President Barack Obama took the oath of office last week (twice, in fact) and prepared the nation for “gathering clouds and raging storms.” Obama is spending the early days of his presidency flooding Congress with a so-called “stimulus” plan saturated with special-interest projects and causing turbulence with the nomination of Eric Holder to be the next attorney general. Conservatives certainly have their work cut out for them.
Obama’s spending plans have some problems, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The AP reported that CBO discovered the congressional Democrats’ spending plan was full of waste. The report stated that only 7% of the spending on roads and other infrastructure projects -- $26 billion out of $274 billion -- will be done by September. Furthermore, only one in seven of the “energy efficiency” and “renewable energy” monies would be spent in the next 18 months.
This doesn’t sound like an emergency plan to stimulate the economy. It sounds like more of the pork–barrel, special–interest, big-government plans of the past. Remember when President Bill Clinton said “the era of big government is over”? Evidently Obama is trying to make big-government solutions to our economic problems cool again.
House Republican Leader John Boehner has stated that the House Democrats’ plan will cost each household $6,700 in debt, which will be paid for by our children and grandchildren. The plan is almost as much as the annual discretionary spending budget for the entire federal government. The House Democrats’ Plan is intended to create or save 3 million jobs -- which means this plan will spend $275,000 per job.
Boehner cites the following projects in the House plan to show how this plan is the old-style pork-barrel spending -- not stimulus:
• $6 billion for colleges/universities -- many which have billion-dollar endowments.
• $166 billion in direct aid to states -- many of which have failed to budget wisely.
• $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts.
• $44 million for repairs to U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.
• $200 million for the National Mall, including grass planting.
Think of the Obama “stimulus” as a tax for wasteful projects levied on kids, which they will have to pay upon graduation from college or earlier. The Obama plan could cause families to defer college tuition for kids, not buy that first car for a teenager, or steer young boys away from healthy activities such as sports, which tend to cost money. Liberals love to use the government to try and ban tobacco products or eliminate global warming in the name of saving the kids. Well, if they really cared about the children, they wouldn’t be handing them a massive tax bill in 2030 for a wasteful spending spree today.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is working on a real stimulus plan for the economy. The DeMint Plan is similar to a plan rolled out by The Heritage Foundation: Keep in place the tax rate reductions scheduled to expire in 2011 and lower marginal tax rates across the board on individuals, small business and corporations.
According to DeMint, his stimulus package will “call for a 10-percentage-point cut in the top rate (from 35 percent to 25 percent)” and other rate cuts. DeMint explains that “these tax cuts would soften the recession and expedite the recovery to the tune of 500,000 new jobs in 2009 and 1 million new jobs in 2010 and surpass by 2012 the president’s stated goal of 3.5 million new jobs.”
This is a genuinely conservative stimulus package -- one that would lower taxes and allow individuals, not bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to make decisions on how to spend stimulus money.
Conservative Cheers
Senators Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and David Vitter (R-La.) were the only two senators to vote no on the nomination of Hillary Clinton to be the next Secretary of State. They had concerns about Hillary Clinton’s role as Secretary of State coming into a conflict of interest with former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. At least Vitter and DeMint take the “advise and consent” constitutional function of the Senate seriously.
Brian Darling is director of U.S. Senate Relations at The Heritage Foundation.
Fighting Nukes With Bibi
Middle East: Choosing Barack Obama as president is supposed to change the world, but it may be another election that averts Islamist nuclear terror. Bibi Netanyahu as Israeli leader might just neutralize Iran.
In two weeks, Israel will pick a new government. Likud Party leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have a comfortable lead. His main rival, Tzipi Livni, the ruling Kadima party's foreign minister, has been sounding an alarm that hard-liner Bibi won't get along with President Obama.
Netanyahu: No illusions in 1996, and none apparently in 2008.
That actually might not be such a bad thing. As Tehran's Islamofascist regime continues on its path toward becoming a nuclear-armed power, a strong dose of tough realism in the Middle East may be just what the doctor ordered — if not in the U.S., then in Israel.
"Bibi" is the younger brother of Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, the slain hero of Israel's Operation Entebbe. The raid saved over 100 Israeli and French Jewish hostages after the hijacking by Palestinian and German terrorists of an Air France flight out of Tel Aviv in 1976.
But in spite of his hawkish reputation, Netanyahu's time in power was known for pragmatism, not just a commitment to security.
He negotiated with the late PLO head Yasser Arafat, and gave most of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank and the second-holiest site in Judaism, to Palestine. As he said after meeting with Arafat at the White House in October of 1996:
"The path to peace is through negotiations and not through violence . . . It's our hope for our children and for the children of the Palestinians as well. We know that such a peace is inextricably bound with security and that peace can progress as long as security holds."
In words that could easily have referred to the free world's present threat from Iran, Netanyahu continued: "I don't have any illusions whatsoever about the difficulties ahead. It's a very tense period, fraught with dangers right now."
When it comes to the fanatical mullahs who've ruled Iran since President Carter let the Shah be overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist revolutionaries, Bibi sees things with clarity.
"It's 1938, and Iran is Germany . . . racing to arm itself with atomic bombs," Netanyahu told the United Jewish Communities General Assembly in 2006. Those words of warning came in the aftermath of the Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly calling on Israel to be wiped off the map.
Netanyahu has contended that Ahmadinejad has been "preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state" and that stopping him "is what we must do. Everything else pales before this."
Moreover, Ahmadinejad's intentions go "way beyond the destruction of Israel." According to Netanyahu, "Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran's tour of destruction. But at the planned production rate of 25 nuclear bombs a year," Iranian nukes, possibly carried by its long-range Shahab-3 missiles, "will be directed against 'the big Satan,' the U.S., and the 'moderate Satan,' Europe."
The Bush administration apparently assured current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that the U.S. is somehow covertly sabotaging Iran's nuclear program with defective components.
But can the world depend on a spy operation that could easily end up botched — like so many CIA covert actions have been over the agency's long history?
Or will it take a unilateral attack by Israel against Iran's nuclear sites?
Some see Netanyahu as a kind of Winston Churchill, a warrior waiting for his moment to answer destiny's call.
Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, no fan of pre-emptive war against Muslim states, takes issue with the widely-held view of Churchill as the 20th century's most laudable historic figure.
In "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War," published last year, Buchanan depicts the cigar-chomping wartime British leader as lusting for, as Churchill once called it, "glorious, delicious war" against Germany. Yet, Buchanan asserts, "At Yalta in February 1945, Churchill gave moral legitimacy to Stalin's control of half of Europe by signing a 'Declaration on Liberated Europe.' "
Buchanan's attitude toward Churchill seems similar to many Israelis' feelings about Bibi Netanyahu. He inexplicably gave away too much to his country's enemies at the negotiating table; but faced with war, who better to have in the driver's seat?
Drill Like Brazil
Stimulus: Brazil, a leader in the use of biofuels such as ethanol and in the face of falling oil prices, still plans to spend huge sums to expand its offshore oil resources. Drilling rigs are infrastructure too.
With oil prices scraping the bottom of the barrel, pun intended, there wouldn't appear to be much incentive to pursue the development of new oil resources. And in tough economic times worldwide, the necessary investment required would appear to be prohibitive.
As the U.S. seeks to get its economy going by building roads, bridges and bicycle paths, Brazil has decided to create jobs and move toward energy independence by investing in its energy infrastructure and the liquid gold that lies just off its pristine beaches.
Brazil's state-owned energy giant, Petrobras, announced on Friday that it plans to spend $174.4 billion on developing its huge recent offshore oil finds through 2013. A $28.6 billion spending plan for this year will be financed in part on loans from Brazil's state development bank.
"This is not a rescue," Petrobras CEO Jose Sergio Gabrielli told reporters in Rio de Janeiro. "This is very different than what is happening in other countries. This is not a bailout."
No indeed. It's an investment that fosters energy independence, keeps Brazil's energy dollars at home and creates jobs.
"The volumes of investments will have an important macroeconomic impact in Brazil," said Gabrielli.
Such investments could have a similar beneficial impact on the American economy, and the irony is that the oil companies are willing to use their own money here if we let them. Yet, even more restrictions on U.S. domestic production are planned.
Thanks in part to a relentless pursuit of domestic energy resources to complement its ethanol production (an "all of the above" energy plan like that proposed by Republicans during the campaign), the Brazilian economy grew 5.8% in 2008 and is projected to expand 2.9% even in a tough 2009, according to the median estimate of 16 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
If Brazil had copied our current energy policy, it wouldn't have discovered in November 2007 the Tupi field or in April 2008 the Carioca field in the deep-water Santos Basin off Brazil's southeastern coast.
Tupi is estimated to contain 5 billion to 8 billon barrels of crude, and Carioca may hold up to 33 billion — the third-largest oil field ever discovered and big enough to supply every refinery in the U.S. for six years.
These discoveries and others around the world show that oil has not peaked, and new technologies continue to expand reserves beyond the level of consumption. Other countries recognize the economic importance of domestic energy resources. We are in fact the only industrial country to put our reserves off-limits.
A study by ICF International, commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, finds that by 2030 the domestic energy resources that Congress has placed off-limits in ANWR, in Rocky Mountain shale and in the Outer Continental Shelf could increase U.S. crude-oil production by 36%, generate more than $1.7 trillion in government revenue and create 160,000 jobs.
Now, that's what we and the Brazilians call a stimulus package.
Closing Guantanamo is way harder than you think
Closing Gitmo is the right decision; now the really hard work starts.
by Matthew Waxman
Today, U.S. President Barack Obama suspended military commissions at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and it is widely expected that later this week he will order its closure. That's the right thing to do. So is leaving options open to get it done, as Obama has. He'll need that flexibility. Proclaiming an intention to close Guantánamo is the easy part; actually doing it is another thing. Even harder will be crafting a new detention policy and legal regime for a post-Guantánamo world. And Obama has offered few details of how he will do so.
A few major elements of the new administration's Guantánamo closure plan are already clear. First, as to those detainees who are not considered the most dangerous, it will step up efforts to transfer them to their home countries (or third countries) that can be trusted to deal with any continuing security threat and not mistreat them. The Bush administration has already sent home two thirds of the roughly 800 total Guantánamo detainees this way, and the new administration hopes its diplomatic goodwill will energize this process.
Second, as to those detainees it seeks to keep locked up, the new administration will pore over the evidence to see if criminal prosecutions can be brought effectively in federal court and without risking disclosure of critical intelligence sources and methods.
The big question is what to do with any detainees who are too dangerous or heinous to send home but who cannot be effectively prosecuted. Some expect this category to be very small, maybe even zero. Don't rest assured. The recent withdrawal of charges against the alleged "20th hijacker," Mohamed al-Kahtani, due to his improper treatment at the hands of interrogators is but one example of the difficulties Obama will face. The government has expanded criminal statutes for terrorism since 9/11, and courts have gained experience in handling terrorism trials. But even when the information linking some of the most dangerous suspects to al Qaeda terrorism is reliable, it may not be usable or admissible in court.
If federal prosecutions aren't workable in many cases, and releasing the most dangerous detainees is ruled out, the new administration has several options -- all of them with significant downsides. It could continue to hold current and future detainees in U.S. facilities as "enemy combatants" and let current habeas corpus litigation continue through the courts. Or it could try to prosecute them in reformed military commissions with more lenient evidentiary rules. But both these options look much like the deeply discredited Bush administration policy, only moved inside U.S. borders.
Another option would be to work with Congress on new legislation authorizing "administrative detention" for periods of time of a carefully limited category of detainees, pursuant to strict standards and robust judicial review. Opponents of this approach justifiably worry that such laws would institutionalize detention without trial.
Any closure plan will entail risks and difficult trade-offs. The new administration should not hurry to adopt new detention schemes that lack the established features and protections of American criminal trials. But nor should it rule out legal tools that might durably protect both liberty and security within constitutional and international legal bounds. Either way, the thorny problems of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects picked up in lawless regions or amid covert intelligence operations will persist long after the 250 remaining Guantánamo cases are resolved. Obama may close Guantánamo, but the complex legal and policy challenges that led to its creation are not going away anytime soon.
Matthew Waxman is associate professor at Columbia Law School, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on National Security and Law. He previously held senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council.
Bush Foreign Policy Legacy Widely Seen as Disastrous
Analysis by Jim LobeIn a farewell press conference on Monday, George W. Bush once again expressed the belief that his eight-year presidency, particularly his foreign policy record, will be vindicated by history, but the portents for that happening are not particularly good.
Already last spring, nearly two-thirds of 109 professional historians polled by the History News Network rated Bush as the worst president in the nation's history, while another 35 percent said he was among the 10 worst of the 42 who preceded him.
And that was six months before the mid-September financial crisis that most economists agree will turn out to be the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Bush will leave office next Tuesday with the lowest sustained approval ratings of any modern president.
With the exception of hardline neoconservatives and other far-right hawks who ruled the roost in Bush's first term, the overwhelming consensus of veteran analysts here is that his "global war on terror"—for which he is likely to be most remembered—has inflicted unprecedented and possibly permanent damage on Washington's image abroad.
The latter problem may not matter to those who, like Vice President Dick Cheney and the "neocons," have long disdained diplomacy and other forms of "soft power."
But the unexpected difficulties confronted by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq—as well as the transparent failure of "hard power" to have the desired effect in other "terror-war" theaters, such as Somalia and Pakistan (or Lebanon, in Israel's case)—have exposed the limits of a U.S.-dominated "unipolar world," and the ability of the U.S. armed forces to enforce it on their own.
"The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again—Gulf War, Afghan war, next war—is that power is its own reward," chortled the Washington Post’s neoconservative columnist and champion of "unipolarity," Charles Krauthammer, after U.S.-backed forces chased the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan in late 2001 in a concise—and now highly ironic—statement of the administration’s first-term worldview and strategic intent. "The psychology in the region is now one of fear and deep respect for American power."
Particularly destructive to Washington's image, of course, were the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the use of "aggressive interrogation techniques"—which most human rights experts call torture—against terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret U.S.-controlled prisons around the world.
Uncritical backing for Israel, even when it waged a series of military campaigns, most recently in Gaza, that appeared to give scant regard to the welfare of the civilian population, were also damaging.
"The Bush administration has left you [the United States] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza," declared no less a friend than former Saudi ambassador and intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal, in a speech last week that created quite a sensation among experts here.
"Neither Israel nor the U.S. can gain from a war that produces this reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world," remarked Anthony Cordesman, a highly regarded Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week, who once called Bush’s hopes of democratizing the Arab world by invading Iraq as "cross[ing] the line between neo-conservative and neo-crazy."
In fairness, the unilateralism and militarism that dominated most of Bush's first term, when Cheney, then-Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and their neoconservative advisers were in the saddle, softened considerably in his second.
This softening was due to both the discrediting of pre-war assumptions about Iraq and the ascendancy of administration realists led initially by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and, after Rumsfeld's resignation in November 2006, by his successor, Robert Gates.
While the hawks strongly opposed any engagement with the surviving members of the "axis of evil," North Korea and Iran, the realists successfully persuaded Bush that pressure, isolation, and military threats had actually proven counterproductive to U.S. interests.
The realists also convinced him that diplomatic engagement would have the benefit of demonstrating to the rest of the world that Washington was prepared to exhaust at least some diplomatic remedies before resorting to war.
In fact, the second term witnessed a notable softening—hawks would say "appeasement"—in Washington's position in a number of areas, including, remarkably, limited cooperation with the previously despised International Criminal Court, a more forthcoming rhetoric—if not actual policy—on global warming, and even deference to Washington's European allies in dealing with a resurgent Russia, notably during last August's conflict in Georgia.
With the military bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, multilateralism and diplomacy ceased to be dirty words.
Indeed, the administration spent considerable effort in its second term patching up ties with what Rumsfeld had once contemptuously referred to as "Old Europe"—that part of the globe that had been most alienated by the neo-imperialist trajectory of the first term.
This is apart from the Arab and Islamic worlds and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, where old resentments flared over Washington's endorsement of, if not complicity with, a failed military coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Judging by opinion polls and expert opinion in Washington, D.C., Bush fared considerably better in Asia, where, to the disappointment of Rumsfeld and Cheney, he built on the progress made by his father and Bill Clinton in deepening ties with China, and did so without alienating Washington’s closest regional ally, Japan.
In addition, Bush's courtship of India, capped by the controversial nuclear energy accord ratified by Congress last summer, is considered by many analysts as his greatest foreign policy achievement.
Bush’s five-year, $15 billion AIDS initiative—launched in part to highlight his "compassionate conservatism" on the eve of the Iraq invasion—also helps explain his not-insignificant popularity in sub-Saharan Africa (although $15 billion is currently what his administration is spending each month on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan).
He is also given credit for his role in ending the long-standing civil war between Khartoum and the insurgency in Southern Sudan, although that diplomatic success, however fragile, stands in rather stunning contrast to failures in Darfur, Eastern Congo, and Somalia, where, if anything, the U.S. efforts to keep Islamist forces from gaining power have been little short of disastrous.
To his defenders, Bush’s finest moment—and one on which he appears to pin the greatest hope for his legacy—came two years ago when, despite the unprecedented popular disapproval of the Iraq War and the advice of foreign policy establishment, he "surged" some 30,000 more U.S. troops into Iraq as part of a counterinsurgency strategy designed to halt the country’s precipitous slide into all-out sectarian civil war.
While favorable trends within the Sunni community were already well under way at the time as former insurgents, backed by U.S. funding and weapons, had turned against al Qaeda in Iraq, the “surge” clearly helped reduce the violence in Baghdad.
But whether the surge has set the stage for its strategic goal of national reconciliation, or even the kind of democratic state that Bush had hoped would become a model for export to its Arab neighbors and Iran, remains far from certain.
If it has, Bush may yet be hailed as a 21st-century Harry Truman, whose low approval ratings at the time of his departure from the White House in 1953 nearly rival Bush’s, but whose sponsorship of NATO and the Marshall Plan, among other early Cold War initiatives, are now recognized as significant achievements.
If, on the other hand, Iraq falls back into chaos or splits apart or evolves into a new dictatorship or becomes even more closely tied to Iran than it already is, then Bush’s fate as the worst U.S. president would almost certainly be sealed. History will have to decide.
Cheney: Master Bureaucrat
For a man who has become one of the most powerful and most despised figures in recent U.S. history, comparatively little substantive analysis has been written about Vice President Dick Cheney. This has been at least in part a product of Cheney’s notorious penchant for secrecy, which has resulted in much of the commentary on him settling for cartoonish vilification or amateur psychoanalysis rather than detailed insight into the vice president’s activities.
For this reason, as well as its documentation of the tremendous influence that Cheney has exerted on the course of U.S. foreign policy, Barton Gellman’s Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency is among the most important works in the burgeoning literature on the George W. Bush administration and provides an excellent denouement to the Bush presidency. Based on unprecedented access to sources within the administration, Angler is the first in-depth treatment of Cheney aside from Stephen Hayes’s sycophantic 2007 authorized biography, and it does a great deal to improve our understanding of Cheney’s role in shaping the last eight years.
What picture of Cheney do we get from Gellman’s book? Angler dispels some of the lazier caricatures of Cheney that have been put forth. The vice president comes across not as a rapacious Halliburton war profiteer, but as a man of deeply held principle; not as a Svengali pulling Bush’s strings, but as a bureaucrat and policy wonk par excellence. It is in fact the image of Cheney as master bureaucrat that comes through most strongly and provides the key to understanding how he held and exercised power. Angler may come to stand as one of the classic chronicles of how bureaucracy shapes American politics.
Bush’s disinterest in details and self-characterization as “the decider” are well known. Power under Bush has therefore been less a matter of whispering in the president’s ear than of framing debates and regulating the flow of information shaping his decisions—of “reaching down” to find the junior staffers who will provide the desired message and marginalizing the senior administration figures who will not.
Much of the most revealing information in Gellman’s book concerns the subtle and little-noticed mechanisms by which Cheney worked the channels of government. It comes to be highly significant, for instance, that all e-mails from the National Security Council (NSC) were blind-carbon-copied to the Office of the Vice President (OVP), but not vice-versa; that Cheney’s chief of staff and right-hand man I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was given the title of “assistant to the president” in addition to his other roles, thereby giving him advance access to all Oval Office paperwork; that Cheney broke with vice presidential tradition by sitting in on meetings of the Senate Republican Caucus.
And much of the drama in Angler comes from watching the OVP and its allies in Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense outmaneuver and marginalize their rivals. (One minor flaw with the book is that Gellman’s understandable focus on Cheney may lead him to diminish the role of Rumsfeld; it may be more accurate to speak of a Cheney-Rumsfeld axis driving policy in Bush’s first term.) With the help of strategically chosen allies in other departments—John Bolton at State, John Yoo at Justice, Stephen Hadley at the NSC—Cheney and Rumsfeld were in the first years of the Bush presidency able to shut out the likes of Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, and Condoleezza Rice. They did not lose many debates in these years—and even when they did, Gellman documents how Cheney frequently managed to slip his preferred policy in through the back door after his antagonists had declared victory and shifted their attention elsewhere.
While most critical attention directed at the Bush administration has focused on the actions of high-ranking principal players, what has happened in the lower ranks of government has arguably been just as important. Junior staffers and career civil servants shape government policy at the ground level, and the past eight years have seen a remaking of the federal bureaucracy far beyond the traditional extent of the spoils system. As Gellman shows, Cheney deserves the most credit (or blame) for this change. While the rest of the Bush team poured into Florida following the 2000 election to handle the recount, Cheney stayed home to spearhead the administration’s transition team and fill out its ranks from top to bottom. Some of his choices were high profile—his one-time mentor Donald Rumsfeld was in short order put in charge of Defense—but the vice president also staffed the lower ranks with little-known but like-minded lobbyists and conservative movement activists. In this way he was able, as was his wont, to exert a constant influence on policy without leaving fingerprints. While Cheney is best known for his focus on foreign policy and national security issues, Gellman shows how influential he was in shaping domestic policy as well, particularly regarding energy, taxes, and the environment.
Still, it is the “war on terror” that forms the crux of the book, and it is here that Gellman has unearthed the most new information. His biggest scoop, first revealed last year in a Washington Post series co-authored with Jo Becker, concerns the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, which had in fact been created by Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. (Addington emerges in Angler as the intellectual driving force behind the war on terror, a figure nearly equal in importance to Cheney himself.) It has been known for several years that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and chief of staff Andrew Card had shown up at a gravely ill John Ashcroft’s hospital bed in March 2004 to try to extract a signature reauthorizing the program after the Justice Department had declared it illegal. But Gellman provides the story’s coda: lacking legal authorization for the program, Addington nonetheless wrote up a presidential directive renewing it—what Gellman calls “the nearest thing to a claim of unlimited power ever made by an American president”—which Bush, unaware of the entire dispute, duly signed. Only when it became clear that more than 20 administration officials were within hours of quitting, including the top five layers of the Justice Department, did Bush reverse course and overrule Cheney. This rare defeat may have helped turn Bush against his vice president.
Cheney’s imprint on detainee treatment was equally great. The initial 2001 order giving the Pentagon the exclusive right to try detainees before military commissions came from the OVP, bypassing Powell and Rice. And it was Addington who apparently wrote the notorious 2002 memo declaring the Geneva Conventions “quaint” that went out under the name of Alberto Gonzales, whose reputation as an empty suit appears from Gellman’s account to be richly deserved. Cheney and Rumsfeld also repeatedly stifled a campaign by Rice and her NSC staff to regularize the status of Guantanamo Bay detainees. One of Angler’s most memorable images is of Rice bursting into tears in frustration after Rumsfeld simply refused to show up to meetings she called concerning the Guantanamo detainees.
Although Cheney’s role in propagating false intelligence surrounding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been documented elsewhere, Gellman provides new and telling details. When then-Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey expressed resistance toward the Iraq War, Cheney got him on board with demonstrably false claims about Iraq’s abilities to miniaturize WMD and personal links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Cheney also continued to peddle discredited claims about Iraqi WMD in meetings with other congressional leaders in the run-up to the war, provided a forum for David Wurmser’s conspiratorial linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and sent staffer William Luti to head the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans, the notorious intelligence shop responsible for much of the discredited intelligence about WMD.
Cheney has from the beginning served as the most aggressive hawk among the top administration leadership. His public pronouncements on the Iraq War have often gone farther than Bush himself was willing to—notably his warning of a “mushroom cloud” in 2002 and claim that the insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005—and in recent years he has led the hardliners pushing for confrontation with Iran and North Korea. Because of this, he is often viewed as a close ally or even a part of the administration’s neoconservative faction, a group that in the first term included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith.
Cheney’s relationship with neoconservatism, and the supposed change in his views wrought by September 11, have been among the most-discussed aspects of the vice president. In the popular mind, the sensible realist of the 1990s, cautious of grand geopolitical ambitions, turned in a matter of hours into a paranoid extremist aiming to remake the world in America’s image by force of arms.
Gellman does not delve much into Cheney’s career prior to 2000, one place where the book could have been filled out, but he does argue for a substantial degree of continuity in Cheney’s views. This is probably wise, for much analysis on Cheney has been handicapped by this obsession with finding the smoking gun, the moment of conversion, or the hidden cause that explains everything.
It has been hard to remember since 2003, when the failure to find WMD turned what had been a fairly narrow argument over U.S. national security into an abstract and ultimately shallow debate over the potential for universal democracy, but the initial case for war was couched in a way that proved deeply attractive for many self-professed hard-nosed realists (not to mention many self-professed liberal humanitarians).
Although Cheney’s rationale for war was less about inspiring the Arab world with democratic ideals and more about cowing it with overwhelming firepower, he found the Iraq War equally congenial to his goals. Similarly, the debate over whether Cheney is “really” a neoconservative is a distraction from the larger point, which is that in the years since 9/11 he and the neoconservatives have been able to unite, with few real disagreements, over the shared goals of an aggressively nationalist foreign policy, a disdain for diplomacy, and an utterly unfettered executive power in time of war.
In Bush’s second term, and particularly since the departure of Rumsfeld in 2006, Cheney has been an increasingly marginalized figure in an administration dominated by Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gellman casts this as a story of hubris and nemesis, of overreach and reaction, and there is something to be said for this view. A common criticism of Cheney and Addington is that they were tactically brilliant but strategically short-sighted—that by fighting every bureaucratic battle to the utmost in their quest for unfettered executive power, they triggered a backlash that lost them the war.
Nevertheless, Cheney’s legacy may be more ambiguous than this neat moral tale would suggest. Although the incoming Obama administration may scale back many of Cheney’s gains, the new president inherits a country whose most important issues (Iraq, Afghanistan, the economic crisis) have been handed to him by the Bush team. And on some issues—for instance, executive power—it remains to be seen whether Obama even wants to dismantle the machinery that Cheney and Addington have built for him. From the vantage point of late 2008, Cheney appears to have paved the way for an Obama presidency and a progressive ascendancy. But a few more years may change our assessment of the vice president’s legacy as drastically as it has changed since the high-water mark of his power four years ago.
Davos Man is fighting for his survival
Is it possible for evolution to go backwards? Could Darwin's 150th anniversary be remembered as the year when natural selection went into reverse? It's a question probably only David Attenborough could answer with authority. Which is why we have to hope that he's in Switzerland this week - so that he can watch the most highly evolved mammal on the planet struggling to maintain its supremacy, in the one environment it feels totally secure. Davos.
Davos Man is the inhabitant of the ultra-chic Swiss ski resort which is home every year to the World Economic Forum, a gathering of the globe's most powerful politicians, businessmen and influence-mongers.
For years now, merchant bankers turned finance ministers and former finance ministers who have found time in their lives for a little light banking have mingled in the queues to hear masters of the universe explain how to sweat assets, add value and spread risk. Normally on to other people's balance sheets.
For many it would normally be the only time every year they queued for anything. Because Davos Man, the plutocrat's plutocrat, has got used to living in a world where you rarely fly commercial, and if you do by some mischance find yourself on an airline, you never turn right; a world where supermarkets are not places where you make purchases but things you actually buy and sell; a world where your bank manager doesn't manage your account, he runs your bank.
But now that world has vanished. Just like the climate cataclysm that robbed the dinosaurs of the lush vegetation on which they relied, the credit crunch has deprived Davos Man of the abundant hedge funds, plumply vulnerable family firms and juicy government contracts on which he used to feed. If he is to survive at all, he may have to reacquaint himself with habits that he imagined he had long outgrown. Like saying sorry. This week might be a good time to start.
BlackBerry fools
If I were offering Barack Obama one piece of advice, it would be about the bulge in his pocket.
The President has let it be known that he'll keep his BlackBerry in the White House, and in the process he'll become the first 24/7 digitally connected commander-in-chief. Even as the BlackBerry-wielding classes are facing catastrophe, the little electronic monster survives and flourishes. The BlackBerry may have thus proved itself a sort of digital cockroach - the one creature that can survive any global disaster, see the environment in which it once securely nestled disappear, and crawl into a new berth as lively as ever. But while the little daemon's creators may rejoice at its durability, I can only grieve for Barack.
I spent part of last week at a conference which brought together some of Europe's greatest and goodest - they were more Homo Sir Humphrey than Davos Man - but every one of these high officials had their little flashing bundle of twinkly e-news. Like some exercise in nouvelle cuisine fruit salad design, each individual mandarin came with a matching BlackBerry. And the effect was like teaming them with a three-year-old child. Every few minutes they were distracted by a plea for attention, repeated requests for a reply and the effects of undisciplined leaks.
And BlackBerry proliferation has actually fed a culture where it is considered acceptable for grown-ups to do what no child would ever have got away with in the past - staring at a screen while someone else is talking.
It has fed an appetite for facts spun out of thin air and instantly confected gossip - candyfloss news and popcorn current affairs - to the detriment of context and analysis. Novelty rather than quality has become the measure of information's value. It is one of Obama's many virtues that, like his hero Lincoln, he enjoys reading for its own sake, and values both history and literature. Which is why the BlackBerry is such a poor companion.
Carrying it on duty is like asking Charbonnel et Walker to make up your packed lunch - there will be lots of delicious goodies to nibble at but nothing substantial worth getting your teeth into. So I hope Barack ditches that electronic bulge and gets some Balzac to put in its place.
Paine and suffering
Proof that Barack is a bookworm at heart came, again, in the invocation of the great liberal polemicist Tom Paine in his inaugural address. Ben Macintyre has paid Paine handsome tribute in these pages, but the terrible truth about Paine is that he was out-written in the great political struggle of his time.
The authors who got the French Revolution right were its enemies, like Edmund Burke, and his Reflections have proved a better read, and wiser guide to human nature, than anything produced by the Revolution's apologists such as Paine. To this day there are still attempts by brave historians such as David Andress to paint that convulsion in sympathetic colours. But, thanks to Burke, the story of the French Revolution has become the eternal parable of what happens when clever men imagine that the world can be remade by force of pure reason and human nature can be bent to their will - nothing but suffering follows. If only Burke were lecturing in Davos this year...
Three Economic Crises In One
By Robert SamuelsonWASHINGTON -- We all want President Obama to succeed in reviving the economy, but that shouldn't obscure his long odds. We need to recognize that we're grappling with three separate crises that, though interwoven, are also quite distinct. The solution to any one of them won't automatically resuscitate the larger economy if the others remain untreated and unchanged.
Here are the three.
First: the collapse of consumer spending. American consumers represent 70 percent of the economy. Traumatized by plunging home values and stock prices -- which have shaved at least $7 trillion from personal wealth -- they've curbed spending and increased saving. That's led directly to layoffs. In December, vehicle sales were down 36 percent from year-earlier levels.
Second: the financial crisis. Lower lending deprives the economy of the credit to finance businesses, homes and costly consumer purchases (cars, appliances). The deepest cuts involve "securitization" -- the sale of bonds. Investors have gone on strike. In 2008, the issuance of bonds backing credit card loans fell 41 percent and those backing car loans 51 percent.
Third: a trade crisis. Global spending and saving patterns are badly askew. High-saving Asian countries have relied on export-led growth that, in turn, has required American consumers to spend ever-larger shares of their income. Huge trade imbalances have resulted: U.S. deficits, Asian surpluses. As Americans cut spending, this pattern is no longer sustainable. Asia is tumbling into recession.
Overcoming any of these crises alone would be daunting. Together, they're the economic equivalent of a combined Ironman triathlon and Tour de France.
Consider consumer spending. The proposed remedy is the "economic stimulus" plan. This seems sensible. If government doesn't offset declines in consumer and other private spending, the economy might spiral down for several years. Last week, House committees considered an $825 billion package, split between $550 billion in additional spending and $275 billion in tax cuts.
But in practice, the stimulus could disappoint. Parts of the House package look like a giant political slush fund, with money sprinkled to dozens of programs. There's $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, $200 million for the Teacher Incentive Fund and $15.6 billion for increased Pell Grants to college students. Some of these proposals, whatever their other merits, won't produce many new jobs.
Another problem: construction spending -- for schools, clinics, roads -- may start so slowly that there's little immediate economic boost. The Congressional Budget Office examined $356 billion in spending proposals and concluded that only 7 percent would be spent in 2009 and 31 percent in 2010.
Assume, however, that the stimulus is a smashing success. It cushions the recession. Unemployment (now: 7.2 percent) stops rising at, say, 8 percent instead of 10 percent. Still, a temporary stimulus can't fuel a permanent recovery. That requires a strong financial system to supply an expanding economy's credit needs. How we get that isn't clear.
The pillars of a successful financial system have crumbled: the ability to assess risk; adequate capital to absorb losses; and trust among banks, investors and traders. Underlying these ills has been the consistent underestimation of losses. Economists at Goldman Sachs now believe that worldwide losses on mortgages, bonds, loans to consumers and businesses total $2.1 trillion. In March, the Goldman estimate was about half that.
All the new credit programs -- the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and various Federal Reserve lending facilities -- aim to counteract these problems by providing government money and government guarantees. Probably Obama will expand these efforts, despite some obvious problems: If government oversight becomes too intrusive or punitive, it might deter much-needed infusions of private capital into banks. Again, let's assume Obama's policies succeed. Credit flows rise.
Even then, we have no assurance of a vigorous recovery, because the economic crisis is ultimately global in scope. The old trading patterns simply won't work anymore. If China and other Asian nations try to export their way out of trouble, they're likely to be disappointed. Any import surge into the United States would weaken an incipient American recovery and probably trigger a protectionist reaction. Down that path lies tit-for-tat economic nationalism that might harm everyone.
Indeed, if the rest of the world doesn't buy more from America, any U.S. recovery may be feeble. What's needed are policies that correct the imbalances in spending and saving. As Americans save more of their incomes, Asians should save less and spend more, so that they rely more on producing for themselves rather than exporting to us. The great trade discrepancies would shrink.
But this sort of transformation requires basic political changes in Asia. Whether China and other Asian societies can make those changes is unclear. The implications are sobering. The success of Obama's policies lies, to a large extent, outside his hands.
The Republicans' Best Weapon
The Republicans' Best Weapon
It's Obama himself.
by Fred Barnes
In 1994, congressional Republicans carried laminated copies of their Contract With America (tax cuts, term limits, etc.) in their pockets. They may now want to laminate President Obama's inaugural address and carry it around.
This is not as silly as it sounds. Republican leaders believe the speech pleased them more than it did House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Obama's "new era of responsibility" echoed the "Personal Responsibility Act," the third of the ten planks in the Contract With America. Obama also said that it's not the size of government which matters but whether it works. Newt Gingrich coined that thought years ago. Obama lauded "risk-takers." Democrats want to tax them to death.
For the foreseeable future, attacking Obama will be counterproductive for Republicans. He's both enormously popular and the bearer of moral authority as the first African-American president. So the idea is for Republicans to make Obama an ally by using his words, from the inaugural address and speeches and interviews, against Democrats and their initiatives in Congress.
Obama is for bipartisanship. Pelosi, Reid, and their cohort are heavyhanded partisans with no interest in accommodating Republicans. Obama favors transparency. They don't. Obama says he wants "to spend wisely" and promises that "programs will end" if they don't work. That's hardly the philosophy of congressional Democrats.
Obama's words may be bromides or boilerplate that bear little relationship to his true sentiments or real plans. But so what? Republicans in the House and Senate are a badly outnumbered minority. They have few political weapons at their disposal. Citing Obama's words makes political sense. It's at least worth a try. Republicans have nothing to lose.
It might even get Republicans some attention. For the mainstream media, Obama is the only story in Washington. Most reporters are indifferent to the excesses of one-party, Democratic rule on Capitol Hill. But the argument that Democrats are out of sync with Obama, if repeated often enough, might get some traction.
Republicans are already using it against the $850 billion economic stimulus package drafted by congressional Democrats and tentatively accepted at the White House as Obama's program. Republicans complained they'd been shut out. Indeed they had been, their input ignored. Obama listened to Republican leaders at a bipartisan meeting at the White House last week and scheduled a session this week with House Republican whip Eric Cantor.
Republicans exploited two other weapons at their disposal. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell got a copy of the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Democratic bill. It wasn't a formal CBO report, wasn't set for public release, and never appeared on the office's website. But McConnell leaked it to the Associated Press, whose story appeared a few hours before Obama was inaugurated. The AP story began, "It will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Obama will boost the economy, according to congressional economists."
The $274 billion for infrastructure had been billed as the job-creating, economy-stimulating part of the bill. But only 7 percent of the money would be spent in 2009 and less than $4 billion in highway construction funds would hit the economy before September 2010.
Democrats were sufficiently embarrassed to start tinkering with the bill and move more spending into 2009. And Peter Orszag, the new White House budget director, noted that 75 percent of the $850 billion will now be spent this year. But most of that money--$166 billion to bail out state governments, for instance--won't produce jobs or goose the economy.The other weapon that aided Republicans was the conservative intellectual community, particularly economists. Amity Shlaes's book on the failure of the New Deal to revive the economy, The Forgotten Man, was widely read by Republicans in Washington. So were her compelling articles on that subject in mainstream newspapers.
Free market economists (some of them surprisingly engaging writers) raised doubts about the Democratic stimulus scheme. Greg Mankiw of Harvard tore apart Joe Biden's claim that "every economist, as I've said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs." Mankiw ticked off a list of well-known economists who don't believe that, including Gary Becker, Robert Barro, Robert Lucas, Eugene Fama, and Mankiw himself. "I am sure there are many others as well," he wrote. True. There's Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, for one.
Republicans might well have invoked Obama when Democrats pulled off an egregious act of partisanship on the State Children's Health Insurance Program, aka S-chip. Last year, Democrats and Republicans reached a compromise on S-chip, and it cleared the finance committee, 17-4. President Bush ultimately vetoed the bill.
Without consulting Republicans, Democrats drafted a new bill several weeks ago, stripping out the relatively minor items that had made S-chip acceptable to Republicans. These included a waiting period for children of immigrants and a measure to limit the number of children lured off private insurance. S-chip not only got more expensive, but children from families in New York and New Jersey earning more than 300 percent of the poverty line ($66,150 for a family of four) would now be eligible.
Expanding S-chip is one of Obama's top priorities. If he's unhappy with the way the new bill was put together, he hasn't said so. That may be because Republicans haven't yelled loudly enough to make it an issue. They should. Democrats may regard bipartisanship as unnecessary. But the public loves it.
The point isn't that S-chip could be stopped. That's not likely. And a laminated copy of Obama's inaugural would be too unwieldy to carry around. No, the point is that Republicans in Congress aren't helpless or powerless. They can make the best of a bad situation. And who knows? The situation might get better.
Opposing President Unity
Opposing President Unity
By Lorie ByrdAfter eight years of savaging George W. Bush, those on the left now believe that supporting the President is good for the country. Supporting the new President, that is.
Barack Obama has only been in office one week, but he has already provided plenty of ammunition for his opponents on the right. In addition to his failure to cure all the ills of the country instantaneously on just the power of his Obamaness, the new President has made a few missteps. Instituting a ban on lobbyists working in his administration only to issue a waiver to the ban the following day, and nominating as Treasury Secretary a man who failed to pay all his taxes, are a couple that have received some attention. If President Bush had done either one of these things he would not only have been strongly criticized by those on the left for it, but the most sinister of intentions would have been ascribed to his actions. What a difference an election makes.
While those on the left demand those on the right now bow at the alter of Obama in the name of unity, many continue to bash President Bush in ways that can best be described as childish and petty. From the verbal “nana nana boo boo” President Bush received from some in the crowd at the inaugural ceremony to the classless digs at Bush on the new White House website, the new administration and its followers seem to have trouble following their own new rules for national unity. Journalist Nina Easton noted that not once in Barack Obama’s inaugural speech did he give Bush credit for any of the things he did right. She specifically referred to the portion of the speech in which he said the new administration would stop ignoring poor countries and their needs. She pointed to what George Bush has done for AIDS and malaria in Africa. “He has saved tens of thousands of lives and this was a moment when I think Obama, in his spirit of bipartisanship, could have given him credit at least on that.” But President Obama could not bring himself to do that, even as he called on the country to unite.
This is not surprising coming from a man who could not even acknowledge the success of the surge in Iraq until it became impossible to deny, and who even then refused to admit he had made a mistake to oppose it. Bush’s opponents, including most of the American media, attacked him for not being able to admit his mistakes. Such attacks on Barack Obama from the media have been (and most likely will continue to be) nonexistent.
Although Republicans already have valid grounds to criticize the new administration, it remains to be seen whether or not they will mount a successful coordinated opposition.
For too long, Republicans have failed to effectively make the case for conservative principles. Too many Republicans, including President Bush, have their fingerprints all over the bailout and proposed stimulus plan, making it hard for them to criticize President Obama’s fiscal policies. There are some Republicans in Washington still committed to fiscal responsibility and conservative principles, but they will face an uphill battle voicing opposition to a President so strongly supported by the media.
Republicans will find it difficult to oppose the popular new President, but at a minimum they must make a strong and clear argument against raising taxes and multi-billion dollar bailouts if they want to retain what is left of their conservative base. It will not be enough to sit back and wait for liberal policies to fail. The same way the media resisted reporting the progress that was being made in Iraq, they will resist telling the public when Obama-Pelosi-Reid policies fail. It will be up to the Republican opposition to inform the public of the specifics of the new administration’s proposals and to use what little political power they have left to oppose bad policy.
Those on the left were allowed by the media to make vicious and unfair attacks on President Bush without scrutiny of their validity. Republicans will not be extended the same courtesy. Republicans will have to make their strongest arguments on the most important issues and resist engaging in the type of nasty, unfair attacks that were routinely aimed at the Bush administration.
The message has been repeated over and over again by those on the left and in the media that the new President is bringing the country together. Many of his followers say he is ushering in a “new age.” Those who don’t get with the Obama program are going to be in for a rough ride, but if Republicans don’t stand up for conservative principles, they might as well pack their bags and go home.
Enough Happy Talk
Enough Happy Talk
The notion of a bipartisan, pro-growth stimulus plan that could pay for some much needed infrastructure was appealing to many Americans. Even Republicans skeptical of the entire Keynesian premise were willing to go along with the deal if they could get some private sector help and some needed spending on national defense. But what has emerged from the clutches of Nancy Pelosi is a grab-bag of liberal special interest group goodies, welfare disguised as “tax relief” and precious little of long term value to the country.
Charles Krauthammer aptly termed it “one of the worst bills in galactic history.” He pans not just the content but the process:
I thought he once said we are not red states or blue states. We are the United States of America. We are not Republican or Democrat. Look, he won as the man who reaches across. But here is an example in which he says ‘I won, you lost. It’s my way.’ He listens, but unless he gives something, it’s all a sham.
It is no wonder that Republicans including John McCain and Minority Leader John Boehner are making clear they want no part of it. On Fox New Sunday, McCain declared:
There should be an end point to all of this spending. Say two years. . . The plan was written by the Democratic majority in the House primarily. So yeah, I think there has to be major rewrites, if we want to stimulate the economy.
He was clear that he “would not support it,” but was cagey on whether to filibuster it: “We need serious negotiations. We’re losing sight of what the stimulus is all about and that is job creation.” (If McCain blocked the spend-a-thon he might finally earn the affection of the conservative base.)
So what happened? President Obama entirely ceded control of the process to Pelosi, who proceeded to fill the bill with junk and exclude Republicans from the process. The Wall Street Journal concludes:
The spending portion of the stimulus, in short, isn’t really about the economy. It’s about promoting long-time Democratic policy goals, such as subsidizing health care for the middle class and promoting alternative energy. The “stimulus” is merely the mother of all political excuses to pack as much of this spending agenda as possible into a single bill when Mr. Obama is at his political zenith.
Apart from the inevitable waste, the Democrats are taking a big political gamble here. Congress and Mr. Obama are promoting this stimulus as the key to economic revival. Americans who know nothing about multipliers or neo-Keynesians expect it to work. The Federal Reserve is pushing trillions of dollars of monetary stimulus into the economy, and perhaps that along with a better bank rescue strategy will make the difference. But if spring and then summer arrive, and the economy is still in recession, Americans are going to start asking what they bought for that $355 billion.
And on a political level, the Democrats have given Republicans every reason to oppose the bill and no reason to support it. As a result the “bipartisan” stimulus will be the Democrats’ bill.
Could the bill be revised to cut out the junk and corral Republican votes? The longer this goes on and the more TV appearances Democrats make extolling the virtues of their spend-a-thon, the more difficult it becomes to reverse course. Perhaps this was what President Obama had in mind all along. Maybe all the talk about focused spending and bipartisanship was just fluffy rhetoric for the easily impressed media pundits. Or maybe this is a sign that President Obama lacks the tenacity and skill to go toe-to-toe with his own party.
The result is the same: a horrid bill and a failure to breach the partisan divide. A smartly designed bill which could garner bipartisan support seems increasingly out of reach. It would have been nice to suspend disbelief for at least a week, but either by intention or neglect we now see that Washington may in fact be the place where good ideas go to die.
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