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An intelligence analyst speaks out re Iran. (See 1 below.)
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Is there any political relevance regarding the Chicago teacher's strike? If so, what? (See 2 and 2a below.)
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What is the significance of the shadow boxing between Netanyahu and Obama?
Is Peres Israel's the Jimmy Carter, ie. an old fool who refuses to leave the scene. (See 3 below.)
More on the subject.
According to Obama sanctions are working, ie effective pressure is being applied to Iran's economy and Iran is hurting economically.
According to Netanyahu sanctions are not working because Iran has no intention of giving up its nuclear program.
Both are correct but how do they bridge the gap and what good are sanctions if Iran suffers and produces a nuclear bomb? (See 3a below.)
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Obama and Gilbert and Sullivan - "I have a Little Plan!" (See 4 below.)
Walter Russell Mead sees Jimmy Carter in Obama's Convention Speech but this was written before yesterday's 'bear hug' episode.
In other words, does America intend to re-elect a disastrous light weight with personality or a heavy weight who lacks a spring in his step?
If there was a way to graft Bernie Marcus' ability to convince an audience to Romney's persona we might have the perfect candidate.(See 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)A Dose of Real-World Intel on Iran
By Herbert E. Meyer
I've been out of the intelligence business for many years now, so I've stayed out of the debate over Iran's nuclear program. I learned a long time ago that when people who don't have access to highly classified intelligence about an issue like this one prattle on about what they think is happening, or is likely to happen, they tend to get it wrong. But the debate over Iran's nuclear program has become so feckless -- so disconnected from reality -- that perhaps it's time to inject a dose of what those of us who served on the national security side of the Reagan administration used to call "real-world intelligence."
Let's focus on the three big questions that lie at the core of this potentially literally explosive issue:
When, precisely, will Iran have a nuclear weapon?
In the real world of intelligence, you never get a report from a spy saying, "This country will have a nuclear bomb two weeks from Thursday." It just doesn't work that way. By the time a spy tells you there's a nuclear weapon at the military base here, or hidden in the warehouse with the green roof at the end of the dirt road there -- that country has had a nuclear bomb for years.
To estimate when a country will have a nuclear bomb, you work with ranges, estimates, and projections based on evidence and experience. And when you look at Iran through this prism, here's what you'll see:
It was the United States that invented the nuclear bomb, of course, in World War II. The total elapsed time from launching the Manhattan Project to Hiroshima was six years. And that was back in the 1940s, well before computers were widely available. There's no need for Iran to re-invent the bomb; they can download the plans. Or they can ask any grad student at MIT or Cal Tech how to build a nuclear bomb. Buying the necessary parts is difficult, and expensive, but these parts are available on the black market to any country, or any group of terrorists, with the will and the cash. The really hard part is creating the nuclear fuel, for instance by converting uranium ore into enriched U-235, or plutonium-239. But it can be done by any country that has the scientific and mathematical talent, and the money. Indeed, quite a few countries have already done it. Iran is Persia; they've got the scientific and mathematical talent, and oil exports have provided more than enough money. And they've been working at it for several years now.
Moreover, there are some kinds of projects where predicting the precise length of time required for completion is easy, and other kinds of projects where it's not so easy. The pilot of a jumbo jet en route from Chicago to London knows to the minute when he'll land at Heathrow. A skilled carpenter can tell you how many hours he'll need to build your new deck. But if you ask an experienced author when he'll complete the manuscript of the book he's writing, he'll just shake his head. Sometimes you cannot meet the publisher's deadline no matter how hard you work, and other times you find yourself whizzing through the pages and sending off the finished manuscript weeks before it's due. You just never know how long it's going to take, and if your estimate turns out to be accurate, it was less a brilliant prediction than a lucky guess.
It's the same with building a nuclear bomb. One time the experts will estimate that a particular country is, say, two to three years from actually having the bomb. Five years later, that country still hasn't got its bomb, and the experts who haven't already retired just shrug and say they did their best with the evidence at hand. Another time, at a top-secret meeting of the Ad-Hoc Crisis Committee, the experts assure you there's at least a two-to-three-year window before any nuclear showdown with a certain country. So you take the experts out to lunch to thank them for their help in defusing what looked to be an imminent confrontation. Then you stroll back to your office and find the place in total panic because that country set off an underground nuclear blast while you and the experts were dawdling over coffee and mousse au chocolat.
Simply put, Iran is "there" -- which means either they already have the bomb, or they'll have it in six weeks, ten months, next year, or the year after that. You cannot be more precise, so don't believe any Washington spin artist who suggests oh-so-confidently that we'll know when Iran is, say, five months, three days, and nine hours from having the bomb. No, we won't.
If Iran is on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, why do I keep hearing that the CIA isn't convinced Iran has even made the decision to use its nuclear program to build a weapon?
It's unfortunate, but in the real world, our intelligence service sometimes plays politics. It isn't our spies who do this -- they're among the finest, most talented and dedicated people I've ever had the privilege to know -- but the analysts. If they believe a certain intelligence judgment will trigger action they oppose -- for instance, a hardline political stance or even a military attack -- they'll refuse to reach that judgment no matter how strong may be the evidence.
During the Reagan years, when a lot of senior intelligence analysts believed that détente was a better approach to dealing with the Soviet Union than confrontation, getting the CIA to acknowledge that the Kremlin was sponsoring terrorism and actively supporting armed insurgencies around the world was like pulling teeth. They just didn't want to give President Reagan the ammunition that proved that what he kept saying about the Russians was absolutely correct. They were afraid of what he'd do with that ammunition. (And part of my job was precisely this: to extract from inside the CIA the evidence that was there, pull it together into a judgment about what this evidence meant would likely happen, and then get that judgment to the president.)
I realize that it's disturbing to read that this kind of gamesmanship takes place at the upper levels of our intelligence service. But it does, and as the debate over Iran comes to a boil, it's crucial to understand how the game gets played. So here's a non-political little anecdote just to illustrate what it's like when someone gathers the evidence, but obstinately refuses to turn that evidence into a judgment because he opposes the likely consequences:
On Wednesday, word reaches me the editor of this website is planning to host a barbecue on Saturday evening for his favorite contributors. But he hasn't invited me, and I'm furious. I want to be at that barbecue, and if I'm not invited, I'm going to show up anyway and cause a big stink. So I order my intelligence service -- my wife and kids, who think that getting into a fight with my editor would be idiotic -- to hop on a plane to the city where my editor lives, keep an eye on things, and let me know what's up.
On Thursday, they call in to report the've just spotted my editor emerging from a Walmart with two cases of beer and a bag of charcoal briquets.
"What do you think's going on?" I ask.
"We can't say for sure," my wife replies blandly, "but we'll keep a close eye on things and get back to you with any new developments."
On Friday morning they telephone again, this time to report they've just spotted the editor's wife in the supermarket buying hamburger meat, hot dogs, several bags of potato chips, and a bucket of coleslaw. And in the afternoon they call yet again, reporting that five of this website's top contributors have landed at the local airport and checked into hotels near my editor's home.
"What exactly does all this mean?" I ask, perhaps a bit less calmly than before. I can hear my wife taking a deep breath before she replies.
"Well, we can say with a high degree of confidence that your editor is taking steps that are consistent with one day hosting a barbecue for his favorite contributors. But at this point in time," she adds, while my kids start giggling in the background, "we have no evidence that a decision to hold that barbecue has actually been made."
By the time they call me a fourth time, at 6pm on Saturday, to report that my editor has lit the grill and that a line of taxis is snaking up his driveway, it's too late for me to get there and start a fight. The editor's barbecue will take place without me, and I must learn to live with that.
Of course Iran is building a nuclear bomb; the evidence is obvious and overwhelming. The only purpose of those leaked National Intelligence Estimates asserting that Iran hasn't actually made the decision to build a nuclear bomb, and of similar leaked documents from European intelligence services, is to prevent what the analysts fear would happen. They're afraid that if they officially judge Iran to be on the verge of having a nuclear bomb, political pressure for a military attack will become irresistible. They want to delay action until it's too late, so we will be left with no choice except to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.
Will the Israelis launch a military strike against Iran?
There are two great lessons of the 20th century:
The first great lesson is that crazy people sometimes get political power. Hitler was crazy. He was brilliant, cunning, deeply insightful -- and a raving lunatic. So was Uganda's Idi Amin, and so were the maniacs in Cambodia who slaughtered two million of their own people, including everyone they could find wearing eyeglasses on the bizarre theory that anyone who had poor eyesight probably had ruined their eyesight by reading too much, and therefore was an intellectual. (Actually, when you study history, it's astonishing how often crazy people get political power.)
The second great lesson is that when crazy people with political power tell you what they're going to do -- believe them. They're not kidding.
And of all the people who've learned these lessons, it's the Israelis. Study the history of Nazi Germany, and you'll discover there were quite a few Jews who could have gotten out safely in 1936, 1937, and even into 1938. But they decided to stay. Some of these Jews who chose to remain in Germany were professionals -- for instance, physicians and architects. Others owned businesses such as department stores and factories. They had beautiful homes, good lines of credit with their bankers in Frankfurt and Zurich, perhaps season tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic. They would meet, talk, and assure one another that things really weren't as bleak as they seemed: "Look, these Nazis are distasteful and maybe a bit nuts. But what are they going to do? Kill us all?" As a matter of fact -- yes, that is precisely what the Nazis did. Even worse, Hitler and his murderous gang of Nazis made no secret of what they had in store for the Jews. Indeed, they never shut up about what they had in mind. But what they said they planned to do was so horrific, so utterly beyond rational imagination, that too many Jews simply didn't believe them until it was too late to escape.
Iran's leaders, like the Nazis before them, are a bunch of genocidal lunatics. They are the world's leading sponsors of terrorism, they slaughter their own people every day, and in just the last month they've described Israel as a "cancerous tumor" that needs to be wiped out, while asserting that Israel's very existence is "an insult to all humanity."
The Jewish people won't make the same mistake a second time. They won't wait patiently for Iran to get its hands on a nuclear bomb and then annihilate another six million of them.
I have no idea precisely how the Israelis will act against Iran, or when they'll do it. In just the last two weeks, diplomatic relations between the White House and Israel have gone from testy to downright nasty; if news reports from Jerusalem are accurate, there was quite a blow-up at a recent meeting between our country's ambassador to Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, has lately said some things about U.S. military cooperation with Israel that suggest that relations between our armed forces and theirs are somewhere between chilly and frigid.
My guess is that Israel would prefer to hold off on any military strike as long as possible; there's always a chance that Iran's own people will rise up and overthrow their government. Certainly the Israelis would prefer to delay any action until after the U.S. elections in November. They would get a lot more sympathy, and practical military support, from a President Romney than from President Obama. But if Iran's nuclear bomb program crosses whatever the Israelis have judged to be a "red line" before November, they will have no choice but to launch an attack immediately.
There's one other scenario that's unlikely, but possible: think back to the 2008 election. It was all going to be about the war, which is why John McCain was the GOP candidate. But in late September, Wall Street melted down, and by election day Americans were concerned not about about the war, but about the economy. And -- alas -- war-hero McCain had nothing impressive to say about that. This time, if political polls in early October show the president far behind Romney in key swing states like Ohio and especially Florida, a desperate President Obama may try to turn things around by doing what only a president can do. He could order an attack on Iran, or co-ordinate an attack with Israel. The election suddenly would be about the war, and the president's spin-artists would try to make the November 6 vote a referendum pitting a businessman and his budget-geek running mate against the commander-in-chief who killed bin Laden and took out Iran's nukes.
One way or the other, don't be surprised if one morning in the not-too-distant future you turn on your television and see smoke pouring from what used to be Iran's nuclear bomb factories.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty.
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2)Chicago Teacher's Strike Defines Election Issues
By Matthew Holzmann
Members of the Chicago Teacher's Union have gone on strike, shutting down the third largest school district in the country with over 404,000 students now in disarray.
Chicago's teachers have the highest average salary in the country at $76,000/year and according to the Mayor's office, the financial side of the $400 Million deal is done. 4%/year raises have been agreed to, taking them to $88,900/year by 2016.
The Mayor's office stated that:
"The two remaining stumbling blocks involve re-hiring laid off teachers from schools that get shut down or shaken up and a new teacher evaluation process that the union says puts far too much weight on student test scores."
So while 404,000 students are missing school, the real issues are accountability and union job protection.
Chicago is not really different from Wisconsin, but while it is only 90 miles away, it is a universe away in its political realities. The city has seen the same economic straits as most large cities in the country and yet at a time when everyone else is cutting back and trying to get by, the Chicago Teacher's Union, who have already been financially sated, wants more control with less accountability.
This crystallizes two of the major issues we face. The terrible state of our K-12 educational system and our out of control public sector unions.
Chicago has a 50% drop out rate; better than Los Angeles 70%, but still what should be an insult to every teacher in each district.
Whether it is for gross misconduct by teachers or for regular evaluations and student testing, the union expects to remain unaccountable. In Chicago, standardized test results are destroyed almost immediately after the tests are scored. They have it down in Chicago. No Atlanta scandals there.
And at a time when the average salary in Chicago is $47,000/year and the city is running massive deficits, the disparity between results, compensation, and accountability in the school district is growing even larger.
The issue is national. In California, the unions own the state government as well as most of the largest cities. Across the country states and municipalities are running huge deficits and there is a massive pension crisis.
And Chicago perfectly summarizes the issue. This was an insider deal to begin with and now the union is pressing its advantage. They play rough in Chicago. It's not about the kids. It is about continuing to rob the taxpayers blind and give them as little as possible in return.
It is interesting to note that back in the 1990's our president was at the forefront of educational reform in Chicago and to note the lack of progress since. The Annenberg Challenge spent hundreds of millions of dollars and in the words of its own final report in 2003 achieved almost nothing.
Mayor Richard M. Daly took control of the School District in 1995 and put Arne Duncan, now U.S. Secretary of Education in charge, to no effect.
One of the obligations of local government is education. It is obvious that Chicago's school district and its teachers are failing in this responsibility. Their answer is to blame the system but it is their system. They did build it.
In Wisconsin, Governor Brown and the state legislature were able to make difficult choices that benefited everyone in the state. Teachers kept their jobs and compromised with economic reality. Public worker's unions were reined in but retained their basic rights.
In education, the Wisconsin reforms allowed schools to hire and fire based on merit. School districts can pay teachers for superior performance. The law allows districts to hire and retain the best and brightest and to shop for insurance, which turns out to have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Basic stuff, but when a system is corrupted, bloat and graft and gaming the system become the norm. The Wisconsin reforms are already bearing fruit. The lack of reform in Chicago is also apparent.
Chicago's teacher union is symbolic of much of what has gone wrong in our country. Self-interest, cronyism, corruption and sloth when our children need the best we have to offer, are completely and utterly unacceptable. The Chicago strike defines what is wrong while the Wisconsin reforms point to a possible solution.
It is the statism and crony interests of one side versus the freedom to innovate and improve of the other. As a key stakeholder our president also must take ownership. His Secretary of Education is a part of the problem, not the solution. The timing and issues cannot be more clear. The Chicago strike is a defining moment.
The smartest parents in Chicago right now are those whose kids attend charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools. Those institutions don’t employ Chicago’s unionized public-school teachers, who went out on strike this morning for the first time in 25 years.
The coverage of the strike has obscured some basic facts. The money has continued to pour into Chicago’s failing public schools in recent years. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.
The city is being bled dry by the exorbitant benefits packages negotiated by previous elected officials. Teachers pay only 3 percent of their health-care costs and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois in the last five years, a full 71 cents has gone to teacher retirement costs.
But beyond the dollars, the fact is that Chicago schools need a fundamental shakeup — which of course the union is resisting. It is calling for changes in the teacher-evaluation system it just negotiated by making student performance less important.
Small wonder. Just 15 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading and only 56 percent of students who enter their freshman year of high school wind up graduating.
The showdown in Chicago will be a test of just how much clout the public-employee unions wield at a time when the budget pressures they’ve created threaten to break the budgets of America’s major cities.
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3)Obama and Netanyahu shadowbox on Iran ahead of final round Sept 28
At odds - but still talking
The wrangling over Iran between the offices of the US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Monday, has been reduced essentially to a battle for the agenda of their meeting in New York on Sept. 28: Netanyahu will be pressing for a US commitment to military action if Iran crosses still-to-be-agreed red lines, while the White House rejects red lines – or any other commitment for action – as neither necessary nor useful.
Israel’s latest rebuttal came Monday, Sept. 10 from former Military Intelligence chief, Amos Yadlin, who argued that even without agreed red lines, Israel was quite capable of coping with its enemies without the United States.
The sparring appeared to have reached a point of no return, leaving Obama and Netanyahu nothing more to discuss. However, just the opposite is true. For both leaders their upcoming tête-à-tête is vital. It is the US president’s last chance to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program before he faces the American voter on Nov. 6, while the prime minister will not forego any opportunity to harness the US to this attack. He needs to prove - not just to the anti-war camp ranged against him at home, but also to assure the military - which has been falsely reported as against an attack - that he bent over backward to procure US backing.
Netanyahu does not feel that even if he fails to talk Obama around (more likely than not), he has lost American support; he counts on the US Congress to line up behind Israel’s case for cutting down a nuclear Iran which is sworn to destroy the Jewish state, as well as sections of the US public and media and some of he president’s Jewish backers, including contributors to his campaign chest.
Those are only some of the reasons why the last-ditch US-Israeli summit cannot be avoided and indeed may be pivotal - both for their participants’ personal political destinies,and for the Middle East at large.
Washington and political sources disclose that their dialogue will have two levels according to current planning:
1. In New York, Obama and Netanyahu will try and negotiate a common framework;
2. At the Pentagon in Washington, defense chiefs Leon Panetta and Ehud Barak will be standing by to render any agreements reached in New York into practical, detailed plans which would then be referred back to the two leaders for endorsement.
The heated dispute between US and Israeli officials over “red lines” was therefore no more than sparring over each of the leaders’ starting-points for their New York dialogue and therefore their agenda and final understandings. Behind the clash of swords, US and Israeli diplomats are working hard to negotiate an agreed starting point. They are putting just as much effort into preventing the row deteriorating into a total rupture before Sept. 28.
Netanyahu discussed another red line Monday when he interviewed President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, their first meeting in three months. Although the Israeli presidency is a largely titular function, Peres has elected himself senior spokesman for the opponents of an Israeli military operation against Iran.
While their advisers sought to establish agreed lines between them ahead of Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama, the confrontation between the two Israeli politicians ended inconclusively, because Peres kept on demanding that the prime minister bend to the will of the White House.
3a)
| Mixed Messages: The US-Israel Dispute Over Iran By Prof. Eytan |
[ Please note the operative assumption: "Iranian leaders feel that nuclear weapons would ensure the survival of their extreme Islamic regime. " But what if in addition to this motivation for nukes the assessment that "Iranian leaders feel that nuclear weapons would enable Iran to incinerate the Jewish State and/or create apocalyptic conditions that would bring the return of the Hidden Imam."? What's the difference? By putting the motives for nuclear Iran in western terms, Prof. Eytan Gilboa unintentionally sets the scene for acceptance of nuclear Iran. After all, if all the Iranian leaders want with nukes is to stay in power then this is something the US may be able to stomach.] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The recent public dispute between American President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has created confusion over the position of the US regarding military action against Iran. This is the wrong way to bring about an end to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It is imperative that the public sparring come to an end and the lines of communication between the two leaders be clearer. The US ought to consider equipping Israel with enhanced military resources that would allow Israel to confront Iran at a later date, giving Western allies more time to pressure the Iranian regime. The latest public exchanges between the United States and Israel reveal that American President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are in disagreement over Iran. While Netanyahu may have been too aggressive in his talks about the situation in Iran and the potential for a military strike, Obama felt the need to respond to every statement, ratcheting up the tension between the two. Obama acts as though the most important war he is waging is against Netanyahu, not the one he should be conducting against Iran. His rage over what he sees as Netanyahu’s support for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is apparently driving him up the wall. Meanwhile, the Iranians are mocking the ability of these leaders to present a unified message. Mixed Messages The US has been frequently sending mixed and contradicting messages on Iran. While all of Obama’s spokespersons explain how supportive the president is of Israel and its security needs, and how determined he is to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program, his chief advisers have made different statements. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, says he does not want US forces to be complicit in any Israeli strike in Iran, exposing Obama’s reluctance to use force against the Islamic Republic even after the US elections in November. Vice President Joseph Biden also raised questions about Obama’s determination to stop Iran after the elections. In an election speech, he accused Romney of being ready to go to war in Iran, implying that Obama is not. On the same day that the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported that the US indirectly conveyed a message to Iran – according to which it would not be dragged into hostilities if Iran refrains from retaliating against American targets in the event of an Israeli strike – the New York Times published an article based on a leak from the White House, stating that the US plans to take military measures in the Gulf to threaten and deter Iran. On the same day, White House spokesman James Carney denied that US-Israel relations were in a crisis and told Iran that while there is still time for diplomacy, “this window will not remain open forever.” These statements leave the observer confused about Obama’s intentions. Disagreement Over the Effectiveness of Sanctions The question at the heart of the matter is how much more time Obama is prepared to give to allow sanctions and diplomacy to work. The president says the sanctions are working, an assertion that Netanyahu flatly rejects. The problem is that when the two leaders discuss the sanctions process they refer to two different phases. The first phase consists of the sanctions that are designed to exert tremendous economic pressure on Iran’s leaders, while the second phase is the aftermath in which the hardships are expected to change Iran’s nuclear policy. When Obama claims that the sanctions are working he is referring to the first phase; he believes that Iranian leaders are feeling lots of economic pressure and that continued pressure will help alleviate the situation. When Netanyahu mentions failing sanctions, however, he is referring to the second phase, and believes that the hurting sanctions are not going to cause a change in Iranian nuclear policy. The situation appears a lot more optimistic to Obama than it does to Netanyahu. Israel, however, is concerned with the Iranian procrastination in the negotiations, claiming that Iran talks merely to buy more time to develop the bomb. Iran and the West have been locked in an impasse, as Iran wants the West to remove the sanctions, while the West wants Iran to stop enrichment. Neither side has been willing to budge thus far. The mistrust between Obama and Netanyahu does not help. Obama does not like Netanyahu and is fearful of an Israeli attack before the elections. Netanyahu is skeptical about Obama’s policy and is not sure that the president will use force against Iran if sanctions and diplomacy fail. Creating a Better Strategy to Stop Iran This diplomatic row can be solved, but only when the war of words in the press ceases. The contradictory statements serve Iranian interests alone. Obama’s people are also displeased by these damaging verbal jabs and are discussing ways to calm Netanyahu down and prevent what they consider a premature Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. Therefore, Netanyahu must secretly travel to Washington and meet with Obama. He should ask the president what he intends to do if and when diplomacy and sanctions fail and Iran continues towards the bomb. Obama and Netanyahu must reach an agreement on the conditions that would give Israel, the US, and the international community a final opportunity to stop Iran without the use of force. It would be difficult for Israel to attack alone without first reaching understandings with Washington. Due to its superior military capabilities, America’s window of opportunity for striking Iran is much wider than Israel’s. Therefore, one of the solutions is to provide Israel with capabilities it does not currently possess, broadening Israel’s window of opportunity. The US may respond positively to such a request. Iranian leaders feel that nuclear weapons would ensure the survival of their extreme Islamic regime. They may consider a change in their nuclear policy if they reach the conclusion that the continuing race to the bomb would endanger their regime. Only the combination of harsher sanctions, tough Western positions in future negotiations, and the threat of a credible military strike may bring about a change in the current Iranian nuclear strategy. Secret negotiations between Obama and Netanyahu and creative solutions to the Iranian problem can put an end to the foolish dispute between the leaders. When the president and prime minister come to an agreement on a red line that Iran will not be allowed to cross, they will be able to more effectively place pressure on Iranian leaders and work towards a solution to the crisis. =============== Professor Eytan Gilboa is Director of the School of Communication and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, both at Bar-Ilan University. BESA Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4)-An Economic 'Plan'?
Former president Bill Clinton told the Democratic National Convention that Barack Obama has a plan to rescue the economy, and only the fact that the Republicans stood in his way has stopped him from getting the economy out of the doldrums.
From all this, and much else that is said in the media and on the campaign trail, you might think that the economy requires government intervention to revive and create jobs. It is Beltway dogma that the government has to "do something."
History tells a different story. For the first 150 years of this country's existence, the federal government felt no great need to "do something" when the economy turned down. Over that long span of time, the economic downturns were neither as deep nor as long lasting as they have been since the federal government decided that it had to "do something" in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which set a new precedent.
One of the last of the "do nothing" presidents was Warren G. Harding. In 1921, under President Harding, unemployment hit 11.7 percent -- higher than it has been under President Obama. Harding did nothing to get the economy stimulated.
Far from spending more money to try to "jump start" the economy, President Harding actually reduced government spending, as the tax revenues declined during the economic downturn.
This was not a matter of absent-mindedly neglecting the economy. President Harding deliberately rejected the urging of his own Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, to intervene.
The 11.7 percent unemployment rate in 1921 fell to 6.7 percent in 1922, and then to 2.4 percent in 1923. It is hard to think of any government intervention in the economy that produced such a sharp and swift reduction in unemployment as was produced by just staying out of the way and letting the economy rebound on its own.
Bill Clinton loudly proclaimed to the delegates to the Democratic National Convention that no president could have gotten us out of the recession in just one term.
But history shows that the economy rebounded out of a worse unemployment situation in just two years under Harding, who simply let the market revive on its own, as it had done before, time and time again for more than a century.
Something similar happened under Ronald Reagan. Unemployment peaked at 9.7 percent early in the Reagan administration. Like Harding and earlier presidents, Reagan did nothing, despite outraged outcries in the media.
The economy once again revived on its own. Three years later, unemployment was down to 7.2 percent -- and it kept on falling, as the country experienced twenty years of economic growth with low inflation and low unemployment.
The Obama party line is that all the bad things are due to what he inherited from Bush, and the few signs of recovery are due to Obama's policies beginning to pay off. But, if the economy has been rebounding on its own for more than 150 years, the question is why it has been so slow to recover under the Obama administration.
The endless proliferation of anti-business interventions by government, and the sight of more of the same coming over the horizon from Barack Obama's appointees in the federal bureaucracies, creates the one thing that has long stifled economic activity in countries around the world -- uncertainty about what the rules of the game are, and the unpredictability of how specifically those rules will continue to change in a hostile political environment.
Both history and contemporary data show that countries prosper more when there are stable and dependable rules, under which people can make investments without having to fear unpredictable new government interventions before these investments can pay off.
A great myth has grown up that President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the American economy with his interventions during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But a 2004 economic study concluded that government interventions had prolonged the Great Depression by several years. Obama is repeating policies that failed under FDR.
Despite demands that Mitt Romney spell out his plan for reviving the economy, we can only hope that Governor Romney plans to stop the government from intervening in the economy and gumming up the works, so that the economy can recover on its own.
4a) The New Republic: Obama “Close to Carter Territory”
By Walter Russell Mead
How much trouble is President Obama’s re-election campaign in? After watching and then re-reading the President’s convention speech, a writer for the (liberal) New Republic has uttered the most dreaded name in the Democratic lexicon: Carter.
The speech did not exactly thrill TNR’s Timothy Noah:
So where are we now?
President Obama is not in immediate danger of retracing Jimmy Carter’s career trajectory. The polls show a still-developing post-convention bounce that has restored the narrow lead he has held for several months. And the Romney camp cannot be indifferent to the reality that even at the apogee of his own small bounce, Governor Romney never managed more than a tie in the RCP average. With the polls in Ohio and other key swing states stillpointing toward an Obama win, the President seems to be a relatively strong position and the dynamics of the race would have to change to bring moving vans to Pennsylvania Avenue come January 20.
But signs that the Obama magic is wearing off and that journals who used to gush are now beginning to see what critics saw in him from the beginning (inexperienced narcissistic windbag is how people unimpressed by the oratory used to describe him) do not bode well. There are eight weeks of campaigning still to come, and the Romney camp will be doing everything possible to push the disenchantment meme.
They will need to do that. In our view, the jobs numbers pose less of a threat to Democratic president than they would to a Republican. Unemployment is heavily concentrated among people who are not very likely to vote for a Republican no matter what the economy is doing: unemployment is heavily concentrated among African Americans, Hispanics and the young. Those groups aren’t likely to vote Republican and are less likely than the general population to blame their problems on a Democratic president. The Obama campaign may have to work a little harder to gin up the turnout among these groups than it would in better times, but that is the kind of challenge the Democrats can handle.
But if anything undercuts President Obama’s ability to influence voters by making speeches, his campaign is in much deeper trouble. Oratory was always the heart of Obama’s political strength. The deep, wise voice booming from that slender young and even boyish speaker inspired millions of people. But unless you believe that Obamacare is a historic accomplishment — and whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, most Americans don’t see it that way — it’s hard to make the case that our current president’s deeds live up to his lofty, soaring words.
An effective Republican attack along these lines would do more than blunt the edge of Obama’s appeal. It would turn his greatest political strength into a source of weakness: the more eloquently he spoke the more vulnerable he would be to the contrast between soaring words and mingy deeds. Each inspiring speech would provide footage for yet another ad pointing out the contrast with the plodding record.
Our political campaigns are getting more Clausewitzian of late: candidates plan their attacks against the opponent’s center of gravity. This summer the Obama campaign went for Governor Romney’s business record, doing their best (and their best was pretty good) to turn his greatest potential strength into a source of weakness. This fall we could see the Romney campaign return the favor: attempting to convert the President’s speech making abilities into a liability by playing on what they see as the chasm between rhetoric and achievement.
Jimmy Carter was still the favorite at this point in the 1980 electoral cycle. His political ghost will be stalking the White House for a few more weeks — even as the shadows of John Kerry (a rich flip flopper who failed to unseat a weak president) and Bob Dole (around whom Bill Clinton ran rings in 1996) loom over Mitt Romney.
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