Did You Know?

Nothing Is Stable Anymore

The world is becoming a very unstable place, and the pace at which things are changing all around us has become absolutely mind-numbing. In fact, change has become one of the only constants in today's world. Once upon a time, people in the United States could actually make 20 or 30 year plans and feel confident about achieving them. But now, nothing is stable anymore. The financial crisis showed us that some of the biggest corporations on the globe can collapse in a single day. The events of the past few weeks have shown us that entire governments can be brought down in a single week. We live in a world where there are now very few "guarantees" that you can count on. One of the only things that is guaranteed is that technology and information will continue to grow at exponential speeds. This year, the total amount of information produced on electronic devices around the globe is projected to be more than a zettabyte. A zettabyte is equivalent to one sextillion bytes. In other words, imagine a one with more than 21 zeroes following it.

Many of the things that we take for granted today didn't even exist a few short years ago. Facebook has only been with us since 2004. YouTube has only been with us since 2005. Can you imagine a world where those two websites did not exist?

We live in a world of information overload. Once upon a time it would have been possible to go to sleep for a decade and wake up and everything would still be pretty much the same. But today if you were to do that you would be in for a case of severe culture shock.

Do you remember when you could buy a set of encyclopedias and the information in them would still be good a decade or two later?

Well, things do not work that way anymore.

In fact, most of the articles on this website will be obsolete a month from now.

In today's world, you really have to think twice before you say that something is "not possible".

A few months ago, it was absolutely inconceivable that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would declare to the world that he has "spent enough time serving Egypt".

Yet here we are.

One week the government of Tunisia seemed perfectly stable and the next week it was toppled.

Do any of you out there still think that you can make realistic "plans for the future" in today's world?

Once upon a time in America, many of us were taught that if we worked really hard in school we could get a great job with a great company. We were promised that if we were faithful to that company for 30 or 40 years that we would be treated fairly and given a good pension.

Well, in today's world you might as well crumple up that plan and throw it into the wastebasket.

There is no such thing as a stable job anymore. Businesses are coming into existence and going out of existence faster than ever before. Today, one out of every four Americans workers has been with their empl0yer for less than a year.

Most Americans still don't really understand that they are now part of a global economy. They keep thinking that things were the way they used to be. They keep thinking that the U.S. economy is invincible.

Well, those days are long gone. The United States is being deindustrialized at lightning speed. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been sent overseas. China, once a complete economic backwater, is now kicking the crap out of us on the global economic stage.

Our financial system is certainly on incredibly shaky ground. Will any of us ever forget what happened in 2008?

Do any of us actually believe that it can't happen again?

Our health care system is also incredibly unstable. Today, 46 million Americans have absolutely no health insurance. That means that 46 million Americans are just one major injury or illness away from financial ruin with no protection whatsoever.

Not that those that actually have health insurance are protected. According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that did have health insurance.

So just because you have health insurance does not mean anything. One bad accident or one really bad disease and you could be totally wiped out.

Isn't that comforting?

But the truth is that our entire economy is on the verge of total collapse.

World famous investor Harry Schultz recently published the last issue of his legendary financial newsletter. After 45 years, the following is how Schultz summed up the economic collapse that we are now facing....

"Roughly speaking, the mess we are in is the worst since 17th century financial collapse. Comparisons with the 1930’s are ludicrous. We’ve gone far beyond that. And, alas, the courage & political will to recognize the mess & act wisely to reverse gears, is absent in U.S. leadership, where the problems were hatched & where the rot is by far the deepest."

David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan was quoted by Schultz as saying the following about how desperate things are about to become....

"Get some gold, beans, water, anything that Bernanke can’t destroy. Ron Paul is right. We’re entering a global monetary conflagration. If a sell-off of U.S. bonds starts, it will be an Armageddon."

Millions of Americans have become "preppers" in recent years as they have come to realize that our economy is headed down a very dark road.

But sadly, the reality is that the vast majority of Americans are not prepared for any kind of economic or natural disaster. As this week has shown us, just the threat of a major snow storm can wipe out store shelves in a single day.

So what would this country look like if a major disaster fundamentally changed life in America and suddenly people were desperate for food and supplies?

It is a frightening thing to think about.

As the pace of change has accelerated dramatically, the U.S. government and other governments around the world have responded by trying to get a tighter grip on everyone and everything.

To get on an airplane in the United States today, you either have to allow a security goon to use a scanner to look over your completely exposed body, or you have to allow a security goon to feel up all of your private areas with the fronts of his or her hands.

Not only that, but the U.S. government has now deployed VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams to set up security checkpoints at bus terminals, subway stations and on major highways.

The America that so many of us once loved is rapidly disappearing.

But it is not just our man-made systems that are rapidly changing. Something seems to be happening to the entire planet. Flooding of biblical proportions has hit Australia, Brazil, China and Pakistan over the past 12 months. Scorching heat caused massive crop failures all over Russia last summer. Record-setting cold temperatures and snowfalls all over the northern hemisphere have scientists scratching their heads. On top of everything else, mass deaths of birds and fish are suddenly being reported all over the globe.

Even the crust of the earth is becoming increasingly unstable. Did you see that volcano go off in Japan the other day? Over the past two years it seems like volcanoes have been suddenly erupting all over the world.

Not only that, but sinkholes have become an absolute epidemic all over the planet. Some of these sinkholes have been so large that they have swallowed entire apartment buildings.

In addition, it seems like there is a magnitude 6 or magnitude 7 earthquake somewhere in the world almost every day now. They have become so common that the mainstream media barely even takes notice of them anymore unless one happens near a very populated area.

None of us really knows what the world is going to look like ten years from now. What will the "new" Facebooks and YouTubes be? Will Ben Bernanke's reckless money printing destroy our economy by then? Will our U.S. dollars still be of any value ten years from now? Will there even still be a U.S. dollar?

Will we still be able to feed most of the people in the world by 2011? Will shortages of food, water and oil start driving people crazy? Could some amazing energy discovery completely transform society?

Who will be the president of the United States? Will there even be a president of the United States? Will war have erupted in the Middle East by that point? Will the United States be in another war by then?

The truth is that things are changing so fast that it is hard to even come up with the right questions to ask. The world is going to change faster this year than it did last year. In 2012 the pace of change will be even faster.

So buckle up and hold on tight because this is going to be one wild ride.

For much more on how incredibly fast the pace of change is in our modern society, check out the video posted below. It is entitled "Did You Know?" and it has been viewed more than 12 million times on YouTube....

Share and Enjoy:

Why Most Consumer Prices Aren’t Affected by Money Printing

By Bill Bonner

02/01/11 Baltimore, Maryland – “Commodities head for longest run since 2000,” says a Bloomberg headline.

What gives?

On Friday, stock markets sold off all over the world. But there was no follow-through on Monday. Instead, the Dow posted another 68-point gain.

Gold, meanwhile, lost $7.

There’s a lot of money in the world. Central banks are printing it! Particularly, the Fed.

So what happens when central banks print money? Well, prices move.

If you believe the “quantity theory of money” you have to believe that prices will rise. More money in circulation means that there is more money available for every unit of output.

So, things that can’t be easily reproduced…and things that are priced on the international auction market…go up. Like wheat. Like copper. Like oil. And, of course, like gold.

Markets are always discovering prices. Prices go up and down. But they usually find an equilibrium in a fairly narrow range. In a world of real money, prices don’t vary that much.

But with so much new, ersatz money in circulation, markets have a hard time keeping up. They get bubbly. They discover that yesterday’s price was too low…so they move it up again. And then they worry that it is too high, so it drops back again.

Generally, as central banks add money, prices move higher and higher…until the bubbles pop.

Why don’t local items react too? Like the cost of parking…or houses? Well, it’s a long story. But the Fed’s easy money doesn’t lift all prices evenly. Because the money isn’t distributed evenly. The Fed prints money, but it doesn’t give the money to us. It gives it to the banks. And the banks put it into hedge funds, trading departments, and speculative portfolios.

This is what is known as “hot” money. It never gets into consumers’ pockets. So, it never is used to buy the ordinary stuff of a domestic economy. Instead, it goes into hot markets – markets for global, auction-priced goods. Those items are soaring…even as the core inflation reading in the US is nearly flat.

Oil is at a 2-year high. And check this out. From the Telegraph:

Christies auction house has best year in 245-year history.

Christie’s has announced record sales for 2010 after the auction house enjoyed the best 12 months in its 245-year history.

Total sales rose more than 50pc to hit £3.3bn last year, as the company retained its position as the world’s largest auction house.

Christie’s was involved in two-thirds of global artwork sales worth more than $50m (£32m).

Works sold over the course of 2010 included Pablo Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which sold for an auction world record £70.3m, as well as the £35.2m sale of Alberto Giacometti’s Grande tête mince, both of which were sold on the same day last May.

Impressionist and modern art sales [were] Christie’s most successful market, with sales [totaling] £767m, followed by post-war and contemporary art sales of £603m.

Europe and the US were responsible for the lion’s share of sales, but growth was fastest in the company’s Asian business, with sales more than doubling to £499m.

These price increases are not driven by consumer price inflation. People aren’t desperate to get rid of money before it loses value. This phenomenon is driven by greed, not fear.

Youth and Islamic Fundamentalism

By Bill Bonner

02/01/11 Baltimore, Maryland – [Ed. Note: The following essay is an excerpt from Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s 2002 bestseller, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century.]

One of the complications of a declining population in the West is a political one. The War on Terrorism, declared on September 13, 2001, promises to be expensive, simply because there are so many potential terrorists to fight.

Westerners constitute a decreasing minority of the global population: In 1900, they amounted to 30 percent of humanity; in 1993 that number had dropped to 13 percent and by 2025, following current trends, the percentage will fall to 10 percent. At the same time, the Muslim world is growing younger and increasing in numbers.

In fact, Muslims’ market share of the global population has increased dramatically throughout the twentieth century and will continue to do so until the proportion of Westerners to Muslims is inverse that of the 1900 ratio. By 1980, Muslims constituted 18 percent of the world’s population and, in 2000, more than 20 percent. By 2025, they are expected to account for 30 percent of world population.

In his Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington considers these demographics to have been a major factor in the Islamic resurgence of the late twentieth century. “Population growth in Muslim countries,” he says, “and particularly the expansion of the 15- to 24-year-old age cohort, provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration…demographic growth threatens Muslim governments and non-Muslim societies.”

Islamic resurgence began in the 1970s and 1980s, just as the proportion of young people in the 15- to 24-year-old age group in Muslim nations exploded. Indeed this proportion peaked at more than 20 percent of the total population in many Muslim countries during these decades.

Muslim youth are a potential supply of members for Islamic organizations and political movements.

The Iranian Revolution, for example, in 1979 coincided with a peak in the youth population of Iran.

“For years to come Muslim populations will be disproportionately young populations,” Huntington explains, “with a notable demographic bulge of teenagers and people in their 20s.”

What are we to make of it?

Huntington suggests that the most accurate analogy in Western Society to this youth bulge in Muslim populations is the Protestant Reformation.

Ironically, both the rise of the fundamentalist movement in the Muslim world and the Protestant Reformation came about in reaction “to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions,” says Huntington. Both advocate a “return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order and discipline; and appeal to emerging, dynamic middle-class people.” Both challenge the political and economic order of the time; and where the threat of the former is concerned, major defense spending on the part of the West would not seem appropriate.

“The Protestant Reformation,” writes Huntington, “is an example of one of the outstanding youth movements in history.” Citing Jack Goldstone, Huntington continues, “a notable expansion of the proportion of youth in Western countries coincides with the Age of Democratic Revolution in the last decades of the 18th century. In the 19th century successful industrialization and emigration reduced the political impact of young populations in European societies. The proportion of youth rose again in the 1920s, however, providing recruits to fascist and other extreme movements. Four decades later the post-World War II baby boom generation made its mark in the demonstrations of the 1960s.”

Whereas young people generally exhibit a rebellious and revolutionary influence on society, what happens when people grow old?

The exact opposite.

Fearfulness and loss of desire commonly accompany aging. Older people tend not to want as many things in life as young people. They lose their desire to impress friends, relatives, and partners. Instead of buying items they don’t need, they tend to become fearful that they will not be able to obtain what they do need. There is nothing peculiar about this; it is just nature’s way of recognizing diminishing opportunities. A man in his forties can start over. But in his late sixties, he no longer has the energy or the desire to do so. He therefore starts saving everything – tinfoil, money, rags – for fear he will not be able to get them when he needs them. This is how an elderly individual tends to behave. But what does an aging society look like? Again, we need only look across the ocean – to Japan.

FOX NEWS Freedom Watch With Judge Napolitano

Freedom Watch-02/01/11-A

1/31/2011 Peter Schiff On FTM: Egypt Hits Global Markets?

Kudlow Report, February 1, 2011

Hope vs Experience On North Korea

1. StumbleUpon
2. Digg
3. Delicious
4. Reddit
5. Yahoo Buzz
6. Mixx
7. Google Buzz
8. Plurk

Inter-Korean defence talks take place next month. But until there’s a leadership change in Pyongyang, don’t expect any breakthroughs.

By Richard Weitz

The best situation for the Korean Peninsula to be in has been clear for quite some time now—free of nuclear weapons, with a formal peace treaty and integrated into East Asian economic and diplomatic institutions. Sadly, 2010 was a bad year for progress on all three of these aspirations.

Three events were particularly troubling. In March, North Korea sank the ROKS Cheonan, a South Korean corvette, firing a torpedo from a submarine that killed 46 sailors. Then, in early November, North Korean officials showed visiting American scientists a new uranium enrichment facility, consisting of some 2000 recently constructed centrifuges. And finally, in late November, the North Koreans launched an artillery barrage against Yeonpyeong Island, a South Korean possession located in the disputed border region, which killed two South Korean soldiers and two civilians.

Needless to say, North Korea has excuses for all of these incidents. In the case of the Cheonan, Pyongyang consistently denied having anything to do with it, despite the findings of an international inquiry to the contrary. On the question of its nuclear programme, Kim Jong-il’s regime claims the facility is intended to manufacture fuel for nuclear power. However, uranium enrichment can also be used to make weapons-grade fissile material. (Until now, North Korea has used the plutonium produced by its Yongbyon nuclear facility to manufacture fissile material for its nuclear explosive devices, including those it detonated in 2006 and 2009).

As for the Yeonpyeong shelling, North Korea accepts responsibility for that attack, but claims it followed a South Korean military exercise that violated the Northern Limit Line, the maritime sea border in the Yellow Sea, as well as earlier provocative joint Korea-US military drills.

Meanwhile, the Six-Party Talks involving China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas and the United States, which were established in 2003 to bring about North Korea’s de-nuclearization in return for various concessions, remain deadlocked over verification of Pyongyang’s claims. Talks haven’t taken place since December 2008, with Pyongyang formally withdrawing from them in April 2009, saying that it refused to participate further in the process. Admittedly, it has since offered to return, and most recently has dropped earlier demands for the lifting of UN sanctions and a US commitment to discuss a peace treaty. But South Korea and the United States, under its policy of ‘strategic patience,’have demanded that North Korea give some concrete indication that it will actually make major nuclear concessions.

It’s unclear what, exactly, prompted North Korea’s actions last year, although one likely explanation is that it was an effort by the regime to help demonstrate ‘toughness’ in the face of foreign pressure of Kim Jong-un—the youngest son of Kim Jong-il and his presumed successor.

1 2 3 4 >

What Syria's President Really Wants

Spoiler Alert: What Syria's President Really Wants

James H. Anderson

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad loves the oft-quoted dictum attributed to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that there can be no war without Egypt and no peace without Syria. In a January 2009 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, he claimed this chestnut “is truer than ever.” Like his father before him, Assad certainly knows how to play the “peace” game, persuading the West to think that Syria is interested in serious talks while at the same time signaling to terror groups that his peace rhetoric is just for show.

The Obama administration fears, and rightly so, that Assad’s intentions with respect to the sputtering renewal of Israeli-Palestinian talks are far from benign. Indeed, administration officials believe that even baby steps toward a two-state solution—not to mention a more comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace agreement—require a focused effort to wean Assad away from his modus operandi as Middle East spoiler. This explains why President Obama hastily dispatched US Special Envoy George Mitchell to visit Assad in mid-September, and why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton considered it urgent to meet with Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem on the margins of the UN General Assembly opening session in late September.

Assad’s skill and sophistication in playing the spoiler role—thwarting the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, hosting terror groups in Damascus, waging a proxy war against Israel, and allowing jihadists to transit into Iraq—explain how he has managed to survive during his ten-year reign. But, as we shall see, playing the role of spoiler also carries its own risks, some of which may pose serious threats to Assad’s rule in the near future.



Bashar Assad’s rise to power was both circuitous and unexpected. He had studied medicine in Damascus and appeared to be headed for a career as an ophthalmologist when he was abruptly recalled from his medical residency in London in 1994 after Basil, his elder brother and his father’s designated successor, was killed in a car crash. His father, President Hafez al-Assad, put Bashar, not yet thirty, on a fast track to bolster his military credentials and develop his leadership bona fides. He quickly rose to the rank of colonel and was given command of a Republican Guard brigade. In 1998, his father gave him the crucial Lebanon portfolio, which provided, in addition to insights into regional diplomacy, instruction in spycraft and subversion.

Assad was only thirty-four when his father died in June 2000. Nepotism created a momentary complication for his succession since Syria’s Constitution required the president be at least forty. A compliant Parliament snapped into action and promptly reduced the minimum age requirement to ensure dynastic continuity.

Most Syria watchers questioned whether Bashar, whose background seemed to indicate a reluctance to dirty his hands, could survive for long in the cutthroat world of Middle East politics. Yet to the surprise of many, the accidental dictator used a combination of luck and tactical cunning to consolidate his hold on power and even solidify and enlarge Syria’s role as a regional player, much to the chagrin of Washington.

While his father had ruled with an iron fist and a heart cold enough to slaughter an estimated forty thousand citizens in Hama in 1982 to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, Bashar has engaged in something of a charm offensive to create a bond with the people he rules. He has made an effort to appear approachable to his subjects and thus carve out a separate identity from his father, whose stern visage still adorns portrait posters in Damascus. Family bike rides always attract fawning Syrian press coverage, as do the president’s theater outings with Asma, his comely, British-born wife. (Their relative youth and sartorial flair have prompted somewhat farfetched comparisons to John and Jackie Kennedy). To soften his image abroad, Assad has also cultivated relationships with European journalists and American media luminaries like Diane Sawyer, Katie
Couric, and Charlie Rose.

Early in his tenure, Assad released some political prisoners and tolerated a limited dose of public criticism from his citizens, thus spurring hopeful talk of a Damascus Spring. Yet these hopes soon evaporated as he reversed course and clamped down on the opposition, probably out of concerns that his subjects might develop a dangerous appetite for political freedom. Citing security concerns, Assad censored the Internet, preventing his citizens’ access to sites like Facebook and YouTube. This particularly demoralized younger citizens, who had been encouraged by the fact that it was Bashar himself, the onetime head of the Syrian Computer Society, who initially convinced his father to permit use of the Internet in Syria in 1998.

For most of his decade-long reign, while still trying to charm, Assad has ruled with an authoritarian fist, much like his father, and has established a continuity with an abysmal Syrian human rights record that dates back to 1963, when the government declared a “state of emergency.” Nearly fifty years later, all the hallmarks of a police state—sweeping arrest powers, arbitrary detention, and torture of political prisoners—remain in force. Impotently chronicled by human rights watchdogs, these abuses are often downplayed, if not outright ignored, by Western capitals seeking to curry favor with Syria.



The Assad dynasty has long matched repression at home with support for terrorism abroad. The US has designated Syria a sponsor of state terrorism for thirty straight years, ever since Congress began requiring the State Department to list such offenders. A state does not make this list for three consecutive decades because its sponsorship of terrorism is somehow tangential to its policies. On the contrary, terrorism as an instrument of state policy lies at the very core of the Assad dynasty. In addition to supplying Hezbollah with sophisticated weapons in Lebanon, Syria has long permitted Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups to operate in Damascus. Assad periodically meets with these groups in public forums, something his father never did.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Assad permitted his intelligence services to provide the US some limited intelligence on al-Qaeda. But this cooperation had evaporated even before the 2003 US intervention in Iraq worsened relations between Washington and Damascus.

Since then, Syria has contributed to the war against American interests in the Middle East by providing safe conduct to jihadists on the way to Iraq to unleash suicide attacks against American soldiers there. Nor has this encouragement of terror always been sub rosa. In 2003, Syrian border guards boldly opened checkpoints and waved buses jammed with jihadists into Iraq in broad daylight. Assad even allowed jihadi volunteers to gather in front of the Iraqi Embassy in Damascus. His repeated denials that such a feeder network of terrorists exists have never passed muster. As recently as March 2010, with the war in Iraq about to wind down, the US State Department noted in a letter to congressional leaders that the “flow [of terrorists transiting Syria into Iraq] has lessened, though not ended.”

At times, Assad has made showy efforts to strengthen Syria’s control over its borders. But the disingenuousness of such gestures, carefully designed to relieve US pressure and encourage false hopes among those who advocate a more concessionary approach to Syria, has always been obvious, even if carried off with a subtlety unmatched by most other dictators in the region.

For all his success, however, Assad has suffered periodic setbacks, most often involving overplaying his hand in Lebanon. After the 2005 car bomb assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which many believed had Syrian fingerprints all over it, international pressure convinced Syria to end its thirty-year military occupation of Lebanon in April 2005, a primary goal of Lebanese citizens supporting the Cedar Revolution.

The withdrawal represented a clear setback for Damascus, at least in the short term. Relations with Arab neighbors reached a low point in August 2006, when Assad lambasted Arab leaders as “half-men” for criticizing Hezbollah during its thirty-four-day war with Israel.

Assad’s relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt have since improved, and Assad is back in business in Lebanon. While its uniformed military personnel have departed Lebanon, Syria retains a powerful position there, mainly via political sympathizers and its shadowy network of intelligence operatives. Assad also maintains gatekeeper leverage over Hezbollah, since Iranian-supplied arms bound for this terrorist group must transit Syrian territory (in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701).

Assad also caught a major break in 2010: the UN tribunal charged with investigating Hariri’s assassination shifted its focus from senior Syrian officials to Hezbollah. It is possible the inquiry may yet return to its initial suspicions regarding direct Syrian involvement, but for the time being senior officials in Damascus can breathe easier.

Meanwhile, Syria has improved its ties with Lebanon. Among other steps, the two countries have reestablished formal diplomatic relations and exchanged ambassadors. In December 2009, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of Rafik Hariri, visited Damascus, an implicit acknowledgement of Assad’s newfound leverage in the Levant. Hariri sidestepped the issue of the investigation into his father’s assassination, saying tribunal issues were not part of the dialogue.



As the case of Lebanon shows, Assad’s role as spoiler ensures that Syria cannot be ignored when it comes to regional security issues. Indeed, despite Syria’s lengthy record on terrorism, European diplomats have been practically tripping over themselves to meet with Assad. The rush accelerated after French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s July 2008 invitation to Assad to attend France’s annual Bastille Day ceremony as a guest of honor. (Some French army veterans took umbrage at the visit, recalling suspicions of Syria’s role in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed fifty-eight French peacekeepers in Lebanon, along with two hundred and forty-one American servicemen.)

By adroitly playing good cop/bad cop, Syria has made progress on other diplomatic fronts as well. Turkish-Syrian relations have improved dramatically over the past several years, and in May of this year, President Dmitri Medvedev became the first Russian leader to visit Damascus since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Seeking to exploit his diplomatic mojo, Assad embarked on a whirlwind tour of Latin America in June, with stops in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Since taking office, the Obama administration has sent its own emissaries to Damascus, including the State Department’s third-ranking official, Under Secretary of State William Burns. In February 2010, the president also nominated career diplomat Robert Ford as ambassador to Syria. His Senate confirmation, however, remains stalled in light of disturbing reports earlier this year about Syria supplying increasingly advanced weaponry, including perhaps even Scud missiles, to Hezbollah. In the interim, Obama has turned to his Middle East special envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, as his primary interlocutor to Assad. Senator John Kerry, who has long favored greater engagement with Syria, appears to play a supporting role with his frequent travels to Damascus.

Engagement efforts are spurred by the hope that such outreach will drive a wedge between Syria and Iran. On paper, this policy approach appears tempting, especially since the theocratic regime in Tehran and the secular Baathist regime in Damascus seem to be strange bedfellows. But Tehran and Damascus currently share a core regional aim—waging a proxy war against Israel via Hezbollah—that has lengthened the honeymoon period of their ideological marriage of convenience.

Bashar Assad is well aware of Washington’s efforts to triangulate in Syria and has made his response clear: no dice. In a January 19, 2009, interview with the magazine Der Spiegel, he asserted, “Good relations with Washington cannot mean bad relations with Tehran.” With Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beside him at a news conference last February, Assad took this point a step further and openly mocked US efforts to split the two allies. It is unlikely he will distance himself from Tehran as long as Iran is able to thumb its nose at the West over its nuclear ambitions with relative impunity. Assad has, in fact, become an apologist for Iranian aspirations, regularly defending Tehran’s “peaceful nuclear reactor” in press interviews.



Helped by the memory of the period before his father took control, when Syria lacked any semblance of domestic political stability and suffered from a parade of failed political leaders, Bashar Assad has stayed in power much longer than many analysts anticipated, no small feat in a region where mere survival is often equated with political success. In fact, his political power base seems stronger than ever, even though his regime is dominated by Alawites, a minority Muslim sect that makes up only fourteen percent of the population. Political opposition within Syria and abroad remains weak and divided. Over the past decade, Assad has deftly replaced much of the old-guard military leadership left over from his father’s presidency with men accountable only to him. In May 2007, he was reelected to another seven-year term, exercising the dictatorial privilege of running unopposed and garnering ninety-seven percent of the vote.

He is young and at this point successful enough to have significant regional ambitions, probably chief among them reclaiming the Golan Heights. This goal has held talismanic sway over Syrian officials ever since Israel seized the territory in the 1967 war, a loss that Assad’s father presided over as Syria’s minister of defense. More broadly, Assad sees a “new geostrategic map which aligns Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia, which are brought together by shared policies, interests and infrastructure,” as he described it in a May 2010 interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It was significant that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which have long held their own claims to regional leadership, were pointedly omitted from this constellation.

Elaborating on his vision, Assad claims a “strategic region is taking place which connects the five surrounding seas: the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Arab Gulf and the Red Sea.” He sees Syria playing a dominant role at the hub of this region, which at a May 2009 press conference he declared the “compulsory intersection for the whole world.” Though lacking on specifics, this formulation is best understood as his effort to revive the dream of a Greater Syria, albeit in more modern and congenial garb.

It is hard to envision Syria—a small, underdeveloped state—actually achieving such heady aspirations. For all his success in reducing Syria’s diplomatic isolation over the past couple of years, Bashar Assad faces some significant domestic challenges. Syria’s economy is weak, and limited reforms have had a mixed impact. Endemic corruption has accompanied limited privatization of banks and insurance companies.

Another problem involves resource depletion, especially oil and water shortages that are becoming increasingly severe as a result of drought and chronic water mismanagement. Agriculture has suffered as a result. According to a recent State Department report, Syria has become a net importer of wheat for the first time in twenty years.

Notwithstanding Assad’s grandiose visions, the likelihood of Syria becoming a regional economic and trading hub is practically nil. The longer he has held onto power, the clearer it has become that it is easier for him to play the role of spoiler than to create something of lasting value for his citizens and his neighbors. It is also becoming apparent that the role of spoiler, while allowing him to balance on the teeter-totter of regional influence, entails its own set of risks—even for a crafty tactician.



Syria is widely believed to have an extensive and sophisticated arsenal of chemical weapons, a perception that Assad does nothing to discourage in press interviews. Syria’s clandestine nuclear program, however, suffered a severe setback on the night of September 6, 2007, when Israel destroyed the al-Kibar nuclear reactor site during Operation Orchard.

Assad shrewdly resisted the urge to retaliate immediately against Israel, which would have invited an even greater disaster, given Syria’s military inferiority. Instead, he downplayed the daring raid, thus reducing its psychological impact both domestically and regionally. He also moved to cover up evidence of Syria’s nuclear ambitions—quite literally, with bulldozers and concrete—all the while holding out the potential for revenge at a more opportune moment.

After initially allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to the site after the Israeli strike, Syria has since stonewalled the monitoring organization, preventing follow-up access and refusing to answer questions. Assad claims the uranium traces found by the IAEA at the site may have been depleted uranium dropped by the Israelis—a claim that plays well in conspiratorial circles, even though it is clearly at odds with IAEA lab tests. Looking forward, there is growing pressure for the IAEA to initiate a “special investigation” of Syria’s nuclear program. If this happens, Syria likely will find itself under far more international scrutiny than it would prefer.

As the case of Syria’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction suggests, some of the most serious dangers Assad faces come from his own strategic choices. Beyond his support for jihadist groups and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s strategic alliance with Iran represents the greatest threat to his survival, given that the long-simmering Iranian nuclear crisis will likely come to a boil within the next year and a half. If Israel or the United States decides to attack Iran’s nuclear program, Syria’s dictator will find himself in a strategic vice largely of his own making. If he joins expected Iranian and Hezbollah efforts to retaliate against Israel, he will risk a humiliating defeat for Damascus. (Unlike Hezbollah, Syria’s armed forces present a largely conventional—and hence very inviting—target for the Israel Defense Forces.) Yet if Assad sits on the sidelines or limits himself to symbolic military action, then he will lose credibility—irrevocably and dramatically—both at home and abroad for failing to assist an ally during war. Either outcome could ultimately hasten the downfall of Syria’s spoiler-in-chief.

Looking back, it is clear that most Syria watchers underestimated Assad at first, thinking the former ophthalmologist’s tenure would be brief. Now many of them are making the opposite mistake, in effect projecting that his rule will last for a very long time, just like his father’s reign did before him. In doing so, they overlook the fact that the younger Assad, in marked contrast with his father, lacks a clear-eyed sense of Syria’s limitations as a regional power. This type of hubris almost always catches up to leaders who try to punch above their weight class for any extended period of time. It is the reason why Bashar Assad is unlikely to come close to matching his father’s longevity as president.

Facts Meet Freedom: On the Air in Afghanistan

Facts Meet Freedom: On the Air in Afghanistan

P. J. O'Rourke

At dinner in Prague with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s president, Jeff Gedmin, and half a dozen RFE/RL staffers, Gedmin said, to no one in particular, “Do you think at any time in the future history will look back and say, ‘I wish they hadn’t broadcast so much information’?”

It will be an unpleasant future if history says that. And it won’t be RFE/RL’s fault. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasts information to Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East in twenty-eight languages. Much of the information comes from the places where those twenty-eight languages are spoken. RFE/RL has five hundred and fifty employees in Prague—speaking the twenty-eight languages and then some—forty more back in Washington, and several hundred full- and part-time correspondents, editors, and technicians at bureaus in eighteen countries. Reporters are also working, sometimes clandestinely, in countries where RFE/RL bureaus aren’t allowed. The mission is to tell people living in those countries what is happening to them.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me” would be a statement of psychological or sociological distress in a liberal democracy, but it’s a plain statement of fact concerning the material world for anyone who doesn’t live in a liberal democracy. Government censorship of media, government influence on or ownership of media, and simple lack of infrastructure keep several billion people uninformed about the most important and intimate matters in their own lives. (And according to Radio Farda, RFE/RL’s Iranian service, the Iranian judiciary has ruled that psychology and sociology should not be taught in schools.)

The concept of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is “surrogate broadcasting”—doing the job that independent media would do if there were any or enough of it in the places RFE/RL serves. Jeff Gedmin calls it “holding up a mirror.” It’s a Cold War idea. Radio Free Europe’s first broadcast was to Czechoslovakia in 1950, as the Communists were using show trials and purges to solidify their control in Prague.

Like its sister organization Voice of America, RFE/RL is funded by the U.S. government. But Voice of America is primarily about America. RFE/RL is primarily about Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, the Balkans, the North Caucasus region, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan...

Vaclav Havel, the first president of free Czechoslovakia, said, “I learned about America from VOA and learned about my own country from Radio Free Europe.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was talk in Washington about closing down Radio Free Europe. More thoughtful policymakers prevailed. With the New World Order came a new set of world disorders. Igor Pomeranzev, a Russian broadcaster for RFE/RL, told me what a Moscow cab driver told him: “In the old days, I listened to Radio Free Europe to get news about my country. Now—I listen to Radio Free Europe to get news about my country.”

RFE/RL no longer broadcasts to Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania (though it has added service to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and other places). The retrenchments may have been premature. Jay Tolson, RFE/RL’s news director, said the president of Romania told the BBC, which also had cut its Romania service, “You left too soon.”

Mardiros Soghom, RFE/RL’s deputy director of broadcasting strategy and operations, said that, in the matter of media independence, “Places like Latvia are losing ground. The trend lines are bad.” He was worried about a “reassertion of the Soviet sphere of influence” while, back in the U.S., there has been a “move toward more Middle East involvement” in concerns about media freedoms.

John O’Sullivan, RFE/RL’s executive editor, said, “Unless there’s a threat involved it’s hard to convince America it’s important.”

But there is a threat involved. O’Sullivan sees, in fact, two threats rising to replace the Cold War threat of international Communism. Jihadism is a threat of course, but so is what O’Sullivan calls “the politicized use of corruption.” Russia, most notably, has managed to harness corruption to increase the power of the state.

“Putin is combining the KGB elite with the oligarchs,” Soghom said.

The increase in state power is being used not just domestically but in foreign policy. And, O’Sullivan points out, politicized corruption and jihadism aren’t mutually exclusive. Witness the Taliban’s harnessing of Afghanistan’s opium crop.

The strange logic of jihadism and the strict solipsism of corruption are more difficult to combat, ideologically, than Marxism. Fortunately no ideology is needed. “We are carrying on an argument promoting liberty’s ideal,” Soghom said, “by just providing information.”



The most effective part of American foreign policy isn’t military or economic and it isn’t even really an ideal. It’s just an idea.

The idea is that nobody in the world thinks, “I wish I knew less. I wish other people could tell me anything, and I’d believe it because I don’t know any better. I wish other people could tell me what to do because they know what’s going on and I don’t. I wish other people could push me around.”

All the rights of freedom rest on freedom of speech, on information, on communication. Armand Mostofi, director of Radio Farda, said, “We try to provide a window to the free world.”

In return, the Iranian government spends, by the estimate of RFE/RL’s technicians, approximately $40 million a year jamming Radio Farda. This is roughly four times Farda’s annual budget. As a work-around, Farda uses shortwave, which is harder to jam, and Web sites on proxy servers, including one that was developed by Falun Gong supporters in China. Radio Farda has more than fifty thousand Facebook friends in Iran. The Iranian government has responded by buying Internet screening systems from China. The Iranian government has also responded with secret police legwork. An eyewitness phoned in a report of a demonstration against Iran’s rigged elections, and Iranian intelligence agents spent eleven months tracing the woman. She was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for giving information to Radio Farda—and for being at the demonstration. Iran’s minister of culture has written a book denouncing Radio Farda. Even the denunciation is secret. The print run was limited to three hundred—for official use only.

I asked why Iran was going to so much trouble. “What do they fear?”

“The truth,” said Mostofi, “about everything.”

Talking to Radio Farda staffers, I could understand that just the structure of the Iranian government is a truth that Iran would not like to have told. The mullahs and the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard seem to have sent themselves to night school, studying every style of totalitarianism. Mimicking the Brezhnev-era Soviet nomenklatura, they’ve created an elite on the take. The Revolutionary Guard Corps is, among other things, 125,000 bagmen skimming graft from the top posts in politics and industry. Iran’s dictators use the stratagems of theocracy with considerably more organizational skill than the Taliban. They employ the Stalinist technique of placing a “political officer”—a Revolutionary Guard member—with every military unit. Meanwhile, like the Nazi SS, they have the Revolutionary Guard as a military of their own. On the original fascist model, Iran is also organized from the bottom up, with the least employed and employable drawn into a militia force, the Basij, which has at least a nominal membership of 13.6 million. There are Basij branches within tribes, at offices, in colleges, high schools, grade schools, and summer camps. And all this is funded with petroleum reserves that allow the Iranian government to combine the “oil-archy” of Saudi Arabia with the isolationist Juche philosophy of North Korea.

Such a monumental structure of repression would seem hard to shake, but the smallest illuminations of ignorance appear to shake it. “Freedom of information for this regime is like sunshine for Dracula,” said Mostofi.



To tell “the truth—about everything” in twenty-eight languages is a lot to expect from any media outlet. And Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty doesn’t actually try to do it. I had lunch with Gordana Knezevic, RFE/RL’s Balkan service director. She kept a daily paper publishing—daily—during the siege of Sarajevo, a paper with Bosnian and Serb reporters. “Truth?” she said, “Who knows what the truth is? We broadcast facts. That’s enough.”

I sat in on news meetings—Europe desk, Asia desk, central news desk—to watch those facts be sorted. There were the usual newsroom discussions about reliability of sources, multiple verifications, what was on and off the record, who reporters did and didn’t have access to. Later I realized that what I hadn’t seen or heard were ideological arguments or even comments. Except in cases where I had prior knowledge—John O’Sullivan used to be the editor of the National Review—I emerged from my interviews at RFE/RL ignorant of everyone’s political orientation. Certainly among five hundred and fifty Americans, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and people from Central Asia, there had to be political disagreements along free market/socialist/social conservative/secular humanist lines. And I don’t think anyone was avoiding the subject. I got no sense of partisan abstemiousness. Instead it seemed people were busy with something that comes first, before the political business of liberal democracy begins. Port and cheese weren’t being served at breakfast.

Also, the close-up facts about faraway places that RFE/RL deals in are a distraction from political theory, if not a remedy for it. With so much concrete information, there’s hardly space for abstraction. For example, speaking of concrete, the heroic-scale, gold-plated concrete statue of Turkmenistan’s late tyrant, Turkmenbashi, was being demolished, pulled down the way the statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein had been, but with one difference. The demolition was concealed behind barricades and no one was allowed near it. A symbol of secretive repression being toppled—in secret.

Eastern Orthodox priests were holding services in Belgrade, praying that the EU wouldn’t recognize Kosovo’s independence, in case anyone thinks Islam is the only religion with jihadist problems.

Moldova continues to suffer secessionist problems in the clash between Slavic-speaking and Romanian-speaking peoples in the Transnistria region. Now Transnistria is suffering secessionist problems in the clash between Ukranian-speaking and Russian-speaking peoples. This in the poorest part of Europe, a continent that has spent two hundred years vacillating between the horrors of attempted unification—Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin—and the griefs of attempted separatism—the IRA, the Basque ETA, wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Caucasuses.
RFE/RL’s Moldovan service has run a feature, “Why Is History Important?” And the Europe desk is working on another feature about the precisions of nationalism and the kind of countries that could be produced, “How Small Can You Get?” According to the North Caucasus service, there are a hundred and eighty tribes and ethnic groups just in Dagestan.

One hopes that there’s a twenty-ninth language—American English—in which what goes out on RFE/RL is being heard.

I had thought the problem of Tajikistan was being caught between Russia’s power in Central Asia to the north and America’s power in Afghanistan to the south. Not so, said Sojida Djakhfarova, RFE/RL’s Tajik service director. Tajikistan is caught between the power of its trade ties to the east and the power of its Persian ethnicity to the west—not squeezed by Russia and America but squeezed by China and Iran. I felt like a spectator at the Great Game who’d gotten the end zones confused with the sidelines.

Amanullah Gilzai, acting director of the Pashto-language Pakistani service, Radio Mashaal, explained the sudden emergence of the Taliban in Swat. It wasn’t so sudden. Swatis had been prepared for radical sentiments by labor exploitation. Hundreds of Swatis are sent thousands of kilometers to mine coal—with predictable work conditions at predictably minimal pay—in the Taliban-fraught Quetta region of Pakistan. And Pakistan performed a specific act of misgovernance. Swat had been a semi-autonomous state with a local Pashtun sultan. Islamabad took over the government of Swat but failed to govern it. No sufficient administrative or judicial systems were installed, leaving Swat without law. The Taliban filled the vacuum with sharia law. People who have experienced the terrors of no law can be convinced that terrible law is better.

The information broadcast by RFE/RL has effects and side effects. A story on Radio Mashaal about two Pakistanis who’d had hands chopped off by the Taliban was picked up by the Pakistani community in Canada and resulted in a group of Canadian doctors volunterring to provide free prostheses.

Hamid Karzai told Jeff Gedmin, “The first thing I do in the morning is turn on Radio Azadi”—Azadi being RFE/RL’s Afghan service—“to figure out what people are thinking.” Those people may be better attuned to Radio Azadi than they are to Hamid Karzai. Afghan Service Director Hashem Mohmand said Azadi’s Prague office has received some two hundred messages from Afghans in Kabul asking to be referred to responsible Afghan government authorities for problems ranging from corruption and missing persons to a school that doesn’t have books and a letter sitting on Karzai’s desk waiting to be signed.
Afghans send their appreciations to Radio Azadi. Often the appreciations are written on illuminated scrolls. The longest so far has been sixty meters. One I looked at, a modest thirty meters, had been written by two high school boys. I asked for the translation of a random passage: “The rightful man in society is the man who gives rights to others.”



The value of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty would seem to be self-evident. It is to a shepherd in a remote part of Kerman Province in Iran. He called while I was in Prague just to say that he would miss Radio Farda. His cell phone was still charged, but his radio batteries were running low and it would be a week before anyone would visit him.

However, this is a period of un-self-evidence for America abroad. The direction of our foreign policy is not clear to anyone, especially not to those holding the compass of foreign policy. Both the current administration and its Tea Party–oriented Republican opponents are more engaged with domestic than international issues. Each side is united in certainty about its domestic agenda and divided internally about the role America should have overseas.

In a way, the current confusion about foreign policy goals in America would seem to be a perfect moment for RFE/RL, where no foreign policy goal is put forth except cultivating respect for those freedoms that everyone in American politics claims to treasure. Yet at a time of ugly budgetary problems when the attention of the body politic is turned elsewhere, one fears for any worthwhile program our government has that isn’t someone’s legal entitlement.

Never mind that RFE/RL is cheap. Its budget is $95 million a year—four Apache helicopters in a country with a foreign policy that causes one Apache helicopter to crash nearly every week—half the annual expenditure of WNET, the PBS station in New York, a city where, judging by the tone of the debate over the proposal to put an Islamic center near Ground Zero, they’ve got more free speech than they know what to do with.

In fairness, the Obama administration has been so far so good with government-funded international broadcasting. There’s a variety of it. Radio/TV Marti is aimed at Cuba. Radio Free Asia goes out to that continent in nine languages. The Middle East Broadcast Network, in Arabic, includes Al Hurra TV and Radio Sawa. Plus there’s Voice of America, founded as the broadcast media arm of the U.S. Information Agency, and RFE/RL. (RFE was originally intended for Soviet satellite countries, while RL went to the Soviet Union itself. They merged in 1976.)

All these entities are now supervised by the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors. President Obama appointed, as chairman, Walter Issacson, the former editor of Time, head of the Aspen Institute bipartisan foreign policy think tank, and an ardent internationalist. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, is ex officio a member of the board. She’s been steadfast in support of RFE/RL, visiting Prague and taking calls on the air during a Radio Azadi panel discussion about the Taliban. (After eighteen years of noisy personal opposition to Hillary’s politics, I hereby confess that she stands as a mighty oak in a pantsuit among the swaying reeds of foreign policy.) RFE/RL’s president, Jeff Gedmin, who came to office during the Bush years, previously headed the Aspen Institute in Berlin, and before that worked on the American Enterprise Institute’s New Atlantic Initiative, trying to reestablish the bonds of the North Atlantic Alliance that led to NATO—bonds everyone agrees could use some reestablishing.

The Broadcast Board of Governors’ organizational chart is a mess. But one should never ask for rationalization when government is doing something effective—the effectiveness will be rationed.

A greater danger to an operation like RFE/RL than the government that funds it is the public that forgets it. Shortly after I’d visited RFE/RL, I gave a speech to a group of American business executives. Their business having its political issues, they were politically well informed. I polled maybe a dozen of them. The younger executives weren’t quite sure what RFE/RL was. The older executives remembered Radio Free Europe well, but not one of them knew it was still broadcasting. They thought of Radio Free Europe not as an idea from the Cold War, but as one of its relics.



The war we’re fighting in Afghanistan is not cold. I flew to Kabul to see what part Radio Azadi plays in the most serious example of America’s foreign policy conundrums. I was met at the airport by Radio Azadi’s bureau chief, M. Amin Mudaqiq.

There’s no doubt about Afghans understanding the importance of communication freedoms. The second most impressive feature of Kabul is the array of billboards, posters, placards, and signs advertising cell phone and Internet services.

The most impressive feature of Kabul is that prerequisite of communication freedoms—staying alive. Soldiers, policemen, and private security forces swarm a city were every important public function is protected behind great lengths and tall heights of reinforced concrete blast walls, and entering even a fast-food restaurant entails a TSA-like experience of metal detectors and pat-downs.

Radio Azadi was protected by a roadblock on its cul-de-sac, a guardhouse, and a barbed wire-topped cinderblock wall around the pleasant, ’70s-style suburban residence that houses its studios and offices. But, in fact, the security at RFE/RL’s Afghan bureau was less intense and less evident than the security at its headquarters in Prague.

There was a bomb attack on the organization in 1981, when it was based in Munich. It injured four employees, two seriously, and caused $2 million in damage. The bomb was placed by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal), who was paid by Romania’s Ceausescu regime.

The Taliban, while hardly friendly to Radio Azadi, is more open to communication than Ceausescu or Carlos. The Taliban will call in to Azadi talk shows to argue with hosts and guests.

On the phone, a Taliban spokeman told Amin Mudaqiq, “We know you are funded by the U.S. Congress, but we judge you by your deeds.” Radio Azadi is committed enough to freedom of speech not to take this as a back-handed compliment.

Mudaqiq is a soft-spoken, thoughtful man looking a little tired from his mission, which is, in brief, to reflect everything in Afghanistan. He is, in Jeff Gedmin’s phrase, “holding up the mirror,” twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

Azadi is the number one radio station in the country. As Afghan Service Director Hashem Mohmand had told me in Prague, “They have reporters in all the provinces who are willing to take risks and know the communities.” Azadi also offers a breadth of programming that out-spans NPR, let alone American commercial radio.

News is the most listened-to, despite the huge surplus of news that Afghanistan produces. One would think news would be a glut on the market. Second most listened-to is a comedy program. Like many people whose lives are no laughing matter, Afghans tell good jokes. Afghanistan has been through a presidential election with all its corruption and was going through a parliamentary election with all its corruption. A fundamentalist mullah told me, “There is God—or there would have been an election.”

Radio Azadi broadcasts features on social issues—women, family, youth, culture, the economy. The most popular topic, if popular is the word, is violence against women. Afghan music is played from noon until two, and it sounds foreign and exotic until the lyrics are translated: “I thought I plucked a rose / But I grabbed a thorn.” Country music happens in every country. A twice-weekly program is devoted to sports. At a meet in Iran, Afghanistan had just won gold, silver, and bronze in, of all things, unarmed fighting—tae kwon do. The top sports in Afghanistan are soccer, cricket, and volleyball, but foremost is buzkashi, a game played on horseback where a goal is scored by dragging the headless carcass of a goat or calf into the goal. Buzkashi involves teams, but each member of both teams is also playing against every member of his own team. Afghan politics can be understood only by a buzkashi fan.

Arguably the most important programs on Radio Azadi are the call-in shows. One is devoted entirely to coping with the government—a sort of audio skein of thread to help callers find their way through the Cretan labyrinth of Afghan bureaucracy. Another, “In the Search of a Loved One,” helps reunite families separated by thirty years of Afghan displacement, exile, and forced flight. A third, hosted by doctors, gives medical advice—a reminder that Afghans face all the prosaic, as well as the sensational, problems of life. The most commonly asked questions are about heart disease. The purpose of other call-in shows is to put people in authority on the spot, in a straightforward and nonadversarial way. On a day when I was at Radio Azadi’s studios, Afghanistan’s ministers of communications and the interior were in a cramped, stuffy broadcast booth answering listener inquiries about a new national ID card. I got the impression that the card-issuing process was full of screw-ups, but the callers and the ministers were patient with each other.

“The producer has only a minimum role of organizing the show,” Mudaqiq said. He told me that people in authority are willing to submit themselves to public questioning—at least some of the people in authority are. Radio Azadi hosted a program about corruption involving the aid money being given to Afghanistan. All the Afghan government officials who were invited showed up, but no foreign ambassadors or other representatives did. Eighty percent of Afghan aid is directly controlled by foreign governments.

Radio Azadi performs its surrogate broadcast duties on a budget of $5.3 million a year, and performs them in two languages, alternating hour by hour between Dari, the lingua franca of Afghanistan, and Pashto, the most widely spoken tribal language.

Azadi has a hundred and twenty full-time employees, twenty-four of whom report from the provinces, plus a number of part-time and freelance journalists. Broadcasts go out on AM, FM, shortwave, and satellite radio. Four of Azadi’s reporters also maintain a Web site that’s manned twenty-four hours a day and reaches Afghanistan’s one million online connections. It gets about two hundred thousand hits a week. “Although I have no budget for Internet,” Mudaqiq said.



Mudaqiq arranged a pen-draining, hand-cramping muster of interviews with tribal leaders, mullahs, members of parliament, journalists, activists, a provincial governor, the minister of education.

Some were opposed to the U.S. and NATO military involvement in Afghanistan. “The forward line of your policy in Afghanistan is your soldiers,” a Pashtun tribal leader said. “They form a public opinion. Think of this—all your soldiers are fighting against the poor.”

Some wanted greater U.S. and NATO commitment. “Leaving this country with the job unfinished,” a member of parliament said, “will leave more tasks and more dangerous tasks—tasks that maybe cannot be done. I hope there is not an air of impatience in the U.S. and Europe.”

Some thought Radio Azadi was getting too close to the Afghan government. “More and more interviews with the Karzai people,” complained a candidate for parliament running on a vehemently anticorruption platform. (Though the candidate admitted he’d been a frequent guest on Azadi programs and had, not long before, been named Radio Azadi “Man of the Year.”)

Some thought Radio Azadi wasn’t getting close enough to the Afghan government. “I wish you could allocate time for a C-Span in Parliament,” the MP who worried about U.S. and European impatience told Mudaqiq.

But everyone agreed on the value of more information, more communication, more talk.

All the rights of freedom that rest on freedom of speech have a firm enough foundation in Afghanistan. Firm enough for the Afghans to make fun of them. “During Communism no one was able to say anything,” a Turkmen tribal leader said. “Now no one is able to listen to anything.”

Afghanistan has a tradition of tribal meeting, or jirga, which the MP described with concision: “Everybody is equal when they sit and talk.”

“Even a poor man,” the Pashtun tribal leader said, “if he can convince people he honestly represents them, will win out.” This individual equality—siali in Pashto—is part of the ancient Pashtun moral code, which is more than can be said for the ancient moral codes of the West.

There is a religious as well as traditional aspect to siali. One of the mullahs with whom I talked said that among the most frequent topics of his sermons is leadership. As a prayer leader he tries to explain how to select a political leader. This is an easy colloquy to have with fellow Muslims. There is no generally accepted earthly hierarchy in Islam, especially not in the Sunni Islam that predominates in Afghanistan. There’s certainly no pope. A mosque is a place of worship defined as Jesus defined it, “Where two or three are gathered together.” Absent coercion, Muslims choose their mosque, and those who pray at that mosque choose their mullah. People who say the Muslim world isn’t ready for democracy ignore, among other things, that Muslims have always had it, at least as an ideal.

And Radio Azadi seems an ideal way—or, at any rate, one of the few feasible ways—for the United States to further the communication that Afghans want. The mullah who preaches about political leadership said that Radio Azadi was one of the most important sources of material for his sermons—something those who condemn “political Islam” should consider.

The minister of education, who has been criticized on Radio Azadi, said he “never had a feeling that Azadi was unnecessarily taking sides in the Afghan conflict. It has maintained its impartiality.” Meaning, I think, that all his political opponents have been criticized on Radio Azadi too.

The Pashtun tribal leader who generally opposed U.S. policy in Afghanistan said, “Azadi is doing very well because they’re telling the facts.”

A female member of parliament who was dubious about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, who felt America was ignoring human rights and human services, praised Azadi’s “diversity of opinion” and the fact that it often upset the Karzai government. She thought it was good that the Taliban feels the need to phone Radio Azadi. This shows, she said, that “Taliban power is not so great.”

The MP who wants the United States and NATO to finish their task thought it was a fine irony that the Taliban has to call a U.S.-funded radio station to bash America, an irony that isn’t missed by Afghans.

“This is a verbal society,” he said. “Communication is the easiest and cheapest way to create an atmosphere of understanding. We are not a book-oriented people. TV is too short, too slogan-oriented. In Afghanistan people need in-depth information; TV does not allow that.”

An Afghan civil society activist said that radio was important for “internalizing the issues.” Reverting from activist-speak, he said, “Radio can pass wisdom.”

“Radio is a very simple instrument,” said the anticorruption candidate for parliament. He contrasted it with other aid expenditures. “Forty billion dollars is enough to build three Afghanistans,” he said. He too was confident in radio’s ability to transmit values. He said, “Your radio, your taxpayers, our people—same interests,” and said he’d told Hillary Clinton, before she came to Kabul for the meeting of U.S. and NATO foreign ministers, “When you come to Afghanistan, don’t leave your values at Kennedy Airport.”

There are of course other kinds of U.S.-funded communication that Afghans want beside radio. “I have no feeling of direct communication with President Obama,” said the female MP. She is a leading advocate for women’s rights, human rights, and other rights dear to the heart of the American Democratic Party, and heads a faction in the Afghan parliament with the Democrat-friendly name “The Third Way.”

Her male counterpart, so strong a proponent of the United States, said, “In five years I have yet to have a meaningful talk with a U.S. official.” He is fluent in English and lived in the United States, where he worked for ten years as a commercial airline pilot.

The minister of education said he couldn’t spend U.S. aid money on his educational programs because they weren’t certified by the U.S., and he couldn’t get them certified by the U.S. because he couldn’t get the U.S. to come inspect them for certification.

Both the female MP and the anticorruption candidate said that the American government seems to do most of its communicating with only one generation of Afghans. “Just the mujahedin,” said the female MP. “They aren’t listening to the silent majority.”

“The older generation were either Islamicist warriors or Communist warriors,” said the anticorruption candidate. “American experts are thirty years out of date.” He said that talking to “even fifty members of the new generation will be enough to do something.”

The anticorruption candidate and the Pashtun tribal leader thought the United States and NATO should sit down with Afghans in a grand assembly, a loya jirga.

The anticorruption candidate thought an international loya jirga would fight corruption. He said, “Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel, and . . . ” (the name of the new fellow running Great Britain slipped his mind, as indeed it slipped mine) “ . . . and the U.K. should come to Afghanistan and organize a meeting, meet with local officials, and tell politicians they are personally responsible.”

The Pasthun tribal leader thought the loya jira would fight what he denied was a war and insisted on calling “instability.” He said, “My advice to the U.S. and the international community is to tell Afghans the truth. Sit with the grand assembly and tell them, ‘We’ve failed.’ Then listen to how they tell you to proceed. If you listen you will succeed.”

Afghans are also alert to more subtle modes of communication. I had dinner with the governor of an eastern Afghan province and his staff at a restaurant in Kabul. The governor was irate about the blast walls everywhere. He said, “They show we are more concerned with ourselves than with the people. I told the U.S. that by building big walls you are giving the impression that the enemy is at your door, also the impression that we are not very much courageous. I told a NATO general, ‘Remove those walls. If you are scared, just put the walls inside your compound. Or paint them with flags.’”

(I noticed a subtle mode of communication myself. Deep in the fortified parliamentary compound, in the window of a very small and shabby sheet metal pre-fab building that looked like a FEMA trailer was a sign reading, “Department of Complaint.”)

In the matter of communication subtlety, or lack thereof, I heard numerous complaints about the translators the United States and NATO have hired.

“They speak kitchen Dari,” said Mudaqiq.

The Pashtun tribal leader said, “Old KGB agents are in the employ of the U.S.—under instruction from their old bosses.” Given the way things have been going in Afghanistan, one wonders if he isn’t right.

“NATO needs strong cultural exposure,” the governor said. “One of the problems is the interpreters. This can harm many people.” He told a story about how, during an international aid agency visit to his province, a U.S. embassy translator had turned the sentence “We want professional doctors treating patients professionally” into “We want professional doctors to threaten patients’ professions.”

An aide to the governor told about another U.S. embassy translator who, when asked to tell locals that the events in their village would be a “news story,” said, in Pashto, that what was going on in the village was a “love story.”

A deputy minister in Afghanistan’s anticorruption agency stopped by the governor’s table. Hearing the stories of horrible translations, he laughed and said, “I was the interpreter for Dr. Najibullah”—the last Communist ruler of Afghanistan.

“That’s why he was hanged!” said the governor.

There was also concern about the people interpreting the interpreters. The anticorruption candidate said, “Change the American embassy staff. Change the American intelligence staff.” I asked why. “All reports are wrong.”

The former airline pilot MP said the same thing. “Every expert has gotten it wrong about Afghanistan.”

The Afghans are confident that they themselves can get it right. For this, the minister of education said, “Communication is the strategic weapon.”

The civil society activist said of himself and his fellow opponents of the Taliban, “We are strong because no one has logically defeated us.”

The governor said, “When the Taliban does not come to the table, it’s not because they’re strong but because they don’t have the logic for argument.”

The former airline pilot said, “Democracy is born in every person. Sometimes it’s nourished. Sometimes it’s not.”

The governor noted, however, that the principal forms of “media” in Afghanistan are still “public gatherings, mosques, and madrassas. And the Taliban is using all of these and the tribal elders—using them much better than our government is.”



I asked Amin Mudaqiq what he’d do with more money for Radio Azadi. He answered without PowerPoint chit or MBA chat. He’d install ten to fifteen more FM transmitters, especially in provincial capitals. Azadi is too AM-dependent, and AM radio has limited range in mountainous terrain. He’d add a night shift. He’d hire more correspondents. He’d increase pay and benefits.

As it is, Radio Azadi employees have no health-care coverage or pension plan. They make between $400 and $1000 a month in a place where, thanks to an influx of foreign aid and foreign aid workers, it is not cheap to live. “We train someone,” Mudaqiq said, “spending thousands of dollars, sending him to Prague. Then someone else offers him two hundred more bucks and he’s gone.”

Pay at the BBC Afghan service starts at $900 a month, plus meals, transportation, and health insurance, while Azadi covers only transportation costs.

If Mudaqiq had more correspondents, he could broadcast more daily news and produce more “packages”—five- to seven-minute features with the in-depth information that the former airline pilot said television can’t provide. At the moment, Radio Azadi broadcasts only two feature packages a week because reporters must produce the features while still covering their regular beats. And every week each reporter is also expected to participate in two on-air roundtable discussions of current events.

Radio Azadi does features on big issues like tax collection. But there are other features that Mudaqiq would like to do—not so big, but more important to listeners in a subsistence economy where there isn’t much for tax collectors to collect. He told me about one such feature in the works, on the use of hashish in exploiting carpet makers. The weaver’s children are dosed with it to keep them quiet while their mother works. It gives one second thoughts about buying an Afghan carpet—and maybe second thoughts about what to do with the kids when one can’t get a sitter on Saturday night.



That there’s too much talk and too much money in politics is an almost universal criticism. But with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty we have a case that may be unique, at least in American politics. We want the whole world to open its big mouth, and we need to spend more.

The best way to establish the idea of America is to help other people establish the idea of Afghanistan or Moldova or Tajikistan.

At RFE/RL headquarters in Prague, Sojida Djakhfarova, director of the Tajik service, put it bluntly, “If the U.S. is going to protect its position in Central Asia, it has to spend money.” Djakhfarova supports her mother in Tajikistan, sending the support in that universal medium, U.S. dollars. The last time Djakhfarova was home, her mother was examining the portrait of George Washington on a one-dollar bill. “My life depends on this man,” her mother said. “Who is he?”

Can Jeffrey Immelt Get the Job Done with Obama?

Can Jeffrey Immelt Get the Job Done with Obama?

By Larry Kudlow

Can GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt talk President Obama into a major corporate tax cut? Immelt has been appointed to the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which replaces the disbanded Paul Volcker Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Immelt was a member of that original board. Now he has a more elevated position in the Obama 2.0, allegedly pro-business, move-to-the-center Clintonesque White House.

Regarding the new President Obama, I am still trust but verify. But yes, of course, Jeff Immelt is a businessman through and through. He is a trustee of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation board, while GE is a big sponsor of the Reagan Centennial Celebration. (Recall that the Gipper worked for GE as a spokesman and television host from 1954 through 1962.) He's also a registered Republican who contributed to both Hillary Clinton and John McCain during the 2008 campaign. And last year, he harshly criticized Obama at a dinner in Italy, where he basically said: Obama doesn't like business, and business doesn't like Obama.

But what goes around comes around. Many business people wanted senior executives in the White House, and now they have two - with GE's Immelt joining William Daley, the former banker and new chief of staff.

GE had a rough time of it during the Great Recession. But in recent quarters it has turned quite profitable; its stock just hit a 52-week high. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Immelt set out his agenda for continued economic recovery. He would focus on manufacturing and exports, free trade, and innovation.

So where's the corporate tax cut? Well, Immelt offered one short line about "a sound and competitive tax system . . ." No, not exactly a ringing call to action. But I believe he will, in fact, push for corporate tax reform.

There's nothing more important than full-fledged corporate tax-rate reduction in order to maximize U.S. economic growth. At 35 percent, our highest-in-the-world corporate tax should be knocked all the way down towards 20 percent.

And businesses taxes should be made territorial, not worldwide, in order to stop the double-taxation of foreign earnings. Business revenues held overseas, now reported to be about $1 trillion, should be repatriated to the U.S. with a 5 percent tax holiday.

Businesses also should enjoy permanent 100 percent cash expensing for new investment in plant, equipment, and research. Studies have shown that this combination by far offers the biggest bang for the buck in terms of additional GDP and job-creation.

And yes, broaden the base with loophole closers. A lower tax rate and full expensing is much more important than all those K Street credits and deductions.

At the Republican House retreat in Baltimore a week ago, I argued for a two-track, pro-growth fiscal plan. Reform the business tax (Rep. Dave Camp) and bring federal spending as a share of the economy down to 20 percent from the current 25 percent (Rep. Paul Ryan). My friend and mentor Arthur Laffer, my co-panelist at the retreat, argued strongly that reduced spending is itself a tax cut. On this point, Laffer, Alan Reynolds, and Dick Armey have all recently cited the late Nobelist Milton Friedman, who held that government spending is the broadest tax on the overall economy.

And let's add a rollback of Obamacare and a return to a reliable King Dollar (referenced to gold) as additional pro-growth measures. Finally, let's enact drill, drill, drill. More energy across the board - "all of the above" - is another great job creator.

But my former boss Jeff Immelt (GE is selling NBC Universal to Comcast) can play a key role in a hugely important corporate tax cut. This will incentivize firms to stay at home instead of going overseas. It will be a huge job-creator, reducing unemployment and playing an important part in deficit reduction. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a 1 percentage point increase in GDP above the meager 2.5 percent baseline would lower the ten-year budget gap by nearly $3 trillion.

Growth solves a lot of problems. Can Mr. Immelt get the job done?

Bernanke and Ethanol Subsidies Sink Egypt

Bernanke and Ethanol Subsidies Sink Egypt

By Larry Kudlow

Decades of autocratic government and a lack of free elections are, of course, the main drivers of the political upheaval in Egypt. But did the sinking dollar and skyrocketing food prices trigger the massive unrest now occurring in Egypt -- or the greater Arab world for that matter?

In addition to Egypt, the people have taken to the streets to varying degrees in Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen. Local food riots have even broken out in rural China and other Asian locales.

While the mainstream media focuses on the political aspects of this turmoil, they are overlooking the impact of rising inflation, driven mainly by record food prices. For example, former Bush advisor Dan Senor notes that Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer. Yet because of skyrocketing prices, Egyptian inflation is now over 10 percent, while some experts estimate that Egyptian food inflation has risen as much as 20 percent.

So I have to ask this tough question: Is Ben Bernanke's ultra-easy QE2 money pump-priming partially to blame?

Commodities are priced in dollars, and the Federal Reserve has been overproducing dollars for more than two years. Consequently, emerging markets throughout the world -- and the food sector in particular -- are suffering from rising inflation.

The CRB food index is up an incredible 36 percent over the past year, including 8 percent year-to-date. Raw materials are up 23 percent in the past year. Inflation breakouts have occurred in China, among various Asian Tigers, and in India, Brazil, and other Latin American countries. Even Britain and Germany are registering higher inflation readings.

In dollar terms, the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.

And let's not forget that the world's poor are the hardest hit by food-price inflation. They literally can't afford to buy bread. It brings to mind the French Revolution in the 18th century. When you see this kind of mass protest in the streets, spreading from country to country, you see a pattern that cannot be explained by local conditions alone.

The dollar is the world's reserve currency. And the rise of dollar food prices is a global phenomenon. It is a monetary phenomenon, as much as anything.

And that's why one can argue that the worldwide revolt against soaring food prices is an unintended consequence of U.S. Fed policy. That policy is aimed at reigniting inflation here at home. But unwanted dollars circulating worldwide are hitting foreign inflation rates first. We may well catch this inflation virus before long.

To be fair, not all of the food inflation can be blamed on the Fed. A good part of this problem can also be placed at the doorstep of bipartisan U.S. policies to subsidize ethanol.

According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2001, only 7 percent of U.S. corn went to ethanol. By 2010, the ethanol share was 39 percent. So instead of growing wheat, our farmers are growing corn in order to cash in on ethanol subsidies. Egyptians who can't afford to buy bread and have taken to the streets in protest might be very interested to know this.

Not even Al Gore still believes that ethanol provides any environmental benefits.

As the world watches events in Egypt play out, be mindful that if the U.S. fixed its mistaken monetary and energy policies, the forces of freedom and democratization would have an easier time of it in the rest of the world.