http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php Foreign Policy en editor@TheRochesterDemocrat.com Copyright 2009 2009-04-03T12:36:04-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/obama_reaffirms_support_for_nato_alliance/ {summary}



STRASBOURG, France (AP) - President Barack Obama is using his participation in a NATO summit to reaffirm support for what he calls "the most successful alliance in modern history."

At a gathering of NATO allies in Strasbourg, France, the U.S. president said Friday that with France's integration into the NATO command structure, the idea that Europe's security is the United States' security will continue to be upheld.

Echoing French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Obama says the U.S. wants strong allies, because that will make the alliance more effective overall.

Obama said: "We would like to see Europe have much more robust capabilities. That's not something we discourage."

]]> 2009-04-03T12:36:04-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/biden_says_us_will_talk_to_iran_but_warns_it_must_abandon_nuclear_ambitions/ {summary} Mid-East Policy



By LOLITA C. BALDOR ,
Associated Press
Last update: February 7, 2009 - 2:35 PM


MUNICH - Vice President Joe Biden warned Saturday that the U.S. stands ready to take pre-emptive action against Iran if it does not abandon nuclear ambitions and its support for terrorism.

But in his first major policy speech as President Barack Obama's No. 2, Biden also declared the U.S. open for talks with Iran and Russia to repair relations. And he reached out to the world with a promise that the Obama administration will work with allies to solve global problems.

"We will draw upon all the elements of our power — military and diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement, economic and cultural — to stop crises from occurring before they are in front of us," he told the gathering in his 25-minute address.

The much anticipated speech got high marks from world leaders in the audience at this annual security conference.

"I think Vice President Biden came to Munich today in a spirit of partnership," British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told AP Television News. "I think he set an ambitious agenda with big goals and high objectives, and he called and challenged us to work with him. I think that's the right spirit."

While Biden's speech was short on details of emerging Obama administration policies — including its plans and ambitions for Afghanistan — his remarks set a tone of partnership in contrast to what some allies saw as a more bullying posture by the previous administration.

"We'll work in a partnership whenever we can, and alone only when we must. The threats we face have no respect for borders," Biden said. "We'll engage. We'll listen. We'll consult. America needs the world, just as I believe the world needs America."

On Iran, Biden said the U.S. will strive to act preventively and avoid having to choose between the risks of war and the dangers of inaction. And he said if Tehran gives up its nuclear program and stops backing terrorists, there will be meaningful incentives.

He said the U.S. continues "to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven and it is cost-effective."

During much of the morning, Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani was in the room. But according to a participant inside the meeting, Larijani left the room during a break and did not return for the Biden address. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak about Larijani's activities.

There is no indication yet that Biden and Larijani will meet during the conference.

Biden, who also met privately with a number of world leaders, including top officials from Russia, France, and Germany, told allies that they will be expected to share the burdens of fighting extremists and bolstering weaker governments and poor nations.

"America will do more, that's the good news," said Biden. "But the bad news is America will ask for more from our partners."

While President Barack Obama has said the U.S. is ready for direct talks with Iran, Biden's comments made it clear the U.S. is not willing to completely discard the stick, despite early warnings from Tehran.

His comments came a day after Larijani sternly declared that the Obama administration must admit past wrongs before there can be reconciliation. The old "carrot-and-stick policy must be discarded," he said, alluding to Western threats and offers of rewards to coax Iran to give up nuclear activities.

Tehran insists its nuclear aims are peaceful.

Reaching out to close another rift, Biden said it's time to repair relations between the U.S. and Russia, and the two should cooperate to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaida.

"It's time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia," said Biden. Yet, he added that the U.S. will continue to have differences with Moscow, including opposition to its efforts to carve out independent states in Georgia.

Biden's comments come just days after Kyrgyzstan announced it will shut down American access to the Manas air base, which the U.S. uses to resupply troops in Afghanistan. The decision came when Kyrgyzstan's president was visiting Moscow, hours after securing more than $2 billion in loans and aid from Russia.

"The tonality was rather encouraging. It was really a serious call to restart U.S. foreign policy — including, clearly, Russian-American relations," said Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international relations committee in Russia's lower parliament house. Kosachev spoke on state-run Vesti-24 television.

On another topic, Biden told the leaders that the U.S. needs their help in taking the detainees now held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

He repeated Obama's vow that the U.S. will adhere to its values, not torture, and will close the detention center at Guantanamo that has spurred such criticism from European allies.



]]> 2009-02-08T14:41:20-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/bush_warns_of_nuclear_armed_iran/ {summary}

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) - President Bush warned Wednesday of a nuclear-armed Iran but did not rule out that the United States would negotiate with its provocative leader if he gives up his suspected nuclear weapons ambitions.

Bush said it's important for the United States to stay engaged in neighboring Iraq to convince the Iranians that the U.S. is committed to democratic reform in the region. "There would be nothing worse for world peace than if the Iranians believed that the United States did not have the will and commitment to help young democracies survive," Bush told businessmen and women where he took questions after a talk on government spending.

"If we left before the job was done, there would be chaos," Bush said about withdrawing U.S. troops prematurely from Iraq. "Chaos would embolden not only the extremists and radicals that would like to do us harm, but it would also embolden Iran. What you don't want is to have a nuclear arms race taking place in the Middle East."

He denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his remarks about destroying Israel.

"In Iran, we're dealing with a country where the leader has said that he wants to destroy Israel," Bush said. "My belief is that the United States will defend our ally Israel. This is a leader who has made very provocative statements. And, we have made it clear, however, that in spite of that, we are willing to sit down with him, so long as he suspends his program."

"In other words, it's his choice, it's not mine anymore. So I believe that's the best way to achieve an objective," the president added.

"If your question is, will you ever sit down with them? We've proven we would with North Korea. And the answer is yeah, just so long as we can achieve something, so long as we are able to get our objective."

Bush traveled to Pennsylvania Dutch country after vetoing a bill that would have expanded health insurance coverage for children. He spoke before members of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry in a Republican-friendly enclave of the state.

Bush, who has threatened to veto 9 of 12 annual appropriations bills, wants the GOP to be seen as the party of fiscal disciplinarians. Democrats, however, say the billions spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dwarf the far smaller increases they want in domestic programs.

Bush said the five-year budget proposed by the Democratic leadership of Congress would increase spending by $205 billion over five years.

"All these programs sound wonderful," he said. "Except how are you going to pay for it? ... And the answer is raising taxes."

The president's motorcade winded through cornfields and tidy neighborhoods on its way to a warehouse, owned by The Jay Group, a marketing firm. About 70 pro- and anti-Bush demonstrators stood outside.

Nick Meley, a 52-year-old contractor from Columbia, held a sign calling Bush the "worst president ever."

"Do I need to say Iraq? Every part of that, from the beginning to where we are now, has been mistake after mistake after mistake," he said.

A Bush supporter, Louis Gable, an 82-year-old World War II vet from Lancaster, said there are no simple answers to the war. "Everyone tries to second-guess," he said. "What would you or I do if we were there?"

]]> 2007-10-03T21:14:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/is_the_us_planning_to_strike_iran/ {summary} Mid-East Policy Jacobs: Iran is behind many of the casualties we sustain in Iraq


By Jack Jacobs
Military analyst
MSNBC
October 2, 2007


It has been said before: from any standpoint, Iran is among the most dangerous countries on the face of the earth. Now, in the October 8 edition of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reports that the Defense Department is preparing plans for a bombing campaign, principally targeting Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities. The article is a bit breathless and hyperbolic, and not surprisingly, it has generated some hysteria about a potential war with Iran. Nevertheless, Hersh isn’t the only one thinking about a strike on Iran.

Most people outside the Pentagon don’t realize that the Defense Department makes plans for every conceivable national security contingency — and quite a few that are almost inconceivable. And by law these plans are reviewed and re-certified every year. There are plans to defend the island of Taiwan if China attacks it. There are plans to attack North Korea in a wide variety of scenarios.

What happens if Russia attacks Western Europe? Well, we have a plan for that.

So, it should come as no surprise that we have plans for Iran too.

Part of any plan is the use of combat aircrafts. Extensive target lists are always developed and refined. So there is a menu of targets to attack in Iran, and there has been such a list since at least 1979. For quite a while, Iran’s nuclear facilities at ab-Ali, Natanz and al-Beshir were targeted, but after we went to Iraq, Iran’s nuclear development was geographically scattered and sited in underground facilities. These days, as Hersh reported, our intelligence about this is not very good, and in my judgment we missed our chance several years ago to slow Iran’s nuclear research. So a plan to hit Iran is not about nuclear proliferation.

The article suggests that the U.S. wants to strike to reduce Iran’s support of Iraq’s insurgents, who are killing Americans every day with sophisticated improvised explosive devices, and to get Iran’s attention in the hope that it will reform and stop its threatening behavior.

It’s hard to see how limited strikes against formations of Revolutionary Guards will motivate Iran to do anything positive. Reports are that Ahmedinejad is not well-liked among his own countrymen, and although he occupies a very public position, it is largely ceremonial. Originating inside Iran, blogs on the subject of Ahmedinejad’s recent visit to the United Nations were almost uniformly critical of him, but even so, one can’t expect that air strikes on troops or headquarters will cause a general uprising of Iranian moderates, who will then throw the mullahs to the wolves. Would that were so.

In the employment of combat power, as in any endeavor, one of the most significant questions is, “What can go wrong?” While it’s always possible that a strike on Iranian forces will result in Iran’s becoming more docile because it doesn’t want us to hit them again, we have demonstrated that we are not keen on escalation, and escalation is what we would likely get.

But Iran is behind many, perhaps even most, of the casualties we sustain in Iraq. IEDs produce the large majority of killed and wounded, and our armored vehicles are very vulnerable to the new family of explosively-formed penetrators that are manufactured in Iran. Furthermore, Iran produces huge 240-millimeter mortars that Shi’a insurgents can use with deadly effect against military and civilian targets. For the American military command in Iraq, getting these weapons off the battlefield is very important, and if there is to be any strike against targets in Iran, it will be against the facilities that manufacture them.

Can these targets be struck with little or no collateral damage? Yes. Is there some danger of an Iranian retaliation? Yes again.

We should never be averse to using the military instrument of power to achieve logical objectives, and we have done it successfully many times. And there are good military reasons to strike the facilities that produce Iranian weapons used against our forces. But if we’ve learned anything in the tragic adventure in Iraq, it’s this: we should think clearly about what happens after the strike — we’d better do a good job of it.

]]> 2007-10-03T13:57:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/us_feels_sting_of_winning_saudi_help_with_other_arabs/ {summary}
By HELENE COOPER
NY Times
Published: March 30, 2007


WASHINGTON, March 29 — American officials said Thursday that they were caught off guard by remarks by the Saudi king condemning the American intervention in Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation” and were seeking clarification. But they sought to tamp down tensions over the comments.

“We were a little surprised to see those remarks,” R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, told a Senate hearing, referring to the statement by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the opening of an Arab League summit meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday. “We disagree with them.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scheduled a telephone call with Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, who was traveling to Riyadh, an administration official said.

The official said the State Department had resisted going straight to Ms. Rice’s counterpart, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, so as to try to lower the temperature of the rhetoric. He said Ms. Rice planned to question Mr. Jubeir about the Saudi monarch’s remarks.

The Bush administration had been bending over backwards in recent weeks not to criticize Saudi Arabia, partly because it is hoping that Saudi leadership will help stem the rising influence of Iran.

And for the moment, Saudi and other Arab officials said the king’s statements should be seen in that context, an effort to position himself to get the leverage he needs in the Arab world.

“He knew it would be a popular thing to say — the American occupation is one of the most unpopular facts on the Arab streets,” said one Saudi official in Riyadh with close ties to the royal family. He allowed that “we don’t want the Americans just to drop Iraq and leave; we would hold the Americans responsible for the damage if that happens.”

But he added that for the long term, if Saudi Arabia is going to lead the Arab world and serve as a counterbalance to Iran, the Saudi monarchy cannot be seen as supporting a foreign occupation in Arab land.

In fact, King Abdullah has warned American officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, that Saudi Arabia might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulled its troops out of Iraq.

Last fall, as a growing chorus in Washington advocated a draw-down of American troops in Iraq, coupled with a diplomatic outreach to the largely Shiite Iran, Saudi Arabia, which considers itself the leader of the Sunni Arab world, argued strenuously against an American pullout from Iraq, citing fears that Iraq’s minority Sunni Arab population would be massacred.

But that is a difficult position for Saudi Arabia to support publicly.

“Everybody assumes that America is a big boy, and big boys have to put up with things,” said Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine. He pointed to the closeness of the relationship between the Bush administration and the Saudi royal family, particularly Prince Bandar, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, who is well known in Washington for his access to the White House.

The assumption, he said, is that the relationship can withstand a gentle whack or two. “But I think that assumption runs the risk of making things unpleasant,” he said.

Administration officials were already angry after Saudi Arabia brokered a power-sharing agreement between the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whom American officials viewed as a moderate, and the militant Islamist group Hamas, which the United States and Israel both view as a terrorist organization.

Privately, administration officials say the pact, reached in Mecca, ruined new American plans to try to restart peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

But no administration official said that publicly because the Saudi path is so central to the American effort in the region. In fact, every time Ms. Rice mentioned the Mecca accord, she took pains to say that she “welcomed the king’s efforts to end the violence between Palestinians,” even as she criticized Hamas for not recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

Similarly, when American officials got wind of King Abdullah’s speech on Wednesday, they were muted, first telling reporters to make sure there was not a mistranslation.

Even by Thursday, when it had become clear that the Saudi King had indeed criticized the American presence in Iraq, the State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was mild in his public comments. “We want to understand more clearly what it is exactly that he had in mind when he talked about an illegal occupation” was the furthest that Mr. McCormack would go in publicly challenging the Saudi statement.

Simon Henderson, the director of gulf and energy policy at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the very use of the phrase “illegal occupation” legitimizes the attacks on American troops in Iraq.

Arab officials said the United States had put enormous pressure on the Saudis by calling on them to make a peace overture to Israel, as Ms. Rice did Tuesday in Jerusalem.

While the Arab League did reaffirm a 2002 land-for-peace proposal for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at its meeting in Riyadh on Thursday, many Arab officials have expressed anger that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel balked at allowing new peace talks with Mr. Abbas. Those talks are being brokered by Ms. Rice to include the “final status” issues that have bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979.

Part of King Abdullah’s criticism of the United States and Israel in his speech, some Arab officials said, stemmed from anger that Ms. Rice could not get more from Israel.

“The Israelis want to win the lottery without paying for a ticket,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a former Saudi Embassy adviser in Washington. “The lottery is normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, but first they must pay for the ticket by reaching an agreement with the Palestinians.”

]]> 2007-03-30T11:08:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/bill_clinton_speaker_at_prestigious_landon_lecture_series/ {summary} Paul Munnis
March 4, 2006


President Bill Clinton spoke today at Kansas State University at the prestigious Landon Lecture Series.

His talk lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes and for those of you who want a treat then you can click on the link below and choose the lecture. You will need the REAL PLAYER VIDEO or AUDIO software to view it on streaming TV or to listen to it as an audio tape. The text material is not yet available.

Copies can be purchased on DVD from CSPAN for $45.

Link: http://ome.ksu.edu/lectures/landon/past.html

This is well worth the time and effort to see or hear.

REAL PLAYER can be downloaded free of charge at:
http://www.realplayerweb.com/co/real/realplayerweb/?sid=M2AG0002bGS

]]> 2007-03-05T02:02:01-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/iraq_occupation_report/ {summary} Control of Oil Revenues


By Michael Renner with Erik Leaver and Bo Palmer | September 2003
Foreign Policy In Focus http://www.fpif.org


While widespread ransacking was happening in Iraq after Baghdad fell, the U.S. moved swiftly to secure the country’s oil facilities. But in the months since the official end of the war, general looting and sabotage have impeded even the oil industry, frustrating efforts to quickly return oil production to prewar levels.

As of early July, the future of Iraq’s oil is still a matter of speculation. Rehabilitating oil facilities and preparing the ground for an expansion of output will take time. Current projections are that because of widespread looting, it will take 18 months just to return to prewar production levels of 3 million barrels per day. [Neela Banerjee, “Barrels of Oil Exported for the First Time Since the War,” New York Times, June 23, 2003]

The U.S. will has broad control over the Iraqi oil industry, principally by means of a Development Fund for Iraq, into which all of Iraq’s oil export revenues, all funds left over from the UN’s “oil for food” program, and all assets of the former Iraqi government located anywhere in the world are to be transferred. With such broad control, U.S. corporations are well posed to reap enormous profits and control of the oil industry.

Pre-War Promises

x “American oil companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil,” says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (and current member of the Iraqi Governing Council)

[Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue,” Washington Post, September 15, 2002.]

“The American undersecretary of commerce, Grant Aldonas, told a business forum hungry for good economic news that a war in Iraq ‘would open up this spigot on Iraqi oil, which certainly would have a profound effect in terms of the performance of the world economy for those countries that are manufacturers and oil consumers.’”
[Michael Moran and Alex Johnson, “Oil after Saddam: All bets are in,” MSNBC, November 7, 2002.]

“We will make sure that Iraq’s natural resources are used for the benefit of their owners, the Iraqi people”

— President George W. Bush [Speech at the Azores Islands, 16 March 2003.]

Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, commented “As Iraq began shipping crude oil today for the first time since the start of the war, the U.S. administrator of the country broached the politically sensitive issue of how oil revenue should be spent, proposing that some of the money be shared with Iraqis through a system of dividend payments or a national trust fund to finance public pensions.

“Iraq’s resources cannot be restricted to a lucky or powerful few,” Bremer said. “Iraq’s natural resources should be shared by all Iraqis.”

[“Bremer Broaches Plans for Iraq’s Oil Revenue,” New York Times, June 23, 2003.]

Post-War Realities

On May 22, 2003, the UN Security Council passed a resolution ending sanctions on Iraq. Significantly, the resolution gave the U.S. decisionmaking power over how the oil funds would be used with regard to relief, reconstruction, disarmament and “other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq.”

[Colum Lynch, “U.S. to Propose Broader Control Of Iraqi Oil, Funds” Washington Post, May 9, 2003.]

On May 4, Philip Carroll was named to head an advisory board to the Iraqi oil ministry. Carroll was chief executive officer (CEO) of Shell Oil, the U.S. arm of Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1990s, and subsequently became head of the construction giant Fluor, a company he ran until 2002. Carroll still owns substantial stock in both of these corporations. He is not known as an Iraq oil specialist and apparently had never been to the country prior to his appointment.

[Michael Renner, “The Other Looting,” Foreign Policy In Focus, July 2003.]

“The Bush administration is considering a provocative idea to pledge some of Iraq’s future oil and gas revenue to secure long-term reconstruction loans before a new Iraqi government is in place to sign off on the proposal. [The question is] whether the U.S.-led occupation administration in Baghdad has the legal or moral authority to pledge future oil revenue as loan collateral before the issue can be debated by elected Iraqis.”

[Warren Vieth, “US May Tap Oil for Iraqi Loans,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2003.]

After the UN approved the Development Fund for Iraq, Bush signed an executive order decreeing that “any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void,” with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and “all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein.”

In other words, if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco touch Iraqi oil, anything they or anyone else does with it is immune from legal proceedings in America.

[Steve Kretzman and Jim Vallette, “Operation Oily Immunity,” CommonDreams.org, July 23, 2003.]

Sir Philip Watts, chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, commenting on the lack of interest in investing in Iraq’s oil infrastructure said, “There has to be proper security, legitimate authority and a legitimate process ... by which we will be able to negotiate agreements that would be longstanding for decades…. When the legitimate authority is there on behalf of the people of Iraq, we will know and recognize it.”

[Carola Hoyos, “Oil Groups Snub US on Iraq Deals,” Financial Times, July 24, 2003.]

Saboteurs blew up yet another section of a major oil pipeline to Turkey today, the second time the route had been hit in three days. Black smoke and flames swirled into the cloudless sky just a few miles from where U.S. soldiers and Iraqi engineers had battled a fire caused by explosives Friday. The two blasts, north of the town of Baiji, abruptly halted crude oil exports that had begun Wednesday. The disruption costs Iraq $7 million a day in revenue, officials say.

[Daniel Williams and Anthony Shadid, “Saboteurs Hit Iraqi Facilities Oil and Water Lines and Prison Targeted in New Ambushes,” Washington Post, August 18, 2003.]

Michael Renner is a Senior Researcher at Worldwatch Institute and a policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus. Erik Leaver is FPIF’s policy outreach director and Bo Palmer is a research intern for FPIF (online at http://www.fpif.org)

]]> 2007-03-05T00:53:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/the_financial_domino_effect/ {summary}
Updated: March 1, 2007
Prepared by: Lee Hudson Teslik
Council on Foreign Relations


It’s a truism to say the world’s economies are interconnected, but the aftermath of the February 27 Chinese stock market collapse was a blunt reminder of one of the darker aspects of an integrated world marketplace. Fearful that a government crackdown on illegal borrowing might dampen investment, Chinese traders pushed the country’s leading stock indices down about 9 percent, their worst trading day (Bloomberg) in ten years. A domino effect ensued. European and U.S. traders, spooked by the news, staged their own sell offs. The same thing happened at exchanges in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Australia—indeed, virtually every major stock index in the world showed losses by the day’s end.

It remains to be seen whether these jitters represent a mere correction or the beginnings of a broader economic downturn. Chinese stocks bounced back on February 28, with the Shanghai index gaining a little over 3.5 percent, though nearly every other Asian stock index ended the day in the red. Some regional analysts responded to the stock stumble by labeling it a painful but necessary “major correction” (The Standard). But others worried something more serious and long-term might be afoot. One immediate concern is that a shriveling appetite (AP) for risky mortgages among U.S. lenders could dry up liquid capital. Following a period of carefree credit grants, lenders like Freddie Mac are clamping down (Reuters), and markets are taking note. "They're taking one of the cylinders out of the credit engine," says CFR Senior Fellow Roger Kubarych in a recent interview.

Even if the world’s stock markets quickly recover their losses, the specter of nearly every major exchange reacting in unison has its own ramifications. One prominent economist, Nouriel Roubini, noted the remarkable “contagion” of China’s stumble. The Financial Times, however, argues that Tuesday’s market slumps were not a case of “contagion”—in the form that riddled Asian markets in the late 1990s—but rather a healthier “correlation” based on the general overvaluation of a wide array of assets worldwide.

Call it what you will. The increasing correlation or contagiousness of financial markets—which also, at times, is called “synchronization” or “comovement”—is a major aspect of financial globalization, and one that more often than not has remained beneath the popular radar. A 2004 research paper by the economist Sébastien Wälti argues that modern market shocks—such as movements in interest rates or oil prices—are often relevant internationally, and that country-specific shocks are now more easily transmitted across borders due to increased efficiency of trade and finance.

Synchronization in financial markets is not in itself controversial, but the appropriate policy prescription is fodder for much debate. Complicating the discussion is the distinction that must be made between financial markets and underlying economies. While synchronization has increased both among the world’s financial markets and the world’s economies, the two correlations do not necessarily mirror (PDF) each other, claims an article in the World Bank journal Finance and Development. Sometimes financial markets are more strongly synchronized than real markets, and vice versa.

These questions of interdependence came into sharp focus on February 28 as Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, testified before the House Budget Committee. Some investors blamed Bernanke’s predecessor, Alan Greenspan, for igniting fears by commenting earlier this week that a recession was “possible” (AP) later this year. Bernanke sought to calm nerves, saying nothing had altered his forecast for moderate economic growth (MarketWatch) in the coming months.

]]> 2007-03-03T21:47:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/at_last_a_diplomatic_offensive/ {summary} Updated: March 1, 2007
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner
Council on Foreign Relations


As one of the preconditions to meet with its regional rivals on Iraq, the United States had set a series of benchmarks (WashPost) for the government in Baghdad to meet, such as striking a deal on revenue sharing of oil profits. Shortly after Iraq’s deeply divided leadership agreed to such a deal, true to its word, the White House agreed to participate (NYT) in an international conference, tentatively set for March 10, which will include Syria and Iran on the issue of bringing stability to Iraq. The two sets of meetings, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced during House testimony and is expected to attend at the foreign ministerial level, marks the latest in a series of about-faces by the White House. A few weeks ago, U.S. officials signed a landmark agreement with the North Koreans as part of the Six-Party framework to suspend their nuclear program.

A regional conference that includes all of Iraq’s neighbors, as well as the permanent members of the UN Security Council, has long been a talking point of critics of the war and featured prominently in the bipartisan Iraq Study Group report last December. But the Bush administration until recently has accused Iran and Syria as being part of the problem, not part of the solution, by arming and funding Iraqi militias. This Backgrounder explores Iran’s involvement in Iraq. Iran’s secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, gave a guarded endorsement of the proposed talks. The conference is expected to address security concerns over Iraq, not larger regional issues like the Israeli-Palestinian agenda or Iran’s nuclear program.

Regional talks that include Iran and Syria are widely seen as a means to achieve stability in Iraq, in light of the influence Tehran and Damascus wield over Iraq’s majority Shiites and militia groups. The blueprint for such talks is the Dayton Accords which helped resolve the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s. One of the chief architects of those accords was Richard C. Holbrooke, who warns in this CFR.org Podcast that the situation in Iraq is vastly different. “[I]n Dayton, we had the threat of bombing them,” he says. “In Iraq, the only threat that we have left is the threat that we’ll withdraw. It’s quite a different kind of thing.” But he adds that the Iranians have been helpful in past face-to-face meetings, particularly the Bonn meetings of 2002 to establish a post-war Afghan government.

CFR President Richard N. Haass argues mutual interests with Iran and Syria on Iraq create a good foundation for talks: “essentially that Iraq not implode, that we not have a country that ends up being partitioned.” The fact that the conference has not been convened at Washington’s behest also helps. CFR Fellow Steven A. Cook tells CFR.org's Bernard Gwertzman the about-face by the Bush administration stems from the feeling they "would be negotiating with the Iranians from a position of strength now." But he warns that this may not be the case. "It is true they’ve ratcheted up the pressure on the Iranians. But at the same time, the Iranians hold many of the cards, and even with this pressure they have the means to make the U.S. military’s life much more difficult in Iraq."

]]> 2007-03-03T21:45:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/corn_fuels_controversy/ {summary}
Council on Freign Relations
Updated: February 1, 2007
Prepared by: Stephanie Hanson


The current energy debate goes beyond global warming or fuel efficiencies. Instead, lawmakers are increasingly abuzz over the new “yellow gold”—corn. President Bush’s call for alternative energy in his State of the Union address has accelerated an already-rising demand for ethanol, propelling corn to its highest prices (ChiTrib) in a decade. The difficulty in making comprehensive changes to energy policy and the bipartisan support for ethanol means the biggest legislation on energy may come from the 2007 Farm Bill, the details of which were announced Wednesday by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns. The bill proposes more than $1.6 billion in renewable energy funding.

Thanks to a boost in corn prices from ethanol, the U.S. government expects a steep drop (BusinessWeek) in price-dependent corn subsidies, from $8.8 billion in 2006 to $2.1 billion this year. The 2007 Farm Bill does not propose any major changes in the farm subsidy program, but it does call for cutting spending (AP) by $18 billion over the next five years, partly because of high prices for commodities like corn. The bill emphasizes direct income payments to farmers and would make it harder for farmers to qualify for production subsidies by lowering the income cap from $2.5 million to $200,000 a year. Some say the farm bill tweaks could bode well (Bloomberg) for global trade talks, currently stalled over agricultural subsidies. Oxfam America, a poverty-fighting group, says the proposed bill would move U.S. policy in a direction "more consistent with international trade rules." But the European Union’s agricultural commissioner criticized the proposed bill, saying the United States will need to propose “more ambitious cuts” (Reuters) to advance trade talks. The Center for American Progress suggests the new farm bill should use creative energy legislation, encouraging domestic production of non-corn biofuels and reducing the U.S. tariff on imported biofuels to “break the deadlock in the Doha Round.”

With the production of non-corn ethanol still prohibitively expensive, and the development of biotechnology to lower its cost years away, increasing U.S. ethanol production in the short-term will depend on corn. Yet for every farmer in Iowa switching acreage from soybeans to corn, there is someone criticizing the new ethanol boom. Chicken, cattle, and dairy producers warn that higher food prices are on the horizon (USAToday). Others note that there isn’t enough farmland in the United States to meet Bush’s alternative energy mandate with corn ethanol alone. Ethanol is less efficient than ordinary gasoline, write Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren of the CATO Institute, and it also increases air pollution. “What this country needs, and soon, is an Ethanolics Anonymous 12-step program,” opines the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Mexicans would agree. Astronomical tortilla prices have the country buzzing almost as much as does President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive military crackdown on drug cartels, and most Mexicans attribute the tortilla price increase to demand for ethanol (WashPost) in the United States.

But the two products use different types of corn (tortillas are made from white corn, ethanol from yellow), and the tortilla price jump is far higher than that of the price of yellow corn. A more likely culprit is an industry monopoly (PDF): One company controls 70 percent of the tortilla market. Some analysts hope Calderon will tackle the tortilla cartel with the same brio (Economist) he’s brought to the war on drugs.

]]> 2007-03-03T21:43:01-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/no_exit/ {summary}
By Joseph Lelyveld
The NY Review of Books


The Bush administration seems never to have put it quite so baldly but in its rush to consolidate its authority after the terrorist attacks of September 11, it came close to asserting the power of the commander in chief to declare anyone in the world, of whatever citizenship or location, "an unlawful enemy combatant" and—solely on the basis of that designation—to detain the person indefinitely without charge, beyond reach of any court. As we now know, it then acted on its own theory; according to a list being compiled by Human Rights Watch, alleged terrorists were detained at American behest in Mauritania, Bosnia, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen— as well as Afghanistan and the border areas of Pakistan where most al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were captured. Many of them were then turned over to the United States for transfer to the prison hastily constructed out of cargo containers in the American military enclave at Guantánamo, or other overseas detention centers used by the United States.[1]

The five years since the first shackled prisoners were unloaded at Guantánamo have not been uneventful for constitutional scholars, lawyers concerned with human rights, and journalists of an investigative bent. Their questions and discovery motions have shaken loose information, including the names of many detainees, out of a government committed to secrecy. That information has been used as kindling for a slow-burning debate on coercive interrogation that eventually led Congress—nearly two years after publication of the notorious pictures of naked Iraqis stacked and taunted at Abu Ghraib prison—to affirm legislatively in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 that existing laws and treaty commitments barring torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (sometimes called "torture lite") were still binding on American interrogators in what was grandiosely called "the Global War on Terror."

At least the question of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment had been addressed; how effectively is another matter. The Supreme Court has also cautiously asserted its jurisdiction on detention issues, picking apart arguments made on behalf of an executive branch that hubristically called on the Court to stand aside and, essentially, let the President reign. But—as the remaining 395 captives at Guantánamo enter the sixth year of their imprisonment without a single one of them having been put on trial—the question of whether we're prepared to hold terrorist suspects without charge for the rest of their natural lives has yet to be squarely addressed by either Congress or the courts. Decisions on detention issues have been handed down and laws have been passed. Some of these may now be revisited by the incoming Democratic Congress—in particular, the recent Military Commissions Act, which, among other things, denies non-US citizens who have been arrested and held in prison recourse to the writ of habeas corpus. But the question of indefinite detention itself —which might be construed as a core issue—hangs over our discussions like a far-off thundercloud, darkening a little with each passing year and each report of another suicide attempt at Guantánamo. From the standpoint of the detainees, nothing much has changed over the years.


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The argument that putative combatants—would-be combatants who have merely been trained as well as those picked up in the vicinity of a battlefield—can be held in wartime until the end of hostilities isn't in itself novel or controversial. What's new in the current conflict, as it pertains to al-Qaeda and those detainees who are alleged to be its followers, is that no one can imagine the armistice or surrender that would signify an end to this war. In these circumstances, or so it now seems, indefinite could prove to be synonymous with endless; in effect, it could signify a life sentence. This would be a far cry from the preventive detention imagined as appropriate in a conventional war by the authors of the Geneva Conventions, which were intended as a rulebook ensuring humane treatment on all sides of those imprisoned for the specific purpose of keeping them out of military action. What has been at issue are the questions of whether the United States has legally been in a state of war since September 19, 2001, when Congress authorized the use of military force against those responsible for the attacks a week earlier, and if it has been, where that war begins and ends.

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Also at issue, obviously, is whether— assuming we're in a war that's even bigger than the ones US troops have been committed to in Afghanistan and Iraq—the President is constitutionally entitled to unilaterally make up new rules and procedures for the treatment of captured supporters of terrorist movements. Since 2001, the United States has tended to cite those parts of international law that serve its purpose and shrug off, dispute, or discount others. "Customary laws of war," the government has correctly argued, justify holding prisoners indefinitely without charge. At the same time, it has contended that the Geneva Conventions, the modern codification of "the customary laws of war," don't apply because al-Qaeda and its offshoots are not parties to them and, all too obviously, have no regard for their standards.

Terrorists who dispatch suicide bombers and behead hostages obviously don't concern themselves with the welfare of civilians and prisoners, so there is little or no prospect of the reciprocity the Geneva regime encourages in conflicts between nations. But the conduct of al-Qaeda and its cohorts hardly relieves the United States of its responsibility to comply with the Geneva standards. The irony is that only the Geneva provisions on prisoners of war—a formal status denied the supposed terrorists the US has detained since 2001—provide a firm legal basis for indefinite detention without charge. According to the Geneva Conventions, those who are suspected of having committed terrorist acts can be charged criminally in front of a military or civil court; but the preventive detention of Islamic militants on the basis of a prudent or cockeyed suspicion that they may harbor terrorist ambitions is harder to justify in terms of existing international law or the US Constitution, which reserves to Congress the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in exceptional circumstances only: "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."


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The outgoing Republican Congress effectively did just that as far as detained aliens, designated as "illegal enemy combatants"—or indeed any aliens—were concerned when it passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in the run-up to the election campaign, in hopes of making an issue of Democratic "nay" votes.[2] That political tactic failed but the law is on the books. Now that Democrats have narrow control of the Senate Judiciary Committee, its new chairman, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, hopes to overturn what he has called "this sickening habeas provision." Even if he is successful, there are still likely to be roughly 250 prisoners at Guantánamo alone facing indefinite detention without charge. A more carefully written law may make it possible for some among them, in the fullness of time, to challenge their designation as "illegal enemy combatants" and their imprisonment. But so far there has been no sign that Democrats care to wrestle with the premise that it's legitimate to hold prisoners indefinitely without charge and to leave them to await the end of a war that shows no sign of ending. Staff aides dealing with detention matters say the Democrats are concentrating on "process issues"—restoring habeas corpus or whether the Uniform Code of Military Justice should govern the handling of evidence before military commissions—rather than the fate of individual prisoners.

The debate over detention issues— and action in the courts—has focused on Guantánamo but the Cuban outpost is only the most exposed of our prisons in this "war on terror." The census and status of the more remote prisons is murkier but US forces also hold prisoners in Iraq and at the air force base at Bagram in Afghanistan.[3] It's possible that there are still other prisons borrowed from other governments that have yet to be uncovered or acknowledged. President Bush conceded in September that the Central Intelligence Agency did in fact maintain such prisons abroad; he said they weren't being used at that moment but would be held in reserve. The striking decline of the prison population at Guantánamo in the last year or so—resulting from an effort to repatriate prisoners reclassified as NLECS (for "no longer enemy combatants")—points to a possibility that still other facilities may have been found; either that or the government has arrived at a recognition that the United States cannot conceivably detain every would-be Islamic fighter in a world where new ones are appearing daily on the streets of Baghdad or in the frontier towns of Pakistan.

The number of prisoners at Camp Delta, as the prison at Guantánamo was officially named, was expected to exceed 2,000 in early Pentagon projections; in late 2002, it topped out at slightly more than 650. By late 2006, the Guantánamo census had declined to 395; an estimated 14,500 were being held at various Iraq locations and about 500 at Bagram. How many of the prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have been held for a period of years— and may continue to be held indefinitely—without charge is uncertain; how many are non-Iraqi and non-Afghan is also a matter of guesswork for those who don't have access to classified information. (The organization Human Rights First, relying on official US figures, estimates that between 60,000 and 70,000 persons have been detained around the globe at one time or another by the United States since the first frantic efforts in 2001 to sweep up as many likely agents and contacts of terrorist networks as possible. The total ought to include the more than one thousand aliens, mostly Muslim, held in the United States after the September 11 attacks, on unrelated immigration charges or as so-called "material witnesses," on orders of Attorney General John Ashcroft.)


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In all, more than 250 Guantánamo prisoners have been repatriated. In some cases, their release appears to have had more to do with diplomatic pressure applied by allied countries in which they had legal residence than with the facts of their particular cases. Prisoners with residence in European countries predominated in the early releases. In other cases—by now, most of them—the releases can be reasonably read as a tacit acknowledgment that they were no longer a serious threat nor of any significant value from an intelligence standpoint and probably never had been. The State Department is seeking to negotiate the release of about eighty-five Guantánamo prisoners to foreign countries but is running into difficulties getting foreign governments to agree to American conditions for continued surveillance in some of these cases. A similar number have been listed by military authorities as potentially chargeable in front of the military commissions established by the President—and now given congressional approval in the Military Commissions Act—but only ten have been actually charged as of this writing. After subtracting these three groups —those who have actually been released, those the government seeks to release, and those who still stand to be charged—we're left with a remainder on the order of 250 prisoners at Guantánamo who, it appears, after five years of severe confinement there, are deemed by their captors to be eligible for neither release nor charging. The plain inference is that their interrogators have come up with no evidence that they've been implicated in acts of terrorism but still consider them too dangerous to let go. These then— along with however many long-term prisoners might be locked away without charge in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other places where the United States continues to have some say over their fates—are the indefinitely detained of the war on terror.

If the "customary law of war" permits their continued imprisonment until the end of hostilities, their prospects seem exceedingly dim. Two questions bear on the legitimacy of their confinement: whether they have been rightly estimated to be part of a hostile enemy force or network and how it can be ascertained when hostilities have ended in this largely clandestine conflict. "Global War on Terror" may have had a certain ring as a battle cry, or at least some utility from a marketing standpoint as a brand name, but it muddies the detention issue, for it seems to imply that the US must remain at war, transforming itself into a permanent national security state, until terrorism—not any particular organized force but a diffuse phenomenon that has existed for more than a century—has been thoroughly banished from the world. In fact, Congress did not authorize a war on "terror" but granted the President authority

to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
The administration sometimes acknowledges as much. "When administration officials refer to the war on terror," John Bellinger, the State Department's legal adviser, recently said, "we are not stating that we are in a legal state of armed conflict with every terrorist organization, everywhere in the world, at all times.... We do think we are in a legal state of armed conflict with al-Qaeda."

Subsumed under that definition, one assumes, are the Taliban in Afghanistan and the foreign fighters connected to the force known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. An end to fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq may be nowhere in sight, but at least when it does finally occur we'll presumably be able to recognize the fact. But how will anyone ever know whether the war with al-Qaeda has ended? An armistice cannot easily be imagined. Will the tribal regions along the border of Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be finding refuge, have to have been pacified? What methods could security officials use to certify that there is no network of "sleeper cells" remaining in the West? And if hopeful answers to these questions cannot easily be imagined, is it possible to imagine any political figure in authority declaring in the foreseeable future that this "war" has ended, or been sufficiently contained, to permit the release of supposed "hard-core" terrorist detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere? If we look at the situation this way, the indefinite detention of combatants in this war seems not just open-ended but truly without limits, a predicament to which the "customary laws of war" do not offer an obvious answer.


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The issue was much on the minds of some Supreme Court justices when oral arguments were heard nearly three years ago in the suit brought on behalf of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen by birth who'd been detained as "an illegal enemy combatant." Repeatedly Justices O'Connor, Souter, and Breyer pressed the government's lawyer to say when it might be appropriate for the courts to hear habeas petitions on behalf of prisoners held for many years in an unending conflict. "Doesn't the Court have some business intervening at some point, if it's the Hundred Years' War or something?" an impatient Stephen Breyer demanded. "We recognize the viability of the writ of habeas corpus," Paul D. Clement replied on the government's behalf. "There certainly is a challenge that can be brought to the length of the detention at some point."[4] When that point would come and how it would be recognized were questions left unanswered by the government. Those questions were obviously still on Justice O'Connor's mind when she wrote the opinion for the Court, holding that an American citizen designated as an "enemy combatant" was still entitled to due process and could not be imprisoned indefinitely without charge.

The plaintiff, she said, faced "the substantial prospect of perpetual detention." If one accepted the gov-ernment's reasoning, she went on, "Hamdi's detention could last for the rest of his life." The ruling in Hamdiv. Rumsfeld established a legal double standard: indefinite detention without charge was now unacceptable for citizens but possibly quite all right for foreigners held in remote places by US armed forces and security agencies, though these foreign prisoners also faced "the substantial prospect of perpetual detention." At best, it could be said that, with Hamdi as a possible precedent, there was room for eventual judicial review on that point—until the passage of the Military Commissions Act last fall, that is, which barred access to federal courts on habeas petitions by foreigners who had been designated as "illegal alien combatants." Now, even if a Democratic-led Congress succeeds in removing that bar—a big if for the next two years, given the possibility of a presidential veto—it could be two or three years before a test case reaches the highest court. By then the longest-serving Guantánamo prisoners would be into their eighth year of detention without charge, with no end in sight.

Inevitably, if the fate of "illegal enemy combatants" once again becomes an issue before the Supreme Court, the relevance of the Geneva Conventions will be debated as it was last June in the case of Hamdanv. Rumsfeld. The majority then held that one of the flaws in the presidential order establishing military commissions was their failure to conform to what's known as Common Article 3 of the conventions; specifically the failure of procedures that had been outlined to meet the article's broad and elevated requirement that they offer "all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples." Writing for the Court, Justice John Paul Stevens noted that in the administration's tribunals, the accused could be denied access to the evidence against them. "Absent express statutory provision to the contrary," he said, "information used to convict a person of a crime must be disclosed to him."


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The Military Commissions Act, drafted a few months later, was a direct response and challenge to the Stevens ruling. It provided statutory authority for withholding evidence from the accused "to protect from disclosure the sources, methods, or activities by which the United States acquired evidence." The Bush administration, of course, had argued from the start that the Geneva Conventions had no application to the struggle against a transnational terrorist group such as al-Qaeda. It now had to backtrack on its claim that the Constitution gave the president "plenary powers over military operations (including the treatment of prisoners)," but it retreated only slightly: while recognizing the existence of the Geneva Conventions, the same Military Commissions Act granted the president "authority for the United States to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva conventions."[5] (In apparent contradiction, Congress claimed authority for itself to interpret the meaning of the Geneva treaties, flatly declaring that the tribunals it was authorizing met the requirements of Common Article 3, Justice Stevens notwithstanding.)

Here again it's open to question whether Democrats seeking to preserve something more than a marginal role for the judiciary on these issues will be able to get the votes needed to overturn a presidential veto, at least during the current Congress. Even if Democrats in the new Congress are blocked in their attempt to amend the Military Commissions Act, it could still make its way to the Supreme Court for review. Or a new administration and Congress, after 2008, could revisit some of these issues. What seems clear is that the question of indefinite detention won't simply disappear and will eventually need to be addressed.

Who then gets to interpret the Geneva Conventions could matter a great deal to supposedly "hard-core" prisoners held in indefinite detention without charge and with little or no prospect of release. Such detention is permitted by the conventions for enemy combatants granted prisoner-of-war status in an "international armed conflict." But there is no provision for indefinite detention in the cases of "protected persons" who have been detained but not charged in conflicts that don't meet that standard. Oblivious of contradiction, the administration has paid lip service to the Geneva standards—President Bush has repeatedly pledged to adhere to their "spirit"—while simultaneously implying that taking them literally could be at least inconvenient, possibly dangerous.

Strictly speaking, the government contended, the struggle against al-Qaeda couldn't be an "international armed conflict" because al-Qaeda isn't a state, or a "noninternational armed conflict" because it sprawls across the borders of many states. Therefore, government lawyers argued (until they lost the argument in the Hamdan case), there is a lacuna in the conventions. The administration, which places a low value on what's called international humanitarian law, came forward with no proposals on how to fill the lacuna it perceived. Instead, claiming a license to set its own standards unilaterally, it charged right through it. It's as if its legal advisers sought to apply to international law their usual conservative precepts about "strict construction" and "the intentions of the framers."

The fact that al-Qaeda wasn't foreseen when the conventions were agreed on in 1949, however, hardly negates a larger truth about the conventions, which the Supreme Court has now recognized: that they were intended in the judgment of most experts to be entirely comprehensive, setting minimal standards of humane treatment for illegal as well as legal combatants. No class of warrior was exempted from the minimal legal protections built into Common Article 3. These include a prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" as well as "cruel treatment and torture." By now it's more than obvious this was the language that worried administration officials, intent as they were on sending a message to interrogators on the urgent need for "actionable intelligence" on terrorist networks.


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It's possible to imagine a different kind of administration in which government lawyers might have worried about a different kind of lacuna in international law: the absence of any clear provision for preventive detention of fighters who view themselves as adherents of networks that spawn terrorist plots (and who therefore might reasonably be considered to be more dangerous than the traditional prisoner taken captive on a battlefield). With a view to maintaining alliances and building international support, such an administration might have thought about seeking an indictment of Osama bin Laden and his most conspicuous aides from the new International Criminal Court, which the United States has strenuously opposed under President Bush. It might have proposed negotiations on a new Geneva convention to cover the new situation. It might even have come forward to propose standards of due process for assessing and reassessing the threat posed by individual detainees. Dream on: that is clearly not the administration we are going to have for the next two years. It remains to be seen whether the new leadership at the Pentagon, following Donald Rumsfeld's departure, will be willing to address a question that clearly never weighed on him: the question—it's political as well as legal—of how long the system of indefinite detention can be sustained.

Tim Golden, in The New York Times, recently described a short-lived attempt by the military authorities at Guantánamo to make conditions there less severe. The plan even involved a new cellblock designed with an eye to encouraging communal exercise and meals, in conditions approaching those afforded traditional prisoners of war.[6] By the time the cellblock opened in December, however, the military authorities had lost faith in the experiment. Following a riot and a mass suicide attempt in 2005 and three successful suicides last June, they clamped down and restored the ban on group activities for the detainees. "I don't think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist," Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr. told the Timesreporter. In other words, the authorities at Guantánamo are once again operating on the premise that Donald Rumsfeld first articulated five years ago—that the prisoners there are "the worst of the worst."

After the three prisoners successfully hung themselves from the wire-mesh framework of their cages in June, the commander of the detention center asserted that it was "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us." That's a very convenient way of thinking. Another, less convenient, would be to grasp the possibility that desperation and a political outlook capable of inspiring "an act of asymmetric warfare" need not be mutually exclusive states of mind. Scores of unsuccessful suicide attempts at Guantánamo and mass hunger strikes, not to mention ordinary common sense, argue that more than a few of the prisoners have reached a state of desperation after more than five years of confinement that, for most of them, has included rounds of relentless interrogation, some of it, as we now know, grossly coercive, including isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, loud music, sexual taunting, and mockery of Islam. Instead of congratulating ourselves on allowing the prisoners to have Korans and listen to the call to prayers five times a day, we might renew the effort to ease the condi-tions of their day-to-day lives, which are harsher by some measures than conditions on death row in mainland prisons.


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Even if we assume, for the purpose of discussion, that the military authorities are right in considering the indefinitely detained to be committed jihadists to a man, finding ways to ease the circumstances of their confinement might be seen as an investment in the possibility—however remote it may now seem—that they will one day return to their homelands. To put it another way, the government might take seriously the possibility that the US may one day be relieved of the political and moral burden involved in their perpetual detention without charge.

None of those released from Guantánamo has received an acknowledgment that there appear to have been no reasonable grounds for his detention, let alone an apology for the years snatched from his life, let alone even a modest attempt at compensation. In fact, Congress has had the foresight to bar damage suits by former detainees. Whenever questions are raised about cases in which reasonable grounds for suspicion are hardest to detect—the teenagers, septuagenarians, and Muslim travelers in war-afflicted regions who, whatever their motives or sentiments, never had a chance to get training as soldiers or bombers—official spokesmen can be relied on to allude to damning material in classified files that cannot be disclosed without damage to national security.

In some well-known cases such claims appear to be a matter of pure convenience—cases like that of Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen, though born and raised in Germany. A couple of months after September 11, Kurnaz was pulled off a public bus in Pakistan at the age of nineteen and turned over to the Americans, who held him at Guantánamo until last August when he was finally released at twenty-four. That was a year and a half after a federal judge, sitting on a habeas petition in his case, declared in open court that most of the evidence in his classified file was actually exculpatory and there was nothing to support suspicions of American interrogators that he had al-Qaeda ties. The purported "intelligence" said he'd been close to a successful suicide bomber named Selcuk Bilgin and that, since he hailed from Germany, he might also have been an associate of Mohamed Atta. The Bilgin Kurnaz knew turned out to be alive in Bremen and the connection to Atta had never been based on anything more than the fact that they were two devout Muslim males, among tens of thousands, who resided in Germany. The September 11 ringleader was an Arab from Cairo who'd lived in Hamburg; Kurnaz, a Turk from Bremen, seventy miles away, spoke no Arabic before arriving at Guantánamo. But how was he to prove that they'd never been acquainted? No one in authority was in any hurry, it seems, to clear up a case that revealed nothing except the inability of some American intelligence officers to look on a religious Muslim of fighting age and imagine that he might not be an enemy.[7]

Kurnaz, now home in Bremen, appears to have emerged from the Guantánamo cages psychologically and spiritually intact. There's the even more dismaying case of Jumah al-Dossari, a Saudi with Bahraini citizenship, who has attempted suicide twelve times, according to the official military count, and who's still being held at Guantánamo. The purpose of Guantánamo is to destroy people and he'd been destroyed, he told his New York lawyer, a young volunteer from the firm of Dorsey and Whitney named Joshua Colangelo-Bryan. He could no longer trust people, the prisoner said, and he had no hope. In his fifth year of detention without charge, with no release in sight, that did not sound like an irrational assessment of his circumstances.[8]

Notes

[1] The sense that normal legal restraints had been suspended showed up elsewhere. Italian magistrates charged agents of the Central Intelligence Agency in a kidnapping on the streets of Milan. In that case, "extraordinary rendition" to Egypt of the captured man appears to have obviated any need for him to be declared a combatant. (Also on renditions, see Raymond Bonner, "The CIA's Secret Torture," The New York Review, January 11, 2007.)

[2] According to a statement signed by some thirty constitutional scholars, the implication of the government's position is that any foreigner living legally in the United States can be held indefinitely without charge once classified as an "illegal enemy combatant" by the president. The scholars were reacting to the case of Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, who was arrested in Illinois and has been held in solitary confinement since 2001 at the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where his family has been denied the right to visit him. See Adam Liptak, "In War with Vague Boundaries, Detainee Longs for Court," The New York Times, January 5, 2007.

[3] Administration lawyers have cited a United Nations Security Council resolution recognizing the United States as an occupying authority in Iraq, passed after the start of the occupation, as a legal basis for the US continuing to hold security detainees in what's now considered to be a sovereign Iraq.

[4] In his oral argument in the case of Hamdanv. Rumsfeld the following year, Clement suggested that the Authorization to Use Military Force resolution passed by Congress might imply the power to suspend habeas corpus in particular cases, given the so-called suspension clause in the Constitution, which says Congress can suspend the writ in instances of "invasion" and "insurrection." A suspension of the writ could be "constitutionally valid," he said, even if Congress "sort of stumbles on it" without the formal act envisioned in the Constitution. "You are leaving us," Justice Souter retorted, "with the position of the United States that the Congress may validly suspend [the writ] inadvertently."

[5] The argument about the President's "plenary power" in matters involving prisoners was first made in a memo by John Yoo in January 2002 when he was head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department. The administration has never quite given up on the claim. When it reached agreement with Republican holdouts in the Senate on the Military Commissions Act, it made a point of saying that President Bush had not needed Congressional approval on issues involving interrogation standards that the act purported to address. "The President, of course, had authority to do this under his powers as Commander-in-Chief," Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said at a press briefing, "but what we wanted to do was to have an additional legal framework supported by the Congress." To have acknowledged that congressional authority had been necessary all along would have amounted to conceding that the President had been overstepping constitutional checks and balances for four years.

[6] "Military Takes a Tougher Line with Detainees," The New York Times, December 10, 2006.

[7] A dispatch on the Kurnaz case by Richard Bernstein appeared in The New York Times on June 5, 2005.

[8] The al-Dossari case was described in detail by Stacy Sullivan in New Yorkmagazine, June 26, 2006.

]]> 2007-02-10T21:20:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/asian_military_drift/ {summary}
February 5, 2007
Prepared by: Carin Zissis
Council on Foreign Relations


Four months after promising power would be “returned to the people,” leaders of a military coup in Thailand remain in charge, with half the country under martial law. Talk of a coup is also in the air in Bangladesh, amid a political crisis (The Economist). In Sri Lanka, the revival of the country’s lengthy civil war has raised the prominence of military voices on its political scene.

Fledgling democracies in South and Southeast Asia appear to be swinging back toward militarism. The events leading up to the changes differ: While former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra faced widespread protests and allegations of corruption before the bloodless coup, Dhaka has become a violent battleground for a feud between political parties whose leaders—both former prime ministers—despise one another. However, Thailand and Bangladesh share the problem of having to deal with rising extremism within their borders. As this new Backgrounder explains, in Thailand, the military junta faces attacks by insurgents in its southern Muslim provinces that have caused nearly two thousand deaths in the past three years. The new government blamed Thaksin’s confrontational approach to the separatist movement. But the junta has made little headway in stopping the violence and the insurgents “ have shown absolutely no interest in negotiations or in the possibilities accorded by the change in government,” writes Zachary Abuza, a Southeast terrorism expert at Simmons College in Boston, on Counterterrorism Blog.

In Bangladesh, Islamic militant extremists have gained a foothold in the vacuum left by political chaos, explains Sumit Ganguly in a report for the United States Institute of Peace. On the rise is the number of Islamist political parties with links to Bangladeshi militant groups, including one linked to synchronized nationwide bombings in 2005. If the United States continues to ignore the crisis in Dhaka, “Bangladesh could become another Afghanistan—a base for regional terrorism—and damage America’s growing relationship with South Asia,” write Joshua Kurlantzick and Anirudh Suri of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in The New Republic.

Backtracking on democracy in Asia is not new: General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's current president, seized control of the government there in a 1999 coup. Thailand and Bangladesh, along with other countries in the region, have followed the example, increasingly relying on the militarism while facing attacks by rebel groups. Over the past few months Sri Lanka, ravaged by a three-decade civil war that ended with a peace treaty in 2002, has experienced a resurgence in violence as the government has squared off once again against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This Backgrounder looks at the history and renewal of the conflict. A new commentary by the Indian think tank South Asian Analysis Group says the lines between the government’s military and political agendas have been blurred. The government is “pursuing a military agenda while avowing a peace process” and “military operations have become an important part of [President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s] political strategy advantage, unlike his predecessors.”

The Philippines has also pursued a militaristic approach to handling its extremists; U.S.-trained Filipino military chiefs have embarked on ground operations that led to the January death of a senior commander of Muslim separatists Abu Sayyaf. But even as the military touts its success over terrorist groups, human rights organizations have raised concern over military involvement in nearly eight hundred extrajudicial killings of activists since 2001. Amnesty International takes a look at the political killings. A January report (Manila Times) released by a government-appointed commission confirmed the military’s involvement in the deaths.

]]> 2007-02-09T15:55:01-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/climate_change_report/ {summary}
Overview


Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing policy-makers today. David G. Victor, a leading expert on environmental policy, takes a fresh look at this issue and persuasively marshals arguments for three distinct approaches to combat the problem, casting each as a presidential speech. A must-read for environmentalists, educators, and anyone else interested in the issue, Climate Change is a most useful reference in the growing public debate about how best to meet this environmental challenge.

Controlling the emissions that cause global warming will require societies to incur costs now, while uncertain benefits accrue in the distant future. These conditions make it hard to create successful policy, yet the longer policy shifts are put off, the more greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Even as a consensus grows that something must be done, there is no agreement on the best course of action. Climate Change begins with a memorandum to the president that explains the multidimensional nature of this critical issue. It then lays out three contrasting perspectives for dealing with climate change and concludes with an index of scientific reports, government speeches, legislative proposals, and further readings. Of the three speeches presented, the first emphasizes the ability of modern, wealthy societies to adapt to the changing climate. A second speech urges reengagement with the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change while demanding reforms to make Kyoto more effective. A third urges unilateral action to create a market for low-carbon emission technologies from the “bottom up,” in contrast with “top-down” international treaties such as Kyoto.

To read the full report Click HERE.

]]> 2007-01-31T15:53:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/speculation_surrounds_choice_by_spy_chief_to_take_step_back/ {summary}
By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID E. SANGER
NY Times
Published: January 5, 2007


WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 — From the start, John D. Negroponte felt miscast as the nation’s first director of national intelligence, a diplomat who never seemed comfortable in spook’s clothing, colleagues and friends of his said.

Even at age 67, Mr. Negroponte longed to be back in the thick of policymaking, they said. But he knew it was the one role he was barred from playing as long as he remained the nation’s top intelligence chief, whose role is to step into the Oval Office each morning as a neutral, impartial adviser on the threats lurking around the globe.

It was because of this, officials said, that he agreed to do something generally unheard of in a city obsessed with the bureaucratic totem pole: trade a cabinet-level job for a subcabinet post as deputy secretary of state, a job that essentially requires him to handle tasks that Condoleezza Rice would rather not deal with.

Mr. Negroponte leaves his office at Bolling Air Force Base after only 19 months and with mixed reviews. The base is the home of a new intelligence bureaucracy created to solve the problems laid bare after the Sept. 11 attacks, but Mr. Negroponte barely had time to get it running. All over Washington on Thursday, there were questions about whether Mr. Negroponte was there long enough to lay the foundations of real change and whether his transfer suggested that the Bush administration was less committed than it claimed to be to an intelligence overhaul that President Bush had billed as the most significant restructuring of American spy agencies in half a century.

Senior administration officials said it was Mr. Bush who personally asked Mr. Negroponte to take on the diplomatic post sometime last month. It was the second time in two years that Mr. Bush had turned to Mr. Negroponte to fill a critical job: Mr. Negroponte became the director of national intelligence only after several other candidates had turned down the job. This time around, Ms. Rice had requested over the summer that Mr. Negroponte become her deputy. But the decision languished for months as the White House sought an adequate replacement for the spy chief, and as Mr. Negroponte vacillated between remaining at the helm of an intelligence community that numbered roughly 100,000 people and a return to the State Department, in the shadow of the administration’s most visible international figure.

Senior administration officials said that Ms. Rice wanted Mr. Negroponte to focus on China and North Korea, which have been among his focuses in the intelligence post, and on Iraq, a country he knows particularly well.

Mr. Negroponte has also served as ambassador to the United Nations, Mexico, the Philippines and Honduras, in a Foreign Service career that spanned more than three decades. A senior administration official who was involved in discussions about his nomination said that Ms. Rice regarded him as a foreign policy moderate who could help fill the big voids left by the departure of Robert B. Zoellick, who stepped down as deputy secretary last summer, and Philip D. Zelikow, who left the job of State Department counselor last month.

Ms. Rice would continue to play a central role in Iraq policy, the official said, but she has also made it clear that she wants to devote more time to a broader diplomatic initiative aimed at Middle East peace.

Mr. Bush is expected to nominate Mike McConnell, a retired vice admiral and former chief of the National Security Agency, to be Mr. Negroponte’s successor.

John E. McLaughlin, a former director of central intelligence who is a friend of Mr. Negroponte, said that he managed to make the transition from career Foreign Service officer to the intelligence arena with little difficulty, but that Mr. Negroponte was now returning to the world where he felt most at ease.

Mr. McLaughlin said he believed that Mr. Negroponte’s familiarity with the latest intelligence from Iraq would help to bring a “realistic” view of the situation there as the administration works to develop a new strategy.

But other intelligence experts expressed concern about what Mr. Negroponte’s departure might mean to the office he helped to establish. “My major concern about this appointment is not about the State Department, but what happens at the D.N.I. office,” said Lee H. Hamilton, who served as co-chairman of both the 9/11 commission and the Iraq Study Group. “The future of that office and the concept of intelligence-sharing is on the line.”

Top Congressional officials responded angrily to the news of Mr. Negroponte’s departure.

“I think he walked off the job, and I don’t like it,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Just as Mr. Negroponte is leaving his post, his office is finishing a major National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s chances of surviving as a unified, independent country — a review that was commissioned only after a Congressional request over the summer, on a problem that Mr. Negroponte will have to help manage in his new post.

“He came into it after just a year in Iraq, and someone without a strong background in intelligence, and I think he is leaving awfully early, given the importance of getting this right,” said Robert Hutchings, the senior diplomat in residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, who once headed the National Intelligence Council.

“I think it is quite irresponsible,” he said.

Mr. Hutchings said the departure would compound “three or four years of nonstop turmoil” within American intelligence agencies.

Bush administration officials noted several successes during Mr. Negroponte’s tenure, most significant the creation and progress of the National Counterterrorism Center. Terrorism experts have credited the center with fusing information from across the intelligence community to understand better the global terrorism threat.

But as he assembled a staff of more than 1,500 people, he was criticized for simply adding another layer to a bureaucracy he was assigned to streamline. But some intelligence experts said that the criticism was unfair, and that the real blame rested with Congress for passing convoluted legislation that made bureaucratic bloat at the director of national intelligence office inevitable. Some critics say that the job of spy czar was never necessary to begin with. Some of those whom the White House first approached to take the job nearly two years ago — including Robert M. Gates, the newly installed secretary of defense — were deeply skeptical about whether that structure would work.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said that President Bush was “very impressed” with the job Mr. Negroponte had done.

One of the greatest difficulties of Mr. Negroponte’s position has been trying to wrest control over multibillion dollar spy satellites and other gadgetry from the Pentagon, which historically had been in charge of 80 percent of the nation’s intelligence budget.

One of the top priorities of the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, was to expand the Pentagon’s role in intelligence gathering, and some members of Congress say that Mr. Negroponte was not aggressive enough in bringing the Pentagon’s intelligence budget more under his control.

Some intelligence experts believe that Mr. Gates is likely to be less territorial than Mr. Rumsfeld was about the Pentagon’s intelligence functions, and may even be eager to cede some of the Pentagon’s authority to the new intelligence chief. Others said that the job of corralling 16 sometimes dysfunctional intelligence agencies is an often thankless task, and one where it is difficult to have a noticeable impact. Mr. Negroponte is said by associates to have grown particularly weary of clashes with members of Congress.

“I think it’s pretty telling that both Bob Gates and John Negroponte prefer jobs trying to bail us out of Iraq to the job of trying to fix U.S. intelligence,” said Amy Zegart, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and an expert in intelligence overhaul.

]]> 2007-01-05T05:05:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/global_affairs_in_2006/ {summary} Interviewee: Gideon Rose
Interviewer: Eben Kaplan
Foreign Policy Advisor
December 28, 2006


Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, speaks about the most important global issues facing the American public in 2006. Rose predicts that problems in the Iraq War will keep administrations in the near future from engaging in interventionism. But he also says the memory of 9/11 "will prevent any kind of retreat too far back into our own borders and into any kind of isolationism."


To hear this report CLICK HERE

]]> 2007-01-02T01:02:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/the_significance_of_saddam_gone/ {summary}
December 26, 2006
Prepared by: Lionel Beehner
Council on Foreign Affairs


Coming soon are two events worth noting that should affect the outcome of the war in Iraq: the hanging of Saddam Hussein and a major speech by President Bush in which he is expected to announce a strategy readjustment in Iraq.


The death of Saddam, whose appeal was rejected by the court (BBC), is expected to be viewed with relief by the bulk of Iraq’s population but scorned by the nation’s Sunnis. They say the trial was a political show, the court a product of an illegitimate U.S.-backed Shiite government. They are partially correct. Human rights groups heaped criticism on the court for its legal shortcomings and lack of security. Several international lawyers objected to staging the trial in war-torn Baghdad, preferring instead either an international or a hybrid tribunal (half international, half domestic). Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch condemned the court’s use of the death penalty, even for a tyrant like Saddam, because it violates international law. “[I]t is morally reprehensible to treat a helpless person in custody as a pawn, his life to be snuffed out for some utilitarian purpose,” says Roth in this CFR Online Debate. “That's true regardless of how awful his crimes may have been or how laudable the purpose of execution may be.”


Yet the court has received some praise. Michael P. Scharf of Case Western University School of Law commended the court’s opinion for its surprisingly detailed factual findings and sophisticated legal analysis. A Pentagon spokeman said Iraq’s judicial system "has followed its rules and processes and come up with its conclusion" (Reuters).


What effect, if any, Saddam’s death will have on the Sunni-led insurgency or the escalating internecine violence in Iraq remains unclear. Some experts say it might provide a needed boost to the government in Baghdad at a time of growing disunity and disfunction. Yet others say it could spark greater unrest among Iraq’s Sunni population (many who believe they make up some 60 percent, not 20 percent, of Iraq’s population, writes journalist Christian Caryl in the New York Review of Books) and dissuade them from joining a Shiite-run government. Moreover, it may further embolden Iraq’s Shiites and their various militias to ratchet up the reprisal killings agains their fellow Sunnis. Or, as The Economist speculates, Saddam's execution may have little impact. After all, according to its website, "the ongoing misery of daily killings is driven by many more forces than fighters loyal to their former leader."


Meanwhile, in January President Bush is expected to unveil his new strategy to win—or at least avoid losing—the war in Iraq. There is growing talk of a “surge” of some thirty thousand U.S. forces in Iraq to secure the capital, as suggested by Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Yet leading Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), promise to fight against any deployments of more U.S. forces to Iraq (AP).

]]> 2007-01-02T00:44:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/2006_in_retrospect/ {summary}
December 28, 2006
Prepared by: Eben Kaplan
Council On FOreign Relations


If history does not regard 2006 as a turning point in the Iraq war, it will almost certainly mark it as the year that President Bush realized he must change course. The growing chorus of calls for change reached critical mass in November, when Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in an election where foreign policy played an unusually important role. The fallout cost former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld his job.


In Iraq, 2006 witnessed the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which many experts cite as the start of that country’s civil war. Of course, the White House still refuses to use the term “civil war,” in large part because of what that kind of conflict means for American forces.


Then there were nuclear rumblings from the other two members of what President Bush once dubbed the “Axis of Evil.” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran had barely taken office at the outset of the year, but by the time he came to New York in September, most Americans recognized his face, though many still struggle to pronounce his name. North Korea’s induction into the nuclear club established a dangerous precedent for dealing with rogue states and cast serious doubts on nonproliferation efforts. Despite the surplus of worrisome news stories, Foreign Affairs Managing Editor Gideon Rose points out in a new CFR.org Podcast that the world survived another year without the threat of a great power conflict, which is “a major accomplishment by any historical standard.”


The dog days of summer turned dire this year when Israel invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Hezbollah militants who abducted a pair of Israeli soldiers. The aftermath left both sides licking their wounds. Meanwhile, Israel faced a threat on another front: Hamas won elections in January, making the U.S.-designated terrorist group the ruling party in the Palestinian territories. Hamas’ refusal to denounce violence or recognize Israel put a freeze on any attempts to resurrect the Mideast peace process.


Washington’s longtime tormentor Fidel Castro fell from the political scene with surprisingly little fanfare. Writing in Foreign Affairs, CFR Senior Fellow Julia E. Sweig explains the smooth transfer of power to Fidel’s brother, Raul, exposed the “willful ignorance and wishful thinking of U.S. policy toward Cuba.” As Castro’s star fell, that of his protégé, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, rose. A leftward trend (Foreign Affairs) swept across the Latin American political landscape, with Chavez-backed leaders in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador all taking or winning office in 2006, and Chavez himself winning reelection in December. Latin Americans living north of the Rio Grande grabbed headlines as well, speaking out on U.S. immigration policy and helping drive the American population past the three-hundred-million milestone.


Though driven from power in Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban reemerged as a powerful force in 2006. Though Taliban fighters still battle with American troops, those soldiers now fall under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s command after the alliance took charge of Afghan security over the summer.


China continued its rise in 2006, as it will in years to come. But China’s ascension became increasingly exotic as the People’s Republic expanded its influence throughout Africa and parts of Latin America. A rare summit of African leaders in Beijing served to strengthen business ties across much of the continent.


TIME broke with convention in deciding its 2006 ‘Person of the Year,’ bestowing the honor upon all the Internet users who generate content on sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, or their own blogs. The U.S. intelligence community caught on to the user-generated-content trend, launching its own so-called wiki, “Intellipedia.” But the decentralized nature of the Internet means it’s not just for the good guys; terrorists relied on the Internet as one of the primary means of spreading propaganda.

]]> 2007-01-02T00:42:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/climate_change/ {summary}
Council On Foreign Relations
June 2004


Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing policy-makers today. David G. Victor, a leading expert on environmental policy, takes a fresh look at this issue and persuasively marshals arguments for three distinct approaches to combat the problem, casting each as a presidential speech. A must-read for environmentalists, educators, and anyone else interested in the issue, Climate Change is a most useful reference in the growing public debate about how best to meet this environmental challenge.


Controlling the emissions that cause global warming will require societies to incur costs now, while uncertain benefits accrue in the distant future. These conditions make it hard to create successful policy, yet the longer policy shifts are put off, the more greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Even as a consensus grows that something must be done, there is no agreement on the best course of action. Climate Change begins with a memorandum to the president that explains the multidimensional nature of this critical issue. It then lays out three contrasting perspectives for dealing with climate change and concludes with an index of scientific reports, government speeches, legislative proposals, and further readings. Of the three speeches presented, the first emphasizes the ability of modern, wealthy societies to adapt to the changing climate. A second speech urges reengagement with the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change while demanding reforms to make Kyoto more effective. A third urges unilateral action to create a market for low-carbon emission technologies from the “bottom up,” in contrast with “top-down” international treaties such as Kyoto.


To Read the full report Click HERE]]> 2007-01-02T00:35:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/national_consequences_of_us_oil_dependency/ {summary} October 2006


Through most of the 1990s energy supplies were plentiful and prices were low. The Economist speculated about the political consequences of a world in which oil declined to $5 per barrel. U.S. foreign policy generally accorded little attention to energy, except in special circumstances such as the location of strategic pipelines in Central Asia.


In recent years, energy prices have surged. President George W. Bush, in this year’s State of the Union address, warned of an addiction to imported oil and its perils. Yet there is no consensus on what should be done to shake the addiction. Virtually everything concerning energy has changed—except U.S. policy.


The Council on Foreign Relations established an Independent Task Force to examine the consequences of dependence on imported energy for U.S. foreign policy. Since the United States both consumes and imports more oil than any other country, the Task Force has concentrated its deliberations on matters of petroleum. In so doing, it reaches a sobering but inescapable judgment: The lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting U.S. foreign policy and national security.


Lee Feinstein, John Deutch, David G. Victor, and Michael Gellert at a Task Force roundtable with Council members.
The Task Force goes on to argue that U.S. energy policy has been plagued by myths, such as the feasibility of achieving “energy independence” through increased drilling or anything else. For the next few decades, the challenge facing the United States is to become better equipped to manage its dependencies rather than pursue the chimera of independence.


The issues at stake intimately affect U.S. foreign policy, as well as the strength of the American economy and the state of the global environment. But most of the leverage potentially available to the United States is through domestic policy. Thus the Independent Task Force devotes considerable attention to how oil consumption (or at least the growth in consumption) can be reduced, and why and how energy issues must become better integrated with other aspects of U.S. foreign policy.


To Read the Full Report Click HERE

]]> 2007-01-02T00:22:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/extending_health_care_to_more_groups/ {summary}
A complete research report is available online from the RAND Corporation on this topic. To read it just click HERE.

]]> 2006-12-14T23:35:01-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/rand_corporation_report_on_us_labor_and_population/ {summary} HERE.


]]> 2006-12-14T23:14:00-06:00 http://www.therochesterdemocrat.com/index.php/weblog/madness_and_war/ {summary} Conn Hallinan | December 7, 2006


Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus http://www.fpif.org


In the 5th century BC, the Greek tragic playwright Euripides coined a phrase that still captures the particular toxic combination of hubris and illusion that seizes many of those in power: “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”


What other line could better describe British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent address to his nation's troops hunkered down at Camp Bastion, in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province? “Here,” Blair said. “In this extraordinary piece of desert is where the fate of world security in the early 21st century is going to be decided.”


While Blair was turning Afghanistan's arid south into the Armageddon of terrorism, the rest of the country was coming apart at the seams. Attacks by insurgents have reached 600 a month, more than double the number in March, and almost five times the number in November of last year.


“We do have a serious problem in the south,” one diplomat told Rachel Morarjee of the Financial Times on November 22, “but the north is a ticking time bomb.”


Suicide bombers have struck Kunduz in the north, where former U.S. protégé Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami organization are hammering away at the old Northern Alliance. The latter, frozen out of the current government following the 2001 Bonn Conference, is busy stockpiling arms and forming alliances with drug warlords. According to the Associated Press, opium poppy production is up 59%.


While Blair was bucking up the troops, their officers were growing increasingly desperate. Major Jon Swift, a company commander in the Royal Fusiliers told the Guardian that casualties were “very significant and showing no signs of reducing,” and Field Marshall Peter Inge, former chief of the British military, warned that the army in Afghanistan “could risk operational failure,” military speak for “defeat.”


The Brits don't have a monopoly on madness, however.


Speaking in Riga, Latvia on the eve of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting, President George Bush said, “I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete. We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.”


In the meantime, the Iraq War that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said would cost $50 billion at the most, was burning up more than twice that each year. The Pentagon just requested $160 billion in supplemental funds for the Iraq and Afghan wars for the remainder of fiscal 2007. Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz says the final costs may exceed $2 trillion.


Ghosts of Vietnam


It is sometimes hard to fathom the source of the Blair's madness, but there is no mistaking the origins of President Bush's brand of insanity: the American experience in Vietnam.


During his recent trip to that country President Bush said he thought the lesson of the Vietnam War was that “we'll succeed unless we quit.” In short, the United States lost the war in Vietnam because it “cut and ran,” a victim of a backstabbing press and a loss of will.


This particular myth is at the core of the administration's ideology. When things began going badly in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz immediately targeted the press. Wolfowitz mocked reporters for being afraid to go outside the Green Zone, while Cheney and Rumsfeld attacked the media for sabotaging the U.S. effort, just like it had in Vietnam.


The mythology that we “won” the Vietnam War on the battlefield but lost it at home is at the core of Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney's book, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics. Johnson is a fellow at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, Tierney is a professor at Swarthmore, and both are strong advocates for not withdrawing from Iraq.


The two men argue that the Viet Cong's 1968 Tet offensive was a military victory for the United States, but because the American press portrayed it as a defeat, the United States was eventually forced to withdraw.


But Tet was less a military battle than a political counterstroke aimed at American claims that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Bush is indeed correct in thinking that the Vietnam War is relevant for what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan; he just hasn't absorbed the lesson: people don't like foreign occupying armies and will fight to get them out.


“In the long run,” says military historian Jack Radey, “there will be more natives of the country ready to die for it than foreigners.” While armies can fight armies, they can't fight a whole people and they fall apart when they occupy a country that doesn't want them there. To overcome this problem, the U.S. military recently issued a blueprint for how to conduct a “friendly” occupation.


But occupation, says Radey, is what creates the problem. “If you go out to make the other side love you by lowering your guard, taking off your helmets, not pointing guns at everyone, and not running around in tanks, the other side gets a lot of easy shots at your guys. So you button up and shoot everything that moves, which means a lot of civilians die. Anyway you look at this you lose.”


War is Their Answer


To the Bush administration the solution to everything is more force. Some Democrats echo this argument when they call for more “boots on the ground” to finish the job.


From August 1964 to January 1973, the United States threw 8.7 million military personnel into Vietnam, pounded the country with more bombs than were dropped on World War II Europe, and killed at least three million Southeast Asians. “Frankly, we're going to just snow the place under with bombs,” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in 1966. “And I am doing it purposely to make them cry ‘stop.'”


They never did, and in the end the United States had no choice but to withdraw. Eventually we will have to do so from Iraq and Afghanistan as well. The only question will be how many more Iraqis and Afghans we kill and maim, and how many more young Americans will we bring home in caskets or wounded in body and mind? It's a Greek tragedy in the making.


Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org) columnist.


]]> 2006-12-11T16:11:00-06:00