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The U.S. Isn't as Free as It Used to Be

2010-01-20T00:17:00.002-04:00

By TERRY MILLER

The United States is losing ground to its major competitors in the global marketplace, according to the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom released today by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. This year, of the world's 20 largest economies, the U.S. suffered the largest drop in overall economic freedom. Its score declined to 78 from 80.7 on the 0 to 100 Index scale.

The U.S. lost ground on many fronts. Scores declined in seven of the 10 categories of economic freedom. Losses were particularly significant in the areas of financial and monetary freedom and property rights. Driving it all were the federal government's interventionist responses to the financial and economic crises of the last two years, which have included politically influenced regulatory changes, protectionist trade restrictions, massive stimulus spending and bailouts of financial and automotive firms deemed "too big to fail." These policies have resulted in job losses, discouraged entrepreneurship, and saddled America with unprecedented government deficits.
In the world-wide rankings of economic freedom, the U.S. fell to eighth from sixth place. Canada now ranks higher and boasts North America's freest economy. More worrisome, for the first time in the Index's 16-year history, the U.S. has fallen out of the elite group of countries identified as "economically free" by the objective measures of the Index. Four Asia-Pacific economies now sit atop the global rankings. Hong Kong stands in first place for the 16th consecutive year, followed by Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Every region of the world maintains at least one country among those deemed "free" or "mostly free" by the Index.

Columnist Mary O'Grady discusses the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom for 2010.

Some countries, notably Britain and China, have followed America's poor example and curtailed economic freedom. But many others—such as Poland, South Korea, Mexico, Japan, Germany and even France—have maintained or expanded economic freedom despite the global crisis. Ignoring the pressures of recession, these enlightened nations have continued to liberalize their economies, granting their entrepreneurs and consumers greater freedom. As a result, the average Index score dropped only 0.1 point in 2010. Eighty-one countries out of the 179 ranked recorded higher scores than in 2009.
These trends are important because study after study shows a strong correlation between economic freedom and prosperity. Citizens of economically freer countries enjoy much higher per-capita incomes on average than those who live in less free economies. Economic freedom also has positive impacts on overall quality of life, political and social conditions, and even on protection of the environment. Perhaps of most significance in these hard times, Index data indicate that freer economies do a much better job of reducing poverty than more highly regulated economies.

Associated Press

The public sector can't match the vitality of the private sector in promoting growth. Governments, even those that promise change, are primarily agents of the status quo. They tend to reflect the views and needs of those already holding political or economic power. Even democratic nations have their vested interests. Real change, however, can happen when those outside the mainstream have the freedom to try new things: new production processes, new technologies and new methods of organizing workers and capital.
It is common these days to dismiss as simpletons or ideologues those who speak in favor of the free market or capitalism. An honest assessment shows otherwise. Economic freedom, as represented in the Index of Economic Freedom, is a philosophy that rejects economic dogma, championing instead the diversity that follows when entrepreneurs are free to choose their own paths to prosperity.
The abiding lesson of the last few years is that the battle for liberty requires perpetual vigilance. President Obama professes desire to foster prosperity, environmental protection, poverty reduction and better health care. How ironic, then, that his economic proposals so consistently ignore or even undermine the one system—free enterprise capitalism—that has proven best able to achieve those goals.
Now America's once high-flying economy is barely crawling forward. Americans deserve better, and they can do better—as soon as they reverse course and start regaining the economic freedom that made America the most prosperous country in the world.
Mr. Miller is director of the Center for International Trade and Economics at the Heritage Foundation. He is co-editor, with Kim R. Holmes, of the "2010 Index of Economic Freedom" (471 pages, $24.95), available at heritage.org/index.

Why America and China will clash

2010-01-19T00:42:00.002-04:00

By Gideon Rachman

Published: January 18 2010 19:54 | Last updated: January 18 2010 19:54

Pinn

Google’s clash with China is about much more than the fate of a single, powerful firm. The company’s decision to pull out of China, unless the government there changes its policies on censorship, is a harbinger of increasingly stormy relations between the US and China.

The reason that the Google case is so significant is because it suggests that the assumptions on which US policy to China have been based since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 could be plain wrong. The US has accepted – even welcomed – China’s emergence as a giant economic power because American policymakers convinced themselves that economic opening would lead to political liberalisation in China.

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If that assumption changes, American policy towards China could change with it. Welcoming the rise of a giant Asian economy that is also turning into a liberal democracy is one thing. Sponsoring the rise of a Leninist one-party state, that is America’s only plausible geopolitical rival, is a different proposition. Combine this political disillusionment with double-digit unemployment in the US that is widely blamed on Chinese currency manipulation, and you have the formula for an anti-China backlash.

Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush firmly believed that free trade and, in particular, the information age would make political change in China irresistible. On a visit to China in 1998, Mr Clinton proclaimed: “In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is essential to the greatness of any nation.” A year later, Mr Bush made a similar point: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy ... Trade freely with the Chinese and time is on our side.”

The two presidents were reflecting the conventional wisdom among America’s most influential pundits. Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist and author of best-selling books on globalisation, once proclaimed bluntly: “China’s going to have a free press. Globalisation will drive it.” Robert Wright, one of Mr Clinton’s favourite thinkers, argued that if China chose to block free access to the internet, “the price would be dismal economic failure”.

So far, the facts are refusing to conform to the theory. China has continued to censor new and old media, but this has hardly condemned it to “dismal economic failure”. On the contrary, China is now the world’s second largest economy and its largest exporter, with foreign reserves above $2,000bn. But all this economic growth shows little sign of provoking the political changes anticipated by Bush and Clinton. If anything, the Chinese government seems to be getting more repressive. Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese dissident, was recently sentenced to 11 years in prison for his involvement in the Charter 08 movement that advocates democratic reforms.

Google’s decision to confront the Chinese government is an early sign that the Americans are getting fed up with dealing with Chinese authoritarianism. But the biggest pressures are likely to come from politicians rather than businessmen. Google is an unusual company in an unusually politicised industry. If the Googlers do indeed head for the exits in China, they are unlikely to be crushed by a stampede of other multinationals rushing to follow them. To most big companies the country’s market is too large and tempting to ignore. Despite Google, US business is likely to remain the lobby that argues hardest for continuing engagement with China.

The pressures for disengagement will come from labour activists, security hawks and politicians – particularly in Congress. To date, the Obama administration has based its policy firmly on the assumptions that have governed America’s approach to China for a generation. The president’s recent set-piece speech on Asia was a classic statement of the case for US engagement with China – complete with the ritualistic assertion that America welcomes China’s rise. But, after being censored by Chinese television in Shanghai and harangued by a junior Chinese official at the Copenhagen climate talks, Barack Obama may be feeling less warm towards Beijing. An early sign that the White House is hardening its policy could come in the next few months, with an official decision to label China a “currency manipulator”.

Even if the administration itself does not move, the voices calling for tougher policies against China are likely to get louder in Congress. Google’s decision to highlight the dangers of cyberattack from China will play to growing American security fears about China. The development of Chinese missile systems that threaten US naval dominance in the Pacific are also causing concern in Washington. Impending US arms sales to Taiwan are already provoking a dispute.

Meanwhile, protectionism seems to be becoming intellectually respectable in the US in ways that should worry China.

A trade war between America and China is hardly to be welcomed. It could tip the world back into recession and inject dangerous new tensions into international politics. If it happens, both sides will share the blame. The US has been almost wilfully naive about the connections between free trade and democracy. The Chinese have been provocative over currency and human rights. If they want to head off a damaging clash with America, changes in policy would be well advised.

gideon.rachman@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/rachman
Post and read comments at Gideon Rachman’s blog

Have You Seen this Man? An "Aged" Osama Bin Laden With Gray Hair, No Beard

2010-01-15T00:45:00.000-04:00

FBI Forensic Artists Produce Enhanced Mug Shot Photos of Top Terrorists.

Using sophisticated digital enhancement techniques, the FBI today published "aged progressed" mug shots of Osama bin Laden and 17 other top terrorists wanted by the U.S.

State Department, FBI Release Digitally Enhanced Photos Of Most Wanted Terrorist Suspects, Osama bin Laden

(State Department/FBI)

One version of bin Laden shows him with a full head of wavy gray and black hair, and a trim beard. No previous photo had shown him without a headdress covering his hair.
The second "aged processed" mug shot of bin Laden shows him with the long flowing beard that has been his trademark, although much grayer than previously seen.

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The FBI and the State Department, which administers the international rewards program called Rewards for Justice, said the enhanced photos were created by forensic artists at the FBI's crime laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
The FBI said its artists modified facial features and altered "grooming and cloth choices" in hopes the public might recognize bin Laden or any of the others.

"These new images are powerful examples of how advances in technology and science can be used to help find and bring to justice wanted persons," said Louis E. Grever, the head of the FBI's Science and Technology Branch.
Despite a $25 million reward for information on his whereabouts, U.S. officials say they have not had a confirmed sighting of bin Laden in more than eight years.
The full list of the aged photos can be seen at the State Department Web site www.rewardsforjustice.net.

Blaming Israel First

2010-01-13T01:00:00.001-04:00

Business as usual at the U.N.

BY Peter Berkowitz

January 18, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 17

Tel Aviv
With the possible exception of the U.S. armed forces, no military in the history of warfare has made greater efforts in the face of grave national security threats to avoid the use of force or has tried harder, when obliged to fight, to protect noncombatants than the Israel Defense Forces. With the possible exception of the U.S. armed forces, no military has investigated itself as rigorously as the IDF. With the possible exception of the U.S. judiciary, no courts have done more to hold their military accountable than Israel’s. And with the possible exception of America, no democracy has gone further in wartime to legitimize dissent than Israel.
It is therefore a bitter irony, fraught with consequences for the legitimacy of international law, that—with the same possible exception—no country’s military, judiciary, and democracy have been the target of greater vilification for alleged human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity than Israel’s.
The continuing controversy over the Goldstone Report is a case in point.
In April 2009, the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council appointed Richard Goldstone, judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to head a mission

to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.

On September 15, the mission released its 575-page report. The bulk was devoted to alleged Israeli misconduct in Operation Cast Lead, which aimed to stop the more than 12,000 rockets and mortars fired over eight years by Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups at civilian targets in southern Israel. The report firmly and in vivid detail accused the Jewish state of human rights violations, war crimes, and “actions” that “might justify a competent court finding that crimes against humanity have been committed.” Tentatively and briefly, the report also found that “it may be that the Palestinian combatants did not at all times adequately distinguish themselves from the civilian population” and that Palestinian rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli civilians “would constitute war crimes, and may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The document recommended that the Security Council require Israel and Palestinian authorities to report, within six months, on the investigations and prosecutions international law obliged them to carry out. Should Israel fail to make good progress, the report recommended that the Security Council refer the mission’s allegations to the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. The report’s recommendations concerning the Palestinian authorities were decidedly more tepid.
On November 3, the U.S. House of Representatives, by a vote of 344-36, passed a nonbinding resolution rejecting the report as “irredeemably biased.” Two days later, the U.N. General Assembly, by a vote of 114-18, adopted the report and sent it to the Security Council.
The Security Council has declined to take action. But damage has been done. By pervasively insinuating that Israel is no better than, and in some respects worse than, the terrorists it battles, the Goldstone Report hands Islamic extremists another propaganda victory. Credulous European and American intellectual and political elites have already casually imbibed the opinion that Israel deliberately attacked civilian targets to terrorize Palestinians and destroy the foundations of civilian life in Gaza.
Goldstone’s mission was suspect in Israel’s eyes from the outset. The Human Rights Council that commissioned it is disreputable. It includes among its 48 members China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; notwithstanding the gross violations of human rights of which many of its members are guilty, it has made a priority of condemning Israel. In addition, statements about Operation Cast Lead and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made before their appointments by two of Goldstone’s three mission colleagues—Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, and Hina Jilani, advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan—could reasonably be seen as prejudging Israel’s guilt. And from the General Assembly’s 1975 resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism to the International Court of Justice’s 2004 ruling that Israel’s security barrier violated international law and must be dismantled, Israel has learned to expect from international bodies hypocrisy, slander, and scorn for its security.
Consequently, the Israeli government’s decision not to cooperate with Goldstone, while still controversial in Israel, was understandable. The mission’s mammoth report, written in unseemly haste, confirmed Israel’s doubts.
A careful reading thoroughly discredits the Goldstone Report. So demonstrated Hebrew University philosophy professor and New York University law professor Moshe Halbertal, a distinguished man of the Israeli left who helped draft the IDF’s ethics code, in a devastating New Republic critique. Here, three examples of the report’s biased and unscrupulous analysis must suffice.
- First, it presents as settled that, despite completely withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, Israel remains under international law an occupying power with attendant obligations because it controls Gaza’s borders. In reality, the legal question is very much in dispute. Israel’s famously progressive and activist Supreme Court has ruled that the country no longer occupies Gaza. And as Col. (Ret.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s International Law Department, pointed out to me, even the International Committee of the Red Cross considers the question to be difficult and unresolved.
- Second, the report blames Israel for causing humanitarian suffering by imposing a blockade on Gaza. In the process it dismisses the heroic efforts the IDF made in the midst of last winter’s military operation that increased food, medicine, and fuel entering Gaza. Nor does it examine Hamas’s theft of these humanitarian supplies or exploitation of Israel’s daily humanitarian pauses to launch rockets at civilians in Israel and attack the IDF in Gaza. And the report fails to note that Egypt controls Gaza’s western border, imposing restrictions more severe than Israel’s—this although the mission itself entered Gaza through the Egyptian-administered Rafah crossing.

- Third, the report accuses Israel of violating the laws of war by killing more than 200 civilian Palestinian police officers. In so accusing, the report relied heavily on Palestinian testimony and ignored or dismissed openly available information showing that Hamas also assigned the police a military role and ordered them, in the event of a ground operation, to fight the IDF.
More generally, the Goldstone Report suffers from fatal methodological flaws. While subjecting Israeli accounts of wartime operations to hyper-exacting scrutiny and relentless skepticism, it routinely accepts Palestinian testimony of alleged Israel crimes at face value, rarely if ever wondering whether Gazans regarded representations to the mission as acts of resistance. This is of a piece with the report’s systematic failure to give due attention, as the laws of armed conflict direct, to military necessity, which in this case means the precautions feasible for reasonable IDF commanders to make in the harsh conditions of urban warfare against an enemy relentlessly striving to blur the distinction between civilians and combatants.
Finally, while the Goldstone Report goes to extravagant and irrelevant lengths to put Israel’s Gaza operation in context by discussing the larger sweep of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it barely mentions Hamas and glosses over the terrorism to which it is devoted. To understand Israel’s operation, however, it is crucial to grasp Hamas’s frequently reiterated determination to wage jihad to destroy Israel. It is also vital to appreciate that Hamas blatantly violates the laws of armed conflict by deliberately transforming Gaza City and other densely populated areas into military bases. From these locations, using its own people as human shields, Hamas launches its rockets and mortars at Israel’s civilian population—ensuring that Israeli operations aimed at ending those attacks will make Israel a killer of Palestinian civilians.

No doubt, like all armies, the IDF made errors in Operation Cast Lead. And in the infernal smoke and fire of asymmetric urban warfare its soldiers and officers may have committed crimes. In the short term, Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps continues to investigate allegations and to pursue substantial ones. A military task force established to examine the Goldstone Report’s allegations headed by Brigadier General Yuval Halamish expects to publish its findings at the end of January.
The long-term stakes, according to General Halamish, are high: “The fundamental problem applies not just to Israel but to all democratic nations—if they accept the Goldstone Report’s approach and conclusions, they will not be able to fight terror.”
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

U.S. Economy: Trade Gap Grows as Oil Prices Jump; Exports Climb

2010-01-13T00:58:00.002-04:00

By Courtney Schlisserman

Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The trade deficit in the U.S. widened in November more than anticipated as imports climbed faster than exports, pointing to a rebound in global demand that is fueling growth.
The gap expanded 9.7 percent to $36.4 billion, the highest level since January, from a revised $33.2 billion in October, Commerce Department data showed today in Washington. Imports increased 2.6 percent, reflecting a jump in oil prices, while exports rose to the highest level in a year.
Spending by American companies and consumers will continue to push up imports, while a 12 percent drop in the dollar since early March and growing economies overseas mean U.S. sales abroad may also improve. China’s move to cool its economy by raising bank reserve requirements caused stocks to tumble worldwide.
“There’s continued strong export growth ahead,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. “On the import side, it’s logical that if U.S. companies are no longer running down their inventories that they’re going to need to import more.”
Stocks dropped, depressed by lower-than-anticipated earnings at Alcoa Inc. and China’s actions. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index was off 0.7 percent to 1,139.52 at 11:14 a.m. in New York.
Median Forecast
Economists forecast the deficit would widen to $34.6 billion from a previously estimated $32.9 billion in October, according to the median of 76 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from gaps of $31 billion to $38.2 billion.
Excluding the influence of prices, which are the figures used to calculate gross domestic product, the trade gap increased to $40.7 billion in November from $38.3 billion the prior month. The average gap for the quarter so far, at $39.5 billion, is little changed from the third-quarter average of $39.4 billion, indicating trade will not have much influence on economic growth in the last three months of the year.
A rebound in global growth along with the dollar’s decline from a five-year high on March 5 against a basket of currencies from the nation’s biggest trading partners are fueling global demand for goods from companies like United Technologies Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc.
Exports increased 0.9 percent, the seventh consecutive gain, to $138.2 billion in November, reflecting increasing demand overseas for food and American-made automobiles and semiconductors.
Soybeans to China
Demand from China for American goods climbed to a record $7.3 billion, led by surging purchases of soybeans due to a drought in Argentina, according to the Commerce Department. The increase caused the U.S. deficit with the Asian nation to fall 11 percent to $20.2 billion.
American-made automobiles and parts, semiconductors and industrial machines were also in demand globally in November, today’s report showed. The increase in vehicle sales mainly reflects cross-border trade with Canada and Mexico to satisfy North American production.
United Technologies, the Hartford, Connecticut-based maker of Pratt & Whitney jet engines and Otis elevators, last month forecast 2010 per-share profit would increase in line with analyst estimates because of cost cuts and growth in emerging markets.
Contracts in Singapore
The company, which garners more than 60 percent of sales outside the U.S., sees improvement in regions including Asia, Chief Executive Officer Louis Chenevert told investors at a meeting on Dec. 10. The Otis unit announced two contracts Dec. 8 to supply, install and maintain 1,300 elevators in Singapore public housing.
Manufacturing in the U.S. expanded in December at the fastest pace in more than three years, the Institute for Supply Management said Jan. 4. Other reports showed factories in Europe and in China also strengthened last month.
Another report today showed confidence among U.S. small businesses decreased in December as the outlook for sales dimmed. The National Federation of Independent Business optimism index fell to 88, the lowest level in five months, the Washington-based group said.
The report signals that larger companies, which are more likely to benefit from growing global demand, are leading the U.S. economic recovery, said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York.
Jobs Outlook
“If this conjecture turns out to be correct, it could be another factor hampering the decline in unemployment, given the importance of small businesses to the job creation process,” Ryding said in a note to clients.
The need to prevent inventories from falling even more as sales improve, and the global economic rebound, which is pushing up commodity costs, are contributing to the increase in imports.
Imports advanced 2.6 percent to $174.6 billion. Today’s report estimated petroleum prices rose to $72.54 a barrel in November, the highest level since October 2008. The increase in costs more than offset a drop in volumes as the U.S. imported 245 million barrels in November, the fewest since February 1999.
Americans also bought more consumer goods, computers and telecommunications equipment from overseas, signaling a revival in overall demand and business investment.
To contact the reporter on this story: Courtney Schlisserman in Washington at cschlisserma@bloomberg.net

U.S. Shifts Iran Focus to Support Opposition

2010-01-09T00:50:00.003-04:00

By JAY SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran's government and moving to find ways to support Iran's opposition "Green Movement," said senior U.S. officials.
The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran's dissident forces, said the U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran's nuclear program.

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Sipa Press

The U.S. is seeking ways to help Iran's opposition, led by figures such as Mahdi Karroubi (pictured).

U.S. Treasury Department strategists already have been focusing on Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has emerged as the economic and military power behind Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In recent weeks, senior Green Movement figures -- who have been speaking at major Washington think tanks -- have made up a list of IRGC-related companies they suggest targeting, which has been forwarded to the Obama administration by third parties.
Names on the list include Iran's largest telecommunications provider, Telecommunication Company of Iran, which is majority-owned by the IRGC, and the Iranian Aluminum Co. A U.S. official involved in Iran said the administration wouldn't comment on whether it was acting on the information.
American diplomats, meanwhile, have begun drawing comparisons in public between Iran's current political turmoil and the events that led up to the 1979 overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi.
"In my opinion there are many similarities," the State Department's chief Iran specialist, John Limbert, told Iran-based listeners this week over U.S. government-run Radio Farda. "I think it's very hard for the government to decide how to react to the legitimate and lawful demands of the people."
Since the opposition movement's demonstrations recently peaked after the death of reformist Islamic cleric Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a number of Iran scholars in the U.S. said they have been contacted by senior administration officials eager to understand if the Iranian unrest suggested a greater threat to Tehran's government than originally understood.

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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

President Ahmadinejad

"The tone has changed in the conversation," said one scholar who discussed Iran with senior U.S. officials. "There's realization now that this unrest really matters."

In a signal of the White House's increased attention to Iran's political upheaval, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered over coffee at the State Department this week with four leading Iran scholars and mapped out the current dynamics, said U.S. officials. One issue explored was how the U.S. should respond if Tehran suddenly expressed a desire to reach a compromise on the nuclear issue. Mrs. Clinton asked whether the U.S. could reach a pact without crippling the prospects for the Green Movement.
U.S. allies are mixed in their response to the new focus. One senior Arab official said he told State Department officials this week they were deluded if they though Iran was close to experiencing a revolution reminiscent of the Shah's overthrow. "The IRGC has its hands on the Iranian people," the official said.
Israel, which faces the greatest security threat from Iran, says only widespread sanctions will effectively upend Tehran's current political leadership. "Many Israeli experts have concluded that expansive sanctions will widen the schisms between the Iranian government and its people," said Israel's ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren.
Senior U.S. officials stressed in interviews this week that President Barack Obama isn't moving toward seeking a regime change as its policy for Iran. Rather, these officials said, Washington remains committed to a dual-track approach of pursuing dialogue aimed at ending Iran's nuclear program while applying increasing financial pressure if the talks fail.
Both the Obama administration and the Iranian dissidents have been wary of any direct contacts, due to fears such meetings could provide ammunition for Tehran. The regime and its supporters continue to put harsh pressure on the Green Movement; on Friday, progovernment demonstrators shot at a car carrying a leading opposition figure, Mahdi Karroubi. He escaped without harm, his Web site reported later.
Still, the White House's re-evaluation of the Green Movement marks a significant evolution of Mr. Obama's Iran policy since demonstrators began openly challenging President Ahmadinejad's re-election in June, said diplomats and analysts.
"The Green Movement has demonstrated more staying power than perhaps some have anticipated," said a senior U.S. official. "The regime is internally losing its legitimacy, which is of its own doing."
The White House initially displayed caution in lending any vocal support to Iranian protesters, as many U.S. and European officials believed Tehran's security forces would quickly suppress any wide-scale dissent. U.S. officials repeatedly stressed over the summer that the U.S. was prioritizing efforts to negotiate with Iran on its nuclear program over any rapid push for democratic change.
The U.S. response was so timid that some Iranian protesters openly challenged Mr. Obama. "Obama, Obama -- either with us, or with them!" Tehran demonstrators were recorded chanting in November.
U.S. officials say that the White House's policy has shifted, in part, due to the surprising resilience of the Green Movement in the face of the pervasive crackdown.
The Obama administration has increasingly voiced support for human rights in Iran as the demonstrations have continued. Mr. Obama used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech last month to forcefully call for the respect of human rights and civil liberties.
U.S. officials cite the White House's public mourning of Mr. Montazeri's death as perhaps the pivotal step in trying to forge common cause with the opposition.
"Do we expect the current government to be overthrown? I wouldn't say that at the current time," said a senior State Department official. "But a crack can certainly grow over time."
Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

The Meaning of al Qaeda's Double Agent

2010-01-08T00:15:00.002-04:00

The jihadists are showing impressive counterintelligence ability that the CIA seems to have underestimated.

By REUEL MARC GERECHT

The recent death in Afghanistan of seven American counterterrorist officers, one Jordanian intelligence operative, and one exploding al Qaeda double agent ought to give us cause to reflect on the real capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency and al Qaeda.
The report card isn't good. America's systemic intelligence problems were partially on display in the bombing at the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost province. Worse, al Qaeda showed skill that had been lacking in many of its operations. In response, President Barack Obama will likely be obliged to adopt counterterrorist methods that could make his administration as tough as his predecessor's.
Professionally, one has to admire the skill of suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi's handlers. This operation could well have been months—if not longer—in the making, and neither the Jordanian intelligence service (GID), which supplied the double agent to the CIA, nor Langley apparently had any serious suspicion that al-Balawi still had the soul and will of a jihadist.
That is an impressive feat. The Hashemite monarchy imprisons lots of Islamic militants, and the GID has the responsibility to interrogate them. The dead Jordanian official, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, reportedly a member of the royal family, may not have been a down-and-dirty case officer with considerable hands-on contact with militants, but al-Balawi surely passed through some kind of intensive screening process with the GID. Yet the GID and the CIA got played, and al Qaeda has revealed that it is capable of running sophisticated clandestine operations with sustained deception.

Martin Kozlowski

Indeed, al Qaeda did to us exactly what we intended to do to them: use a mole for a lethal strike against high-value targets. In the case of al-Balawi, it appears the target was Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Ladin's top deputy. During the Cold War, the CIA completely dropped its guard in the pursuit of much-desired Cuban and East German agents. The result? Most of our assets were plants given to us by Cuban and East German intelligence. With al-Balawi supposedly providing "good" information about al Zawahiri and al Qaeda's terrorist planning, a salivating CIA and the GID proved inattentive to counterintelligence concerns.
Whereas al Qaeda is showing increasing proficiency, the same cannot be said for the CIA. Competent case officers can get duped by a good double. And the GID, whose skill has been exaggerated in fiction and film and by Hashemite-stroked American case officers, isn't a global service. Take it far from its tribal society, where it operates with admirable efficiency, and it is nothing to write home about.
The CIA uses the GID so often not because the Jordanians are brilliant but because the Americans are so often, at best, mediocre. The GID's large cadre of English-speaking officers makes liaison work easy with Langley, which has never been blessed with a large number of Arabic-speaking officers, particularly within the senior ranks.

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Language issues aside, the now-deceased chief of Base Chapman should have kept most of her personnel away from al-Balawi, and should never have allowed seven officers to get that close to him at one time. Traditional operational compartmentation clearly broke down.
It is also highly likely that all of the CIA officers at Chapman—and especially the chief of base, who was a mother of three—were on short-term assignments. According to active-duty CIA officers, the vast majority of Langley's officers are on temporary-duty assignments in Afghanistan, which usually means they depart in under one year. (The same is true for the State Department.) Many CIA officers are married with children and they do not care for long tours of duty in unpleasant spots—the type of service that would give officers a chance of gaining some country expertise, if not linguistic accomplishment.
Moreover, security concerns usually trap these officers into a limited range of contacts. Truth be told, even the most elemental CIA activity—meeting recruited agents or "developmentals" outside of well-guarded compounds—often cannot be done without contractor-supplied security. Without Blackwater, now renamed Xe, which handles security for Langley in Afghanistan, CIA case officers would likely be paralyzed.
The officers at Chapman were probably young. This isn't necessarily bad. As a general rule, younger case officers do better intelligence-collection work than older colleagues, whose zeal for Third World field work declines precipitously as their knowledge and expertise in CIA bureaucratic politics increases. But experience does breed cynicism, which doesn't appear to have been in abundance at the CIA base.
All of this reinforces the common U.S. military criticism of the Agency in Afghanistan and Iraq: It does not often supply the hard tactical and intimate personal and tribal portraits that military officers need to do their work. Army officers are generally among the natives vastly more than their CIA counterparts.
What does this all mean for President Obama? He did not come into office pledging to reform the CIA, only restrain it from aggressively interrogating al Qaeda terrorists. There is near zero chance that the president will attempt to improve the Agency operationally in the field. His counterterrorist adviser, John Brennan, is as institutional a case officer as Langley has ever produced. If Attorney General Eric Holder is so unwise as to bring any charges against a CIA officer for the rough interrogation of an al Qaeda detainee during the Bush administration, the president will likely find himself deluged with damaging CIA-authored leaks. Mr. Obama would be a fool to confront the CIA on two fronts.
But the president is likely to compensate for systemic weakness in American intelligence in substantial, effective ways. Mr. Obama has been much more aggressive than President George W. Bush was in the use of drone attacks and risky paramilitary operations. One can easily envision him expanding such attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Visa issuances, airport security, and perhaps even FBI surveillance of American Muslim militants are likely to become much tougher under Mr. Obama than under Mr. Bush. President Obama will, no doubt, continue to say empirically bizarre things about Guantanamo's imprisonment system creating jihadists, but his administration will now likely find another location to jail militants indefinitely. Too many of President Bush's released detainees have returned to terrorism.
National Security Adviser James Jones has already described the 21st century as the liaison century, where intelligence and security services cooperate energetically. The CIA has often compensated for its internal weaknesses through liaising with foreigners. President Bush and then Central Intelligence Director George Tenet kicked these relationships into hyper-drive after 9/11; President Obama is likely to kick them even further. Mr. Obama may have foreclosed the possibility of the CIA again aggressively questioning jihadists, but he's kept the door wide open for the rendition of terrorists to countries like Jordan, where the GID does not abide by the Marquess of Queensbury rules in its interrogations.
The deadly attack in Fort Hood, Texas, by Maj. Malik Hassan in November, the close call in the air above Detroit on Christmas Day, and now the double-agent suicide bombing in Khost have shocked America's counterterrorist system. Mr. Obama surely knows that one large-scale terrorist strike inside the U.S. could effectively end his presidency. He may at some level still believe that his let's-just-all-be-friends speech in Cairo last June made a big dent in the hatred that many faithful Muslims have for the U.S., but his practices on the ground are likely to be a lot less touchy-feely. This is all for the good. These three jihadist incidents ought to tell us that America's war with Islamic militancy is far—far—from being over.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

What Does the Detroit Bomber Know?

2010-01-07T00:48:00.002-04:00

The president's job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY

There was much to celebrate in the providential combination of an incompetent terrorist and surpassingly brave passengers and crew who saved 288 people aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day. There is a lot less to applaud in the official reaction.
Well-deserved mockery has already been heaped on the move-along-folks-nothing-to-see-here tone of the administration's initial pronouncements—from Janet Napolitano's "the system worked," to President Obama's statement that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was an "isolated extremist." This week brought little improvement.
The president acknowledged that the plot had been hatched in Yemen, but not without adding the misleading statement that Yemen faces "crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies." That Yemenis have to cope with "crushing poverty" is irrelevant here. Abdulmutallab is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker. Other jihadists, including the physician who blew himself up and killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan last week, and indeed the millionaire Osama bin Laden, prove that poverty does not beget terrorists. "Deadly insurgencies" is a half-truth, which omits the fact that the Yemeni government itself has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people—Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso—involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Then, too, there was the unfortunate metaphor chosen by a senior intelligence adviser to account for why a conspiracy helped along by at least two Guantanamo alumni had not been discovered before Abdulmutallab boarded the plane. There was, he said, "no smoking gun"—a clue one would expect to find after disaster strikes, not before. There were, as it happens, many smokeless but redolent clues lying about before the plane took off. These included Abdulmutallab's father's warning to the State Department that his son was being radicalized and had gone to Yemen; the one-way ticket purchased for cash; no luggage; and intercepted communication referring to a plot involving "the Nigerian" in Yemen.

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David Gothard

But it is not so much these gaffes as what they appear to reflect that gives serious cause for concern. Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from.

Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people—and with it our ability to find and neutralize them—is subject to rapid change.
Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above—he of the "no smoking gun"—that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution.
Whatever that official thinks he knows about the plea bargaining process, he certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process, assuming such a process ever gets started.
Holding Abdulmutallab for a time in military custody, regardless of where he is ultimately to be charged, would have been entirely lawful—even in the view of the current administration, which has taken the position that it needs no further legislative authority to hold dangerous detainees even for a lengthy period in the United States. Then we could decide at relative leisure where to charge him—whether before a military commission or before a civilian court. In Abdulmutallab's case, it would hardly make a difference, given the nature of most of the evidence against him. (Although potential disclosure of the body of intercepted communications that included reference to "the Nigerian" could prove problematic if the prosecution were to be brought in a civilian court.)
Those considerations, however, are entirely academic because Abdulmutallab was proceeded against—if that is the correct description—in a civilian tribunal where the first step was to get him a lawyer who promptly put an end to his disclosures. The point is less where Abdulmutallab will eventually be prosecuted than what use could have been made of him as an intelligence source. No consideration whatsoever appears to have been given to where Abdulmutallab fits in the foreign contingency operation (formerly known as the global war on terror) in which we are engaged.
Most recently we have had the promise of more rigorous searches at the airport, along with a White House summit meeting that featured a furrowed brow, an earnest injunction to "do better" at "connecting dots," an oddly benign reference to al Qaeda as our "agile adversary," and a promise to suspend the transfer of prisoners to Yemen because of the "unsettled" situation in that country, accompanied by an emphatic recommitment to closing Guantanamo.
What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as "war" and "Islamist terrorism," and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That's too bad, because the Constitution vests "the executive power"—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us.
There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.
Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

The Ramzi Yousef Standard

2010-01-06T00:23:00.002-04:00

The Administration has ways of making terrorists not talk.

The failed terrorist attack aboard Northwest Flight 253 is proving to be highly educational, not least about the Obama Administration and its pre-September 11 antiterror worldview. Yesterday, the White House reversed itself on repatriating Guantanamo detainees to chaotic Yemen, a step in the right direction. Now if it would only revisit its Ramzi Yousef standard for interrogating captured terrorists like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Ramzi Yousef, you may recall, was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who is now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison in Colorado. The Obama Administration likes to cite his arrest, conviction and imprisonment as a model for its faith that the criminal justice system is the best way to handle terrorist detainees.
"Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists. The record makes that clear," said President Obama last May 21 at the National Archives. "Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. He was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons."
On June 9, 2009, the Justice Department repeated the claim in a fact sheet arguing for handling terrorists in criminal courts:
"1993 World Trade Center Bombing: After two trials, in 1993 and 1997, six defendants were convicted and sentenced principally to life in prison for detonating a truck bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. One of the defendants convicted at the second trial was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the attack."

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Associated Press

A criminal case study.

The World Trade Center trials were successful in winning convictions, and they were understandable because at the time we didn't understand the war we were in. But more than a decade later, the real news in these Administration statements is what they don't claim: Whether Ramzi Yousef told U.S. interrogators anything of actionable value about al Qaeda and its future terror plans.

We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef's uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef's co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.
Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM's plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn't surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don't recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.
All of this is directly relevant to the Administration's rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.
John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism official, tried to defend the criminal indictment on the Sunday talk shows but mainly revealed the Administration's confusion about the law and the uses of interrogation. Asked by David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press" why Abdulmutallab wasn't named an enemy combatant, Mr. Brennan said, "Well, because, first of all, we're a country of laws, and what we're going to do is to make sure that we treat each individual case appropriately."
But there is nothing illegal about holding an enemy combatant indefinitely, as the Supreme Court has upheld and as the Obama Administration has argued in court.
When Mr. Gregory pressed about "additional intelligence that could be gleaned" by interrogation, Mr. Brennan replied:
"Well, first of all, we have different ways of obtaining information from individuals according to that criminal process. A lot of people, as they understand what they're facing and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, we're going to pursue that. So—and we are continuing to look at ways that we can extract that information from him."
A plea agreement? Mr. Brennan seems to be saying that now that he has a public defender, Abdulmutallab has clammed up. But the Administration might be able to coax him to talk if it offers him a lower sentence or some kind of other legal concession, even though he tried to kill nearly 300 people aboard an American airliner.
In other words, because the Obama Administration is loath to interrogate terrorists outside the criminal justice system, our only lever to get them to talk is offering a legal reprieve. This is bizarre to say the least, and self-destructive if it turns out that Abdulmutallab has information that could help prevent future attacks.
Mr. Brennan's other defense on Sunday was that the Bush Administration also prosecuted terrorists as criminals on occasion, in particular shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui. But Reid was captured only months after 9/11 when the system of military commissions wasn't in place, and Moussaoui's trial was a legal fiasco that took years to prosecute. In neither case did they provide intelligence that revealed anything close to what KSM did about al Qaeda.
The lesson of these cases, like that of Ramzi Yousef, is not that the criminal justice system can sometimes convict terrorists. It is that criminal prosecution is far less vital to U.S. security than is conducting the interrogations that can yield information that saves innocent lives.

Tehran Plans a Major Military Exercise

2010-01-04T01:08:00.002-04:00

Drill to Boost 'Defensive Capabilities' Coincides With Deadline Iran Has Set for West on Nuclear Offer

By CHIP CUMMINS

Iranian media on Sunday reported Tehran will conduct a large-scale defensive military exercise next month, coinciding with what government officials now say is a deadline for the West to respond to its counteroffer to a nuclear-fuel deal.
The commander of Iran's ground forces, Brig. Gen. Ahmad-Reza Pourdastan, said the drill will be conducted by Iran's army, in conjunction with some units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to improve "defensive capabilities," Press TV, the English-language, state-run media outlet reported.

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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A candlelight vigil in Frankfurt, Germany, on Sunday commemorates victims who died during antigovernment demonstrations in Iran.

The report follows comments by Iran's foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Saturday, challenging Western nations to decide by the end of the month on counterproposals Tehran has floated to an internationally brokered nuclear-fuel deal. In the counterproposals, Iran has said it would agree to swap the bulk of its low-enriched uranium for higher enriched uranium, but in small batches and on Iranian soil.

Iranian officials also have named Turkey as a possible venue to swap the fuel. Iran has separately suggested it would be willing to buy enriched uranium from a third party.
The U.S. and Western allies have dismissed the counterproposals outright. In autumn, negotiators from Iran, the U.S., France, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency hammered out a proposed deal in which Iran would agree to ship out the bulk of its uranium to Russia, where it would be enriched and shipped back for use in a medical-research reactor. But Iranian officials refused to endorse the deal, despite a U.S.-imposed year-end deadline for Tehran to show progress in talks.
An IAEA spokesman declined to comment on the latest Iranian statements.
A European diplomat said that on Monday, the diplomatic year begins with a "review of measures the international community can use to increase its pressure on Iran" to begin serious negotiations.
The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has said it would push for new sanctions against Iran early this year if Tehran didn't respond positively to the nuclear-fuel deal. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have suggested they would strike militarily if they thought Iran was nearing nuclear-weapons capability.
Mr. Obama has "begun talking to our friends and allies to consider the next step in this process," National Security Council Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said last week in Honolulu.
The U.S. is expected to push for United Nations-backed sanctions, despite uncertain support from Security Council members Russia and China. Washington is also consulting allies who might be willing to back sanctions outside the U.N., including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Arab support would further isolate Iran from some of its closest trading partners. While Iran and its Arab neighbors along the Persian Gulf have long had testy relations, Tehran depends on Arab Gulf states for significant trade -- in particular on the U.A.E.'s Dubai, a regional re-export hub.
Not all Arab neighbors are onboard with Washington's sanction plans. In a heavily attended security conference in Manama early last month, Bahrain's foreign minister said further Iranian sanctions wouldn't be fair.
"I think the people of Iran have had enough," Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa said to delegates, including Mr. Mottaki and top U.S. diplomats and military officials. Bahrain is a staunch American ally, hosting the U.S. Fifth Fleet.
Recent Iranian domestic unrest raises fresh challenges for the Obama administration in crafting any new sanctions. Officials must weigh measures that are tough enough to pressure the regime, but not too tough to enflame popular anger and shore up domestic support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The original, IAEA-backed fuel proposal was embraced by Washington because it was seen as a first step in a longer negotiating process over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Iran says it is pursuing peaceful energy, but many officials in the West suspect it's building weapons. The deal would have removed enough fissile material to delay the manufacture of any weapon for at least a short while.
Mr. Mottaki on Saturday said Iran would go ahead and produce and enrich its own fuel for the medical reactor if Western powers didn't agree either to swap the fuel or to sell it enriched uranium.
The U.S. has rejected any proposal other than the one hammered out with the IAEA.
"The IAEA has a balanced proposal on the table that would fulfill Iran's own request for fuel and has the backing of the international community," Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in an emailed statement.
—Elizabeth Williamson and David Crawford contributed to this article. Write to Chip Cummins at chip.cummins@wsj.com

Democrats' worst nightmare: Terrorism on their watch

2010-01-03T02:18:00.000-04:00

: The W.H. response to the attempt to blow up a flight to Detroit could rank as a low point for Barack Obama. Photo: AP

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer - since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

“The presidency is sometimes about symbolism and not just substance,” said Bob Shrum, who help craft Senator John Kerry’s response to the late-October message from Osama bin Laden that was a pivotal point in the 2004 campaign – and learned a painful lesson in the uneven political playing field on the question of terrorism, at least at that time.

“Kerry reacted perfectly, but it probably cost us the election,” said Shrum, who said he thought Obama had effectively changed course after his aides’ overconfident appearance on the Sunday shows following the attempted attack.

Obama’s campaign was intensely familiar with the danger a potential terror incident posed to any Democratic candidate, and all the more to one who lacked Kerry’s military service and foreign policy experience. They did everything they could to compensate with a high-profile Senate focus on nuclear disarmament and a set of graybeard validators to vouch for Obama’s readiness to lead.

A terror attack during the 2008 campaign, allies and former aides said, would have drawn a response similar to the posture he eventually took toward the financial crisis, one drawn from “Obama’s DNA,” in the words of an ally: To put politics aside, stand with the sitting president and to, ultimately, appear presidential.

The attack never came. Terrorism virtually disappeared as an issue, despite the best efforts of Obama’s opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, who had a distinct advantage over Obama on the issue because of his military experience. And Obama aced the politics of the campaign’s sole public crisis – the financial meltdown of September 2008 – projecting concern and solidarity, acting – as his advisers were at pains to point out – like a president should.
As president, Obama has been criticized by the left for adapting many Bush administration policies – on Iraq, Afghanistan, surveillance and secret detention. But when finally forced to confront national security situations directly, from a restive Iran to a near-miss attack, Obama’s characteristic caution has appeared tentative, and the vacuum he left was filled by a political food fight between Congressional Republicans and Democrats and, ultimately, his staff.

His staff’s first statement, released after Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, was informed of the news three hours after the suspect was taken into custody, was merely that the president was “closely monitoring” the situation and stressed that his schedule would not change.

The next day his aides informed reporters that he was continuing to receive updates from his top national security advisers and began to set the stage for press secretary Robert Gibbs to announce on the Sunday morning talk shows that Obama had ordered reviews of the terrorist watch-list system and airport security procedures.

But on Sunday Gibbs and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano also sought to reassure the traveling public that – despite questions about how the suspect had boarded the plane – the system of responding to a possible attack had “worked” after the fact. It was an understandable tone of reassurance for a country on the move because of the holidays. “Imagine if the president had freaked out,” the White House ally said, suggesting a dramatic Obama reaction could have provoked chaos in the air travel system.

But that was the moment when some Democrats began to grow concerned about the White House’s strategy.

The muted response, allies said, was aimed at denying al Qaeda a propaganda victory, and at demonstrating how little the terrorists can now disrupt Americans’ lives. “The president and his team have done a good job at handling the situation given the competing interests at play. He’s been forceful without the bellicose chest bumping of the last administration,” said Jim Manley, the chief spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “One thing he’s got going for him is Republicans have no credibility on this issue when their sending out former Vice President Cheney you know they’ve hit the bottom of the barrel.”

Still, the response failed to reckon with the intense public interest in a story of repeated government failures and a near-fatal attack. Not to mention that Americans and flight crews were on edge – as evidenced in the detainment of a man who was in an airplane bathroom for too long and who authorities released once they learned he was just a businessman who’d gotten ill. The White House, already feeling heat for its Christmas Day response, had a spokesman quickly issue a statement when the man was taken into custody.

In Obama’s effective absence, Republicans began sharply attacking the administration, producing a partisan stand-off critics say could have been avoided.

“They should have approached it as a national security emergency requiring a bipartisan response, not a political response,” said Doug Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “He absolutely should have interrupted his vacation and absolutely should have gone back to Washington, and convened a high-level, bipartisan meeting.”

White House aides have repeatedly said there was never any discussion about Obama returning to Washington. Because of secure communications systems and by staff he brought with him to Hawaii, including his National Security chief of staff, he was perfectly able to stay on top of the situation from his vacation home in Kailua.

Aides also say Obama wouldn’t necessarily be working more on the issue if he were back in Washington. Yet they made a point of announcing Thursday that he will hold a high-level Situation Room meeting with Cabinet secretaries and top intelligence and security officials on Tuesday, the day after he’s expected to return. It’s a meeting aimed at projecting his concern with the situation and insistence that it not recur.

But the listlessness of an initial response remains a puzzle, coming as it did during the same week Obama rushed off of the golf course in the middle of a game, his presidential motorcade screaming down a Hawaii highway at top speed to deliver one of his golf partners to the house where the friend’s son had cut his chin on a surfboard.
Explanations of Obama’s low-key reaction in the face of a terror attack include the characteristic caution of a president who resists jumping to conclusions and being pushed to action. They also include the White House’s belief – disproven repeatedly in 2009 – that it can evade the clichéd rules of politics, which include a suspicion of Democratic leadership on national security. Only Sunday night, when criticism of the system “worked” comment was not going away, did White House aides realize their approach was not working and that they needed to shift course.

Others note that Obama does not like to interrupt his vacations, and that this isn’t the first time his preference for staying in Hawaii – a hard place for a quick round-trip flight – has cost him politically. In 1999, as an up-and-coming Illinois senator, he challenged Rep. Bobby Rush in a Democrat primary race that came to focus tightly on gun violence after Rush’s son was shot.

Obama, in Hawaii, missed a key vote on state gun control legislation in the state legislature, and wrote an unusually defensive column in the Hyde Park Herald defending his missed vote.

“Unfortunately, on Monday, December 27 — during an extremely short trip to visit my grandmother — my 18 month-old daughter Malia came down with the flu. By Tuesday, my daughter was feeling worse. I discussed the situation with my wife, and we determined that it was not advisable to take an eight-hour, red-eye flight back to Chicago with a sick baby. I also decided that I could not leave my wife alone with my daughter without knowing the seriousness of the baby's condition, and without knowing whether they might be able to get a flight out of Hawaii before New Year's Day” he wrote.

“I take my responsibilities as a parent very seriously. We hear a lot to talk from politicians about the importance of family values. Hopefully, you will understand when your stale senator tries to live up to those values as best he can.”

Nobody really did. Obama was pilloried for missing the vote, and Rush crushed him in the primary, the only defeat of the future president’s political career.

Ten years later, once again in Hawaii, Obama has not shown any public defensiveness about the growing chorus of critics. Indeed the only instance in which he addressed the criticism in the two five-minute statements he has delivered since the attempted attack occurred was to defend Napolitano. In his first statement, however, he made the case for not paying the attempted suicide bomber too much mind.

“The American people should remain vigilant, but also be confident,” Obama said December 28. “Those plotting against us seek not only to undermine our security, but also the open society and the values that we cherish as Americans. This incident, like several that have preceded it demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.”

Christmas day's recycled terrorists

2009-12-30T02:20:00.000-04:00

Releases from Gitmo are coming back to haunt us

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

With reports appearing that former Guantanamo detainees played a role in the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253, President Obama's plan to shutter the facility, putting detainees back on the streets, doesn't look so popular. Nor should it. Every released detainee has the potential for political and literal blowback.
Details are sketchy, but this much we know. On Jan. 24, Guantanamo alumni Mohammed Atiq Awayd al-Harbi (aka al-Awfi, or detainee No. 333) and Said Ali al-Shiri (detainee No. 372), both from Saudi Arabia, appeared in a video announcing their leadership roles in the newly formed al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This was the same organization that recruited Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Under intense pressure, the Bush administration released the two men to Saudi custody in 2007; they went through Saudi jihadist deprogramming before being released into the population. It did not take. "By God, our imprisonment [in Guantanamo] has only made us more resilient and more committed to our principles that we had fought jihad and been taken prisoners for," al-Shiri said. The al Qaeda video was released within days of Mr. Obama's ordering the facility closed and was viewed widely as a pointed rebuke of the president's gesture.
It is unlikely that al-Awfi had anything to do with the plot because he turned himself back into Saudi authorities in February. Al-Shiri, however, may have had a direct role in the bomb plot because Mr. Abdulmutallab was in Yemen from August to early December, according to the Yemenis. Al-Shiri reportedly was killed in an American-assisted air strike there on Dec. 24, the second of two rounds of bombings in as many weeks personally ordered by Mr. Obama.
The Christmas Day bombing plot became al Qaeda's attempt at payback. "We are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of God," an al Qaeda member declared at a large public gathering on Dec. 21. It is possible that al-Shiri helped plan an operation that turned into revenge for his own death.
The Guantanamo connection to the Christmas Day attack has prompted some liberal commentators to blame President George W. Bush for the incident. Indeed, the Bush administration released hundreds of detainees, some because they were innocent people caught in the dragnet, some because they no longer had intelligence value, and some, like al-Shiri and al-Awfi, under determined pressure from the Democratic Congress. However, if Mr. Bush's critics had their way, these characters would not have been rounded up in the first place.
Liberals are being forced to deal with the cognitive dissonance conjured by the inconvenient truth that Mr. Bush freed al-Shiri from detention and Mr. Obama hunted him down and killed him. We support the targeted killing program because it is the only aspect of Mr. Obama's national security strategy that is reaping concrete benefits. The "blame Bush" mantra, however, is simply a way for Mr. Obama's left-wing supporters to avoid asking hard questions about the future of terrorist detainees.
Meanwhile, potential reinforcements continue to flow to the region under the president's detainee-release program. On Dec. 20, six Yemenis arrived in the country, shortly to rejoin the general population and perhaps later to capture global headlines. This is no way to run a war or, rather, as the Obama administration would have it, an "overseas contingency operation."

'Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants planning attacks from Yemen'

2009-12-30T01:04:00.002-04:00

(Reuters)

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab

Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants are planning terror attacks from Yemen, the country’s Foreign Minister said today.
Abu Bakr al-Qirbi appealed for more help from the international community to help to train and equip counter-terrorist forces.
His plea came after an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day airliner bomb plot.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, alleged to be behind the attempt to blow up an American-bound aircraft, spent time in Yemen with al-Qaeda and was in the country only days before the failed attack.
Dr al-Qirbi said: “Of course there are a number of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders. We realise this danger.
“They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit. There are maybe hundreds of them — 200, 300.”
Dr al-Qirbi said it was the “responsibility” of countries with strong intelligence capabilities to warn states such as Yemen about the movements of terror suspects.
The United States, Britain and the European Union could do a lot to improve Yemen’s response to militants on its own soil, he added.
“We have to work in a very joint fashion in partnership to combat terrorism,” he said. “If we do, the problem will be brought under control.
“There is support, but I must say it is inadequate. We need more training, we have to expand our counter-terrorism units and provide them with equipment and transportation like helicopters.”
Mr Abdulmutallab is said to have told US agents that there were more people “just like him” ready to carry out attacks.
An al-Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility yesterday for the failed attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit as US President Barack Obama pledged to hunt down the plotters.
Photographs apparently showing the underpants worn by alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and willed with explosives were broadcast today by ABC News.
The American government pictures show the singed underwear with a six-inch packet of a high explosive called PETN sewn into the crotch, the US network reported.
Mr Abdulmutallab was reported to be carrying about 80g of PETN, more than one-and-a-half times the amount carried by Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, in 2001 and enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft.
Mr Abdulmutallab’s former tutors at University College London, where he was a student between 2005 and 2008, described him as “well-mannered, quietly spoken, polite and able” and said that he never gave any cause for concern. He was president of the institution’s Islamic society between 2006 and 2007.
Nigerian-born Mr Abdulmutallab is being held at a federal prison in Michigan on a charge of trying to destroy an aircraft.
He apparently wrote of his loneliness and struggle between liberalism and Islamic extremism in a series of postings on Facebook and in Islamic chatrooms, The Washington Post reported today.
In January 2005, when he was attending boarding school, he wrote: “I have no one to speak too. No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”
Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, said it was unlikely that Mr Abdulmutallab acted alone and revealed that he was banned from entering Britain and placed on a “watch list” this year.
Mr Johnson said that the alleged terrorist was refused a new visa and had been monitored since May after applying for a bogus course.

Terror Watch Lists Come Under Scrutiny

2009-12-28T02:22:00.002-04:00

By CAM SIMPSON, EVAN PEREZ and SIOBHAN GORMAN

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's order to review the databases used to track terrorism suspects and keep them off airplanes comes amid growing concerns about those systems from lawmakers in both parties.
Lawmakers questioned watch-list policies Sunday after a Nigerian man who had been on such a list tried unsuccessfully to bring down a trans-Atlantic jetliner carrying 278 people Christmas Day.
"We have to have a better process to decide which people to move to the 'no-fly' list and which" should have secondary screening at airports, Rep. Jane Harman (D., Calif.), chairwoman of a House homeland security subcommittee on intelligence, said in an interview. "This is a learning experience. There was a failure."

The Flight 253 Bomb Attempt

The databases used for such tracking are managed by numerous intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security. They have been criticized for being overly broad -- barring musicians, lawmakers and toddlers from jetliners -- and for not being broad enough to keep suspected radicals out of the U.S., or off planes.
Officials said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old suspect, received a visa at a U.S. consular outpost in London in 2008 allowing him to repeatedly enter the U.S. as a tourist.
In November 2009, officials said he was added to an entry-level, or preliminary, terrorism watch list maintained by the government. That came after his father warned officials at the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria that the young man had become radicalized by Islamic extremists. The father also warned that his son might be in contact with terrorist groups.
Mr. Abdulmutallab's entry onto the first list, called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, essentially meant U.S. intelligence officials had opened a file on him, authorities said. There are more than 550,000 names on that list, which are shared across the government.
But authorities didn't have enough credible or derogatory information to elevate him to a narrower, more serious list of terrorism suspects, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday on NBC. "We did not have the kind of information that under the current rules would elevate him," she said.
Lawmakers want to know why his entry into the first terrorism database didn't automatically prompt a review of his visa status, or why he didn't get more serious scrutiny, which could have led to him being elevated.
With more screening, Mr. Abdulmutallab could have landed in a smaller database of 400,000 names, called the Terrorist Screening Data Base, the main database on international terrorism within the U.S. government, officials said.
That list is maintained by an multiagency group managed by the FBI. It is supposed to contain names of individuals who are "known or reasonably suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of or related to terrorism," according to an FBI Web site.
With additional scrutiny Mr. Abdulmutallab also might have been added to the roughly 14,000-person database maintained by the Transportation Security Administration called the "Selectee" list. Those people are supposed to be automatically selected for intensified, secondary screening at airports.
The next step up is the so-called no-fly list, which contains fewer than 4,000 names of people who are banned from jetliners.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R., Mich.) said Sunday in an interview that serious alarm bells should have sounded after Mr. Abdulmutallab's father went to U.S. authorities. "Within the intelligence community, I would think this would have gone right to the top of the pile, saying, 'We've got to look at this guy,'" Mr. Hoekstra said.
Write to Cam Simpson at cam.simpson@wsj.com, Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com

The Real Rules of War

2009-12-23T01:07:00.002-04:00

Sometimes the good guys do commit 'war crimes.'

By WARREN KOZAK

Five years ago, a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.
This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.
This incident and its twisted irony takes me back to an oddly serene setting many years ago. When I was in college, I joined my parents on a trip to retrace my father's wartime experience in Europe. We drove from France, through Holland and Belgium and on to Germany—the same route he had taken with the U.S. Army in 1944-45. At a field outside the Belgian town of Malmedy, we got out of our rented car where my father described something I had never heard before.
During the Battle of the Bulge, in the bleak December of 1944, the Germans had quickly overrun the American lines. They took thousands of prisoners as they pushed through in a last chance gamble to turn the war around. One unit, part of the First SS Panzer Division, had captured over a hundred GIs. They were moving fast, and they didn't care to be burdened by prisoners. So the SS troops put the American soldiers in that field and mowed them down with machine guns.
Around 90 Americans were killed in that barrage. The Germans then walked through the tangle of bodies, shooting those who were still alive in the back of the head. The few that survived were brought to where my father was located in the nearby town of Liege where word of the massacre quickly spread.
My father was never a talker. And in spite of the fact that we were on a trip to look at his past, he didn't open up much, or couldn't. When I asked him what the reaction was among the U.S. troops, he answered without emotion: "We didn't take prisoners for two weeks." I immediately understood what he meant, and had the sense not to press the issue any further. I just looked out at the field, now green and peaceful on a beautiful summer day, and realized he was looking at the same field and seeing something quite different.
In the weeks following the Malmedy massacre, U.S. troops clearly broke the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Justified or not, they were technically guilty of war crimes.
My guess is that the American correspondents imbedded with those troops knew all about this and chose not to report it. So did their officers. They understood the gravity of the war, as well as the absolute importance of its outcome. And they understood that disclosing this information might ultimately help the enemy. In other words, they used common sense. Was the U.S. a lesser country because these GIs weren't arrested? Was the Constitution jeopardized? Somehow it survived.
You don't have to dig too deep to understand that war brings out behavior in people that they would never demonstrate in normal life. In Paul Fussell's moving memoir, "The Boys' Crusade," the former infantryman relates a story about the liberation of Dachau. There were about 120 SS guards who had been captured by the Americans. Even though the Germans were being held at gunpoint, they still had the arrogance—or epic stupidity—to continue to heap verbal abuse and threats on the inmates. Their American guards, thoroughly disgusted by what they had already witnessed in the camp, had seen enough and opened fire on the SS. Some of the remaining SS guards were handed over to the inmates who tore them limb from limb. Another war crime? No doubt. Justified? It depends on your point of view. But before you weigh in, realize that you didn't walk through the camp. You didn't smell it. You didn't witness the obscene horror of the Nazis.
Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone's behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won't ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?
In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. "I have always felt," Capt. Tonkin said, "that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can't."
Mr. Kozak is the author of "LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay" (Regnery, 2009).

The Peoples' Revolt in Iran

2009-12-22T00:22:00.002-04:00

The regime is losing legitimacy, even as Obama engages it.

The foundation stones of Iran's Islamic Republic were shaken again yesterday, showing that the largest antigovernment movement in its 30 years may be one of the biggest stories of next year as well. Now imagine the possibilities if the Obama Administration began to support Iran's democrats.
The perseverance of the so-called Green Movement is something to behold. Millions of Iranians mobilized against the outcome of June's fraudulent presidential election, and their protests were violently repressed. But the cause has only grown in scope, with the aim of many becoming nothing less than the death of a hated system.
Yesterday offered a glimpse into the regime's crisis of legitimacy. As in the waning days of the Shah in the late 1970s, Iranians merely need an excuse to show what they think of their rulers. The funeral of a leading Shiite cleric who'd inspired and guided the opposition brought out tens to hundreds of thousands to Iran's religious capital of Qom. Media coverage is severely restricted, but the demonstration's size was impossible to deny.

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Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who died Sunday, was no ordinary religious figure. He stood alongside the leader of the Islamic Revolution, his mentor Ayatollah Khomeini, and he was handpicked to replace him. But Montazeri broke with the ruling mullahs in the late 1980s, criticizing their violence and repression. And in recent months, he became a spiritual leader to the opposition.

He knew the regime intimately: "A political system based on force, oppression, changing people's votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate," he wrote.
Ailing at his death, Montazeri leaves behind a legacy Iranian modernizers can build on. Like the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, he believed that the Shiite clergy should stay out of democratic politics. He also helped shape views on Iran's nuclear program. In October, Montazeri issued a fatwa against developing an Iranian bomb. His statement confirmed the view among Green Movement figures who believe an atomic weapon will only consolidate the regime's hold on power and isolate Iran.

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Absent religious legitimacy for the so-called Islamic Republic, the current rulers must rely on blunt means of preservation, such as the elite Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji militias. Thus Iran seems to be morphing into a military dictatorship, not unlike the Poland of Wojciech Jaruzelski after the "workers"—the supposed communist vanguard—turned against that regime.
Relying on thugs carries risks. During the summer protests, many protestors were killed, tortured and raped in the regime's jails. Among the dead is the son of a prominent conservative parliamentarian. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei sought to damp public outrage by closing the most notorious prison at Kahrizak, but pressure has continued to build. Reversing months of denials, the government on Saturday acknowledged the abuses, bringing charges against 12 military officials for the murder of three young protestors this summer.
Previously a neutral broker in Iranian politics, Khamenei undermined himself by siding so openly with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after June's elections. The decision to prosecute, which he would have had to sign off on, may be another miscalculation. A trial could help expose the corruption at the heart of this system.
(Another Polish parallel comes to mind: The 1984 trial of the secret policemen who murdered the pro-Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, that further hurt that government's credibility.)
Which brings us to President Obama. Throughout this turbulent year in Iran, the White House has been behind the democratic curve. When the demonstrations started, Mr. Obama abdicated his moral authority by refusing to take sides, while pushing ahead with plans to negotiate a grand diplomatic bargain with Mr. Ahmadinejad that trades recognition for suspending the nuclear program.
Mr. Obama has since moved at least to embrace "universal values," and in his Nobel address this month he mentioned the democracy protestors by name. The White House yesterday sent condolences to Montazeri's friends and family, which is what passes for democratic daring in this Administration.
But the White House is also still pleading for talks even as its December deadline passes without any concession from Tehran. Meantime, the Iranian opposition virtually begs Washington not to confer any legitimacy on the regime, and the democracy demonstrators crave American support. Iran's civil society clock may now be ticking faster than its nuclear clock. However hard it may be to achieve, a new regime in Tehran offers the best peaceful way to halt Iran's atomic program. Shouldn't American policy be directed toward realizing that goal?

Iranian Scorecard

2009-12-18T00:56:00.000-04:00

The Administration opposes a bipartisan sanctions bill.

In his Inaugural address, President Obama promised the world's dictators—with Iran plainly in mind—that he would "extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." Here's a status report on the mullahs' knuckles:
• Weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, Iran tested a new version of its Sajjil-2 medium-range ballistic missile, a sophisticated solid-fuel model with a range of 1,200 miles—enough to target parts of Eastern Europe.
Also this week came news that Western intelligence agencies have an undated Farsi-language document titled "outlook for special neutron-related activities over the next four years." It concerns technical aspects of a neutron initiator, which is used to set off nuclear explosions and has no other practical application. The document remains unauthenticated, and Iran denies working on a nuclear weapon. But it squares with accumulating evidence, from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other sources, that Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons design and uranium enrichment.
• Support for terrorists. Iran also continues to supply Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon with weapons and money, and there's reason to suspect the help extends to Colombia's terrorist FARC. Centcom Commander David Petraeus told ABC News Wednesday that Iran "provides a modest level of equipment, explosives and perhaps some funding to the Taliban in western Afghanistan." As for Iraq, he says, "there are daily attacks with the so-called signature weapons only made by Iran—the explosively formed projectile, forms of improvised explosive devices, etc."
• Political gestures. Isolated regimes sometimes signal their desire for better relations through seemingly small gestures: ping-pong tournaments, for instance. Tehran has taken a different tack.
On Monday, it announced that three American hikers arrested along its border with Iraq in July would be put on trial. The charge? "Suspicious aims." New charges were also brought last month against Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who was already sentenced to at least 12 years in prison on espionage charges. The regime has been going after other foreign nationals, including French teacher Clotilde Reiss, who is living under house arrest in the French embassy in Tehran. Christopher Dickey notes in Newsweek that "since [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad took over four years ago, some 35 foreign nationals or dual nationals have been imprisoned for use as chump change in one sordid deal or another."

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Associated Press

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

• Diplomacy. In October, the U.S. and its allies offered to enrich Iran's uranium in facilities outside the country, supposedly for the production of medical isotopes. The idea was that doing so would at least reduce Iran's growing stockpile of uranium and thus postpone the day when it would have enough to rapidly build a bomb.

Tehran finally came back with a counterproposal late last week, in which no uranium would leave Iranian soil. Even Hillary Clinton admits it's a nonstarter: "I don't think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians," the Secretary of State told reporters.
Given those remarks, we would have imagined that Mrs. Clinton would take it as good news that on Tuesday the House voted 412-12 in favor of a new round of unilateral sanctions on Iran. The Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act would forbid any company that does energy business with Iran from having access to U.S. markets.
Instead, last week Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg wrote to Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry urging that the Senate postpone taking up the House bill. "I am concerned that this legislation, in its current form, might weaken rather than strengthen international unity and support for our efforts," wrote Mr. Steinberg.
So let's see: Iran spurns every overture from the U.S. and continues to develop WMD while abusing its neighbors. In response, the Administration, which had set a December deadline for diplomacy, now says it opposes precisely the kind of sanctions it once promised to impose if Iran didn't come clean, never mind overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. For an explanation of why Iran's behavior remains unchanged, look no further.

Americans Oppose Closing Gitmo, Moving Prisoners to U.S.

2009-12-17T00:28:00.002-04:00

Support is 8% among Republicans, 28% among independents, and 50% among Democrats

by Frank Newport

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans remain opposed to closing the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and moving some of the terrorist suspects being held there to U.S. prisons: 30% favor such actions, while 64% do not. These attitudes could present a significant roadblock for President Obama at a time when he seeks congressional approval to move terrorist suspects from Guantanamo to a converted state prison in northwestern Illinois.

President Obama signed an executive order after his inauguration that called for the closing of Guantanamo, and he recently reiterated his commitment to doing this in his West Point speech on Afghanistan. The plans announced this week represent the first concrete effort to follow through on his promise, but occur in the context of continuing opposition from the American public. About two-thirds of Americans in the Nov. 20-22 poll oppose such a move, virtually the same as measured last May.

"An additional political challenge for Obama is the fact that he lacks strong support among rank-and-file Democrats as well. Half of Democrats agree that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed and some prisoners moved to the U.S., while 45% disagree."

Republicans on Capitol Hill this week have been highly vocal in their negative responses to the proposed move. Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, for example, was quoted as saying, "The administration has failed to explain how transferring terrorists to Gitmo North will make Americans safer than keeping terrorists off of our shores in the secure facility in Cuba."
McConnell and the other GOP lawmakers who have spoken out against the move are clearly representing the sentiments of rank-and-file Republicans across the country, only 8% of whom favor closing the prison and moving prisoners to the U.S.

An additional political challenge for Obama is the fact that he lacks strong support among rank-and-file Democrats as well. Half of Democrats agree that the Guantanamo Bay prison should be closed and some prisoners moved to the U.S., while 45% disagree. Twenty-eight percent of independents favor the prison closure. These partisan breaks are similar to what Gallup found in May.
The prison the Obama administration has proposed taking over and converting to a home for Guantanamo terrorist suspects is in northwestern Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Iowa. Local leaders in that area have applauded the decision, which would reportedly bring hundreds of millions in new revenue to the region, along with many new jobs.
The area potentially affected by the moves is a small part of the larger Midwestern region of the country, where there is slightly higher acceptance of the decision on Guantanamo prisoners than occurs elsewhere in the country. Support is slightly lower in the South. These differences are not substantial.

Implications
President Obama's announcement this week that he plans to move terrorist suspects to Illinois from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay represents a follow-through on his stated intention to ultimately close the Guantanamo prison.
The implementation of his plan will require congressional approval, since current law prohibits bringing Guantanamo prisoners into U.S. territory unless they are being put on trial. Congressional lawmakers voting on the plan to bring terrorist suspects now housed at Guantanamo to the U.S. will generally be doing so in the context of significant opposition from their constituents, thus potentially reducing the chances that the president will be able to get quick House and Senate approval for his proposal.

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Survey Methods
Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,017 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Nov. 20-22, 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points.
Interviews are conducted with respondents on land-line telephones (for respondents with a land-line telephone) and cellular phones (for respondents who are cell-phone only).
In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Democracy Under Arrest

2009-12-16T01:01:00.002-04:00

'Universal' human- rights law never seems to apply to the likes of Kim Jong Il.

By JOHN BOLTON

'Universal jurisdiction" sounds like a term plucked from obscure international law journals, but it has pernicious and profoundly antidemocratic consequences in the real world. A British arrest warrant, issued over the weekend in London for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, shows precisely why.
The warrant charged Ms. Livni—the current leader of the Knesset opposition—with war crimes allegedly committed by Israeli forces during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter. Ms. Livni and other Israeli leaders have always staunchly defended their operation against Hamas, and the arrest warrant was withdrawn Monday when it became clear Ms. Livni would not be in Britain as previously scheduled. But the fallout from this misguided warrant will linger long after it fades from the headlines.
Universal jurisdiction originated centuries ago to deal with hostes humani generis ("the enemies of all mankind") such as pirates or slavers, who were not under any state's control but legitimately concerned them all. It has grown explosively in recent years, as self-styled human-rights advocates have pushed to criminalize national actions that they find offensive.

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Today's version of universal jurisdiction masquerades as a legal concept, but is in fact a form of political morality. It empowers prosecutions in states with little or even no connection to alleged offenses such as war crimes and gross abuses of human rights. And in many countries, as in Britain, the ability of private citizens to trigger the criminal process only adds to the danger of politicized prosecutions.
When leaders of constitutional, representative governments are targets, there is simply no argument for applying universal jurisdiction. Ms. Livni and her colleagues won free and fair Israeli elections, and were in fact defeated in subsequent free and fair elections. Israel's laws have been adopted by democratically elected Knesset members and enforced by an independent judiciary. If crimes under Israeli law have been committed, they can be prosecuted by Israel's courts. Same goes for the United States.
Augusto Pinochet's 1999 arrest in Britain on a Spanish warrant for offenses committed while overthrowing Chile's Salvadore Allende first brought universal jurisdiction global prominence. But Pinochet's arrest was followed by Belgium's toying with the idea of arresting Donald Rumsfeld for having the temerity to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels. Now Ms. Livni and other Israeli officials involved in recent regional conflicts are subject to potential arrest and trial if they travel beyond Israel's borders.
It is no accident that arrest warrants never seem to be issued for the likes of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since the real targets of universal jurisdiction these days are Western nations. Ultimately, what it targets is the very ideas of sovereign accountability and political independence. These goals largely motivated the 1998 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, itself a step toward constraining states' abilities to police their own affairs, and an institution that the Obama administration yearns to join.
Transferring accountability for decisions from democratic politics to the criminal justice system understandably intimidates policy makers from making perfectly justifiable choices, such as defending against terrorist threats. Moreover, "command responsibility" has been transmogrified from liability for failing to stop known criminal activity, to liability when officials "should have known" their subordinates were committing crimes. This further ups the ante and explains why former foreign ministers like Ms. Livni or Henry Kissinger are at risk.
This deterrent impact is exactly what universal jurisdiction advocates seek—both to affect decisions at the highest national levels, and to discourage mid- and low-level officials from implementing disfavored policies. Some foreign critics hope to prosecute former President George W. Bush for enhanced interrogation techniques and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. While they likely won't get to the former president, they'll be at least somewhat content prosecuting the attorneys who wrote the underlying legal justifications. Incredibly, the Obama administration has yet to definitively reject the possibility of allowing such prosecutions overseas.
Universal jurisdiction against officials of authoritarian regimes sounds appealing. But in these cases, the real goal should be replacing such regimes with representative governments that undertake sovereign accountability for prior transgressions.
Nonetheless, human-rights activists who view their morality as higher than that of elected governments are satisfied by nothing less than prosecution. That is precisely why contemporary universal jurisdiction is so profoundly antidemocratic.
Undoubtedly, leaders of constitutional democracies make mistakes about whom they do and do not prosecute. But to substitute the judgments of self-designated international Platonic Guardians for representative governments and independent judiciaries is perilous at best, and authoritarian at worst. It's the time to unambiguously reject universal jurisdiction before its infection spreads even further.
Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

The Tehran-Caracas Nuclear Axis

2009-12-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Ahmadinejad and Chávez: new evidence of a radioactive relationship.

Here's one from the Department of We Are The World: Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will address the U.N.'s climate summit in Copenhagen. Say what you will about these two gentlemen—the support for terrorists, the Holocaust denial, the suppression of civil liberties—at least nobody can accuse them of being global warming "deniers."
On the contrary, the two leaders, who met in Caracas last month for at least the 11th time, have been nothing if not cooperative when it comes to environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral technologies. Bicycles, for instance: In 2005, Chávez directed his government to "follow seriously the project of manufacturing Iranian bicycles in Venezuela." An Iranian dairy products plant (no doubt ecologically sensitive) also set up shop hard on the Colombian border, in territory controlled by Colombia's terrorist FARC.

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Ahmadinejad and Chávez: A new document sheds light on this radioactive relationship.

Then there was the tractor factory Iran built in Ciudad Bolivar. In January, the Associated Press reported that Turkish authorities had seized 22 containers labeled "tractor parts." What they contained, according to one Turkish official, "was enough to set up an explosives lab."

But perhaps the most interesting Iranian venture is a supposed gold mine not far from Angel Falls, in a remote area known as the Roraima Basin. The basin straddles Venezuela's border with neighboring Guyana, where a Canadian company, U308, thinks it has found the "geological look-alike" to Canada's Athabasca Basin. The Athabasca, the company's Web site adds, "is the world's largest resource of uranium."
In 2006, Chávez publicly mocked suspicions of nuclear cooperation with Iran, saying it "shows they have no limit in their capacity to invent lies." In September, however, Rodolfo Sanz, Venezuela's minister of basic industries, acknowledged that "Iran is helping us with geophysical aerial probes and geochemical analyses" in its search for uranium.
The official basis for this cooperation seems to be a Nov. 14, 2008 memorandum of understanding signed by the two countries' ministers of science and technology and given to me by a credible foreign intelligence source. "The two parties agreed to cooperate in the field of nuclear technology," reads the Spanish version of the document, which also makes mention of the "peaceful use of alternative energies." Days later, the Venezuelan government submitted a paper to the International Atomic Energy Agency on the "Introduction of a Nuclear Power Programme." (Online readers can see the memorandum for themselves in their Farsi and Spanish versions. One mystery: The Farsi version makes no mention of nuclear cooperation.)
Iran would certainly require large and reliable supplies of uranium if it is going to enrich the nuclear fuel in 10 separate plants—an ambition Ahmadinejad spelled out last month. It would also require an extensive financial and logistical infrastructure network in Venezuela, not to mention unusually good political connections. All this it has in spades.

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Consider financing. In January 2008, the Bank of International Development opened its doors for business in Caracas. At the top of its list of its directors, all of whom are Iranian, is one Tahmasb Mazaheri, former governor of the central bank of Iran. As it turns out, the bank is a subsidiary of the Export Development Bank of Iran, which in October 2008 was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for providing "financial services to Iran's Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics."
Or consider logistics. For nearly three years, Venezuelan airline ConViasa has been flying an Airbus 340 to Damascus and Tehran. Neither city is a typical Venezuelan tourist destination, to say the least. What goes into the cargo hold of that big plane is an interesting question. Also interesting is that in October 2008 the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, also sanctioned by Treasury, announced it had established a direct shipping route to Venezuela.
Finally, there are the political connections. What do Fadi Kabboul, Aref Richany Jimenez, Radwan Sabbagh and Tarek Zaidan El Aissami Maddah have in common? The answer is that they are, respectively, executive director for planning of Venezuelan oil company PdVSA; the president of Venezuela's military-industrial complex; the president of a major state-owned mining concern; and, finally, the minister of interior. Latin Americans of Middle Eastern descent have long played prominent roles in national politics and business. But these are all fingertip positions in what gives the Iranian-Venezuelan relationship its worrying grip.
Forty-seven years ago, Americans woke up to the fact that a distant power could threaten us much closer to home. Perhaps it's time Camelot 2.0 take note that we are now on course for a replay.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Obama Gives Britain the Cold Shoulder

2009-12-14T01:21:00.000-04:00

Ideology and history explain the new U.S. disregard.

By CON COUGHLIN

Britain is the only European country President Barack Obama can really count on to respond positively to his plea for NATO to provide extra forces for Afghanistan. So why is it, then, that the Obama administration can barely conceal its disdain for a nation that, by its deeds, time and again proves itself to be America's staunchest and most reliable ally?
Shortly before Mr. Obama's Afghan policy speech at West Point earlier this month, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Britain was sending another 500 troops to that beleaguered country, bringing the total number of British troops to around 10,000. Yet the president never mentioned Britain's support—even though, unlike most other European countries, British soldiers are prepared to undertake combat operations, and have incurred significant casualties in so doing.
While NATO officials trumpeted the fact that they had secured an additional 7,000 troops from a variety of NATO and other states to support Mr. Obama's surge strategy, there been only silence from France and Germany. For domestic political reasons, both French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are reluctant to increase their military contributions.
This makes Britain the most important European contributor to Mr. Obama's war against the Taliban, in which British soldiers are fighting alongside U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan. Add to this the close and long-established intelligence-sharing operation that exists between the two countries, which has prevented a number of major terrorist atrocities, and it is easy to understand why the bond between America and Britain has long been the cornerstone of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
That is not how the Obama administration sees it.
Before he became president it was said that Mr. Obama harbored a deep grudge against Britain for its colonialist past. It is alleged that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, when it was controlled by Britain. In his autobiographical book "The Audacity of Hope," Mr. Obama unflatteringly compares the British Empire to South Africa's apartheid regime and the former Soviet Union.
Soon after his inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.
There is also an important ideological reason that Britain's leading policy makers find themselves increasingly shunned by the U.S. Key foreign-policy advisers to Mr. Obama are keen advocates of a federal Europe, one in which the European Commission based in Brussels is the main center of power and influence, rather than the individual capitals, such as London, Paris and Berlin. In this context, Britain's dogged attachment to a "special relationship" with America is regarded as an embarrassing relic of a previous era.
Michèle Flournoy, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, is a leading supporter of an integrated European defense policy, which was anathema to the Bush administration because it would challenge the future of NATO. Philip H. Gordon, the State Department's assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, is another committed Europhile.
Before taking office Mr. Gordon wrote that America should "support the European project" and warned that Britain's historic resistance to closer European integration could seriously damage London's standing in Washington. "Fully in Europe, Britain has every chance to remain America's preferred and privileged partner," he said. "Marginalized from the EU [European Union], Britain could find itself less influential in Washington as well."
Yet in recent years, whenever the EU has been faced with a major international crisis, whether in the Balkans or the Middle East, the major European powers have tended to put their national interests first. This was graphically illustrated in Bosnia and during the build up to the Iraq war. And in Afghanistan, Europe divides between those who are prepared to fight, such as Britain, and those that are not, such as France and Germany.
For this reason alone, Mr. Obama and his advisers may regret their disregard for their most important battlefield ally in Afghanistan.
Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London's Daily Telegraph.

Americans Detained in Pakistan Found to Have al Qaeda Links

2009-12-10T13:33:00.002-04:00

By ZAHID HUSSAIN

ISLAMABAD -- Five young Americans detained in eastern Pakistan had developed contacts with al Qaeda operatives through the Internet and were on their way to North Waziristan to join a militant training camp, said a senior intelligence official here.

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Associated Press

Five Americans were arrested in Sargodha, Pakistan, at the house (pictured) of an activist of Jaish-e-Mohammed, an outlawed Pakistani militant outfit with known links to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

All of them -- students in their 20s from northern Virginia -- were arrested this week in the garrison town of Sargodha at the house of an activist of Jaish-e-Mohammed, an outlawed Pakistani militant outfit with known links to the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The suspects had arrived in Pakistan last month. They are being interrogated by Pakistani intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence official said.
The intelligence official said that information gleaned from their laptop computers and other material recovered from the suspects established their links with the militant network operating from the lawless tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
He said the men came in contact with al Qaeda through its local operatives in Pakistan. Police have also seized some jihadist literature from the house where they were arrested.
"We watched them for one and a half days and then arrested them," Usman Anwar, police chief of Sargodha, told reporters. He said they admitted that they had come to Pakistan with the intention of joining jihad. Police also arrested an employee of the federal highway department.
A U.S. official briefed on the probe said that initial evidence and interviews collected by investigators indicate the men were seeking to join a "jihadist operation against U.S. soldiers," tough it's unclear if their goal was to attack troops in Afghanistan.
A Pakistani security official said the five men were detained Monday. They had flown to Karachi on Nov. 30 and then traveled to Lahore on Dec. 5, and then on to Sargodha, he said. Investigations are under way and no charges have been filed against them, he said.
Analysts said the latest arrests gave credence to the fears that Pakistan has become the main hub of global al Qaeda, threatening the security of the U.S., Britain and other Western countries. The arrests are likely to fan worries in Western countries that the sons of immigrants from Muslim countries are being drawn to violent Islamist militancy, a process made easier by the Internet.
Pakistan is home to a number of militant groups waging a violent struggle against the government, mostly in the northwest. They have developed close links with al Qaeda.
Two of the men arrested were of Pakistani origin while the other three have origins in Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. They are all naturalized Americans. Analysts said the arrests showed how the appeal of al Qaeda has penetrated some young Muslims in America and other Western countries.
"Al Qaeda is very successful in recruiting in the Muslim diaspora particularly among Pakistanis," said Raffat Hussain, a professor in the department of strategic studies at Quad-e-Azam University in Islamabad. "Its target is the young generation which feels alienated by the perceived repression of Muslims across the world."
Scores of radical Muslims from the West are believed to have received training in al Qaeda camps in recent years and have now been fighting on both sides of the border Afghanistan and Pakistan border. In September, Pakistani security forces arrested Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, a Swedish national and a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, who was trying to go to Waziristan to join al Qaeda.
The traffic of foreign fighters has slowed because of a Pakistani military offensive in South Waziristan and some other tribal regions, but they are still trickling in. A senior intelligence official said many British and German citizens have joined the militants fighting in Afghanistan. Most of the new militants are Germans of Turkish origin, the security official said.

Petraeus Says Afghan War Is Tougher Fight Than Iraq

2009-12-10T00:34:00.002-04:00

Dec. 9 (Bloomberg) -- General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East and Central Asia, struck a note of caution on the war in Afghanistan, saying making headway against the insurgency probably will take longer than in Iraq.
“Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq,” Petraeus told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. “Nonetheless, as with Iraq, in Afghanistan hard is not hopeless.”
Violence will increase as additional troops from the U.S.- led 43-nation alliance enable a stepped-up offensive against Taliban insurgents, he said. He predicted “greater turmoil” within the Afghan government as it moves to combat corruption with international assistance.
Petraeus testified along with Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew in the second of three days of hearings this week on President Barack Obama’s revised strategy in Afghanistan.
Petraeus’s caution contrasts with the optimism that Army General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, voiced repeatedly yesterday before two other congressional committees. With the caveat that the battle won’t be easy, McChrystal said, “I believe we will absolutely be successful.”
$40 Billion
Obama needs Congress to approve funds to carry out his policy, which is aimed at reversing Taliban gains in Afghanistan, training Afghan forces and preparing the country’s government to take more control. The buildup may cost as much as $40 billion next year, according to Representative John Murtha, who heads the House spending panel which appropriates money for defense.
Republicans question whether the 30,000 extra U.S. troops approved by Obama are sufficient and the timeline too hurried. Democrats say the U.S. could become mired in a war already surpassing eight years.
Petraeus said he fully supports the policy and cautioned lawmakers to “withhold judgment” on whether it is successful until December 2010, when the strategy and will be assessed with an eye to beginning a drawdown of U.S. forces in July 2011.
Skepticism Voiced
The top Democrat and Republican on the committee expressed concern that, while resources flow to finance the fight in Afghanistan, the leadership of the insurgency will find haven across the border in Pakistan.
“I am convinced that what happens in Pakistan, particularly near the Afghan border, will do more to determine the outcome in Afghanistan than any increase in troops or shift in strategy,” said panel Chairman John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat.
Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, said the “most salient question” is whether gains in Afghanistan “will mean much if Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan remain or if instability within Pakistan intensifies.”
Petraeus said Pakistan has taken “an important step forward” in waging military campaigns against extremists on its territory. The measures “facilitate our efforts to degrade the extremist groups in the border region and to defeat al-Qaeda,” he told the committee.
Still, “these operations have not directly engaged the sanctuaries of the Afghan Taliban groups in Pakistan,” Petraeus said. Pakistan also hasn’t confronted all of the elements of an extremist syndicate that includes the Pakistani Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Taiba group that carried out the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, India, and the militant Haqqani network, he said.
‘Beacon and Symbol’
“Although most Taliban fighters confronting our forces are local Afghans motivated by local circumstances, the Afghan Taliban leadership is organized, is ideologically motivated and has become a beacon and symbol for other dangerous extremist elements,” Petraeus told the panel.
Eikenberry also took a more cautious note yesterday and today than McChrystal on the prospects for success in Afghanistan, saying the U.S. is concentrating on what is “essential and attainable.”
“Afghanistan represents a daunting challenge,” Eikenberry told the committee. “Success is not guaranteed but it is possible.”
While the added troops will improve stability and make room to improve governance and expand the nation’s security forces, the U.S. faces the risk that the Afghan government will “struggle” to take over “on a timely basis.”
He also cited Pakistan as an important factor.
“The effort we’re undertaking in Afghanistan is likely to fall short of our strategic goals, unless there is more progress in eliminating sanctuaries used by the Afghan Taliban and their associates inside of Pakistan,” Eikenberry said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net

Obama to Accept Nobel Peace Prize as War President, Address Afghanistan Troop Surge

2009-12-09T14:16:00.001-04:00

Trip to Norway Reignites Debate Over Obama's Qualifications for Prestigious Award

There is a bit of irony that just 10 days after announcing the deployment of 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, President Obama will accept the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow in Oslo, Norway.

President says award is a result of the "efforts of people around the world."

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The award, which the Nobel committee said was for Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," comes as he presides over wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and faces an American public that is increasingly skeptical about the U.S.-led efforts there.
Obama will walk a delicate line in his acceptance speech, and the White House said he will acknowledge that he accepts the peace prize as a war president. Aides said he will address Afghanistan and the decision to add troops there and present it in the overall context of the award he is accepting.

"We'll address directly the notion, I think, that many have wondered, which is the juxtaposition of the timing for the Nobel Peace Prize and his commitment to add more troops into Afghanistan," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. "That's obviously something that he will address."
The award was seen internationally, and at the White House, as a mixed blessing – given for the promise of what an Obama presidency could do across the globe and an acknowledgement of what his election represents, but also carrying with it the added pressure to produce tangible results.

Obama is just the third sitting U.S. president to win the prestigious award and the first to win it in his first year in office. The previous sitting U.S. presidents who won were Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919.
The peace prize sparked considerable debate over Obama's qualifications: was his resume too thin? Was the committee actually rewarding the United States for its election of Obama? Was the award more for what Obama represents than what he has accomplished?
Obama provided a preview of the humble tone he will likely strike in Oslo when he spoke at the White House the day the award was announced.
"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize," Obama said in brief remarks Oct. 9. "I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations."

Ceremony Reignites Debate Over Obama's Qualifications for Nobel Prize

The award opens up again the debate over whether Obama deserved the Nobel Prize after less than a year in office. The deadline for nominations was Feb. 1, meaning the president was nominated after being in office for just 11 days.
Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, said that Obama needs to accept the award with humility, given his thin resume so far in office.
"I think the best thing he can do is to take the prize and accept it in the name of those who the Nobel committee apparently didn't want to consider and who really are deserving," Pletka said, citing the Iranian people and Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Congress as examples of others who she thinks have done more in the last year to advance world peace.

Obama Got What?! Conservatives Sputter Over Peace Prize

Obama's Nobel: High Honor or Heavy Burden?

GEORGE: Best Obama-Nobel Jokes

Republican strategist Kevin Madden said the fact that Obama accepts the prize as the commander in chief of a military engaged in two wars is "the elephant in the room. They're going to have to acknowledge it."
"What you're going to see is the White House project an image that says, 'this isn't about me, and this is about the people who actually have done something. This is a shared reward, a shared responsibility,'" Madden said on "ABC News Now's Top Line." "And sort of deflect away from his most recent actions, which was to essentially increase troop movement in Afghanistan."
The news that Obama was awarded the prize came as a surprise even to the White House back in October. Press aides said they had heard from news reports that the president had been nominated for the Peace Prize, but they do not believe Obama himself even knew of his nomination. The Nobel committee took a forward approach with the prize, citing the "hope" that Obama's presidency brings to the global community.
"Obama has, as president, created a new climate in international politics," the citation from the Nobel committee reads. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."
The director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute said this fall that the decision to award Obama with the peace prize was unanimous.
"President Obama has changed, very dramatically, international politics," Geir Lundestad told "GMA's" Diane Sawyer Oct. 9. "We feel he has emphasized multilateral diplomacy, he has addressed international institutions, dialogue negotiations. He has inspired the world with his vision of a world without nuclear arms. He has changed the U.S. policy dramatically. There's a whole list."
Michael Worek, author of "Nobel: A Century of Prize Winners," said Obama's win was "extraordinarily unprecedented."
"It's like giving an Oscar award halfway through the movie when you haven't seen how it ends," Worek said. "We're saying, 'well, Obama has just started, we don't know if he's going to be successful.' Yes, he's said good things, but is it going to work?
"I think in America we feel he's been given his Oscar too early."
But Worek said the award was given not for what Obama has done but what the international community expects he will do.
"It's rewarding hope and they use that word in their release, they use vision twice and hope once," Worek said of the Nobel committee's citation. "It says Obama has captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."
"I will applaud President Obama if he one day does something that earns him the Nobel Peace prize, but he hasn't done that yet, and if they want to honor this symbolically, let them honor the people of America that elected Barack Obama," Pletka said.

Massive TSA Security Breach As Agency Gives Away Its Secrets

2009-12-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

Online Posting Reveals a "How To" for Terrorists to Get Through Airport Security

By BRIAN ROSS and MATT HOSFORD
Dec. 8, 2009

In a massive security breach, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently posted online its airport screening procedures manual, including some of the most closely guarded secrets regarding special rules for diplomats and CIA and law enforcement officers.

In a massive security breach, the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) inadvertently posted online...

(Transportation Security Agency)
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The most sensitive parts of the 93-page Standard Operating Procedures manual were apparently redacted in a way that computer savvy individuals easily overcame.
The document shows sample CIA, Congressional and law enforcement credentials which experts say would make it easy for terrorists to duplicate.
The improperly redacted areas indicate that only 20 percent of checked bags are to be hand searched for explosives and reveal in detail the limitations of x-ray screening machines.
"This is an appalling and astounding breach of security that terrorists could easily exploit," said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. "The TSA should immediately convene an internal investigation and discipline those responsible."

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"This shocking breach undercuts the public's confidence in the security procedures at our airports," said Senator Susan Collins, R-Me., ranking Republican member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "On the day before the Senate Homeland Security Committee's hearing on terrorist travel, it is alarming to learn that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently posted its own security manual on the Internet."
"This manual provides a road map to those who would do us harm," said Collins. "The detailed information could help terrorists evade airport security measures." Collins said she intended to ask the Department of Homeland Security how the breach happened, and "how it will remedy the damage that has already been done."

TSA Document Leaked Online

A TSA spokesperson says the document posted online is an outdated version "improperly posted by the agency to the Federal Business Opportunities Web site wherein redacted material was not properly protected."
The TSA requested the document be taken offline, but by then it had spread around the Internet and is still available today.
The document contains a list of items for which screening is not required including wheelchairs, footwear of disabled individuals, casts and orthopedic shoes.
The redacted portions also indicate which law enforcement personnel are specially screened or exempt from some screening procedures, and indicate what requirements they must meet to be eligible for special screening.
TSA screeners are also told to require extra screening for any passenger whose passport was issued by Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen or Algeria.
The document also reveals that during peak travel times, TSA screeners who check identification can reduce from 100 percent to 25 percent the times they use black lights to authenticate documents.
"Screening is like a big puzzle and this SOP gives you directions on putting the puzzle together," said Robert MacLean, a former Federal Air Marshal who was fired for revealing holes in TSA's security after the 9/11 attacks. MacLean added that TSA's assertion that the documents posted are old holds no merit. "How much in screening procedure changes in 17 months?" asked MacLean. "It's a one-dimensional process."
The TSA says it is taking the release of the sensitive information "seriously" and is conducting a full review.
"TSA has many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe and to constantly adapt to evolving threats," the agency said in a statement. "TSA is confident that screening procedures currently in place remain strong." The document also provides a glimpse of the special treatment available for governors, lieutenant governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C., as well as their spouses and family and staff.

Israel's Settlement Freeze

2009-12-08T00:51:00.000-04:00

Prime Minister Netanyahu has broken with his party to restart the peace process.

By MICHAEL B. OREN

Distracted by the crucial debate over Afghanistan, many Americans may have missed a pivotal event in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. On Nov. 25, Israel's government announced a 10-month construction freeze in Judea and Samaria—the areas generally known as the West Bank. Though some projects already begun will be completed and essential public buildings like medical clinics and schools will be approved, no new housing permits will be issued.
"We hope that this decision will help launch meaningful peace negotiations," declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "and finally end the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel." The Obama administration praised the decision and recognized its significance. Special Envoy George Mitchell hailed the decision as "substantial," and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it "unprecedented."
By contrast, Palestinian leaders rejected Israel's gesture as grossly inefficient. Without an indefinite cessation of all Jewish building in the West Bank and Jerusalem, they say, peace talks cannot resume.
What Mr. Mitchell and Mrs. Clinton understand, but what the Palestinians miss, is that Mr. Netanyahu has shown more flexibility on this issue than any previous head of his Likud Party, which is staunchly pro-settlement. Indeed, he has gone further than any prime minister in limiting a right that many Israelis consider incontestable and a vital component of their national security.
Twice—in 1948 and 1967—the West Bank served as the staging ground for large-scale attacks against Israel. While defending itself, Israel captured the territory and reunited with its ancestral homeland: Haifa is not in the Bible, but Bethlehem, Hebron, and Jericho decidedly are. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis rushed to resettle their tribal land.
These communities widened Israel's borders, which at points are a mere eight miles wide. American policy makers recognized Israel's need for defensible borders and, in November 1967, they supported U.N. Resolution 242, which called for withdrawals from "territories" captured in the war, but not from "all the territories" or even "the territories."
All successive Israeli governments supported the settlements. Only with the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords did then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agree to restrain construction in outlying communities that he considered unnecessary for Israel's defense. But the settlements continued to expand. Meanwhile the peace process progressed. The Palestinians never made a construction freeze in Jerusalem and the settlements a precondition for talks—until earlier this year.
Mr. Netanyahu initially responded that Jews, like all people, can build legally in Jerusalem, and that it's unreasonable to disallow settlers from building even an extra room for a newborn. Still, he promised not to establish new settlements, not to appropriate additional land for existing ones, nor even to induce Israelis to move to them. Yet the Palestinians balked. The peace process was moribund, awaiting an intrepid stroke.
Mr. Netanyahu has now taken that initiative. By suspending new Israeli construction in all of the West Bank, the prime minister has done what none of his predecessors, including Rabin, ever suggested.
At home, Mr. Netanyahu's decision has been fiercely criticized, even by some members of his own party. The Knesset has considered a vote of no-confidence in his leadership. And the most recent poll shows that more Israelis oppose the freeze than support it.
The prime minister has nevertheless persisted—his coalition is among the strongest and most representative in Israel's history—but the opportunity generated by his action will not endure indefinitely. Together with the Obama administration, which has repeatedly asserted its commitment to restarting talks without preconditions and to achieving a permanent two-state solution, Israelis hope that Palestinians will once again join them in talks.
By taking risks and accomplishing the unprecedented, Mr. Netanyahu has demonstrated his commitment to peace. Now the Palestinians must match that dedication and seize this propitious moment.
Mr. Oren is Israel's ambassador to the United States.

Bin Laden 'seen in Afghanistan in early 2009'

2009-12-07T00:28:00.002-04:00

Bin Laden is believed to be somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghan border

A Taliban detainee in Pakistan claims to have information about Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts in January or February of this year.

His claims cannot be verified, but a leading American expert says his account should be investigated.
The detainee claims to have met Osama Bin Laden numerous times before 9/11.
He claims that in January or February he met a trusted contact who had seen Bin Laden about 15 to 20 days earlier in Afghanistan.
"In 2009, in January or February I met this friend of mine. He said he had come from meeting Sheikh Osama, and he could arrange for me to meet him," he said.
"He helps al-Qaeda people coming from other countries to get to the sheikh, so he can advise them on whatever they are planning for Europe or other places.
"The sheikh doesn't stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni, so I think that's where the sheikh was."

The province of Ghazni in eastern Afghanistan has an increasingly strong Taliban presence.
Large parts of the province are no-go areas for coalition and Afghan forces.
He says he declined the invitation to travel to meet Bin Laden because he was afraid of compromising his security, if he was captured by the police or the army.
"If I had met him, the first question they would have asked would be where have you met him, and I would have had more problems and it would have created problems for them [al-Qaeda]."
According to a Pakistani security official the detainee has close ties with leaders of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and was involved in kidnapping and fund-raising operations in the north-western city of Peshawar.

The entire Western intelligence community, CIA and M16, have been looking for [Osama Bin Laden]for the last seven years, and haven't come upon a source of information like this

Bruce Riedel
Former CIA analyst

The detainee, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said that militants were avoiding Pakistani territory because of the risk of US drone attacks.
"Pakistan at this time is not convenient for us to stay in because a lot of our senior people are being martyred in drone attacks," he said.
We were given access to him twice in the past month. He spoke at length and in detail, painting a picture of close co-operation between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
A Pakistani interrogator was listening as he spoke.
His account suits Pakistan, which maintains that Bin Laden is not on its soil, though Britain and the US think otherwise.
But US counter-terrorism expert Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, says his story is "a very important lead, that ought to be tracked down."
"The entire Western intelligence community, CIA and M16, have been looking for OBL [Osama Bin Laden] for the last seven years, and haven't come upon a source of information like this.
"So, if it's true - a big 'if' - this is an extraordinary and important story," he said.
"We know Osama Bin Laden is alive. We know that he is living somewhere in the badlands along the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"What's extraordinary about this story is we have someone who has come forward and said, really for the first time, 'I met with Osama Bin Laden and I had the opportunity to met him again in the recent past'."
Active and healthy
The detainee claims that Bin Laden is well, though there has been speculation for years that he was in poor health.
"What my associate told me was that he is fresh, and doing well," he said.
He also claims the al-Qaeda leader is still active, training instructors who in turn train others.
"The information I have is that he provides training to special people. There are training centres in homes, and all the teachers are first trained by the Sheikh. Then they go and teach the classes."
The detainee's account raises a lot of questions - among them, what were his motives for talking.
Western interrogators may have lots of questions they would like to ask, but so far the detainee has been out of their reach.

Putin says no plans to leave power

2009-12-04T01:33:00.001-04:00

By Michael Stott and Gleb Bryanski

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in power for over 10 years, ruled out a departure from politics on Thursday, telling a questioner: "Don't hold your breath."
The country's most powerful leader made the comment with a smile when asked on his annual televised question and answer session with the Russian people if he would like to leave politics and start a quiet life.
Putin, 57, also said he "will think about" taking part in the 2012 presidential election, when many Russians expect him to return to the Kremlin for a six-year term.
Looking relaxed and confident, Putin said Russia had passed the peak of the economic crisis and reassured callers worried about job security, pensions and living standards.
"The economy has grown by an average of 0.5 percent per month over the last five months," Putin said in the session, broadcast live nationwide by state television and radio. "I'm counting on these positive trends in economic development becoming more significant in the middle of next year."
Putin's eighth annual phone-in entitled "A Conversation with Vladimir Putin. The Sequel" showed the premier back on form after an uncharacteristically subdued performance last year amid the economic crisis.
Commenting on everything from Russia's football performance to the brand value of Lada cars, Putin showed the mastery of detail, firm command, trademark frankness and humor which has made him the country's most popular politician.
An increase in oil prices has pulled the Russian economy back from the brink of collapse this year but despite billions of dollars of government aid, Russia still lags far behind emerging market peers such as Brazil, India and China.
Many questioners asked Putin about their jobs and their pensions, including workers in the town of Pikalyovo, which the premier visited in the summer to help a cement factory threatened with closure and scold its oligarch owner.
"The situation in one-industry towns, including Pikalyovo, is under control," Putin said.
RUSSIAN NOUVEAUX RICHES "A PROBLEM"
Asked why nobody was in jail for allowing the crisis to hit Pikalyovo, the prime minister shot back: "If we put everyone in jail, who would work?"
Putin had harsh words for Russia's new rich, saying the way they flaunted their wealth was wrong, and implicitly condemning a group of young Russians whose Lamborghini and Bugatti luxury sports cars crashed recently in Switzerland.
"The nouveau riche all of a sudden got rich very quickly but cannot manage their wealth without showing it off all the time. Yes, this is our problem," Putin said.
"In Soviet times some of our rich showed off their wealth by having gold teeth put in, preferably at the front. The Lamborghinis and other pricey knickknacks -- they are simply today's gold teeth which are shown off to everybody."
The televised question and answer session was conducted in a specially built Moscow studio with invited guests.
It included video links to Pikalyovo, to an aircraft plant in a Far Eastern city and to the turbine room of the giant Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric dam in Siberia, damaged in an August accident which killed 75.
All questions were screened in advance and access to the Moscow studio and the video link-up locations was by invitation only. Journalists were not given access to the questioners.
Enthusiastic presenters beamed as they counted more than two million questions submitted by phone, internet and text message.
Foreign affairs were barely mentioned in a session dominated by domestic issues.
Putin reassured a grieving widow from the dam about her children's education, calmed factory workers worried about their jobs, joked over his sometimes awkward relationship with the leader of neighboring Belarus and condemned terrorism.
Islamist rebels have claimed responsibility for detonating a bomb under a luxury express train as it traveled from Moscow to St Petersburg last week, derailing and wrecking carriages and killing 26 people, including some senior officials.
Putin said Russia would "break the spine" of terrorism and demanded tough action against "criminals" who attacked their own people. "The threat of terrorism remains very high," he added.
A caller said that an old woman near the train crash site who cared for the victims, lived in horrible conditions and her fence was damaged during rescue work.
"You have a good heart. Just like this old woman. Do not worry, everything will be fine with her," Putin said, adding that Russian Railways had already doubled the old woman's pension and would fix her fence and the house.
Helped by lavish coverage on state media and an absence of credible political opponents, Putin still dominates Russian politics 10 years after he was first picked as a successor by ailing then-president Boris Yeltsin.
Although his ratings have drooped slightly to an eight-month low of 65 percent, down from 72 percent in mid-October, according to the FOM pollster, they remain numbers most politicians would envy after 10 years of rule.
They also outshine those of his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev, who most Russians believe has little real power. It was almost two hours into the question session before Putin mentioned Medvedev's name at all.
He later told a questioner asking about their "tandem" system of government that he and Medvedev worked well together and shared common values.
"We graduated from the same university, had the same teachers, who not only gave us the same knowledge but also a common approach to life. Those common principles allow us to work efficiently today," he said.
(Editing by Ralph Boulton.)

Obama's revealing Afghanistan war speech: 4,582 words and not one of them was 'victory'

2009-12-03T00:58:00.000-04:00

December 2, 2009 | 3:08 am

President Obama spoke 4,582 words in his primetime Afghanistan war speech at West Point last night.

He said "al Qaeda" 22 times.
He mentioned the "Taliban" 12 times.
And here's how many times the Democratic chief executive used the word "victory" -- 0.
That telling omission says more than anything about Obama's 322d day in office when he gave his first major address as the United States' commander-in-chief.
Through a clever, timely use of leaks late Monday and suggestive advance excerpts Tuesday afternoon, the Obama White House communications team used the public and news media's intense curiosity about his war decisions to steer public attention toward the number of additional American troops he'll dispatch into that war-torn land in the first half of 2010.
That number is 30,000, significantly less than some reported numbers requested by the ground commander. But added to the existing 68,000 there and taken out of context, that would appear....

...to show a strong commitment to persevering in the bloody struggle, now entering its ninth year, that has claimed 936 American lives and another 596 allies, mainly Canadians and Brits.
But reading the speech over and over overnight, another, far stronger impression comes through: Limits.
As former White House communications strategist David Gergen puts it succinctly, "The cavalry is coming. But not for long."
Perhaps appropriately for someone who just won the Nobel Peace Prize while sending thousands more fellow citizens into war, Obama's speech is not a bold cry to rally the nation for battle, as Franklin Roosevelt's was after the Pearl Harbor attack 68 years ago next Monday.
Obama's was instead a well-crafted, nicely-wrapped political speech that calmly attempts to give something to everybody, those concerned over national security and his Democratic Party's antiwar left.
The president offers firm resolve to disrupt and dismantle terrorist ability to organize in Afghanistan along with a promised deadline to get out of Dodge in 2011. Assurances of getting the bad guys even if they're inside Pakistan along with an unsubtle threat to Afghanistan's corrupt and impotent central government. A threat, btw, that Obama made with last March's troop surge to no Afghan avail.
In so carefully tacking to and fro, though, Obama may have left both sides feeling unsatisfied. A new Gallup Poll shows approval of his war handling nearing one-in-three, down from 56% last summer. "The United States," Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich charged, despite the speech, "should get out of Afghanistan and stop the escalation."
Now, the Taliban and its extremist cohorts know when U.S. troops will start leaving. And so do America's would-be Afghan collaborators whose eagerness to collaborate may well be tempered by the knowledge that they'll be left alone at home before the end of the American president's first term.
Zalmay Khalizad, who praised parts of Obama's address, recounts a story that as U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, he once received a direct message from the Taliban: "You have all the watches. But we have all the time."
After tracing the history of U.S. military involvement there post-9/11....

... (and recounting his ongoing withdrawal of American forces from Iraq), here's how Obama put it, tacking to: "As Commander-in-Chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan."
The very next sentence is tacking fro: "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home." As if any military commander can foresee the battlefield 18 days ahead, let alone 18 months. And that's 18 months from surge start, only about 12 from surge end. Not a long time in a genuine counter-insurgency.
Some other revealing presidential excerpts about limits:

I believe that we must exercise restraint in the use of military force, and always consider the long-term consequences of our actions....
Years of debate over Iraq and terrorism have left our unity on national security issues in tatters, and created a highly polarized and partisan backdrop for this effort. And having just experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American people are understandably focused on rebuilding our economy and putting people to work here at home....
These additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.

The next sentence, tacking to again, is aimed at a perennial problem for Democrats. That is, talk of cutting and running from a national security fight, so seared were they by Vietnam war turmoil that saw Republicans win five of the next six presidential elections. Obama added: "Just as we have done in Iraq, we will execute this transition responsibly."
However, the president then adds seven words carefully giving himself an out should the promised 18 months actually prove insufficient: "taking into account conditions on the ground."
Much as the practical realities of his much-hailed promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison in calendar 2009 have now pushed the closure well back into 2010.
Other passages:

The days of providing a blank check are over...(He mentions those who prefer not setting an exit schedule) I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what we can achieve at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests....I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests....Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

All carefully-calculated, well-phrased tactical talk. But no words of winning a victory for the war's immense dollar costs -- $30 billion more just for the latest surge this fiscal year. Or for all the lives and limbs lost so far -- and the additional losses yet to come, possibly from among his audience of young Army cadets.
Meaning what? This is really a holding action? The professorial president doesn't expect victory? He's uncomfortable with talk of actually winning a war that he's sending more troops into?
One other interesting war speech stat: President Obama mentioned himself 44 times.

-- Andrew Malcolm

Obama Approval on Afghanistan, at 35%, Trails Other Issues

2009-12-02T00:40:00.002-04:00

Decline from 49% in September far exceeds that for other issues and for approval more broadly

by Jeffrey M. Jones

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans are far less approving of President Obama's handling of the situation in Afghanistan than they have been in recent months, with 35% currently approving, down from 49% in September and 56% in July.

"The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups, with double-digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points)."

Tuesday, Obama outlines his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan in a nationally televised address. The policy has been months in the making as Obama held numerous meetings with his military and foreign policy advisers, drawing some criticism for the delay in formulating a new strategy. The commanding U.S. general in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has recommended that the United States increase the number of troops it has in that country by about 40,000. Obama is expected to announce a slightly smaller increase.
The decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan is evident among all party groups, with double-digit decreases since September among Republicans (17 points), independents (16 points), and Democrats (10 points).

While a slim majority of Obama's fellow Democrats approve of his handling of the issue, his new policy may not be well-received by Democrats, who have indicated opposition to troop-level increases in Afghanistan. The details of the policy will likely be more appealing to Republicans, who are supportive of putting more U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The question about Afghanistan comes from a Nov. 20-22 USA Today/Gallup poll that also asked Americans to rate Obama's handling of six other issues. The president registers less than majority approval for his performance on all seven issues, with Afghanistan his worst rating. His best rating is on energy policy, with 49% approval.

Obama's overall job approval rating has also been below the majority level for most of the time since Nov. 20 in Gallup Daily tracking, though it has inched back above the 50% mark in recent days.
The 14-point decline in Obama's approval rating on Afghanistan stands in contrast to the trend lines on other issues, including the economy, healthcare, and energy. While his current ratings on these issues are down since September, the declines have been fairly minimal.

Bottom Line
The president's decisions on U.S. military action in Afghanistan are arguably among the most important and difficult of his presidency. He met several times with his advisers in recent weeks before outlining his new policy to the American public Tuesday night. The speech gives the president a chance to regain the confidence of Americans on the issue, after a sharp drop in his ratings over the past two months.
But the decline in Americans' evaluations of Obama on Afghanistan does not appear to have greatly affected their more general views of him, as his overall job approval rating -- though down slightly since September -- has not declined to nearly the same degree as his rating on Afghanistan.

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Obama Channels Bush

2009-12-01T23:54:00.000-04:00

Tonight we watched Obama address the cadets of West Point and, over their shoulder, the American people. I kept asking myself: if I were in the audience did I hear anything worth risking my life for?

There is a lot in Afghanistan worth risking one's life for, but Obama sure didn't summon it.

Watching President Obama address the nation, the right probably recognized the incongruity of sending additional troops on a difficult mission and setting, at the same time, a very short timetable for their withdrawal. The right doubtless wondered why the Taliban won't just wait Obama out and move in after he leaves.

But the political cost of this speech will not come on the right. Obama will get the support of everyone who won't ever vote for him. But it is with his base on the left that he will be in trouble.

His volunteers, his backers, his donors have to have watched that speech and asked themselves "why did we win the election?" Obama sounded just like Bush. More articulate, perhaps, but substantively precisely the same.

His decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, an odd move for a peace candidate, his failure to close Guantanamo, our continued military presence in Iraq, and his failure to act on liberal priorities like gays in the military and immigration reform, are all sapping his support from those who voted for him.

For those with memories of Vietnam, the task of backing a corrupt regime summons the most unpleasant of comparisons.

Obama looked out of place giving a speech he didn't believe in. He seemed like he was reading a communiqué. His focus on pulling out, even as he was going in, reminded one of Bill Clinton defining what the meaning of 'is' is.

This speech will inflame the left and that is the real threat to Obama's base.

Even in the health care debate, the under 30 voters are learning that they are targeted -- just like the elderly -- for special punishment in Obama's health care bill. When they realize that they must spend $15,000 on average per family for health insurance or face a fine of 2.5% of their income or go to prison, the bill loses its appeal. And, when they find out how shallow the subsidies are (only after they spend 8% of their paychecks if their household income is $45,000 a year and 12% if it is $65,000), they begin to turn off both the bill and the president for whom they were once so enthusiastic.

Then he is losing popularity on issues that have nothing to do with ideology. It all begins with unemployment. While voters still believe by 50-42 (Rasmussen) that Bush is more at fault than Obama for the economy, Bush is not on the ballot. The high jobless rate nurtures a belief that Obama doesn't really know what he is doing. This discontent need not take the form of ideological opposition to the stimulus package or the deficit spending. It can merely be a sense that things aren't going right.

And then come the adjectives. Voters are increasingly complaining that Obama is weak, vacillates, does not keep his promises, spends too much time on other priorities than jobs, and seems egotistical.

All polls have Obama below 50 and some, like Harris, have him all the way down to 43% in job approval. These surveys mean that Obama, who won 52% of the vote, is now losing between one in ten and one in five of his voters.

This erosion of support makes the elections of 2010 look more and more like a rerun of 1994. It is now reasonable to predict -- and I do -- that the GOP will take both houses of Congress.

In the Senate, the Republicans are likely to hold all their vacant seats with the possible exception of New Hampshire. Incumbent Democrats Dodd (Ct), Specter (Pa), Lincoln (Ark), Reid (Nev), and Bennett (Col) are the low hanging fruit. Among the open seats, Delaware seems ripe for the Republicans. Add to these six seats, two more if Rudy Giuliani challenges Kristin Gillibrand in New York and if North Dakota governor Hoeven takes on Dorgan. Mark Kirk could the ninth pickup in Illinois. And, in a Republican sweep, you have to respect GOP chances in California and New Jersey.

A deluge swamps all boats.

On Capitol Hill, the Democrats seem to have almost abandoned the message war on health care. They are hunkering down and focused on keeping their troops in line. The appeals to party discipline are so strong that one senses that they are prepared to march, in lock-step, over the cliff together.

When one considers where Obama was only a year ago and where he is today, the fall is simply stunning. That he clings to the staff that helped him take it is amazing. This has to be the least successful White House since, well, Clinton's 1993-94 crowd. In fact, its many of the same people!

John Kerry's Tora Bora Campaign

2009-12-01T12:44:00.000-04:00

The Senator is now in favor of more troops after he was against them.

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops.
In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the "unwillingness" of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals "to deploy the troops required to take advantage of solid intelligence and unique circumstances to kill or capture bin Laden," the al Qaeda leaders escaped.
This in turn "paved the way for exactly what we had hoped to avoid—a protracted insurgency that has cost more lives than anyone estimates would have been lost in a full-blown assault on Tora Bora."
The timing of the report's release suggests that Mr. Kerry intends this as political cover for Mr. Obama and Democrats, and some in the press corps have even taken it seriously. But coming from Mr. Kerry, of all people, this criticism is nothing short of astonishing.
In 2001, readers may recall, the Washington establishment that included Mr. Kerry was fretting about the danger in Afghanistan from committing too many troops. The New York Times made the "quagmire" point explicitly in a famous page-one analysis, and Seymour Hersh fed the cliche at The New Yorker.
On CNN with Larry King on Dec. 15, 2001, a viewer called in to say the U.S. should "smoke [bin Laden] out" of the Tora Bora caves. Mr. Kerry responded: "For the moment what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way." The Rumsfeld-General Tommy Franks troop strategy may have missed bin Laden, but it reflected domestic political doubts about an extended Afghan campaign.
Remarkably, Mr. Kerry is now repeating those same doubts about Mr. Obama's troop decision, saying that the "Afghans must do the heavy lifting" and that he supports additional troops only for "limited purposes" and wants the U.S. out within "four to five years." Adapting his legendary 2004 campaign locution, Mr. Kerry is now in favor of more troops after he was against them, but in any case not for very long.

Dubai says not responsible for Dubai World debt

2009-12-01T01:04:00.002-04:00

By Rania Oteify and Tamara Walid Rania Oteify And Tamara Walid – Mon Nov 30, 6:00 pm ET

DUBAI (Reuters) – The Dubai government said on Monday it was not responsible for the debts of Dubai World, dealing a blow to creditors' assumptions that the Arab emirate would guarantee the conglomerate's liabilities.
"Creditors need to take part of the responsibility for their decision to lend to the companies," said Abdulrahman al-Saleh, director general of Dubai's Department of Finance. "They think Dubai World is part of the government, which is not correct."
In its first statement since the crisis began, Dubai World, the government-controlled holding company at the heart of the storm, said a restructuring would involve $26 billion in debt and mostly affect its property firms, Nakheel and Limitless.
Other firms, such as DP World, Jebel Ali Free Zone and Istithmar World would not be included in the restructuring because they were financially stable, it said in a statement released by e-mail late on Monday night.
The previously unreleased figure of $26 billion may help markets to grapple with the scope of the crisis following estimates that the restructuring could affect $59 billion or more in liabilities.
United Arab Emirates stocks plunged on Monday as investors waited for clarity on Dubai's request for a delay until May 2010 on repaying billions of dollars in debt issued by Dubai World and its Nakheel unit, developer of three distinctive palm-shaped islands in the emirate.
European shares fell as investors worried about sovereign financial crises, with the FTSEurofirst 300 off 1.4 percent. But the U.S. dollar fell against the euro after the United Arab Emirates promised liquidity, easing worries about default.
Saleh's remarks in an interview to Dubai TV, a station owned by the ruler of Dubai, came after UAE markets closed.
"They have confirmed there is going to be a restructuring and are doing what they can to differentiate between the government and companies," said Mohieddine Kronfol, managing director at Algebra Capital.
"It doesn't take away from the fact that you have a major potential event that is unraveling. People's expectations aren't going to be met with this announcement."
The UAE's central bank pledged financial support, helping to steady global markets.
The central bank promised additional liquidity to local banks and an official in Dubai's oil-exporting neighbor, Abu Dhabi, said on Sunday it would offer selective support to Dubai firms.
Without referring directly to the Dubai World debt problems, the UAE's central bank governor said on Monday there was no cause for concern about local banks, which he said had proven themselves able to weather the global crisis.
"I have advice for foreign investors. They should study available investment opportunities and conduct realistic feasibility studies to make sure they are real opportunities with no risk," the state news agency WAM quoted Sultan Nasser al-Suweidi as saying.
Michael Ganske, head of emerging market research at Commerzbank in London, said a default, which could ultimately benefit the region, "is becoming more likely.
"At the end of the day it should be positive for Dubai, Dubai's sovereign risk should go down," he said.
Dubai World -- which had $59 billion of liabilities as of August -- shocked investors last week with news of the standstill request while it restructures, along with its property developer Nakheel. The agreement would affect about $5.7 billion of debt due to mature before the end of May.
Nakheel earlier on Monday asked for three of its Islamic bonds, worth a total of $5.25 billion, to be suspended on Nasdaq Dubai until it was in a position to "fully inform the market.
STANDALONE ENTITY
Saleh made clear on Monday that while the government owned Dubai World, the conglomerate had long operated as a stand-alone entity and was never guaranteed by the emirate's government.
"It deals with all parties on this basis and it borrows based on ... its projects and not the guarantee of the government," Saleh said.
When contacted by Reuters and asked whether Dubai could still repay its Nakheel bond, Saleh declined to comment.
The head of a Dubai budget committee said the government's own debt was $10 billion. "Dubai government's debts have been declared. They are only 10 billions. There should be no confusion between (the government) and any company," Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, also Dubai's police chief, told Al Arabiya television.
Dubai World Chairman Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem also declined to comment on Monday. Other Dubai World officials could not immediately be reached.
John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi-Credit Agricole Group, said the distinction between the Dubai government and the flagship company appeared minimal.
"What role does the sovereign play? This continues to create uncertainty," he said from Riyadh. "Their motivation is to make a distinction between the two, but the difference ... is nebulous."
Saleh said he believed the market reaction to last Wednesday's announcement by Dubai World, which initially shook global financial confidence, was exaggerated.
"The restructuring is a wise decision that is in the interest of all parties in the long-term but might bother creditors in the short term," he declared.
(Additional reporting by Raissa Kasolowsky, John Irish in Dubai and Carolyn Cohn in London; Writing by Amran Abocar and Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Alistair Lyon, John Stonestreet, Kenneth Barry and Dan Grebler)

500,000 Iranian Centrifuges

2009-11-30T13:29:00.000-04:00

Tehran ups the ante again as diplomacy goes nowhere.

Mohamed ElBaradei caps his contentious and ultimately failed 12-year stint as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency today, having spent many years enabling Iran's nuclear bids only to condemn them in his final days in office. Mr. ElBaradei combined his rebuke of Iran with his familiar calls for more negotiation, but we'll take his belated realism about Iran as his tacit admission that Dick Cheney and John Bolton have been right all along. Let's hope the education of the Obama Administration doesn't take as long.
As if to underscore the point, yesterday the Iranian government ordered up 10 additional uranium enrichment plants on the scale of its already operational facility in Natanz, which has a planned capacity of 54,000 centrifuges. That could mean an eventual total of more than 500,000 centrifuges, or enough to enrich about 160 bombs worth of uranium each year. Whether it can ever do that is an open question, but it does give a sense of the scale of the regime's ambitions.
The decision is also a reminder of how unchastened Iran has been by President Obama's revelation in September that Iran had been building a secret 3,000 centrifuge facility near the city of Qom. The IAEA's governing board finally got around on Friday to rebuking Iran for that deception, a vote the Administration trumpeted because both Russia and China voted with the United States. But perhaps only within the Obama Administration can a symbolic gesture by the IAEA be considered a diplomatic triumph.

View Full Image

Associated Press

Mohamad ElBaradei

"Time is running out for Iran to address the international community's growing concerns about its nuclear program," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, but the West has said this many times before. Earlier this year, Mr. Obama said Iran had a deadline of September.

The regime scoffed at Mr. Obama after he delivered a conciliating message for the Persian New Year in March, scoffed again after he mildly criticized its post-election crackdown and killing spree in June (following days of silence), and scoffed a third time by rejecting the West's offer last month to enrich Iran's uranium for it. Yet the Administration insists the enrichment deal is still Iran's for the taking. "A few years ago [the West] said we had to completely stop all our nuclear activities," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last month. "Now look where we are today."
Those are the words of a man who believes he has Mr. Obama's number. And until the President, his advisers and the Europeans realize that only punitive sanctions or military strikes will force it to reconsider its nuclear ambitions, an emboldened Islamic Republic will continue to march confidently toward a bomb over the wreckage of Mohamed ElBaradei's—and Barack Obama's—best intentions.

War tax proponent Obey calls expected troop surge a 'fool's errand'

2009-11-30T10:35:00.002-04:00

By Jim Snyder - 11/29/09 01:19 PM ET

The chief architect of a bill to increase taxes to pay for the Afghanistan war said he didn't believe adding troops would yield much benefit.

"The problem is you can have the best policy in the world but if you don't have the tools to implement it it isn't worth a bean bag,"
Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.), the House Appropriations Committee chairman, told CNN on Sunday.

President Barack Obama is expected to announce on Tuesday he will add 30,000 troops to the war effort in Afghanistan to stem the rise of Taliban and to pursue al-Qaeda.

But Obey said supporting a corrupt Afghan government by adding troops amounted to a "fool's errand."

If policymakers believe continuing the war effort in Afghanistan was an important public policy, Obey added, then they should be willing to pay for it by raising taxes on higher income levels. The war would likely cost as much over the next decade as the effort to reforming the healthcare system, Obey said.

"If we're being told we have to pay for healthcare we certainly pay for this effort as well," Obey said. Otherwise, Congress would eventually have to raid other parts of the budget targeted at education or the economy to fund the war effort. Using deficit spending to pay for the operations has also removed most Americans from any burden in the war effort.

"In this war, we have not had any sense of shared sacrifice," Obey said.

Obey's bill would increase taxes by 1 percent on incomes over $150,000. Tax rates would increase further at higher income levels.

The financial cost of sending more troops to Afghanistan was a central theme on Sunday talk shows.

Earlier on CNN's "State of the Union," Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said a surtax should be part of the debate about how to pay for the war.

"We're going to have to have a serious talk about budget and about the $1 trillion deficit we are in now and will continue to be in," Lugar said.

But his colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), told ABC's "This Week" that Congress should cut spending to pay for the additional troops.

Dubai is just a harbinger of things to come for sovereign debt

2009-11-27T17:33:00.000-04:00

Jeremy Warner

Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph, is one of Britain's leading business and economics commentators.

Watch out. This may be just the beginning. In the scale of things, the debt problems of Dubai are little more than a flea bite. Dubai’s sovereign debts total “just” $80bn, which counts for nothing against the trillions being raised by advanced economies to plug fiscal deficits.

Dubai has been a one-way ticket of economic expansion until recently

Small wonder, though, that this minor tremor has sent such shock waves around the wider capital markets. The fear is that threatened default in this tiny desert kingdom is just a harginger of things to come for government debt markets as a whole. According to new estimates by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, the total stock of sovereign debt worldwide will have risen by nearly 50 per cent between 2007 and 2010 to $15.3 trillion. The great bulk of this increase comes not from irrelevant little states like Dubai, but from the big advanced economies – America, Europe, and Japan.
Perversely, they are for the time being beneficiaries of the “flight to safety” that trouble in Dubai has sparked. Government bond yields in the major advanced economies have fallen in response to the crisis in the Gulf. If experience of the banking crisis, when investors removed their money from one bank only to find that the one they had put it into looked just as dodgy, is anything to go by, this effect will not last.
Up until now, markets have assumed that the ruinous fiscal cost of addressing the financial and economic crisis was probably just about affordable to the major economies. That view may be about to be challenged.
I’m going to be writing more about the fallout for Dubai and its implications for the advanced economies in tomorrow’s paper.

Obama to unveil his Afghan strategy Tuesday at West Point

2009-11-27T01:50:00.000-04:00

The president is expected to announce that the U.S. will send more troops to Afghanistan. He also is likely to offer a plan for eventually withdrawing U.S. forces.

By Peter Nicholas

November 25, 2009 | 9:33 a.m.

Reporting from Washington - President Obama will roll out his new strategy for the Afghanistan war during a televised speech Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern time from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the White House said.

Obama, who has presided over at least nine meetings of his senior advisers devoted to the war, is expected to announce higher troop levels for Afghanistan while also detailing a plan for ultimately withdrawing U.S. forces and handing over security responsibilities to the Afghan government.

In announcing Obama's address to the nation, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Obama has no appetite for an indefinite military presence in Afghanistan.

"We're in the ninth year of our efforts in Afghanistan," Gibbs told reporters in his White House office. "The president will want to walk through his decision-making process and give people a sense of the importance of our efforts, but reiterate for them that the president does not see this as an open-ended engagement."

He added: "Our time there will be limited, and I think that's important for people to understand."

Before traveling to West Point on Tuesday, Obama will privately brief members of Congress about his decision. The White House has asked the television networks for airtime.

For a president facing a raft of domestic and foreign policy challenges, Afghanistan is among the thorniest. Polls show the war to be unpopular, with Americans eager for an exit strategy. Liberal Democrats who comprise Obama's political base are loath to see him commit more troops.

Yet Obama's ground commander has said at least 40,000 more military personnel are needed for the mission to succeed. Presently, about 68,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan. Obama himself has described Afghanistan as a crucial battleground in the effort to defeat Al Qaeda terrorists.

Obama has undertaken a weeks-long review process of strategy in Afghanistan, while Republican opponents have accused him of "dithering."

With lives at stake, Obama has said he did not want to rush the decision.

Gibbs said that "throughout this process, the president has repeatedly pushed and prodded not simply for, as I've said, how are we going to get a certain number of troops in, but what is the strategy? What has to be implemented ultimately to get them out?"

Whatever the number of new troops sent to the region, Obama has indicated he is determined to complete the mission in Afghanistan. At a news conference on Tuesday he said, "I've also indicated that, after eight years, some of those years in which we did not have, I think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done, it is my intention to finish the job."

peter.nicholas@latimes.com

British Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth criticises Barack Obama over Afghanistan

2009-11-25T00:30:00.002-04:00

Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, has blamed Barack Obama and the United States for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan.

James Kirkup, Thomas Harding and Toby Harnden
Published: 9:00PM GMT 24 Nov 2009

The Defence Secretary's blunt remarks about the US threaten to strain further a transatlantic relationship Photo: REUTERS

Mr Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticising the US President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban.
A “period of hiatus” in Washington - and a lack of clear direction - had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said.
Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defence chiefs echoing the concerns.
But Mr Ainsworth is the first Government minister to express in public what amounts to personal criticism of the US president’s leadership over the conflict which has so far cost 235 British lives.
Polls show most voters now want an early withdrawal, following the death of 98 British service personnel this year alone.
Ministers say the mission is vital to stop international terrorists using Afghanistan as a base, but Gordon Brown has promised an “exit strategy” that could start next year.
The Defence Secretary’s blunt remarks about the US threaten to strain further a transatlantic relationship already under pressure over the British release of the Lockerbie bomber and Mr Obama’s decision to snub Mr Brown at the United Nations in September.
Mr Ainsworth spoke out as the inquiry into the 2003 war in Iraq started in London, hearing evidence from British diplomats that the UK government concluded in 2001 that toppling Saddam Hussein by military action would be illegal.
Mr Obama has been considering advice from General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, to send more than 40,000 extra troops to the country.
Next week, after more than three months of deliberation, the president is expected to announce that he will send around 34,000 more troops.
Mr Ainsworth, speaking to MPs at the defence committe in the House of Commons, welcomed that troop 'surge' decision, but lamented the time taken to reach it.
He said that the rising British death toll, the corruption of the Afghan government and the delay in Washington all hamper efforts to retain public backing for the deployment.
“We have suffered a lot of losses," he said. "We have had a period of hiatus while McChrystal's plan and his requested uplift has been looked at in the detail to which it has been looked at over a period of some months, and we have had the Afghan elections, which have been far from perfect let us say.
“All of those things have mitigated against our ability to show progress... put that on the other side of the scales when we are suffering the kind of losses that we are."
Britain has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan and has announced it will send another 500, a decision some US officials saw as a move to put pressure on Mr Obama.
Mr Ainsworth said he is confident that once Mr Obama confirms his new strategy, allies will follow and British public opinion will shift back in favour of the mission.
“I hope and believe that we are about to get an announcement from the USA on troop numbers and I think that that will be followed by contributions from many other Nato allies and so we will be able to show that we are going forward in this campaign to an extent that we have not been able to in recent months with those issues still hanging,” he said.
Mr Ainsworth was appointed defence secretary earlier this year, his first Cabinet post.
A former factory worker and union official, he has faced questions about whether he has the stature or political clout to oversee the Armed Forces at a time of war.
In August, he told The Daily Telegraph he was less intellectually accomplished than the commanders who answer to him and suggested that his critics are motivated by class prejudice.
A report earlier this week suggested that Mr Brown is considering removing Mr Ainsworth and replacing him with Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary.
Attempting to play down Mr Ainsworth's remarks, No 10 and the Ministry of Defence last night made a statement backing Mr Obama's deliberations.
It stated: "It is right that Nato partners have taken the time to review next steps in the campaign. These are hugely important issues that rightly need careful and detailed consideration."
In an article in this newspaper today Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, claims that the reason public opinion is switching against the war in Afghanistan is because of the lies told in the run up to the Iraq war.
Mr Clegg also calls for a new approach to Afghanistan from the US. He writes: “We now need a complete change of strategy, which we still hope President Obama will announce next week.”
White House sources said yesterday that Mr Obama is preparing to address Americans in a live prime-time broadcast next Tuesday followed by testimony before Congress by senior figures such as General Stanley McChrystal, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, and Karl Eikenberry, US ambassador to Kabul.
Mr Obama is believed to have decided to send about 34,000 more American troops in addition to the 68,000 currently in Afghanistan. Gen McChrystal requested about 40,000 more soldiers.
The US president convened a group of senior officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr Gates in the White House Situation Room on Monday night for a ninth and final “war council” meeting.

Obey's Afghan War Surtax

2009-11-24T11:32:00.002-04:00

The real liberal objection to the war on terror is that it takes away from domestic spending priorities like ObamaCare.

The White House says domestic politics is irrelevant to its pending Afghanistan decision, but domestic politicians beg to differ. "There ain't going to be no money for nothing if we pour it all into Afghanistan," the liberal warhorse David Obey told ABC's Jonathan Karl, before threatening a "war surtax" if President Obama does end up granting General Stanley McChrystal's request for 40,000 more troops.
"That's what happened with the Vietnam War, which wiped out the Great Society," the House Appropriations Chairman said with his customary subtlety. "That's what happened with the Korean War, which wiped out Harry Truman's Square Deal. That's what happened with the end of the progressive movement before the '20s when we went into World War I. In each case, the costs of those wars shut off our ability to pay for anything else."
Well, that's one reading of 20th-century national security, but another way of putting it is that the real liberal objection to the war on terror is that it takes away from domestic spending priorities like ObamaCare. For many Democrats, the goal isn't victory in Afghanistan, but victory on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Obey last floated a war surtax in the Iraq debate of 2007, and this year's iteration would be imposed on all taxpayers up to 5% on the highest income bracket. Combined with the House health-care surcharge of 5.4 percentage points and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, that would bring the top federal marginal rate to above 50%. Economic growth, in other words, would be hostage to both the anti-antiterror and the single-payer left, if that isn't redundant.

Obama's Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage

2009-11-24T00:27:00.002-04:00

By Gabor Steingart

US President Barack Obama is back in the US after an Asian trip that produced few results.

When he entered office, US President Barack Obama promised to inject US foreign policy with a new tone of respect and diplomacy. His recent trip to Asia, however, showed that it's not working. A shift to Bush-style bluntness may be coming.

There were only a few hours left before Air Force One was scheduled to depart for the flight home. US President Barack Obama trip through Asia had already seen him travel 24,000 kilometers, sit through a dozen state banquets, climb the Great Wall of China and shake hands with Korean children. It was high time to take stock of the trip.

Barack Obama looked tired on Thursday, as he stood in the Blue House in Seoul, the official residence of the South Korean president. He also seemed irritable and even slightly forlorn. The CNN cameras had already been set up. But then Obama decided not to play along, and not to answer the question he had already been asked several times on his trip: what did he plan to take home with him? Instead, he simply said "thank you, guys," and disappeared. David Axelrod, senior advisor to the president, fielded the journalists' questions in the hallway of the Blue House instead, telling them that the public's expectations had been "too high." The mood in Obama's foreign policy team is tense following an extended Asia trip that produced no palpable results. The "first Pacific president," as Obama called himself, came as a friend and returned as a stranger. The Asians smiled but made no concessions.
Lost Some Stature
Upon taking office, Obama said that he wanted to listen to the world, promising respect instead of arrogance. But Obama's currency isn't as strong as he had believed. Everyone wants respect, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it. Interests, not emotions, dominate the world of realpolitik. The Asia trip revealed the limits of Washington's new foreign policy: Although Obama did not lose face in China and Japan, he did appear to have lost some of his initial stature.
In Tokyo, the new center-left government even pulled out of its participation in a mission which saw the Japanese navy refueling US warships in the Indian Ocean as part of the Afghanistan campaign. In Beijing, Obama failed to achieve any important concessions whatsoever. There will be no binding commitments from China to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A revaluation of the Chinese currency, which is kept artificially weak, has been postponed. Sanctions against Iran? Not a chance. Nuclear disarmament? Not an issue for the Chinese.
The White House did not even stand up for itself when it came to the question of human rights in China. The president, who had said only a few days earlier that freedom of expression is a universal right, was coerced into attending a joint press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, at which questions were forbidden. Former US President George W. Bush had always managed to avoid such press conferences.
Relatively Unsuccessful
A look back in time reveals the differences. When former President Bill Clinton went to China in June 1998, Beijing wanted to impress the Americans. A press conference in the Great Hall of the People, broadcast on television as a 70-minute live discussion, became a sensation the world over. Clinton mentioned the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when the government used tanks against protestors. But then President Jiang Zemin defended the tough approach taken by the Chinese Communists. At the end of the exchange, the Chinese president praised the debate and said: "I believe this is democracy!"
Obama visited a new China, an economic power that is now making its own demands. America should clean up its government finances, and the weak dollar is unacceptable, the head of the Chinese banking authority said, just as Obama's plane was about to land.
Obama's new foreign policy has also been relatively unsuccessful elsewhere, with even friends like Israel leaving him high and dry. For the government of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, peace is only conceivable under its terms. Netanyahu has rejected Obama's call for a complete moratorium on the construction of settlements. As a result, Obama has nothing to offer the Palestinians and the Syrians. "We thought we had some leverage," says Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration and now an advisor to Obama. "But that proved to be an illusion."
Even the president seems to have lost his faith in a genial foreign policy. The approach that was being used in Afghanistan this spring, with its strong emphasis on civilian reconstruction, is already being changed. "We're searching for an exit strategy," said a staff member with the National Security Council on the sidelines of the Asia trip.
'A Lot Like Jimmy Carter'
An end to diplomacy is also taking shape in Washington's policy toward Tehran. It is now up to Iran, Obama said, to convince the world that its nuclear power is peaceful. While in Asia, Obama mentioned "consequences" unless it followed his advice. This puts the president, in his tenth month in office, where Bush began -- with threats. "Time is running out," Obama said in Korea. It was the same phrase Bush used against former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, shortly before he sent in the bombers.
There are many indications that the man in charge at the White House will take a tougher stance in the future. Obama's advisors fear a comparison with former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, even more than with Bush. Prominent Republicans have already tried to liken Obama to the humanitarian from Georgia, who lost in his bid to win a second term, because voters felt that he was too soft. "Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead," Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: "This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Iran to conduct military exercise aimed at protecting nuke sites

2009-11-23T01:20:00.002-04:00

Iran test-fired missiles in September amid heightened tension over the country's nuclear program.

Tehran, Iran (CNN) -- Iran plans to launch a large aerial military exercise Sunday to prepare for any possible attack, state media said.

The five-day exercise was to cover a vast area in the country's northwest, west, south and southwest, Press TV said, citing Brig. Gen. Ahmad Miqani.

Iran's regular military and its elite Revolutionary Guards were to participate in the exercise against aerial attacks, especially against Iran's nuclear plants, according to Press TV.

The report did not offer further details about the scope of the exercise, but came as world powers have been strategizing about how to deal with Iran's apparent rejection of a key part of a nuclear deal.

The United States, Russia, China, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, along with the European Union, are trying to map a way forward on Tehran's controversial nuclear program. They seek to reduce international fears that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons.

On Wednesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said his country refused a request to send its partly enriched uranium abroad to be turned into material for medical research.

However, he said, Tehran might allow the nuclear material to be reprocessed inside Iran, the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.

The nuclear deal, hammered out in October with the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is aimed to reduce the amount of raw material Iran has to build a nuclear bomb.

President Obama has warned of "consequences" if Iran does not accept the plan.

Iran says it intends to produce nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes, including civilian electricity and medical research.

Iranian media reported on Saturday that, according to a senior Iranian lawmaker, the country is capable of producing partly enriched uranium up to 20 percent, but had requested to buy the fuel from other countries instead. The move was described as a sign of good will.

"Given that Iran is capable of enriching uranium to a level more than 5 percent inside the country, it could well take a step to produce the fuel for its Tehran (research) reactor," said Kazem Jalali, of the parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, according to Press TV.

However, Iran sees buying the fuel as a better option, he said.

Awash in Unintended Consequences

2009-11-23T01:18:00.002-04:00

By Jim Hoagland

WASHINGTON -- Few things are as dangerous in the Middle East as well-intentioned outsiders. They invariably bring unintended consequences upon those they would guide to a better life. Ask Job. Or consider the case of Mahmoud Abbas, whose hurt and fury over foreign meddling has triggered his threat to quit as Palestinian leader.
No one could accuse President Barack Obama or Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa of harboring ill will toward the president of the Palestinian Authority. But their separate worthy initiatives have resulted in pushing Abbas into a no-exit hell while lowering the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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Afghanistan is not alone. The Obama administration's wobbly approach to the Middle East peace process is also in urgent need of reassessment. Plan A -- to get concessions from Arab states to balance an Israeli freeze on settlement construction -- was abruptly abandoned after Obama was stiffed by both sides at a trilateral summit in September. Now the administration hopes to leapfrog the impasse over settlements by going straight into "final status" negotiations by getting agreement on conditional borders for an independent Palestinian state.
But the Arabs are newly upset and are moving the goal posts: They say the encouraging rhetoric of Obama's Cairo speech last June has been washed away by his failure to deliver the settlement freeze -- which has now become an Arab precondition for resuming negotiations with Israel.
Israelis, on the other hand, are newly confident of U.S. support, which rattles the Arabs even more. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu got a cold shower from Obama and congressional leaders when he visited Washington in May. He was told that he should accept the principle of a Palestinian state, which he grudgingly did last summer.
But Netanyahu emerged from a Nov. 9 White House meeting with Obama able to claim credibly that the two men had talked as allies about Middle East peace and Iran's nuclear program -- with Obama setting a new end-of-December deadline for his engagement efforts with Tehran to produce results. (That deadline had been September, and is almost certain to slip again.)
What happened in the interim? Part of the answer is Goldstone and his U.N.-commissioned report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its January assault on the Gaza Strip. Stung by the accusations and prodded by Washington, the Israeli government -- which refused to cooperate with Goldstone's investigation -- is debating carrying out its own investigation of the Gaza operation.
Whatever the Goldstone report's merits -- and they are lessened by its deliberate demonization of Israel's motives and milquetoast exculpations of Hamas' actions -- it seems to have been written with no feel for the political consequences it would bring for the peace process. The report also ignored the concern it would create at the Pentagon and in other Western military headquarters with forces fighting guerrillas who use civilian populations and infrastructure as shields in modern asymmetrical warfare.
On Capitol Hill, misgivings about Netanyahu were buried in a reflexive gathering around Israel under U.N.-inspired attack. The Goldstone fracas also helped push the politically sensitive Obama White House back toward a more supportive, traditional U.S. attitude toward Israel. Abbas -- not glimpsing the quagmire he was lurching toward -- went along with Washington's request to ask the U.N. to delay taking up Goldstone's report, only to back down when Jordan and Egypt joined Hamas in unleashing ferocious criticism of Abbas in their media.
"He is hurt, and angry," says an Arab official who has talked to Abbas recently. "He has been let down by everybody, especially Egypt," which has tilted toward cooperating with Hamas at the expense of Abbas' Fatah movement in recent months. The Egyptian turn (caused more by internal succession problems than regional factors) has also antagonized Saudi Arabia, which is locked in an increasingly open and hostile war of words with Iran, Hamas' most important patron.
This is a combustible mix of betrayals, failures and intentions gone awry. So Netanyahu may yet throw Abbas a lifeline on settlements if only to keep his weakened opponent in office.
Israel's long occupation of Palestinian territory has helped produce the cynicism and weak leadership on both sides that confound would-be international shapers of peace and moral rectitude. Outsiders cannot resolve this conflict: Only an Israeli decision to end that occupation in fast order can lead to the security Israelis need and deserve, and the dignity Palestinians seek through a state of their own. That is the broader, more vital decision that Netanyahu needs to make.

High-Income Tax May Be Needed for Afghan War Cost, Levin Says

2009-11-20T17:15:00.002-04:00

By Viola Gienger

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said higher-income Americans should be taxed to pay for additional troops sent to Afghanistan and that NATO should provide half of the new soldiers.
An “additional income tax to the upper brackets, folks earning more than $200,000 or $250,000,” could fund more troops, Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt,” airing this weekend. White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has estimated that each additional soldier in Afghanistan could cost $1 million, for a total that could reach $40 billion if 40,000 more troops are added.
That cost, Levin said, should be paid by wealthier taxpayers. “They have done incredibly well, and I think that it’s important that we pay for it if we possibly can” instead of increasing the federal debt load, the senator said.
Other countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should bear responsibility for delivering half the additional troops needed to secure the conflict zone and train Afghan forces, Levin said. He didn’t predict how many troops President Barack Obama would add.
Levin also said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has faced calls for his resignation from Republicans in Congress, should stay as long as he has Obama’s confidence. The six-term senator said the administration was right to move the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to federal court in New York from a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Troop Decision Near
On Afghanistan, Obama may decide within a few weeks whether to grant a request from the top commander in the field, General Stanley McChrystal, for 40,000 more troops to fight the Taliban, which harbored al-Qaeda before being toppled in the invasion following the Sept. 11 attacks. The U.S. contributes about 70,000 of the 110,000 foreign forces fighting the Afghan war.
Levin, who has supported adding U.S. troops to the war mainly to train the Afghan army and police to take over, said he might back an increase closer to 40,000 under certain conditions. They include the proportion that would be used for training, a plan for preparing enough Afghan troops and a “major program” to provide equipment to their forces.
“There’s a lot of other things involved in showing resolve beside just a troop level,” Levin said. A key element to gain support will be “that whatever is announced, it be part of a NATO-Afghan initiative,” he said.
Conditions on Aid
The U.S. also should place conditions on aid that goes through Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government to ensure that he cooperates in fighting corruption, Levin said. Karzai won re-election by default when his main challenger dropped out of a planned runoff after the first balloting in August was marred by allegations of fraud.
Levin said that while he wanted to be “hopeful” that Karzai would take steps to weed out corruption, “I’m also skeptical.”
Levin commended Pakistan’s leaders for turning more of their attention from their conflict with India to the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters sheltering near the other border with Afghanistan. Pakistan’s army and its citizens have “taken some very severe losses” in fighting the militants, he said.
“They’ve got a way to go,” Levin said.
He also praised India, saying leaders had shown “restraint” in dealing with “fanatics” who crossed over the border from Pakistan.
On the economy, Levin said Geithner has been “very helpful” on finding ways to support automakers to preserve the industry.
Tighter Regulations
The broader financial crisis has demonstrated the need for tightening regulations on Wall Street, Levin said. He called the Obama administration’s recommendations “very significant.”
“I think the failure to move forward on those reforms in the Senate is the Republican resistance to some of those proposed reforms from the administration, not Democratic resistance,” Levin said.
He also praised proposals for changes from Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.
Dodd “has put forth a very significant reform of Wall Street,” Levin said. “It is long overdue.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net

Banished at Turtle Bay

2009-11-20T15:51:00.002-04:00

A U.N. critic has her credentials stripped.

As part of our public-service reports on the workings of your favorite world body, allow us to introduce you to Anne Bayefsky. The Toronto native is an expert on human-rights law and an accredited United Nations observer. She is also a friend of Israel, which makes her persona non grata as far as the folks at Turtle Bay are concerned.
Ms. Bayefsky's sin was a two-minute talk she delivered at the U.N. earlier this month after the General Assembly had issued a resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report, which levels war crimes charges at Israel for defending itself in the face of Hamas's rockets. "The resolution doesn't mention the word Hamas," she said. "This is a resolution that purports to be even-handed; it is anything but."
Ms. Bayefsky's comments were the only note of criticism on a day otherwise marked by much U.N. jubilation. Whereupon she was summarily stripped of her U.N. badge and evicted from the premises. "The Palestinian ambassador is very upset by your statement," Ms. Bayefsky says the U.N. security chief told her. Journalist Matthew Russell Lee tells us that he heard the ambassador asking whether U.N. security had "captured" Ms. Bayefsky.
For the record, the U.N. claims that Ms. Bayefsky violated procedures by bringing a colleague who lacked a proper badge, and that she was not entitled to speak where she did, though representatives of nongovernment organizations have used it in the past. And when we called the Palestinian Mission to get their side of the story, they told us the fracas was the last of their worries. Maybe so.
Yet the U.N. continues to bar Ms. Bayefsky from the premises, despite calls on her behalf by the U.S. mission and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Best-case scenario, one U.N. insider tells us, is that "they'll put her on probation." We hear the U.N.'s NGO accreditation committee, chaired by Sudan, will likely make the final decision.
Meanwhile, a committee of the General Assembly recently passed a resolution on the so-called defamation of religion. "Everyone has the right to hold opinions without interference, and has the right to freedom of expression, the exercise of which carries with it special duties and responsibilities and may therefore be subject to limitations," it says.
"Without interference" yet "subject to limitations." Orwell should be living now.

Travesty in New York

2009-11-20T10:37:00.002-04:00

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.
And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.

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September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.
So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.
Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.
Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.
That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."
Finally, there's the moral logic. It's not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.
By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.
What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime -- an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war which the U.S. itself has engaged in countless times?
By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?
Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadi is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform -- everything but your own blog.
Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.
Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.
Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Obama’s Pacific Trip Encounters Rough Waters

2009-11-20T00:16:00.000-04:00

By HELENE COOPER and MARTIN FACKLER
Published: November 18, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — For all of President Obama’s laying claim to the title of “America’s first Pacific president,” Asia was always going to be a tough nut for him to crack.

Without the first lady at his side, he would not have the kind of round-the-clock coverage the first couple got during their inaugural tour of Europe.

Without a popular gesture like elevating the plight of the Palestinian people to equal status of the Israelis, he would not be showered with the kind of praise he got for his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo.

And without a stop in Indonesia, his boyhood home, he would not bask in the kind of adulation he received in Accra, Ghana.

Instead, with the novelty of a visit as America’s first black president having given way to the reality of having to plow through intractable issues like monetary policy (China), trade (Singapore, China, South Korea), security (Japan) and the 800-pound gorilla on the continent (China), Mr. Obama’s Asia trip has been, in many ways, a long, uphill slog.

So it is no wonder that on the last day of the toughest part of his trip — the China part — Mr. Obama took a hike: a brisk, bracing 30-minute climb up the Great Wall. Around 3:30 Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Obama’s mile-long motorcade arrived at the Badaling section of the Great Wall, which snakes over jagged, rocky mountains.

Visitors to that touristy section of the wall generally encounter a cacophonous melee of vendors, but on this day, the place was like a ghost town, courtesy of the Chinese authorities who had shut it down. (The same thing happened Tuesday when Mr. Obama sped through an empty-but-for-his-entourage Forbidden City.)

Even the two sightseeing trips did not offer a total respite, however, as they were prominent, well-publicized examples of what Mr. Obama did not do in China. He steered clear of public meetings with Chinese liberals, free press advocates and even average Chinese, with his aides citing scheduling conflicts. Mr. Obama did, though, give an interview on Wednesday morning to Southern Weekly, one of China’s most popular newspapers, sometimes known for poking the authorities by breaking news on delicate subjects.

Still, for an American president who has tried to make openness a hallmark of his public persona, it was a departure, made more stark since Chinese authorities largely hijacked Mr. Obama’s one other attempt at a give and take with Chinese students, a town hall meeting in Shanghai, by stuffing the auditorium with young Communist Party aspirants.

A week ago, when Mr. Obama kicked off his trip in Japan, things were not so grim. Tokyo welcomed him as much as a celebrity as a world leader, with cries of “Obama-san!” from the people who gathered in the rain to watch his motorcade pass. Local newspapers gushed about how he told his Japanese hosts that he wanted to eat tuna and Kobe beef. Even the ballyhoo from right-wing bloggers back at home over Mr. Obama’s deep bow to Emperor Akihito did not seem to dent Mr. Obama’s image in Japan; his aides said he was unfazed by the criticism.

But Mr. Obama quickly discovered that popularity on the Asian streets did not necessarily translate into policy successes behind closed doors in the Kantei, the Japanese White House, let alone in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Political analysts in Japan gave Mr. Obama high marks for what was one of his principal goals: improving communication with Japan’s outspoken new leaders.

But the trip managed only to paper over some of the recent differences between the sides, like the contentious issue of the relocation of an unpopular Marine air base in Futenma, on the southern island of Okinawa. Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama could not solve that issue, instead merely deferring a tough decision by agreeing to form a working group to look at the relocation problem.

One former Japanese diplomat praised the president for showing patience and avoiding mishaps that would have further tarnished the relationship. The former diplomat, Kunihiko Miyake, who now teaches international affairs at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, said the United States and Japan still did not see eye to eye on their single biggest bilateral issue: how to make their cold-war-era alliance relevant in a region where the balance of power had been upset by China’s rise.

“The two countries are in the same bed, but dreaming different dreams,” Mr. Miyake said. “The Americans want the alliance to be stronger, but the Japanese seem to want to do less.”

Mr. Obama’s next stop was Singapore for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, best known for its quaint custom of making all the leaders wear the same style of colorful shirt, helpfully supplied by the host country. Mr. Obama, in blue, wore a brave grin in the group photo, flanked by the red-shirted Singaporean prime minister and an identical blue-shirted Indonesian president.

This year, APEC made headlines, though not the sort Mr. Obama might have liked. With a deadline looming for a big climate change conference in Copenhagen, the leaders convened a hastily called breakfast meeting to acknowledge that they would not be able to resolve entrenched differences in time.

And then, Mr. Obama departed for China, where the authorities stage-managed and restricted access to his town hall meeting in Shanghai. He did offer a nuanced, oblique critique of China’s rigid controls and restrictions of the Internet and free speech without mentioning, let alone condemning, China’s government.

Mr. Obama and President Hu Jintao presented their two days of talks as substantive, even though they did not appear to make much progress on issues like Iran, China’s currency or human rights. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, took the unusual step of sending a statement to reporters — something he did not do for either stop in Japan or Singapore — saying the China trip went well.

In Seoul, where Mr. Obama ends his trip, he will have perhaps his easiest leg. South Korea is a longtime ally that has been cooperating with the United States on vital issues like North Korea and does not appear to have any big ax to grind with the United States.

China govt pleased but ordinary folk cool on Obama

2009-11-19T01:53:00.002-04:00

BEIJING (AP) - State media heralded President Barack Obama's maiden trip to China as a triumph, but ordinary Chinese were largely shielded by their government from his most critical remarks and activists were disappointed by the measured tone of those they did hear.

One blogger even pined for the tough line taken by former President George W. Bush.

"Like a star rushing from one show to another, Obama has come and gone, without stirring the slightest ripples," blogger Zhao Dezhu wrote in an online post.

Zhao, who writes a popular blog and twitters under the name Hecaitou, said the visit made him miss Bush who "couldn't speak with flowery language and even made grammatical mistakes but spoke as plainly as an American farmer."

Obama, by contrast, speaks "with sweet but empty words."

State media portrayed the two-and-a-half day trip as a slam-dunk for China-U.S. relations, saying a joint statement issued by Obama and China's President Hu Jintao was a breakthrough to inspire the world.

"The Sino-U.S. Joint Statement is as worthy as gold," trumpeted the state-run 21st Century Business Herald while the Beijing Post said it set "a good example for many other bilateral relations."

Among regular folk, there was no such sizzle.

Maybe it was the rain in Shanghai or the below freezing temperatures in Beijing, but crowds did not line the streets to catch a glimpse of the president's motorcade—a marked difference from the well-wishers who have clamored to see Obama in Europe.

Obama does have a following in China, particularly among youth who see him as an exciting contrast to China's staid leadership, but his visit seems to have had little affect on even those who like him—possibly because many of his comments were not widely disseminated.

Several young people interviewed Wednesday said they admired Obama, but none had seen his town hall-style meeting in Shanghai and they based their opinions on photos, state media coverage, or things they'd read about him before. They had little to say about his visit specifically.

"He has a big fan club among the young people of China, because many of us have seen the adversity he has gone through and we look up to him for inspiration," Li Yuanyuan, a 24-year-old office worker said during her lunch break in downtown Beijing.

Han Xuanke, 29, an employee of a technology firm in Beijing's business district said he was more interested in Obama than he had been in Bush or former President Bill Clinton.

"He represents energy and something new and exciting that Chinese politicians don't have," Han said.

The town hall was intended to let the president mix with people like Han and Li, but Beijing ensured it was a tightly scripted affair that few people were able to see because it was only broadcast on one regional television channel.

Obama's strongest comments during the town hall were directed at China's Internet controls.

"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship," Obama said. "I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet—or unrestricted Internet access—is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged."

The critical remarks were played down in the Chinese media and scrubbed from some Chinese Web sites.

The event was streamed live on the White House Web site, but the connection was choppy and delayed. The State Department said later more than 7,000 Chinese Internet users watched the event—a tiny fraction of the more than 300 million Chinese who are online.

Chinese bloggers who saw it were grateful that he addressed censorship, but many zeroed in on what they considered Obama's waffling language.

"Learn English from Obama: Instead of saying 'I want to eat,' say 'I am a big supporter of non-hunger,'" Wang Pei, a writer based in eastern China's Hangzhou, twittered on Tuesday.

Many were watching the town hall closely for how Obama would handle China's poor human rights record, especially after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in February that the United States would not let such concerns interfere with cooperation with Beijing on global crises.

Obama spoke broadly about basic freedoms but steered clear of the buzz phrase "human rights." The next day, he more pointedly raised the issue during a media appearance with President Hu, even touching on rights for minorities—a particular sore spot in China, where Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs seek more autonomy.

"We do not believe these principles are unique to America, but rather they are universal rights and that they should be available to all peoples, to all ethnic and religious minorities," Obama said.

Xue Chen, a research fellow of Strategic Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, said Obama's measured tone on such sensitive topics was a positive development that showed a rethinking of U.S. foreign policy since Bush.

"They are now more willing to take the role of a listener. And only in this way can the U.S. interests be better met," he said.

For many mainland activists, however, the approach fell short.

Yang Zili, a Chinese dissident recently freed after eight years in prison for forming a political study group, had been expecting something stronger from Obama.

"Although Obama mentioned some words such as 'rights' and 'freedom' in the speech in Shanghai, we expect he can do more to promote the improvement of China's human rights condition," he said.

Zhang Jian, a 30-year-old office worker from north China's Inner Mongolia region said many Chinese were taking a wait-and-see approach to the new leader.

"It's a trip Obama needs to make. ... But I don't think we're necessarily going to immediately warm up to the U.S. as a result of one trip," said Zhang who was visiting Beijing on business. "It will be a relationship built over mutual trust and understanding over time."

___

Associated Press writer Chi-Chi Zhang and researcher Xi Yue contributed to this report.

Eric Holder's Grave Mistake

2009-11-18T21:02:00.002-04:00

By Michael Gerson

WASHINGTON -- Eric Holder -- distinguished prosecutor, judge, foe of public corruption, basketball enthusiast, mentor to disadvantaged youth -- seemed a reassuring choice for attorney general. When Holder affirmed during his confirmation hearing that America remains at war with terrorists, Sen. Lindsey Graham enthused, "I'm almost ready to vote for you right now."
So how did Holder become the most destructive member of Barack Obama's Cabinet?

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Holder launched his tenure by showing disdain for the work of career federal prosecutors when it fit his ideological predispositions. In 2004, a task force from the Eastern District of Virginia investigated allegations of misconduct against the CIA and found insufficient evidence of criminal conduct or intent. Holder ignored the views of these respected prosecutors and appointed his own special prosecutor, appeasing a political constituency that wanted the CIA to be hounded and punished. As a result, morale at a front-line agency in the war on terror has plunged. What possible reason could a bright, ambitious intelligence professional have to pursue a career in counterterrorism when the attorney general of the United States is stubbornly intent on exposing and undermining his colleagues?
Now Holder is displaying an exaggerated respect for the work of career federal prosecutors in New York, also when it fits his ideological predispositions. He is asking them to make the case against five 9/11 conspirators, in a circus atmosphere, with an uncertain chain of evidence (gathered on a battlefield), under a cloud of torture allegations that Holder himself has encouraged.
There is one serious argument for this course: that a civilian court will provide greater legitimacy for the imposition of the death penalty than a military tribunal. But the guilt of these terrorists is not in question. And it is difficult to imagine that those repulsed or impressed by Khalid Sheik Mohammed's confessed crimes will care much about the procedures surrounding his sentencing.
In exchange for a marginal public relations advantage, America will be subjected to the airing of intelligence sources and methods, to the posturing of mass murderers fully aware of their terrorist star power, to the possibility of mistrial and procedural acquittal, and to an increased threat of revenge attacks against New York City. Holder seemed to concede this last complication by asserting that New York is "hardened" against possible terrorism. If I were a New Yorker, that would fall into the category of chilly comfort.
In the end, Holder made a decision memorable for its incoherence. He declared American military tribunals constitutional and appropriate for some terrorists -- then awarded 9/11 mastermind Mohammed a presumption of innocence and the full O.J. Simpson treatment.
In the original plan for the terrorist attacks, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission, Mohammed was supposed to be on the only hijacked plane that landed. He would kill all the males aboard, then make a dramatic speech to the world. At his trial, he will now get his wish.
Holder's choices do not reflect the normal policy shifts between administrations. It is not typical that seven former directors of the CIA have publicly denounced Holder's assault on the institution they served. It is not typical that Holder's immediate predecessor, Michael Mukasey, has called the plan for trials in Manhattan a risky "social experiment" that will raise the risk of attack "very high." Something unique and frightening is taking place: The ACLU is effectively being put in charge of the war on terror.
Holder contends that if people will "in a neutral and detached way, look at the decision ... and try to do something rare in Washington -- leave the politics out of it and focus on what's in the best interest of this country -- I think the criticism will be relatively muted." Holder clearly views himself as Atticus Finch, dispassionately defending the rule of law against the howling mob. In fact, Holder is taking the legal path blazed by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who defined legal objectivity as indifference to the soiled interests of his country. Holder's liberal principles have become "detached" from the real-world struggle against terrorism: Let justice be done, though the heavens, and buildings, fall.
Wartime American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt have understood that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. So enemy combatants consistently have been judged by a different and harsher legal standard than American citizens. Whatever his initial assurances, Holder does not believe America is at war with terrorists. Even worse, he seems determined to undermine those who do.

Graham Presses Holder On Reading Osama Bin Laden Miranda Rights

2009-11-18T20:53:00.004-04:00

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: "If you're gonna prosecute anybody in civilian court, our law is clear that the moment custodial interrogation occurs, the defendant, the criminal defendant, is entitled to a lawyer and to be informed of their right to remain silent. The big problem I have is you're criminalizing the war, that if we caught bin Laden tomorrow, we have mixed theories and couldn't turn him over to the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence for an interrogation on the battlefield, because now you're saying he's subject to criminal court in the United States and you're confusing the people fighting this war."

Poll: Most Oppose Terror Trials in Open Court

2009-11-18T16:23:00.000-04:00

(CBS)

The Obama administration appears to be going against public opinion with its decision to try five terrorist suspects – including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – in a civilian trial in New York City.

A new CBS News poll finds that only 40 percent of Americans believe suspected terrorists should be tried in an open criminal court. Fifty-four percent say such suspects should be tried in a closed military court.

There is a correlation between where people stand on the trials and their political beliefs. Roughly six in ten Republicans and independents favor closed military trials, while 54 percent of Democrats prefer open civilian trials.

Read the Complete Poll

The suspects have been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, which the Obama administration has promised to close. Americans have become increasingly resistant to doing so, according to the poll: fifty percent now say the facility should be kept open, while 39 percent back the administration's plan to close it.

Americans were more split in February, when 46 percent wanted the facility kept open and 44 percent wanted it closed.

A majority of Democrats want to see the Guantanamo Bay facility closed, while a majority of Republicans and independents want it kept open.

Obama admits Guantanamo won't close by Jan. deadline

2009-11-18T12:28:00.002-04:00

By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 8:52 AM

BEIJING -- President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime next year.
Obama refused, however, to set a new deadline.
In an interview in the Chinese capital with Major Garrett of Fox News, Obama said he was "not disappointed" that the Guantanamo deadline had slipped, saying he "knew this was going to be hard."
"People, I think understandably, are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keep terrorists out," Obama said. Closing the facility, he added, is "also just technically hard."
Obama came to office pledging to shut a detainee facility that had become a symbol for prisoner abuse at the hands of American officials. He signed orders to shut the military prison by January 2010, but White House officials quickly encountered resistance from members of Congress opposed to moving prisoners to U.S. soil and from other countries they had hoped would accept detainees.
There was also a tangle of legal issues involving what to do with suspected terrorists who had been tortured in prison in a way that jeopardized the integrity of the evidence against them, or who for other reasons could not stand trial.
Last week, the administration announced that it will try five Guantanamo prisoners -- including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- in federal court in New York. The fate of dozens of other detainees remains in limbo.
Guantanamo is a sensitive subject in China, where Obama conducted the television interview shortly before wrapping up a two-day visit. The United States has refused to release some ethnic minorities, known as Uighurs, back to Chinese officials for fear that they will be tortured. Several Uighurs who had been detained at Guantanamo have been sent instead to Bermuda and Palau after being cleared as non-combatants.
Despite the slow trickle of prisoners out of the facility, Obama insisted in the interview that the facility will be shuttered eventually.
"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year," he said. "I'm not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress."

Trying KSM In Civilian Court Could Cost Obama the Presidency

2009-11-18T01:08:00.003-04:00

Is America at war, or not?

Posted: November 16, 2009
6:50 pm Eastern

© 2009
Are we at war – or not?
For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?
Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies – that he may not be guilty.
And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.
When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.
A jaw-dropping expose on the six-month undercover operation that revealed the true terror-supporting nature of CAIR: "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America." It's also available in electronic form at reduced price through Scribd.
Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.
We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?
Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed nearly as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.
When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.
Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.
When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?
When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Fort McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?
Is the Obama administration
aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?
How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?
Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but told that his family would be killed and he would be waterboarded if he refused to talk?
And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?
There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.
If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governors Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?
What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?
In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.
The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.

China Holds Firm on Major Issues in Obama’s Visit

2009-11-18T00:57:00.002-04:00

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

President Obama toured the historic Forbidden City in Beijing on Tuesday during a break from meetings with Chinese leaders

BEIJING — In six hours of meetings, at two dinners and during a stilted 30-minute news conference in which President Hu Jintao did not allow questions, President Obama was confronted, on his first visit, with a fast-rising China more willing to say no to the United States.

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

President Obama signed a guest book during his tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing on Tuesday. He has taken a conciliatory tone on his first visit to China.

On topics like Iran (Mr. Hu did not publicly discuss the possibility of sanctions), China’s currency (he made no nod toward changing its value) and human rights (a joint statement bluntly acknowledged that the two countries “have differences”), China held firm against most American demands.
With China’s micro-management of Mr. Obama’s appearances in the country, the trip did more to showcase China’s ability to push back against outside pressure than it did to advance the main issues on Mr. Obama’s agenda, analysts said.
“China effectively stage-managed President Obama’s public appearances, got him to make statements endorsing Chinese positions of political importance to them and effectively squelched discussions of contentious issues such as human rights and China’s currency policy,” said Eswar S. Prasad, a China specialist at Cornell University. “In a masterstroke, they shifted the public discussion from the global risks posed by Chinese currency policy to the dangers of loose monetary policy and protectionist tendencies in the U.S.”
White House officials maintained that they got what they came for — the beginning of a needed give-and-take with a surging economic giant. With a civilization as ancient as China’s, they argued, it would be counterproductive — and reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s style — for Mr. Obama to confront Beijing with loud chest-beating that might alienate the Chinese. Mr. Obama, the officials insisted, had made his points during private meetings and one-on-one sessions.
“I do not expect, and I can speak authoritatively for the president on this, that we thought the waters would part and everything would change over the course of our almost two-and-a-half-day trip to China,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman. “We understand there’s a lot of work to do and that we’ll continue to work hard at making more progress.”
Several China experts noted that Mr. Obama was not leaving Beijing empty-handed. The two countries put out a five-point joint statement pledging to work together on a variety of issues. The statement calls for regular exchanges between Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu, and asks that each side pay more attention to the strategic concerns of the other. The statement also pledges that they will work as partners on economic issues, Iran and climate change.
But despite a conciliatory tone that began weeks ago when Mr. Obama declined to meet the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, before visiting China to avoid offending China’s leaders, it remains unclear whether Mr. Obama made progress on the most pressing policy matters on the American agenda in China or elsewhere in Asia.
The president has had to fend off criticism from American conservatives that he appeared to soften the American stance on the positioning of troops on the Japanese island of Okinawa, and for bowing to Japan’s emperor.
At a regional conference in Singapore, Mr. Obama announced a setback on another top foreign policy priority, climate change, acknowledging that comprehensive agreement to fight global warming was no longer within reach this year.
Past American presidents have usually insisted in advance on some concrete achievements from their trips overseas. President Bush received vigorous endorsements of his top foreign policy priority, the global war on terrorism, during his visits to Beijing, and President Bill Clinton guided China toward joining the World Trade Organization after prolonged negotiations. When either of those presidents visited the country, China often made a modest concession on human rights as well.
This time, Mr. Hu declined to follow the lead of President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, who, after months of massaging by the Obama administration, now says that he is open to tougher sanctions against Iran if negotiations fail to curb Iran’s nuclear program. The administration needs China’s support if tougher sanctions are to be approved by the United Nations Security Council. But during the joint appearance in Beijing on Tuesday, Mr. Hu made no mention of sanctions.
Rather, he said, it was “very important” to “appropriately resolve the Iranian nuclear regime through dialogue and negotiations.” And then, as if to drive home that point, Mr. Hu added, “During the talks, I underlined to President Obama that given our differences in national conditions, it is only normal that our two sides may disagree on some issues.”
White House officials acknowledged that they did not get what they wanted from Mr. Hu on Iran but said that Mr. Obama’s method would yield more in the long term. “We’re not looking for them to lead or change course, we’re looking for them to not be obstructionist,” one administration official said.
Mr. Obama did not appear to move the Chinese on currency issues, either. China has come under heavy pressure, not only from the United States but also from Europe and several Asian countries, to revise its policy of keeping its currency, the renminbi, pegged at an artificially low value against the dollar to help promote its exports. Some economists say China must take that step to prevent the return of large trade and financial imbalances that may have contributed to the recent financial crisis.
Mr. Obama on Tuesday could only cite China’s “past statements” in support of shifting toward market-oriented exchange rates, implying that he had not extracted a fresh commitment from Beijing to move in that direction soon.
There are many reasons the White House may have heeded China’s clear desire for a visit free of the polemics that often accompany meetings between leaders of the two countries. Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is rooted in recasting the United States as a thoughtful listener to friends and rivals alike.
“No we haven’t made China a democracy in three days — maybe if we pounded our chest a lot that would work,” Mr. Gibbs said in an e-mail message on Tuesday night. “But it hasn’t in the last 16 years.”
Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution scholar who oversaw China issues in President Clinton’s White House, agreed. “The United States actually has enormous influence on popular thinking in China, but it is primarily by example,” he said. “If you go to the next step and say, ‘You guys ought to be like us,’ you lose the impact of who you are.”
The National Security Council’s spokesman, Michael A. Hammer, added, “What we did come to do is speak bluntly about the issues which are important to us, not in an unnecessarily offensive manner, but rather in the Obama style of showing respect.”
Mr. Obama, even as he projected a softer image, did nudge the Chinese on some delicate issues.
On Tuesday, standing next to Mr. Hu, Mr. Obama brought up Tibet, where Beijing-backed authorities have clamped down on religious freedom. “While we recognize that Tibet is part of the People’s Republic of China, the United States supports the early resumption of dialogue between the Chinese government and representatives of the Dalai Lama to resolve any concerns and differences that the two sides may have,” he said.

Sharon LaFraniere, Edward Wong and Michael Wines contributed reporting.

China and the American Jobs Machine

2009-11-17T17:05:00.000-04:00

China's export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order.

By ROBERT B. REICH

President Barack Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese . . . just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending.
This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many).
Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50% higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at or near its current rate and the benefits of that growth trickle down to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, the country would become the largest shopping bazaar in the history of the world. They'll be driving over a billion cars and will be the world's biggest purchasers of household electronics, clothing, appliances and almost everything else produced on the planet.
But in fact China is heading in the opposite direction of "rebalancing." Its productive capacity keeps soaring, but Chinese consumers are taking home a shrinking proportion of the total economy. Last year, personal consumption in China amounted to only 35% of the Chinese economy; 10 years ago consumption was almost 50%. Capital investment, by contrast, rose to 44% from 35% over the decade.

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David Gothard

China's capital spending is on the way to exceeding that of the U.S., but its consumer spending is barely a sixth as large. Chinese companies are plowing their rising profits back into more productive capacity—additional factories, more equipment, new technologies. China's massive $600 billion stimulus package has been directed at further enlarging China's productive capacity rather than consumption. So where will this productive capacity go if not to Chinese consumers? Net exports to other nations, especially the U.S. and Europe.

Many explanations have been offered for the parsimony of Chinese consumers. Social safety-nets are still inadequate, so Chinese families have to cover the costs of health care, education and retirement. Young Chinese men outnumber young Chinese women by a wide margin, so households with sons have to accumulate and save enough assets to compete in the marriage market. Chinese society is aging quickly because the government has kept a tight lid on population growth for three decades, with the result that households are supporting lots of elderly dependents.
But the larger explanation for Chinese frugality is that the nation is oriented to production, not consumption. China wants to become the world's pre-eminent producer nation. It also wants to take the lead in the production of advanced technologies. The U.S. would like to retain the lead, but our economy is oriented to consumption rather than production.
Deep down inside the cerebral cortex of our national consciousness we assume that the basic purpose of an economy is to provide more opportunities to consume. We grudgingly support government efforts to rebuild our infrastructure. We want our companies to invest in new equipment and technologies but also want them to pay generous dividends. We approve of government investments in basic research and development, but mainly for the purpose of making the nation more secure through advanced military technologies. (We regard spillovers to the private sector as incidental.)
China's industrial and technological policy is unapologetically direct. It especially wants America's know-how, and the best way to capture knowhow is to get it firsthand. So China continues to condition many sales by U.S. and foreign companies on production in China—often in joint ventures with Chinese companies.
American firms are now helping China build a "smart" infrastructure, tackle pollution with clean technologies, develop a new generation of photovoltaics and wind turbines, find new applications for nanotechologies, and build commercial jets and jet engines. GM recently announced it was planning to make a new subcompact in China designed and developed primarily by the Pan-Asia Technical Automotive Center, a joint venture between GM and SAIC Motor in Shanghai. General Electric is producing wind turbine components in China. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar announced it will be moving its solar panel production to China.
The Chinese government also wants to create more jobs in China, and it will continue to rely on exports. Each year, tens of millions of poor Chinese pour into large cities from the countryside in pursuit of better-paying work. If they don't find it, China risks riots and other upheaval. Massive disorder is one of the greatest risks facing China's governing elite. That elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.
To this extent, China's export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order. Despite the Obama administration's entreaties, China will continue to peg the yuan to the dollar—when the dollar drops, selling yuan in the foreign-exchange market and adding to its pile of foreign assets in order to maintain the yuan's fixed relation to the dollar. This is costly to China, of course, but for the purposes of industrial and social policy, China figures the cost is worth it.
Both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment.
Both societies are threatened by the disconnect between production and consumption. In China, the threat is civil unrest. In the U.S., it's a prolonged jobs and earnings recession that, when combined with widening inequality, could create political backlash.
Mr. Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and former secretary of labor under President Clinton, is the author of "Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

CNN Poll: Americans want KSM tried in military court

2009-11-17T14:04:00.002-04:00

Posted: November 16th, 2009 04:06 PM ET

Washington (CNN) – Two-thirds of Americans disagree with the Obama administration's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court rather than a military court, according to a new national poll.
But six in 10 people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks should be tried in the United States, as the administration plans to do, rather than at a U.S. facility in another country.
The poll indicates that 64 percent believe Mohammed should be tried in military court, with 34 percent suggesting that he face trial in civilian court. Six in 10 people questioned say Mohammed should be tried stateside, with 37 percent calling for the trial to take place at a U.S. facility in another country.
"The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in front of a civilian court is universally unpopular - even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Despite that, most Americans say that he will get a fair trial in the U.S."

Mohammed is one of five Guantanamo Bay detainees with alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks that will be tried in civilian court in New York.
"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice," U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday.
Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi will all be transferred to the Southern District of New York - a few blocks from where the World Trade Center towers stood prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
What should happen if Mohammed is found guilty?
"Nearly eight in 10 favor the death penalty if that happens - including one in five who say they normally oppose the death penalty, but would support it in this case," adds Holland.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted November 13-15, with 1,014 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the overall sample.
Full results (pdf)

Put Osama bin Laden on trial

2009-11-16T13:11:00.002-04:00

By Paul Cruickshank, Special to CNN

November 13, 2009 5:53 p.m. EST

A trial for Osama bin Laden would be a media circus, says Paul Cruickshank, but would be good for the United States

Editor's note: Paul Cruickshank, a Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, regularly contributes to CNN's coverage of al Qaeda terrorism.

New York (CNN) -- The announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of the 9/11 attacks will soon be moved to New York to face trial in a federal court will be welcomed by some Americans as finally starting the process of bringing the perpetrators of these attacks to justice.
To date, not one person has been convicted for the attacks. But it also will be a reminder that their boss, the man most responsible for killing 3,000 civilians -- the majority of them Americans but many from all around the world -- is still at large.
President Obama has stated that it is vitally important for the country to put some of the controversial policies of the last eight years behind it. While the forthcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several figures allegedly involved in plotting the 9/11 attacks in New York will be helpful, nothing would help more than if Osama bin Laden were captured, afforded full due process and put on trial.
It would be nothing short of a watershed moment, doing much to restore the public's confidence in American institutions and the rule of law after years of being told that they were too quaint for the challenges of a new era. And it would go a long way, too, in restoring the moral high ground for the United States in the court of global opinion.
An indictment dating back to 1998 awaits al Qaeda's leader in the Southern District Federal Court of New York, which can be easily updated by a grand jury to include his crimes since. This is where Mohammed and four others accused of the 9/11 attacks are also expected to be tried.
Less than a mile from ground zero, there could be no more appropriate place to try bin Laden. There is virtually no chance that bin Laden would walk free from a U.S. courtroom as there are at least three separate video recordings of him acknowledging responsibility for the 9/11 attacks.
What's more, the U.S. government, thanks to cooperation agreements struck at the end of previous trials, already has at least three former al Qaeda insiders lined up, including the former Egyptian al Qaeda operative Ali Mohammed, to provide testimony about bin Laden's hands-on involvement in the 1998 African Embassy Bombings.

There is virtually no chance that bin Laden would walk free from a U.S. courtroom.
--Paul Cruickshank

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A trial for bin Laden in federal court would be somewhat less problematic for prosecutors than for some of the high value detainees now being held in Guantanamo. No "enhanced interrogation techniques" have been employed on al Qaeda's leader.
Capturing bin Laden will, of course, not be easy. There has been no meaningful intelligence on his location since he escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001. And bin Laden, believed now to be somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, will likely do everything he can to avoid being taken into custody.
"According to our security arrangements, if enemy forces surrounded Sheikh Osama and there was a possibility that he would escape, I was to kill him before they could catch him alive. ... I constantly stood behind his back around the clock," Abu Jandal, bin Laden's chief bodyguard until 2000, later revealed.
Despite this, the Obama administration would be well advised to put its emphasis on capturing bin Laden alive, such would be the benefits of a public trial.
The Obama administration will feel obliged to target al Qaeda's leader with a Predator strike if there is a narrow window of opportunity -- no other individual inspires and unifies al Qaeda like he does, and few have been as slippery -- but if intelligence suggests bin Laden has been living for some time in a particular location, real consideration should be given to sending in a Special Forces team to take him alive.
The Bush administration, while often repeating the mantra of needing to "capture or kill" al Qaeda's leader, in practice leaned heavily toward the latter. The leader of the Delta Force team charged with tracking down bin Laden at Tora Bora later recalled, "We knew the writing on the wall was really to kill him. No one wanted to bring Osama bin Laden back to stand trial in the United States somewhere."
Those in favor of quietly killing al Qaeda's leader have argued that a public trial would be dangerous because it would provide bin Laden with a global platform for his views and unleash a wave of terrorist attacks and kidnappings by his comrades in efforts to release him.
These are concerns that cannot be dismissed lightly. In a federal trial, bin Laden would have the right to defend himself and the media frenzy over proceedings would likely dwarf even that of the O.J. Simpson trial. In the past there has been a link to the imprisonment of individuals beloved of al Qaeda and terrorist violence.
As CNN analyst Peter Bergen documented in "The Osama bin Laden I Know," the 1993 arrest, trial and imprisonment in the United States of Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the Blind Sheikh), was a central motivating factor for al Qaeda's terrorist campaign thereafter.
In deciding to try Mohammed in New York, the Obama administration has clearly decided that the benefits of public trials for high profile terrorism suspects outweigh such dangers. Joshua Dratel, a defense lawyer who has represented clients in several of the most high profile terrorism trials in the United States, says, "So what if bin Laden were to articulate his views in court?" Says Dratel, "He already has a global audience every time he puts out his recordings, but this time the platform would in reality belong to the United States."
Those familiar with those recordings (which have rarely been aired in full by mainstream media outlets) can attest to the fact that bin Laden's rambling speaking style, his shallow knowledge of Islam and his often twisted logic are unlikely to make his courtroom pronouncements resonate with those who are not already fervent admirers.
That will particularly be the case if his public defense follows a full documenting by the prosecution of the human suffering he has orchestrated over the years, evidence which should prove devastating to those who still deny bin Laden's culpability. "The vast majority of people in the Muslim world have rejected bin Laden's calls for attacks on civilians," says Yosri Fouda, a leading Egyptian television presenter, "and nothing bin Laden could say during a trial could change that."
Would bin Laden's capture lead to a spike of attacks against American interests? This is possible to some degree but al Qaeda can hardly be accused of having shown any restraint whatsoever in targeting Americans since it declared global jihad in 1998. Conversely, convicting bin Laden could -- in the medium term -- lead to a steep drop in al Qaeda violence. While martyrdom would seal bin Laden's status in the jihadist movement, capture would seriously deflate it.
Abu Jandal, bin Laden's bodyguard put it this way: "In the case of his death, I think he will be a symbol for all those who follow him.... His death will be a great force for stirring up everybody's emotions and enthusiasm to follow him on the path to martyrdom. In the case of his arrest, the situation might be a bit different. It might lead to a strong psychological defeat for the group's members."
A trial for bin Laden, undertaken with due process, would not only help the United States take back the moral high ground in the court of global opinion, it would also serve as a powerful counterpoint to the indiscriminate barbarism of bin Laden's terrorist campaign. The affording of due process, even of the worst of enemies is line with the best instincts of the American people.
A month after 9/11, when emotions were at their most raw, an Ipsos poll showed that nearly as many Americans said they wanted bin Laden tried (42 percent) as said they wanted him instead killed (49 percent). There has been no comparable poll since, but given Americans voted overwhelmingly for a president who vowed to shut down Guantanamo, it would not be farfetched to suggest that the number favoring a trial for bin Laden has substantially increased.
At the National Archives in May, President Obama made a keynote speech on national security and detention. "Wherever feasible, we will try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts --- courts provided for by the United States Constitution. Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trial of terrorists. They are wrong. Our courts and juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists," he said.
A trial for bin Laden, if he can be captured, is not just feasible, but at this juncture in American history would be invaluable.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul Cruickshank.

Will Obama Apologize for Hiroshima & Nagazaki?

2009-11-16T00:57:00.002-04:00

By Richard Halloran

Within a couple of hours of landing in Japan on Friday, President Barack Obama walked into a political minefield by implicitly promising someday to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of American atomic bombs in 1945.
After meeting with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Mr. Obama was asked by a Japanese reporter in an evening press conference whether he would go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where no US president has ever been. "What is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" the Japanese asked. "Do you think that it was the right decision?"

"I certainly would be honored," the president replied. "It would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future."
The Japanese reporter persisted, asking again whether the US was right in dropping the atomic bombs. Mr. Obama slid off the question, turning to the charged issue of North Korea's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
A presidential journey to the only cities to have experienced a nuclear assault would underscore Mr. Obama's intent to rid the world of nuclear arms. If not handled with sensitivity, however, the visit could trigger emotional outbursts from Japanese victims of the bombings and from Japanese who experience a "nuclear allergy."
Many Japanese, particularly left-wing organizations, would most likely demand that the US apologize for dropping the bombs, which would stir up rancor in the US. That would call into question the judgment of President Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the bombs. In turn, that would put President Obama in a politically difficult position.
Among Americans, veterans of World War II, especially survivors of Japan's surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, would be vigilant for any sign of remorse for an action that many believe ended World War II with Japan's surrender, sparing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans poised to invade Japan.
In addition, many American private citizens, whether they lived through the war or not, would insist that a US presidential visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki be preceded by the visit of a Japanese prime minister to Pearl Harbor. That has not happened so far.
In April, the president set a lofty goal, saying in Prague that "as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act." Mr. Obama continued: "Today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
The president followed up in Tokyo on Saturday with a wide-ranging address on American policy in Asia that included a passage on nuclear arms. Americans and Japanese, the president said, must "redouble our efforts to meet a threat to our security that is the legacy of the 20th century - the danger posed by nuclear weapons."
"Indeed," Mr. Obama said, "Japan serves as an example to the world that true peace and power can be achieved by taking this path. For decades, Japan has enjoyed the benefits of peaceful nuclear energy, while rejecting nuclear arms development - and by any measure, this has increased Japan's security, and enhanced its position."
The president, however, emphasized: "Let me be clear: so long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a strong and effective nuclear deterrent that guarantees the defense of our allies - including South Korea and Japan." Leaders in both nations have expressed concern that the US would withdraw that extended deterrence, also known as the "nuclear umbrella."
From Japan, Mr. Obama's itinerary will take him to Singapore for meetings with leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations, thence to China and South Korea.

Richard Halloran, a free lance writer in Honolulu, was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years. He can be reached at oranhall@hawaii.rr.com

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