easily be made that all of this might have been avoided if B'tselem hadn't taken it upon itself to delegitimize Israel's right to self-defense. As part of its efforts, in 2002 B'tselem spearheaded the international campaign against Israel's right to build the separation fence to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of its major cities.
As NGO Monitor's recent in-depth report about the lawfare campaign to use the language of law to criminalize Israel shows, B'tselem was the first NGO to launch a campaign against the security fence. It coined the draconian term, "The Wall" to define the barrier which is in most places nothing more than a wire fence. NGO Monitor recalls that in 2002 and 2003 B'tselem "issued two lengthy position papers, which became accepted as the definitive analyses of 'the Wall' and were widely adopted."
B'tselem's campaign against the security fence was quickly joined by other NGOs, the UN and the EU. Its allegations formed the basis of the international campaign to delegitimize Israel's right to build the barrier.
That campaign reached a high point in 2004 with the publication of International Court of Justice's opinion on the matter. The ICJ's opinion parroted B'tselem's charge that Israel has no right to defend itself from Palestinian aggression. So too, the "evidence" against Israel's right to defend itself submitted by the PLO was based largely on the two B'tselem reports.
If B'tselem hadn't launched the campaign against the fence, it is possible that Israel's decision to built it might have been greeted with the same indifference as the security fences erected by the likes of India, Spain and numerous other countries in disputed territories. That is, it might have been seen as the legitimate act of self-defense it is.
The central role that B'tselem and its anti-Zionist comrades in the Israeli NGO community play in the international political war being waged against Israel's right to exist first came under significant public scrutiny following the publication of the UN Human Rights Committee's Goldstone report on Operation Cast Lead in 2009.
As NGO Monitor and the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu demonstrated last year, B'tselem and 15 other Israeli NGOs funded by the New Israel Fund and foreign governments lobbied the UN Human Rights Council to form the Goldstone Commission with the clear agenda of criminalizing Israel and whitewashing Hamas's war crimes against the Jewish state. Moreover, B'tselem and its fellow-NIF grantees, provided 92 percent of the anti-Israel allegations originating from Israeli sources. These allegations — most of which were firmly denied by the IDF — were used by Judge Richard Goldstone and his colleagues to "prove" that Israel committed war crimes in prosecuting its campaign to protect southern Israel from Hamas's illegal missile onslaught.
Not surprisingly, when scrutinized, like the story about the scorched pregnant ewes, the Yitzhar "bullies" and the "illegality" of the fence, these allegations came apart under scrutiny.
For instance, B'tselem claimed that during Cast Lead the IDF killed 1,387 Gazans and only 330, or less than a quarter of them were combatants. As NGO Monitor notes, the Goldstone report's claim that "Only one of every five [Gazan] casualties was a combatant," clearly was based on B'tselem's numbers.
The IDF — which B'tselem and its comrades claim has no credibility — reported that of 1166 Palestinian deaths, 709 were fighters killed in combat. Goldstone dismissed the IDF data.
Yet in November, Hamas's "Interior Minister" Fathi Hamad admitted to the London-based Al Hayat newspaper that the IDF's numbers were far more accurate than B'tselem's. According to Hamad, 600-700 Hamas fighters were killed in Cast Lead.
One of the reasons that false stories by the likes of B'tselem and its fellow Israeli-staffed anti-Zionist pressure groups are treated with respect by the local media and the international community alike is because they are perceived as Israeli groups. Why would Israelis lie about their own army?
Wednesday the Knesset voted to form a commission of inquiry to examine these groups' sources of funding. The rationale behind this parliamentary investigation is clear. The time has come to determine just how "Israeli" these organizations that form such an integral part of the international political war against Israel actually are. How much of their funding comes from foreign governments? And if their foreign funding is significant, then how can they claim to be Israeli groups?
B'tselem for instance receives funding from the British, Swiss, and Irish governments, Christian Aid, the Ford Foundation, DanChurchAid, (funded by the Danish Government), Diakonia, (funded by the Swedish and Norwegian governments and the EU), Tr�caire, (funded by the Irish and UK governments),and others.
Yesh Din, which specializes in conducting domestic lawfare against the IDF is funded by the Irish, Dutch, British, German, and Norwegian governments, the EU, and George Soros' Open Society Institute.
Physicians for Human Rights- Israel, Breaking the Silence, Bimkom, Peace Now, Gush Shalom, Adalah, the Geneva Initiative, the Committee for Peace and Security and so on and so forth all receive massive funding from foreign governments. The Samaria Regional Council alleges that over the past decade, foreign governments have donated hundreds of millions of euros, dollars and shekels to these Israeli "grassroots" groups.
The fact is that these groups' claim to grassroots' status is as credible as their allegations of Israeli criminality and Palestinian victimhood. In truth, these NGOs are local agents of foreign governments who use them to advance their anti-Israel policies.
The Knesset's move to investigate these groups was greeted by righteous rage from the groups' leaders and sympathetic Leftist Knesset members. The Knesset's decision was castigated as "McCarthyite," and "anti-democratic." But it is clear these groups and their parliamentary allies doth protest too much.
No one is talking about shutting them down. But the public has a right to know what these groups really are. And our political representatives have an obligation to investigate and expose subversive foreign agents. Israel and Israel's democratic system is weakened, not strengthened when the state's international reputation and domestic discourse is hijacked by foreign governments who hide behind their Israeli foot soldiers.
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4) The Blair Hitch Project
Since leaving 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair has faced continuing public condemnation for leading the U.K. into Iraq, converted to Catholicism, and plunged into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Debating Blair in Toronto, the author finds the former prime minister battered but unapologetic.
By Christopher Hitchens.
Say “Toronto” or “Ontario” and the immediate thought associations are with a somewhat blander version of North America: a United States with a welfare regime and a more polite street etiquette, and the additionally reassuring visage of Queen Elizabeth on the currency. But this part of Canada also has its quixotic and romantic dimension. It was to here that the Tory loyalists fled the American Revolution. In the village of Deptford, Ontario, on the banks of the local river Thames, the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies cast and situated a trilogy variously composed of the elements of magic and exile. One of his chief characters, Percy “Boy” Staunton, gives up much of his life and energy to the cause of the Prince of Wales, a once dashing and promising young blade who shatters and demoralizes his admirers by falling under the thrall of a designing woman and abdicating the throne without a fight.
As I was led past a phalanx of guards to be admitted to Tony Blair's hotel suite overlooking Toronto and Lake Ontario, I was mentally running through our previous meetings. The first had been in the room of the leader of the opposition in the House of Commons shortly after he had been elected to head the Labour Party and to re-brand—or should I say re-baptize?—it as “New Labour.” Then I had seen him in the private office of the prime minister in Downing Street, just before he became eligible to celebrate an entire decade in the job, almost eclipsing Margaret Thatcher and setting an indoor record for any Labour politician. Most recently he had slipped downstairs to say hello while he was on a private visit to the British Embassy residence in Washington. The surroundings were still grand, but by then he had abdicated and was being forced to watch his disliked and inferior successor throw away an election he knew in his heart he himself could have won.
Now he was traveling with a very small but devoted staff, and looking like a Prince Charming in exile. The high-wattage grin was still there, but framed in a lined face with cropped and graying hair that still gave the ephemeral impression of youth. We were due to have a public debate: the first he had agreed to since he had left office. Blair had made an appearance before the Chilcot committee, which is still investigating Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq, looking tight-lipped and conceding nothing. The taunts against him had swollen from run-of-the-mill abuse (“Bush's poodle,” “Liar,” or sometimes “Bliar”) to full-out hatred. “War criminal!” “Murderer.” The first two public launches of his new memoir, A Journey, had been disrupted or canceled. At a bookstore signing in Dublin he had been pelted with shoes and other objects by a mixed mob of anti-war types, stiffened with some gaunt lads from the periphery of “the Real I.R.A.” A later event at the Tate Modern, in London, had to be called off. “It just wouldn't have been fair to everyone else to go ahead,” he says with a rather lame shrug. Perhaps he was relying on the legendary politeness of Torontonians, and on the apparently more neutral subject of our dispute, which was religion. He now operates under the somehow touching name of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which can sound rather like a body set up to express faith in Tony Blair. His principal day job is to serve as mediator for the “Quartet” of powers that supervise the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” This means regular efforts to reconcile Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Holy Land. Cheer up, I want to tell him. At least it's a job for life.
Meanwhile, he has not lost his talent for swift parliamentary footwork. The proposition for debate states clearly that religion is “a force for good.” The onus here is always on those who are advocating the motion. Yet somehow, without quite understanding it, I find that I have agreed to speak first and to surrender the traditional advantage of giving the reply. I feel as if I have gone into a revolving door in front of someone and come out behind him: even as if one of Robertson Davies's suburban conjurors had pulled a fast one. During our public exchange I trail my coat on the Roman question, criticizing Cardinal Newman, whose beatification Blair had advocated, and ridiculing the Pope's position on family planning and aids. He doesn't rise to the defense of what he is bound to regard as the One True Church. Can it be true, then, that he did what both Clinton and George W. Bush had done before him, and ended up in the pews of his wife's church? Cherie Blair—who has told us more than we need to know about the times she did and didn't take her highly heretical birth-control kit for fertile weekends with the Queen at Balmoral—is a devout if eclectic Catholic. Her half-sister Lauren announced a few weeks ago that she had converted to Islam after a visit to a mosque in Iran, for whose state-run “Press TV” she works as a journalist. She described the moment of revelation, in terms that would have delighted Karl Marx, as a “shot of spiritual morphine,” and claims not to have had a drink or any pork products ever since. In spite of her brother-in-law's many pretzel-shaped attempts to accommodate himself to the followers of the Prophet, she took the opportunity to describe him as a foe of Islam. Blair, who relates in his memoirs a period when he became too fond of the cocktail and nightcap hours, yet who exhausts himself daily on “outreach” to Muslims, has no alternative but to put on his sadly misunderstood face once again.
And he really does possess one of the most mobile and expressive faces I have ever seen. I asked him in private what it was like to be hated: not hated a bit but hated really quite a lot. The receptive grin stayed in place, even if very slightly contracted, as if he wanted to go on giving the impression of seeing all points of view. Did he feel he had had to unfairly absorb some of the spittle directed at George Bush? He didn't seem to want to take shelter in this refuge. Now, those who fail to register emotion under pressure are often apparently good officer material, but that very stoicism can also conceal—as with officers who don't suffer from battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress—a psychopathic calm that sends the whole platoon into a ditch full of barbed wire and sheds no tears.
Blair on the platform was an almost complete contrast. He virtually pantomimed reaction: smiling readily if a joke was at his expense, wincing here and there, spreading his palms resignedly once or twice. Yet this body candor, too, can have its iffy aspect, like Clinton biting his fat lip in fake empathy. I couldn't quite make up my mind until after the debate was over. He and I had been chatting in his greenroom, and I excused myself to go to my own (for a shot of morphine, I think, to boost the weak scotch I'd been given). Returning rather quickly, I found Blair whispering with one of his aides. As I paused at the door, they both looked up rather shyly. I offered to withdraw, but they said no: they had just been saying to each other how grateful they were that I had said some words that evening in defense of his decision to remove Saddam Hussein. I have spent my life growing a carapace to shield myself from the appeal of politicians, and nine out of ten of my closest friends now regard Blair as the classic example of the trickster exposed, the hollow man calcified by cynicism and media manipulation. I, too, can remember gagging at his uncritical courtship of Rupert Murdoch and his annexation of the Princess Diana obsequies (even if the latter did make him the first Labour prime minister to give instructions to the royal family). But having caught him in this micro-moment of being vulnerable without exactly being wounded, I find that I simply can't lend myself to the glib consensus. There is a moral pulse to be detected here, and it's quite a strong one.
When Tony Blair took office, Slobodan Milošević was cleansing and raping the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Mullah Omar was lending Osama bin Laden the hinterland of a failed and rogue state. Charles Taylor of Liberia was leading a hand-lopping militia of enslaved children across the frontier of Sierra Leone, threatening a blood-diamond version of Rwanda in West Africa. And the wealth and people of Iraq were the abused private property of Saddam Hussein and his crime family. Today, all of these Caligula figures are at least out of power, and at the best either dead or on trial. How can anybody with a sense of history not grant Blair some portion of credit for this? And how can anybody with a tincture of moral sense go into a paroxysm and yell that it is he who is the war criminal? It is as if all the civilians murdered by al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be charged to his account. This is the chaotic mentality of Julian Assange and his groupies.
Scripture warns gloomily that prophets are not honored in their own countries, and given the record of many prophets, that's very probably a good thing. Blair could also join the club of wandering ex-statesmen, including at different times Mikhail Gorbachev and Richard Nixon, who are given respect and recognition only when they visit other peoples' countries. As we said good-bye, he was being taken straight to the airport, staying one jet-lag stage ahead of his demons, and heading back to Jerusalem—that birthplace of all our dreams and graveyard of all our hopes.
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5) Constitutionalism
By Charles Krauthammer
For decades, Democrats and Republicans fought over who owns the American flag. Now they're fighting over who owns the Constitution.
The flag debates began during the Vietnam era when leftist radicals made the fatal error of burning it. For decades since, non-suicidal liberals have tried to undo the damage. Demeaningly, and somewhat unfairly, they are forever having to prove their fealty to the flag.
Amazingly, though, some still couldn't get it quite right. During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.
Today, the issue is the Constitution. It's a healthier debate because flags are pure symbolism and therefore more likely to evoke pure emotion and ad hominem argument. The Constitution, on the other hand, is a document that speaks. It defines concretely the nature of our social contract. Nothing in our public life is more substantive.
Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration's bold push for government expansion - a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders' intent.
Call it constitutionalism. In essence, constitutionalism is the intellectual counterpart and spiritual progeny of the "originalism" movement in jurisprudence. Judicial "originalists" (led by Antonin Scalia and other notable conservative jurists) insist that legal interpretation be bound by the text of the Constitution as understood by those who wrote it and their contemporaries. Originalism has grown to become the major challenger to the liberal "living Constitution" school, under which high courts are channelers of the spirit of the age, free to create new constitutional principles accordingly.
What originalism is to jurisprudence, constitutionalism is to governance: a call for restraint rooted in constitutional text. Constitutionalism as a political philosophy represents a reformed, self-regulating conservatism that bases its call for minimalist government - for reining in the willfulness of presidents and legislatures - in the words and meaning of the Constitution.
Hence that highly symbolic moment on Thursday when the 112th House of Representatives opened with a reading of the Constitution. Remarkably, this had never been done before - perhaps because it had never been so needed. The reading reflected the feeling, expressed powerfully in the last election, that we had moved far, especially the past two years, from a government constitutionally limited by its enumerated powers to a government constrained only by its perception of social need.
The most galvanizing example of this expansive shift was, of course, the Democrats' health-care reform, which will revolutionize one-sixth of the economy and impose an individual mandate that levies a fine on anyone who does not enter into a private contract with a health insurance company. Whatever its merits as policy, there is no doubting its seriousness as constitutional precedent: If Congress can impose such a mandate, is there anything that Congress may not impose upon the individual?
The new Republican House will henceforth require, in writing, constitutional grounding for every bill submitted. A fine idea, although I suspect 90 percent of them will simply make a ritual appeal to the "general welfare" clause. Nonetheless, anything that reminds members of Congress that they are not untethered free agents is salutary.
But still mostly symbolic. The real test of the Republicans' newfound constitutionalism will come in legislating. Will they really cut government spending? Will they really roll back regulations? Earmarks are nothing. Do the Republicans have the courage to go after entitlements as well?
In the interim, the cynics had best tread carefully. Some liberals are already disdaining the new constitutionalism, denigrating the document's relevance and sneering at its public recitation. They sneer at their political peril. In choosing to focus on a majestic document that bears both study and recitation, the reformed conservatism of the Obama era has found itself not just a symbol but an anchor.
Constitutionalism as a guiding political tendency will require careful and thoughtful development, as did jurisprudential originalism. But its wide appeal and philosophical depth make it a promising first step to a conservative future.
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6) The Underpaid Robert Gibbs and Washington's Sense of Entitlement
Analysis by Walter Shapiro
With the capital awash in star-spangled sentiment this week, it seems appropriate to recall a patriotic parable so dangerous that it undermines the governing ethos of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington.
Leaving office in 1953, as biographer David McCullough writes, Harry Truman "traveled home from Washington unprotected by Secret Service agents ... He had come home without salary or pension. He had no income or support from the federal government other than his Army pension of $112.56 a month ... Truman had been forced to take out a loan at the National Bank in Washington in his last weeks as president to tide him over."
The Myth of Cincinnatus -- the Roman general who saved the Republic and then humbly returned to his farm -- is as outmoded in 21st century Washington as remembering that slavery and Prohibition were once in the Constitution. Instead, these days the governing philosophy of governing is that doing good by selflessly working in the White House entitles you to do well for the rest of your life.
Barack Obama bid a grateful farewell to Robert Gibbs Wednesday by stressing to The New York Times that his press secretary "had a six-year stretch now where basically he's been going 24/7 with relatively modest pay." As a senior White House aide, Gibbs modestly earned $172,200 last year. That income alone -- leaving out any earnings by his wife -- would put Gibbs in the upper 8 percent of all American families, according to 2009 Census figures.
Yes, Washington and its close-in suburbs are expensive places to live. But it is a safe guess that most print reporters who pepper Gibbs with questions at his daily briefings make less than $172,000 a year -- and they somehow manage to live in Washington as well. Salaries for federal judges (all of whom boast educational pedigrees that outstrip Gibbs' undergraduate degree from North Carolina State) start at $174,000 and waft skyward to $223,000 for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Obama's sympathetic comments about Gibbs' financial sacrifice illustrate that populism remains an abstraction for the president, despite the persistence of the worst economic downturn since the Depression. In the world of Obama (or Clinton or either Bush), it is par for the course that William Daley, the new White House chief of staff, served as Midwest chairman for JP Morgan Chase between his stints in government. Or that Rahm Emanuel made $16 million as an investment banker during the three years between his departure from the Clinton White House and his 2002 election to the House.
If Gibbs were immediately heading to a comparably paid job in the president's 2012 re-election campaign, only a churl would complain about his need for some time off -- as Obama put it -- "to step back, reflect and retool." But at his press briefing Wednesday, Gibbs announced without a flicker of embarrassment, "I will have an opportunity I hope to give some speeches." The Washington Post reported that Gibbs has hired Washington lawyer Robert Barnett to negotiate these speeches and other potentially lucrative engagements after leaving the White House. While the departing White House press secretary ruled out a book "in the near future" and doubted that he would ever work for a political candidate not named Obama, Gibbs did not offer any Sherman-esque denials about taking on corporate work.
To be fair, Gibbs is a portrait in Gandhian self-denial compared to many who have glided from a presidential limousine to a personal one. Little more than a year after he left the Reagan White House, lobbyist Michael Deaver posed for an infamous 1986 Time magazine cover showing him talking on an early car phone from the back seat of a limo as the headline ominously asked: "Who's This Man Calling? Influence Peddling in Washington." While Deaver was an imagemaker, not an attorney, he was following the buck-raking tradition of lawyer-fixers like Tommy Corcoran (FDR) and Clark Clifford (Truman), who learned government from the inside and then greased the levers of power for grateful corporate clients.
Unlike lobbying (on which Obama deserves credit for taking a hard line), Gibbs will be hurting no one if in three months, say, he gets paid $30,000 for telling some harmless anecdotes about the president and the press corps to the annual convention of the Cat Food Producers of America. But there remains something slightly unseemly about cashing in like this while the president who has made your career is still in the Oval Office. The problem is that as long as Gibbs, Obama and the entire political-insider culture of Washington believe that working in the White House for $172,000 is a form of martyrdom, then the only restraint after leaving government will be the fine print in the ethics laws.
There was an era (personified by the likes of Truman and Sam Rayburn in the 1950s) when a high-level career in public service and an upper-middle-class income seemed reward enough. These bygone values endure among many in the military and the federal judiciary -- not to mention among the underpaid denizens of the White House briefing room. But too often power players in Washington believe that if they see the president every day, appear on television and have a permanent seat on Air Force One, they are entitled to get rich as soon as they leave government.
When it comes to personal money, there is a sense in Washington that what happens within the Beltway stays within the Beltway. But voters are not dumb, even if more than 90 percent of them survive on less than $172,000 a year. What happens in government is not the only trigger for populist outrage. For it is equally easy to become enraged by career arcs after government.
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8) The Next Decade: Where We've Been... And Where We're Going
By George Friedman
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This book is about the relation between empire, republic, and the exercise of power in the next ten years. It is a more personal book than The Next 100 Years because I am addressing my greatest concern, which is that the power of the United States in the world will undermine the republic. I am not someone who shuns power. I understand that without power there can be no republic. But the question I raise is how the United States should behave in the world while exercising its power, and preserve the republic at the same time.
I invite readers to consider two themes. The first is the concept of the unintended empire. I argue that the United States has become an empire not because it intended to, but because history has worked out that way. The issue of whether the United States should be an empire is meaningless. It is an empire.
The second theme, therefore, is about managing the empire, and for me the most important question behind that is whether the republic can survive. The United States was founded against British imperialism. It is ironic, and in many ways appalling, that what the founders gave us now faces this dilemma. There might have been exits from this fate, but these exits were not likely. Nations become what they are through the constraints of history, and history has very little sentimentality when it comes to ideology or preferences. We are what we are.
It is not clear to me whether the republic can withstand the pressure of the empire, or whether America can survive a mismanaged empire. Put differently, can the management of an empire be made compatible with the requirements of a republic? This is genuinely unclear to me. I know the United States will be a powerful force in the world during this next decade—and for this next century, for that matter—but I don’t know what sort of regime it will have.
I passionately favor a republic. Justice may not be what history cares about, but it is what I care about. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the relationship between empire and republic, and the only conclusion I have reached is that if the republic is to survive, the single institution that can save it is the presidency. That is an odd thing to say, given that the presidency is in many ways the most imperial of our institutions (it is the single institution embodied by a single person). Yet at the same time it is the most democratic, as the presidency is the only office for which the people, as a whole, select a single, powerful leader.
In order to understand this office I look at three presidents who defined American greatness. The first is Abraham Lincoln, who saved the republic. The second is Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the United States the world’s oceans. The third is Ronald Reagan, who undermined the Soviet Union and set the stage for empire. Each of them was a profoundly moral man ... who was prepared to lie, violate the law, and betray principle in order to achieve those ends. They embodied the paradox of what I call the Machiavellian presidency, an institution that, at its best, reconciles duplicity and righteousness in order to redeem the promise of America. I do not think being just is a simple thing, nor that power is simply the embodiment of good intention. The theme of this book, applied to the regions of the world, is that justice comes from power, and power is only possible from a degree of ruthlessness most of us can’t abide. The tragedy of political life is the conflict between the limit of good intentions and the necessity of power. At times this produces goodness. It did in the case of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan, but there is no assurance of this in the future. It requires greatness.
Geopolitics describes what happens to nations, but it says little about the kinds of regimes nations will have. I am convinced that unless we understand the nature of power, and master the art of ruling, we may not be able to choose the direction of our regime. Therefore, there is nothing contradictory in saying that the United States will dominate the next century yet may still lose the soul of its republic. I hope not, as I have children and now grandchildren—and I am not convinced that empire is worth the price of the republic. I am also certain that history does not care what I, or others, think.
This book, therefore, will look at the issues, opportunities, and inherent challenges of the next ten years. Surprise alliances will be formed, unexpected tensions will develop, and economic tides will rise and fall. Not surprisingly, how the United States (particularly the American president) approaches these events will guide the health, or deterioration, of the republic. An interesting decade lies ahead.
INTRODUCTION
Rebalancing America
A century is about events. A decade is about people. I wrote The Next 100 Years to explore the impersonal forces that shape history in the long run, but human beings don’t live in the long run. We live in the much shorter span in which our lives are shaped not so much by vast historical trends but by the specific decisions of specific individuals.
This book is about the short run of the next ten years: the specific realities to be faced, and the specific decisions to be made, and the likely consequences of those decisions. Most people think that the longer the time frame, the more unpredictable the future. I take the opposite view. Individual actions are the hardest thing to predict. In the course of a century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century. But in the shorter time frame of a decade, individual decisions made by individual people, particularly those with political power, can matter enormously. What I wrote in The Next 100 Years is the frame for understanding this decade. But it is only the frame.
Forecasting a century is the art of recognizing the impossible, then eliminating from consideration all the events that, at least logically, aren’t going to happen. The reason is, as Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
It is always possible that a leader will do something unexpectedly foolish or brilliant, which is why forecasting is best left to the long run, the span over which individual decisions don’t carry so much weight. But having forecast for the long run, you can reel back your scenario and try to see how it plays out in, say, a decade. What makes this time frame interesting is that it is sufficiently long for the larger, impersonal forces to be at play but short enough for the individual decisions of individual leaders to skew outcomes that otherwise might seem inevitable. A decade is the point at which history and statesmanship meet, and a span in which policies still matter.
I am not normally someone who gets involved in policy debates—I’m more interested in what will happen than in what I want to see happen. But within the span of a decade, events that may not matter in the long run may still affect us personally and deeply. They also can have real meaning in defining which path we take into the future. This book is therefore both a forecast and a discussion of the policies that ought to be followed.
We begin with the United States for the same reason that a study of 1910 would have to begin with Britain. Whatever the future might hold, the global system today pivots around the United States, just as Britain was the pivotal point in the years leading up to World War I. In The Next 100 Years, I wrote about the long-term power of the United States. In this book, I have to write about American weaknesses, which, I think, are not problems in the long run; time will take care of most of these. But because you and I don’t live in the long run, for us these problems are very real. Most are rooted in structural imbalances that require solutions. Some are problems of leadership, because, as I said at the outset, a decade is about people.
This discussion of problems and people is particularly urgent at this moment. In the first decade after the United States became the sole global power, the world was, compared to other eras, relatively tranquil. In terms of genuine security issues for the United States, Baghdad and the Balkans were nuisances, not threats. The United States had no need for strategy in a world that appeared to have accepted American leadership without complaint. Ten years later, September 11 brought that illusion crashing to the ground. The world was more dangerous than we imagined, but the options seemed fewer as well. The United States, did not craft a global strategy in response. Instead, it developed a narrowly focused politico-military strategy designed to defeat terrorism, almost to the exclusion of all else.
Now that decade is coming to an end as well, and the search is under way for an exit from Iraq, from Afghanistan, and indeed from the world that began when those hijacked airliners smashed into buildings in New York and Washington. The impulse of the United States is always to withdraw from the world, savoring the pleasures of a secure homeland protected by the buffer of wide oceans on either side. But the homeland is not secure, either from terrorists or from the ambitions of nation-states that see the United States as both dangerous and unpredictable.
Under both President Bush and President Obama, the United States has lost sight of the long-term strategy that served it well for most of the last century. Instead, recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goals because they have framed the issues incorrectly, as if they believed their own rhetoric. As a result, the United States has overextended its ability to project its power around the world, which has allowed even minor players to be the tail that wags the dog.
The overriding necessity for American policy in the decade to come is a return to the balanced, global strategy that the United States learned from the example of ancient Rome and from the Britain of a hundred years ago. These old-school imperialists didn’t rule by main force. Instead, they maintained their dominance by setting regional players against each other and keeping these players in opposition to others who might also instigate resistance. They maintained the balance of power, using these opposing forces to cancel each other out while securing the broader interests of the empire. They also kept their client states bound together by economic interest and diplomacy, which is not to say the routine courtesies between nations but the subtle manipulation that causes neighbors and fellow clients to distrust each other more than they distrust the imperial powers: direct intervention relying on the empire’s own troops was a distant, last resort.
Adhering to this strategy, the United States intervened in World War I only when the standoff among European powers was failing, and only when it appeared that the Germans, with Russia collapsing in the east, might actually overwhelm the English and French in the west. When the fighting stopped, the United States helped forge a peace treaty that prevented France from dominating postwar Europe.
During the early days of World War II, the United States stayed out of direct engagement as long as it could, supporting the British in their efforts to fend off the Germans in the west while encouraging the Soviets to bleed the Germans in the east. Afterward, the United States devised a balance-of-power strategy to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Western Europe, the Middle East, and ultimately China. Throughout the long span from the first appearance of the “Iron Curtain” to the end of the Cold War, this U.S. strategy of distraction and manipulation was rational, coherent, and effectively devious.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the United States shifted from a strategy focused on trying to contain major powers to an unfocused attempt to contain potential regional hegemons when their behavior offended American sensibilities. In the period from 1991 to 2001, the United States invaded or intervened in five countries— Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Yugoslavia, which was an extraordinary tempo of military operations. At times, American strategy seemed to be driven by humanitarian concerns, although the goal was not always clear. In what sense, for example, was the 1994 invasion of Haiti in the national interest?
But the United States had an enormous reservoir of power in the 1990s, which gave it ample room for maneuver, as well as room for indulging its ideological whims. When you are overwhelmingly dominant, you don’t have to operate with a surgeon’s precision. Nor did the United States, when dealing with potential regional hegemons, have to win, in the sense of defeating an enemy army and occupying its homeland. From a military point of view, U.S. incursions during the 1990s were spoiling attacks, the immediate goal being to plunge an aspiring regional power into chaos, forcing it to deal with regional and internal threats at a time and place of American choosing rather than allowing it to develop and confront the United States on the smaller nation’s own schedule.
After September 11, 2001, a United States newly obsessed with terrorism became even more disoriented, losing sight of its long-term strategic principles altogether. As an alternative, it created a new but unattainable strategic goal, which was the elimination of the terrorist threat. The principal source of that threat, al Qaeda, had given itself an unlikely but not inconceivable objective, which was to re-create the Islamic caliphate, the theocracy that was established by Muhammad in the seventh century and that persisted in one form or another until the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. Al Qaeda’s strategy was to overthrow Muslim governments that it regarded as insufficiently Islamic, which it sought to do by fomenting popular uprisings in those countries. From al Qaeda’s point of view, the reason that the Islamic masses remained downtrodden was fear of their governments, which was in turn based on a sense that the United States, their governments’ patron, could not be challenged. To free the masses from their intimidation, al Qaeda felt that it had to demonstrate that the United States was not as powerful as it appeared—that it was in fact vulnerable to even a small group of Muslims, provided that those Muslims were prepared to die.
In response to al Qaeda’s assaults, the United States slammed into the Islamic world—particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. The goal was to demonstrate U.S. capability and reach, but these efforts were once again spoiling attacks. Their purpose was not to defeat an army and occupy a territory but merely to disrupt al Qaeda and create chaos in the Muslim world. But creating chaos is a short-term tactic, not a long-term strategy. The United States demonstrated that it is possible to destroy terrorist organizations and mitigate terrorism, but it did not achieve the goal that it had articulated, which was to eliminate the threat altogether. Eliminating such a threat would require monitoring the private activities of more than a billion people spread across the globe. Even attempting such an effort would require overwhelming resources. And given that succeeding in such an effort is impossible, it is axiomatic that the United States would exhaust itself and run out of resources in the process, as has happened. Just because something like the elimination of terrorism is desirable doesn’t mean that it is practical, or that the price to be paid is rational.
Recovering from the depletions and distractions of this effort will consume the United States over the next ten years. The first step—returning to a policy of maintaining regional balances of power—must begin in the main area of current U.S. military engagement, a theater stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. For most of the past half century there have been three native balances of power here: the Arab-Israeli, the Indo-Pakistani, and the Iranian-Iraqi. Owing largely to recent U.S. policy, those balances are unstable or no longer exist. The Israelis are no longer constrained by their neighbors and are now trying to create a new reality on the ground. The Pakistanis have been badly weakened by the war in Afghanistan, and they are no longer an effective counterbalance to India. And, most important, the Iraqi state has collapsed, leaving the Iranians as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf area.
Restoring balance to that region, and then to U.S. policy more generally, will require steps during the next decade that will be seen as controversial, to say the least. As I argue in the chapters that follow, the United States must quietly distance itself from Israel. It must strengthen (or at least put an end to weakening) Pakistan. And in the spirit of Roosevelt’s entente with the USSR during World War II, as well as Nixon’s entente with China in the 1970s, the United States will be required to make a distasteful accommodation with Iran, regardless of whether it attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities. These steps will demand a more subtle exercise of power than we have seen on the part of recent presidents. The nature of that subtlety is a second major theme of the decade to come, and one that I will address further along.
While the Middle East is the starting point for America’s return to balance, Eurasia as a whole will also require a rearrangement of relationships. For generations, keeping the technological sophistication of Europe separated from the natural resources and manpower of Russia has been one of the key aims of American foreign policy. In the early 1990s, when the United States stood supreme and Moscow lost control over not only the former Soviet Union but the Russian state as well, that goal was neglected. Almost immediately after September 11, 2001, the unbalanced commitment of U.S. forces to the Mediterranean-Himalayan theater created a window of opportunity for the Russian security apparatus to regain its influence. Under Putin, the Russians began to reassert themselves even prior to the war with Georgia, and they have accelerated the process of their reemergence since. Diverted and tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has been unable to hold back Moscow’s return to influence, or even to make credible threats that would inhibit Russian ambitions. As a result, the United States now faces a significant regional power with its own divergent agenda, which includes a play for influence in Europe.
The danger of Russia’s reemergence and westward focus will become more obvious as we examine the other player in this second region of concern, the European Union. Once imagined as a supernation on the order of the United States, the EU began to show its structural weaknesses during the financial crisis of 2008, which led to the follow-on crisis of southern European economies (Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece). Once Germany, the EU’s greatest economic engine, faced the prospect of underwriting the mistakes and excesses of its EU partners, it began to reexamine its priorities. The emerging conclusion is that potentially Germany shared a greater community of interest with Russia than it did with its European neighbors. However much Germany might benefit from economic alliances in Europe, it remains dependent on Russia for a large amount of its natural gas. Russia in turn needs technology, which Germany has in abundance. Similarly, Germany needs an infusion of manpower that isn’t going to create social stresses by immigrating to Germany, and one obvious solution is to establish German factories in Russia. Meanwhile, America’s request for increased German help in Afghanistan and elsewhere has created friction with the United States and aligned German interests most closely with Russia.
All of which helps to explain why the United States’ return to balance will require a significant effort over the next decade to block an accommodation between Germany and Russia. As we will see, the U.S. approach will include cultivating a new relationship with Poland, the geographic monkey wrench that can be thrown into the gears of a German-Russian entente.
China, of course, also demands attention. Even so, the current preoccupation with Chinese expansion will diminish as that country’s economic miracle comes of age. China’s economic performance will slow to that of a more mature economy—and, we might add, a more mature economy with over a billion people living in abject poverty. The focus of U.S. efforts will shift to the real power in northeast Asia: Japan, the third largest economy in the world and the nation with the most significant navy in the region.
As this brief overview already suggests, the next ten years will be enormously complex, with many moving parts and many unpredictable elements. The presidents in the decade to come will have to reconcile American traditions and moral principles with realities that most Americans find it more comfortable to avoid. This will require the execution of demanding maneuvers, including allying with enemies, while holding together a public that believes—and wants to believe—that foreign policy and values simply coincide. The president will have to pursue virtue as all of our great presidents have done: with suitable duplicity.
But all the cleverness in the world can’t compensate for profound weakness. The United States possesses what I call “deep power,” and deep power must be first and foremost balanced power. This means economic, military, and political power in appropriate and mutually supporting amounts. It is deep in a second sense, which is that it rests on a foundation of cultural and ethical norms that define how that power is to be used and that provides a framework for individual action. Europe, for example, has economic power, but it is militarily weak and rests on a very shallow foundation. There is little consensus in Europe politically, particularly about the framework of obligations imposed on its members.
Power that is both deeply rooted and well balanced is rare, and I will try to show that in the next decade, the United States is uniquely situated to consolidate and exercise both. More important, it will have little choice in the matter. There is an idea, both on the left and on the right, that the United States has the option of withdrawing from the complexities of managing global power. It’s the belief that if the United States ceased to meddle in the affairs of the world, the world would no longer hate and fear it, and Americans could enjoy their pleasures without fear of attack. This belief is nostalgia for a time when the United States pursued its own interests at home and left the world to follow its own course.
There was indeed a time when Thomas Jefferson could warn against entangling alliances, but this was not a time when the United States annually produced 25 percent of the wealth of the world. That output alone entangles it in the affairs of the world. What the United States consumes and produces shapes lives of people around the world. The economic policies pursued by the United States shape the economic realities of the world. The U.S. Navy’s control of the seas guarantees the United States economic access to the world and gives it the potential power to deny that access to other countries. Even if the United States wanted to shrink its economy to a less intrusive size, it is not clear how that would be done, let alone that Americans would pay the price when the bill was presented.
But this does not mean that the United States is at ease with its power. Things have moved too far too fast. That is why bringing U.S. policy back into balance will also require bringing the United States to terms with its actual place in the world. We have already noted that the fall of the Soviet Union left the United States without a rival for global dominance. What needs to be faced squarely now is that whether we like it or not, and whether it was intentional or not, the United States emerged from the Cold War not only as the global hegemon but as a global empire.
The reality is that the American people have no desire for an empire. This is not to say that they don’t want the benefits, both economic and strategic. It simply means that they don’t want to pay the price. Economically, Americans want the growth potential of open markets but not the pains. Politically, they want to have enormous influence but not the resentment of the world. Militarily, they want to be protected from dangers but not to bear the burdens of a long-term strategy.
Empires are rarely planned or premeditated, and those that have been, such as Napoleon’s and Hitler’s, tend not to last. Those that endure grow organically, and their imperial status often goes unnoticed until it has become overwhelming. This was the case both for Rome and for Britain, yet they succeeded because once they achieved imperial status, they not only owned up to it, they learned to manage it.
Unlike the Roman or British Empire, the American structure of dominance is informal, but that makes it no less real. The United States controls the oceans, and its economy accounts for more than a quarter of everything produced in the world. If Americans adopt the iPod or a new food fad, factories and farms in China and Latin America reorganize to serve the new mandate. This is how the European powers governed China in the nineteenth century—never formally, but by shaping and exploiting it to the degree that the distinction between formal and informal hardly mattered.
A fact that the American people have trouble assimilating is that the size and power of the American empire is inherently disruptive and intrusive, which means that the United States can rarely take a step without threatening some nation or benefiting another. While such power confers enormous economic advantages, it naturally engenders hostility. The United States is a commercial republic, which means that it lives on trade. Its tremendous prosperity derives from its own assets and virtues, but it cannot maintain this prosperity and be isolated from the world. Therefore, if the United States intends to retain its size, wealth, and power, the only option is to learn how to manage its disruptive influence maturely.
Until the empire is recognized for what it is, it is difficult to have a coherent public discussion of its usefulness, its painfulness, and, above all, its inevitability. Unrivaled power is dangerous enough, but unrivaled power that is oblivious is like a rampaging elephant.
I will argue, then, that the next decade must be one in which the United States moves from willful ignorance of reality to its acceptance, however reluctant. With that acceptance will come the beginning of a more sophisticated foreign policy. There will be no proclamation of empire, only more effective management based on the underlying truth of the situation.
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9)Muslim inbreeding ... An interesting study.
(and not often discussed):
Nicolai Sennels is a Danish psychologist who has done extensive research
into a little-known problem in the Muslim world: the disastrous results of
Muslim inbreeding brought about by the marriage of first-cousins.
This practice, which has been prohibited (for the most part), in the Judeo-Christian traditionsince the days of Moses, was sanctioned by Muhammad and has been going on
now for 50 generations (1,400 years) in the Muslim world.
This practice of inbreeding will never go away in the Muslim world since
Muhammad is the ultimate example and authority on all matters, including
marriage.
The massive inbreeding in Muslim culture may well have done virtually
irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to
its intelligence, sanity, and health.
According to Sennels, close to half of all Muslims in the world are
inbred. In Pakistan , the numbers approach 70%. Even in England, more
than half of Pakistani immigrants are married to their first cousins, and
in Denmark the number of inbred Pakistani immigrants is around 40%.
The numbers are equally devastating in other Muslim countries:
67% in Saudi Arabia, 64% in Jordan and Kuwait, 63% in Sudan, 60% in
Iraq, and 54% in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
According to the BBC, this Pakistani, Muslim-inspired inbreeding is
thought to explain the probability that a British Pakistani family is more
than 13 times as likely to have children with recessive genetic disorders.
While Pakistanis are responsible for three percent of the births in the
UK, they account for 33% of children with genetic birth defects.
The risk of what are called autosomal recessive disorders such as cystic
fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy is 18 times higher and the risk of
death due to malformations is 10 times higher.
Other negative consequences of inbreeding include a 100 percent increase
in the risk of stillbirths and a 50% increase in the possibility that a
child will die during labor.
Lowered intellectual capacity is another devastating consequence of Muslim
marriage patterns. According to Sennels, research shows that children of
consanguinous marriages lose 10-16 points off their IQ and that social
abilities develop much slower in inbred babies.
The risk of having an IQ lower than 70, the official demarcation for being
classified as retarded, increases by an astonishing 400 percent among
children of cousin marriages.
(Similar effects were seen in the Pharaonic dynasties in ancient Egypt and
in the British royal family, where inbreeding was the norm for a
significant period of time).
In Denmark, non-Western immigrants are more than 300 percent more likely
to fail the intelligence test required for entrance into the Danish army.
Sennels says that the ability to enjoy and produce knowledge and abstract
thinking is simply lower in the Islamic world. He points out that the Arab
world translates just 330 books every year, about 20% of what Greece alone
does.
In the last 1,200 years years of Islam, just 100,000 books have been
translated into Arabic, about what Spain does in a single year. Seven out
of 10 Turks have never even read a book.
Sennels points out the difficulties this creates for Muslims seeking to
succeed in the West. A lower IQ, together with a religion that denounces
critical thinking, surely makes it harder for many Muslims to have success
in our high-tech knowledge societies.
Only nine Muslims have ever won the Nobel Prize, and five of those were
for the Peace Prize. According to Nature magazine, Muslim countries
produce just 10 percent of the world average when it comes to scientific
research (measured by articles per million inhabitants).
In Denmark, Sennels' native country, Muslim children are grossly
over-represented among children with special needs. One-third of the budget
for Danish schools is consumed by special education, and anywhere from 51%
to 70% of retarded children with physical handicaps in Copenhagen have an
immigrant background.
Learning ability is severely affected as well. Studies indicated that 64%
of school children with Arabic parents are still illiterate after 10 years
in the Danish school system. The immigrant drop-out rate in Danish high
schools is twice that of the native-born.
Mental illness is also a product. The closer the blood relative, the
higher the risk of schizophrenic illness. The increased risk of insanity
may explain why more than 40% of the patients in Denmark's biggest ward
for clinically insane criminals have an immigrant background.
The U.S. is not immune. According to Sennels, one study based on 300,000
Americans shows that the majority of Muslims in the USA have a lower income,are less educated, and have worse jobs than the population as a whole.
Sennels concludes:
There is no doubt that the wide spread tradition of first cousin marriages
among Muslims has harmed the gene pool among Muslims. Because Muslims'
religious beliefs prohibit marrying non-Muslims and thus prevents them
from adding fresh genetic material to their population, the genetic damage
done to their gene pool since their prophet allowed first cousin marriages
1,400 years ago are most likely massive. (This has produced) overwhelming
direct and indirect human and societal consequences.
Bottom line:
Islam is not simply a benign and morally equivalent alternative to the
Judeo-Christian tradition. As Sennels points out, the first and biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Simple Jewish and Christian compassion for Muslims and a common-sense desire to protect Western civilization from the ravages of Islam dictate a vigorous opposition to the spread of this dark and dangerous religion.
These stark realities must be taken into account when we establish public
polices dealing with immigration from Muslim countries and the building
of mosques in the U.S.
Lets hope America wakes up before a blind naivete about the reality of
Islam destroys what remains of our Judeo-Christian culture and our domestic
tranquility.
Bryan Fischer,
"Focal Point": A huge Muslim problem: inbreeding Written by Bryan Fischer
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