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The U.S. has revised its count of juveniles ever held at Guantanamo Bay to 12, up from the eight it reported in May to the United Nations, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.
The government has provided a corrected report to the U.N. committee on child rights, according to Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. He said the U.S. did not intentionally misrepresent the number of detainees taken to the isolated Navy base in southeast Cuba before turning 18.
"As we noted to the committee, it remains uncertain the exact age of many of the juveniles held at Guantanamo, as most of them did not know their own date of birth or even the year in which they were born," he said.
A study released last week by the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas concluded the U.S. has held at least a dozen juveniles at Guantanamo, including a Saudi who committed suicide in 2006.
"The information I got was from their own sources, so they didn't have to look beyond their own sources to figure this out," said Almerindo Ojeda, director of the center at the University of California, Davis.
Rights groups say it is important for the U.S. military to know the real age of those it detains because juveniles are entitled to special protection under international laws recognized by the United States.
Eight of the 12 juvenile detainees identified by the human rights center have been released, according to the study.
Two of the remaining detainees are scheduled to face war-crimes trials in January. Canadian Omar Khadr, now 21, was captured in July 2002 and is charged with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. special forces soldier. Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who is about 24, faces attempted murder charges for a 2002 grenade attack that wounded two U.S. soldiers.
The study identified the only other remaining juvenile as Muhammed Hamid al Qarani of Chad.
The Saudi who hanged himself with two other detainees in 2006, Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, was 17 when he arrived at Guantanamo within days of the military prison opening in January 2002, according to the study.
About 250 prisoners remain at Guantanamo on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Bailout’s Next 60 Days
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A month into the Bush administration’s $700 billion bank bailout, the effort has become as fractured as the ad hoc rescues that it was supposed to replace. As a result, the modest easing the bailout initially brought about in the credit markets is now being reversed over doubts about the Treasury’s stewardship of the plan.
The rates for loans between banks have begun edging up again, and consumer borrowing costs are also up — that is, assuming consumers can find a bank willing to lend.
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is reportedly planning how the new administration will better manage the bailout. But two months is a long time to wait while the Bush Treasury burns through the bailout billions, with little to show in terms of enhanced stability and even less in terms of enhanced confidence.
Last week Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a complex new bailout strategy intended to promote consumer borrowing. Mr. Paulson defended this latest iteration, saying he would never apologize for changing his approach as the facts change. But it is not surprising that everyone else is feeling whiplashed.
Before the bailout even got under way in October, Mr. Paulson had to sideline his original strategy — to buy up banks’ bad assets — because, he soon came to realize, it was too complex and indirect to deliver the swift jolt the financial markets needed.
He indicated that he would return to that strategy later, but to get the bailout started, he opted instead to directly invest $250 billion in the nation’s banks. The about face was necessary, but it raised uncertainty about whether the Treasury really had a firm grasp of the problem — exactly what spooked markets don’t need.
Since then, the doubts have grown, among investors and the public. Mr. Paulson invested the taxpayers’ money on terms so lenient that banks have felt free to hoard it, or to buy other banks — while refusing to bolster lending to consumers and small businesses.
He has diverted another $40 billion of the fund to American International Group, the reckless insurance company that had already received $85 billion in federal assistance. If government officials know where all that money is going, they haven’t shared their knowledge with the public.
Last week Mr. Paulson disappointed investors by ditching the plan to buy up banks’ bad assets. Instead, he expanded the bailout to include investing money in nonbank financial companies, like GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors, and the other carmakers’ lending units. He also announced that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve were considering a plan to use taxpayer money to jump-start consumer lending via credit cards, car loans and student loans. The Fed quickly said the plan was still in early development.
The one approach Mr. Paulson stubbornly refuses to consider is using bailout money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. His reasoning — that the money is to be used to stabilize the financial system — inexplicably ignores the fact that the instability he is seeking to quell is rooted in the housing bust.
Over the next two months, Mr. Paulson must impose some coherence and clarity on the bailout. Otherwise he will only fan anxieties and mistrust, which will undermine the effectiveness of his good decisions and amplify the fallout of his bad ones. With markets gyrating wildly, and the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation needs clear leadership and a sound plan.
A month into the Bush administration’s $700 billion bank bailout, the effort has become as fractured as the ad hoc rescues that it was supposed to replace. As a result, the modest easing the bailout initially brought about in the credit markets is now being reversed over doubts about the Treasury’s stewardship of the plan.
The rates for loans between banks have begun edging up again, and consumer borrowing costs are also up — that is, assuming consumers can find a bank willing to lend.
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is reportedly planning how the new administration will better manage the bailout. But two months is a long time to wait while the Bush Treasury burns through the bailout billions, with little to show in terms of enhanced stability and even less in terms of enhanced confidence.
Last week Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson outlined a complex new bailout strategy intended to promote consumer borrowing. Mr. Paulson defended this latest iteration, saying he would never apologize for changing his approach as the facts change. But it is not surprising that everyone else is feeling whiplashed.
Before the bailout even got under way in October, Mr. Paulson had to sideline his original strategy — to buy up banks’ bad assets — because, he soon came to realize, it was too complex and indirect to deliver the swift jolt the financial markets needed.
He indicated that he would return to that strategy later, but to get the bailout started, he opted instead to directly invest $250 billion in the nation’s banks. The about face was necessary, but it raised uncertainty about whether the Treasury really had a firm grasp of the problem — exactly what spooked markets don’t need.
Since then, the doubts have grown, among investors and the public. Mr. Paulson invested the taxpayers’ money on terms so lenient that banks have felt free to hoard it, or to buy other banks — while refusing to bolster lending to consumers and small businesses.
He has diverted another $40 billion of the fund to American International Group, the reckless insurance company that had already received $85 billion in federal assistance. If government officials know where all that money is going, they haven’t shared their knowledge with the public.
Last week Mr. Paulson disappointed investors by ditching the plan to buy up banks’ bad assets. Instead, he expanded the bailout to include investing money in nonbank financial companies, like GMAC, the lending arm of General Motors, and the other carmakers’ lending units. He also announced that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve were considering a plan to use taxpayer money to jump-start consumer lending via credit cards, car loans and student loans. The Fed quickly said the plan was still in early development.
The one approach Mr. Paulson stubbornly refuses to consider is using bailout money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. His reasoning — that the money is to be used to stabilize the financial system — inexplicably ignores the fact that the instability he is seeking to quell is rooted in the housing bust.
Over the next two months, Mr. Paulson must impose some coherence and clarity on the bailout. Otherwise he will only fan anxieties and mistrust, which will undermine the effectiveness of his good decisions and amplify the fallout of his bad ones. With markets gyrating wildly, and the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation needs clear leadership and a sound plan.
GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered
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By Harvey Wasserman
Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system?
First let them remake what they destroyed.
GM responded to the 1970s gas crisis by handing over the American market to energy-efficient Toyota and Honda.
GM met the rise of the hybrids with "light trucks."
GM built a small electric car, leased a pilot fleet to consumers who loved it, and then forcibly confiscated and trashed them all.
GM now wants to market a $40,000 electric Volt that looks like a cross between a Hummer and a Cadillac and will do nothing to meet the Solartopian needs of a green-powered Earth.
For this alone, GM's managers should never be allowed to make another car, let alone take our tax money to stay in business.
But there is also a trillion-dollar skeleton in GM's closet.
This is the company that murdered our mass transit system.
The assertion comes from Bradford Snell, a government researcher whose definitive report damning GM has been a vehicular lightening rod since its 1974 debut. Its attackers and defenders are legion. But some facts are irrefutable:
In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.
Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, "virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system."
But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.
The campaigns varied, as did the economic and technical health of many of the systems themselves. Some now argue that buses would have transcended many of the rail lines anyway. More likely, they would have hybridized and complemented each other.
But with a varied arsenal of political and financial subterfuges, GM helped gut the core of America's train and trolley systems. It was the murder of our rail systems that made our "love affair" with the car a tragedy of necessity.
In 1949 a complex federal prosecution for related crimes resulted in an anti-trust fine against GM of a whopping $5000. For years thereafter GM continued to bury electric rail systems by "bustituting" gas-fired vehicles.
Then came the interstates. After driving his Allied forces into Berlin on Hitler's Autobahn, Dwight Eisenhower brought home a passion for America's biggest public works project. Some 40,000 miles of vital eco-systems were eventually paved under.
In habitat destruction, oil addiction, global warming, outright traffic deaths (some 40,000/year and more), ancillary ailments and wars for oil, the automobile embodies the worst ecological catastrophe in human history.
Should current General Motors management be made to pay for the ancient sins of Alfred Sloan?
Since the 1880s, American corporations have claimed human rights under the law. Tasking one now with human responsibilities could set a great precedent.
GM has certainly proved itself unable to make cars that can compete while healing a global-warmed planet.
So let's convert the company's infrastructure to churn out trolley cars, monorails, passenger trains, truly green buses.
FDR forced Detroit to manufacture the tanks, planes and guns that won World War 2 (try buying a 1944 Chevrolet!). Now let a reinvented GM make the "weapons" to win the climate war and energy independence.
It demands re-tooling and re-training. But GM's special role in history must now evolve into using its infrastructure to restore the mass transit system---and ecological balance---it has helped destroy.
By Harvey Wasserman
Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system?
First let them remake what they destroyed.
GM responded to the 1970s gas crisis by handing over the American market to energy-efficient Toyota and Honda.
GM met the rise of the hybrids with "light trucks."
GM built a small electric car, leased a pilot fleet to consumers who loved it, and then forcibly confiscated and trashed them all.
GM now wants to market a $40,000 electric Volt that looks like a cross between a Hummer and a Cadillac and will do nothing to meet the Solartopian needs of a green-powered Earth.
For this alone, GM's managers should never be allowed to make another car, let alone take our tax money to stay in business.
But there is also a trillion-dollar skeleton in GM's closet.
This is the company that murdered our mass transit system.
The assertion comes from Bradford Snell, a government researcher whose definitive report damning GM has been a vehicular lightening rod since its 1974 debut. Its attackers and defenders are legion. But some facts are irrefutable:
In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses.
Just one American family in 10 then owned an automobile. Instead, we loved our 44,000 miles of passenger rail routes managed by 1,200 companies employing 300,000 Americans who ran 15 billion annual trips generating an income of $1 billion. According to Snell, "virtually every city and town in America of more than 2,500 people had its own electric rail system."
But GM lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.
The campaigns varied, as did the economic and technical health of many of the systems themselves. Some now argue that buses would have transcended many of the rail lines anyway. More likely, they would have hybridized and complemented each other.
But with a varied arsenal of political and financial subterfuges, GM helped gut the core of America's train and trolley systems. It was the murder of our rail systems that made our "love affair" with the car a tragedy of necessity.
In 1949 a complex federal prosecution for related crimes resulted in an anti-trust fine against GM of a whopping $5000. For years thereafter GM continued to bury electric rail systems by "bustituting" gas-fired vehicles.
Then came the interstates. After driving his Allied forces into Berlin on Hitler's Autobahn, Dwight Eisenhower brought home a passion for America's biggest public works project. Some 40,000 miles of vital eco-systems were eventually paved under.
In habitat destruction, oil addiction, global warming, outright traffic deaths (some 40,000/year and more), ancillary ailments and wars for oil, the automobile embodies the worst ecological catastrophe in human history.
Should current General Motors management be made to pay for the ancient sins of Alfred Sloan?
Since the 1880s, American corporations have claimed human rights under the law. Tasking one now with human responsibilities could set a great precedent.
GM has certainly proved itself unable to make cars that can compete while healing a global-warmed planet.
So let's convert the company's infrastructure to churn out trolley cars, monorails, passenger trains, truly green buses.
FDR forced Detroit to manufacture the tanks, planes and guns that won World War 2 (try buying a 1944 Chevrolet!). Now let a reinvented GM make the "weapons" to win the climate war and energy independence.
It demands re-tooling and re-training. But GM's special role in history must now evolve into using its infrastructure to restore the mass transit system---and ecological balance---it has helped destroy.
Chronic malnutrition in Gaza blamed on Israel
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Donald Macintyre reveals the contents of an explosive report by the Red Cross on a humanitarian tragedy
The Israeli blockade of Gaza has led to a steady rise in chronic malnutrition among the 1.5 million people living in the strip, according to a leaked report from the Red Cross.
It chronicles the "devastating" effect of the siege that Israel imposed after Hamas seized control in June 2007 and notes that the dramatic fall in living standards has triggered a shift in diet that will damage the long-term health of those living in Gaza and has led to alarming deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.
The 46-page report from the International Committee of the Red Cross – seen by The Independent – is the most authoritative yet on the impact that Israel's closure of crossings to commercial goods has had on Gazan families and their diets.
The report says the heavy restrictions on all major sectors of Gaza's economy, compounded by a cost of living increase of at least 40 per cent, is causing "progressive deterioration in food security for up to 70 per cent of Gaza's population". That in turn is forcing people to cut household expenditures down to "survival levels".
"Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micronutrient deficiencies are of great concern," it said.
Since last year, the report found, there had been a switch to "low cost/high energy" cereals, sugar and oil, away from higher-cost animal products and fresh fruit and vegetables. Such a shift "increases exposure to micronutrient deficiencies which in turn will affect their health and wellbeing in the long term."
Israel has often said that it will not allow a humanitarian crisis to develop in Gaza and the report says that the groups surveyed had "accessed their annual nutritional energy needs". But it warned governments, including Israel's, that "food insecurity and undernutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies" were occurring in the absence of "overt food shortages".
A 2001 Food and Agriculture Organisation definition classifies "food security" as when "all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life."
The Red Cross report says that "the embargo has had a devastating effect for a large proportion of households who have had to make major changes on the composition of their food basket." Households were now obtaining 80 per cent of their calories from cereals, sugar and oil. "The actual food basket is considered to be insufficient from a nutritional perspective." The report paints a bleak picture of an increasingly impoverished and indebted lower-income population. People are selling assets, slashing the quality and quantity of meals, cutting back on clothing and children's education, scavenging for discarded materials – and even grass for animal fodder – that they can sell and are depending on dwindling loans and handouts from slightly better-off relatives.
In the urban sector, in which about 106,000 employees lost their jobs after the June 2007 shutdown, about 40 per cent are now classified as "very poor", earning less than 500 shekels (£87) a month to provide for an average household of seven to nine people.
The report quotes a former owner of a small, home-based sewing factory, who said he had laid off his 10 workers in July 2007. "Since then I earn no more than 300 shekels per month by sewing from time to time neighbours' and relatives' clothes. I sold my wife's jewellery and my brother is transferring 250 shekels every month ... I do not really know what to say to my children." Others said they were not able to give their children pocket money.
In agriculture, on which 27 percent of Gaza's population depends, exports are at a halt and, like fisheries, the sector has seen a 50 per cent fall in incomes since the siege began. Among the two-fifths classified as "very poor", average per capita spending is down to 50p a day. In the fisheries sector, which has been hit by fuel shortages and narrow, Israeli-imposed fishing limits, "People's coping mechanisms are very limited and those households that still have jewellery and even non-essential appliances sell them".
The report says that if the Israeli-imposed embargo is maintained, "economic disintegration will continue and wider segments of the Gaza population will become food insecure".
Arguing that the removal of restrictions on trade "can reverse the trend of impoverishment", the Red Cross warns that "the prolongation of the restrictions risks permanently damaging households' capacity to recover and undermines their ability to attain food security in the long term."
The detailed Gaza fieldwork for the report was carried out between May and July. An International Monetary Fund report confirmed in late September that the Gaza economy "continued to weaken".
Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that, contrary to hopes when Israel pulled out of Gaza, the Gazan people were being "held hostage" to Hamas's "extremist and nihilist" ideology which was causing undoubted suffering. If Hamas focused resources on the "diet of the people" instead of on "Qassam rockets and violent jihadism" then "this sort of problem would not exist", he said.
Donald Macintyre reveals the contents of an explosive report by the Red Cross on a humanitarian tragedy
The Israeli blockade of Gaza has led to a steady rise in chronic malnutrition among the 1.5 million people living in the strip, according to a leaked report from the Red Cross.
It chronicles the "devastating" effect of the siege that Israel imposed after Hamas seized control in June 2007 and notes that the dramatic fall in living standards has triggered a shift in diet that will damage the long-term health of those living in Gaza and has led to alarming deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.
The 46-page report from the International Committee of the Red Cross – seen by The Independent – is the most authoritative yet on the impact that Israel's closure of crossings to commercial goods has had on Gazan families and their diets.
The report says the heavy restrictions on all major sectors of Gaza's economy, compounded by a cost of living increase of at least 40 per cent, is causing "progressive deterioration in food security for up to 70 per cent of Gaza's population". That in turn is forcing people to cut household expenditures down to "survival levels".
"Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micronutrient deficiencies are of great concern," it said.
Since last year, the report found, there had been a switch to "low cost/high energy" cereals, sugar and oil, away from higher-cost animal products and fresh fruit and vegetables. Such a shift "increases exposure to micronutrient deficiencies which in turn will affect their health and wellbeing in the long term."
Israel has often said that it will not allow a humanitarian crisis to develop in Gaza and the report says that the groups surveyed had "accessed their annual nutritional energy needs". But it warned governments, including Israel's, that "food insecurity and undernutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies" were occurring in the absence of "overt food shortages".
A 2001 Food and Agriculture Organisation definition classifies "food security" as when "all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life."
The Red Cross report says that "the embargo has had a devastating effect for a large proportion of households who have had to make major changes on the composition of their food basket." Households were now obtaining 80 per cent of their calories from cereals, sugar and oil. "The actual food basket is considered to be insufficient from a nutritional perspective." The report paints a bleak picture of an increasingly impoverished and indebted lower-income population. People are selling assets, slashing the quality and quantity of meals, cutting back on clothing and children's education, scavenging for discarded materials – and even grass for animal fodder – that they can sell and are depending on dwindling loans and handouts from slightly better-off relatives.
In the urban sector, in which about 106,000 employees lost their jobs after the June 2007 shutdown, about 40 per cent are now classified as "very poor", earning less than 500 shekels (£87) a month to provide for an average household of seven to nine people.
The report quotes a former owner of a small, home-based sewing factory, who said he had laid off his 10 workers in July 2007. "Since then I earn no more than 300 shekels per month by sewing from time to time neighbours' and relatives' clothes. I sold my wife's jewellery and my brother is transferring 250 shekels every month ... I do not really know what to say to my children." Others said they were not able to give their children pocket money.
In agriculture, on which 27 percent of Gaza's population depends, exports are at a halt and, like fisheries, the sector has seen a 50 per cent fall in incomes since the siege began. Among the two-fifths classified as "very poor", average per capita spending is down to 50p a day. In the fisheries sector, which has been hit by fuel shortages and narrow, Israeli-imposed fishing limits, "People's coping mechanisms are very limited and those households that still have jewellery and even non-essential appliances sell them".
The report says that if the Israeli-imposed embargo is maintained, "economic disintegration will continue and wider segments of the Gaza population will become food insecure".
Arguing that the removal of restrictions on trade "can reverse the trend of impoverishment", the Red Cross warns that "the prolongation of the restrictions risks permanently damaging households' capacity to recover and undermines their ability to attain food security in the long term."
The detailed Gaza fieldwork for the report was carried out between May and July. An International Monetary Fund report confirmed in late September that the Gaza economy "continued to weaken".
Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that, contrary to hopes when Israel pulled out of Gaza, the Gazan people were being "held hostage" to Hamas's "extremist and nihilist" ideology which was causing undoubted suffering. If Hamas focused resources on the "diet of the people" instead of on "Qassam rockets and violent jihadism" then "this sort of problem would not exist", he said.
US's road to recovery runs through Beijing
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By Francesco Sisci and David P Goldman
English author G K Chesterton rhymed about "the night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier", and it may seem no less whimsical to argue that the United States' road to recovery, as well as Barack Obama's path to presidential greatness, run through China.
In the rush to prop up America's financial institutions, foreign economic policy seems remote from Washington's agenda. America wants to revive the mortgage market and consumer spending. The effort is doomed to failure. For a quarter of a century the American consumer has been the locomotive of the world economy, and now the locomotive has derailed and taken the rest of the world economy with it.
Recovery requires a great change in direction of capital flows. For the past decade, poor people in the developing world have financed the consumption of rich people in America. America has borrowed nearly $1 trillion a year, mostly from the developing world, and used these funds to import consumer goods and buy homes at low interest rates. The result is a solvency crisis of the American household, which shows up as a solvency crisis for financial institutions. If we reckon the retirement needs of households as a liability, the household sector is as good as bankrupt.
No recovery is possible unless American households can save, and they cannot save in an economic contraction when incomes spiral downwards. To save, Americans must sell goods and services to someone else, and a glance at the globe makes clear who that must be: nearly half the world’s population, and most of the world’s capacity for economic growth, is concentrated in China and the Pacific Littoral.
China’s economic problem is the inverse of America’s: China has achieved fast rates of growth at the expense of huge disparities between the prosperous coast and the backward interior, as well as excessive dependence on foreign markets. China’s policy response to the economic crisis is far more radical than Washington’s. Rather than attempting to patch up the situation and restore the status quo ante, China plans to spend nearly a fifth of its gross domestic product on an internal stimulus focused on infrastructure in its interior. Severe execution risk attends the Chinese proposal, and markets remain to be convinced.
China can reduce the execution risk of its great economic shift towards home consumption, and America can solve its savings problem, through a grand partnership. This partnership need not be exclusive to America and China, but it must be founded on America and China, two of the world’s largest economies. India and the other Asian economies should be encouraged to join this partnership. A great deal has been written about prospective conflict between China and the United States, but very little explanation is offered as to what issues might arise between China and the United States. China and America have far more to gain from cooperation than from conflict.
America’s objection to Chinese foreign policy center on China’s pursuit of commercial interest with countries (Iran, Sudan) whose behavior America considers unacceptable. America stands to gain an ally in questions of rogue-state behavior, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and other matters of national interest, in return for helping China achieve its legitimate goals.
The goals of the partnership should be to:
Support China’s internal development by re-orienting export flows towards China and other emerging economies from the United States and other industrial countries.
Transfer technologies and other expertise to the emerging economies.
Make the emerging economies partners in the recovery of American asset prices.
Fear and risk-aversion rather than trust and optimism conditioned the two-way capital flow between emerging markets and the United States during the past 10 years. After the 1997 Asia financial crisis, and the 1998 Russian bankruptcy, investors in emerging markets lent their savings to the American government or its quasi-governmental agencies to diversify their portfolios into safe assets, while Westerners invested in local emerging market currencies for higher returns.
As one of the authors reported recently at this site (See Who will finance America’s deficit? David P Goldman, Asia Times Online, November 13, 2008), global financing of the US government deficit drew on leverage in emerging markets. De-leveraging of the world financial system sharply curtails the availability of overseas financing for the Treasury deficit.
America’s economy model is broken. The tape cannot be run in reverse: America can’t rescue an economy based on rising consumer debt and zero savings. America must become a technology exporter. Throwing more money into consumer stimulus, bailouts for the automobile sector, and so forth will fail miserably. America should recognize that the deformation of its economy is the inverse of the deformation of the Chinese economy (as well as other emerging economies), and that their common problem has a common cure.
The trouble in the world economy has been that a rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese, unless the poor Chinese first moves to America. China bought American mortgages, including poor-quality assets dressed up as high-quality assets, because China does not have the financial, legal and administrative capacity as well as the trust to write sufficient mortgage business at home. China’s efforts to spend a fifth of its GDP on infrastructure face enormous problems of governance. In the United States, voters most approve most public spending at the local level, and the federal system provides checks and balances against abuse of public funds. Emerging economies must rely on the probity of a small number of officials with enormous power, a far less effective check against corruption.
China can use America’s help in shifting its economy towards the internal market. Ironically, American officials have been trying to persuade China to import the American financial model for years, and the collapse of the American model has made the prospect less attractive. But it is a very good moment for China to bring in American banks, and start up a consumer lending market. The failures of the American consumer market do not wipe out a century of banking experience in evaluating and securitizing consumer loans. To help import the American model, China should be given the opportunity to purchase major American institutions in return. Citicorp, for example, could be bought today for about $50 billion or Capital One for $13 billion.
America remains the most technologically advanced economy in the world. China needs American high technology. In many instances, America restricts the sale of technology to China due to security concerns.
The United States should offer China a general reduction in restrictions on imports of American technology and acquisition of American companies, in return for a treaty linking Chinese and American security interests. The treaty would include:
A system of royalties for technology transfers and guarantees against pirating.
Freedom for Chinese companies to acquire American companies, including financial institutions.
Agreement on a common stance towards rogue states, nuclear arms proliferation, terrorism and other issues of mutual concern, covering such issues as Pakistan, Sudan, Iran and other areas of past diplomatic conflict.
An agreement on strategic arms deployment in Asia.
A roadmap for China’s democratization.
Environmental and energy-efficiency goals.
Stabilization of China’s yuan against the dollar to support free capital flows between the US and China.
There are close to 2 billion people in China and the countries in its immediate periphery, and a further 1.1 billion people in India. Half the world’s population lives in emerging Asia, and its productivity could triple in a generation. Out of the present crisis, the world might enjoy one of the longest and fastest economic booms in history - or it might remain in an economic mire for a decade. The incoming American administration might be remembered as one of the worst, or one of the best, in American history.
By Francesco Sisci and David P Goldman
English author G K Chesterton rhymed about "the night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier", and it may seem no less whimsical to argue that the United States' road to recovery, as well as Barack Obama's path to presidential greatness, run through China.
In the rush to prop up America's financial institutions, foreign economic policy seems remote from Washington's agenda. America wants to revive the mortgage market and consumer spending. The effort is doomed to failure. For a quarter of a century the American consumer has been the locomotive of the world economy, and now the locomotive has derailed and taken the rest of the world economy with it.
Recovery requires a great change in direction of capital flows. For the past decade, poor people in the developing world have financed the consumption of rich people in America. America has borrowed nearly $1 trillion a year, mostly from the developing world, and used these funds to import consumer goods and buy homes at low interest rates. The result is a solvency crisis of the American household, which shows up as a solvency crisis for financial institutions. If we reckon the retirement needs of households as a liability, the household sector is as good as bankrupt.
No recovery is possible unless American households can save, and they cannot save in an economic contraction when incomes spiral downwards. To save, Americans must sell goods and services to someone else, and a glance at the globe makes clear who that must be: nearly half the world’s population, and most of the world’s capacity for economic growth, is concentrated in China and the Pacific Littoral.
China’s economic problem is the inverse of America’s: China has achieved fast rates of growth at the expense of huge disparities between the prosperous coast and the backward interior, as well as excessive dependence on foreign markets. China’s policy response to the economic crisis is far more radical than Washington’s. Rather than attempting to patch up the situation and restore the status quo ante, China plans to spend nearly a fifth of its gross domestic product on an internal stimulus focused on infrastructure in its interior. Severe execution risk attends the Chinese proposal, and markets remain to be convinced.
China can reduce the execution risk of its great economic shift towards home consumption, and America can solve its savings problem, through a grand partnership. This partnership need not be exclusive to America and China, but it must be founded on America and China, two of the world’s largest economies. India and the other Asian economies should be encouraged to join this partnership. A great deal has been written about prospective conflict between China and the United States, but very little explanation is offered as to what issues might arise between China and the United States. China and America have far more to gain from cooperation than from conflict.
America’s objection to Chinese foreign policy center on China’s pursuit of commercial interest with countries (Iran, Sudan) whose behavior America considers unacceptable. America stands to gain an ally in questions of rogue-state behavior, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and other matters of national interest, in return for helping China achieve its legitimate goals.
The goals of the partnership should be to:
Fear and risk-aversion rather than trust and optimism conditioned the two-way capital flow between emerging markets and the United States during the past 10 years. After the 1997 Asia financial crisis, and the 1998 Russian bankruptcy, investors in emerging markets lent their savings to the American government or its quasi-governmental agencies to diversify their portfolios into safe assets, while Westerners invested in local emerging market currencies for higher returns.
As one of the authors reported recently at this site (See Who will finance America’s deficit? David P Goldman, Asia Times Online, November 13, 2008), global financing of the US government deficit drew on leverage in emerging markets. De-leveraging of the world financial system sharply curtails the availability of overseas financing for the Treasury deficit.
America’s economy model is broken. The tape cannot be run in reverse: America can’t rescue an economy based on rising consumer debt and zero savings. America must become a technology exporter. Throwing more money into consumer stimulus, bailouts for the automobile sector, and so forth will fail miserably. America should recognize that the deformation of its economy is the inverse of the deformation of the Chinese economy (as well as other emerging economies), and that their common problem has a common cure.
The trouble in the world economy has been that a rich Chinese won’t lend money to a poor Chinese, unless the poor Chinese first moves to America. China bought American mortgages, including poor-quality assets dressed up as high-quality assets, because China does not have the financial, legal and administrative capacity as well as the trust to write sufficient mortgage business at home. China’s efforts to spend a fifth of its GDP on infrastructure face enormous problems of governance. In the United States, voters most approve most public spending at the local level, and the federal system provides checks and balances against abuse of public funds. Emerging economies must rely on the probity of a small number of officials with enormous power, a far less effective check against corruption.
China can use America’s help in shifting its economy towards the internal market. Ironically, American officials have been trying to persuade China to import the American financial model for years, and the collapse of the American model has made the prospect less attractive. But it is a very good moment for China to bring in American banks, and start up a consumer lending market. The failures of the American consumer market do not wipe out a century of banking experience in evaluating and securitizing consumer loans. To help import the American model, China should be given the opportunity to purchase major American institutions in return. Citicorp, for example, could be bought today for about $50 billion or Capital One for $13 billion.
America remains the most technologically advanced economy in the world. China needs American high technology. In many instances, America restricts the sale of technology to China due to security concerns.
The United States should offer China a general reduction in restrictions on imports of American technology and acquisition of American companies, in return for a treaty linking Chinese and American security interests. The treaty would include:
There are close to 2 billion people in China and the countries in its immediate periphery, and a further 1.1 billion people in India. Half the world’s population lives in emerging Asia, and its productivity could triple in a generation. Out of the present crisis, the world might enjoy one of the longest and fastest economic booms in history - or it might remain in an economic mire for a decade. The incoming American administration might be remembered as one of the worst, or one of the best, in American history.
A pact with the devil
Go to Original
By Pepe Escobar
The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's majority Shi'ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it's that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth - including massive nationwide protests - to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.
The proposed Status of Forces Agreement not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal - 2011 - but also puts new restrictions on US combat operations in Iraq starting on January 1 and requires a military pullback from urban areas by June 30. The pact goes before parliament in a week or so.
Sadrist spokesman Ahmed al-Masoudi stressed this Sunday that the pact "did not mean anything" and "hands Iraq over on a golden platter and for an indefinite period".
Masoudi is right on the money when he says the overwhelming majority of popular opinion is against it and the Sadrists and many Sunni parties insist a popular referendum to approve it is essential.
Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's position is and has always been "end the occupation now". That happens to be the same view from Tehran: the pact further extends Iraq's agony as an American colony. But Iranian state TV has been spinning it as a victory for the Maliki government - stressing the US was forced to make concessions (in fact Maliki did not extract all the concessions he wanted in terms of prosecuting US troops for crimes in Iraq).
Last week, a spokesman for the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq said he would "directly intervene" if he felt the pact was against Iraqi sovereignty. In this case, he'd better start intervening this week - when a debate about the pact starts ahead of a vote on November 24. Parliament can vote for or against it, but cannot make any changes to the text.
As for how much of the 275-member parliament in Baghdad is against the pact depends on how much they are in the US pocket - like Maliki's Interior and Defense ministries. As much as US General Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, has charged that Iran has been bribing parliamentarians to reject the pact, the reverse also applies.
Muqtada, make your move
This version of the pact was basically supported by Maliki's Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs and Finance ministries, by the Kurdistan Alliance and by the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, led by former US intelligence asset and former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. So the backbone of support is Kurdish and "establishment" Shi'ite. That does not account for the crucial leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, very close to Iran, who recently has been less critical of the pact. The SIIC in the end caved in.
In theory, all US troops should be out of Iraq on January 1, 2012. For all practical purposes, this is the new timeline for the end of the occupation - way longer than Obama's 16 months.
Even though the pact allows Iraq limited authority to try US soldiers and the Bush administration-enabled army of defense contractors (only in the case of serious crimes committed off-duty and off-base), and formally forbids the Pentagon to use Iraq as a base to attack Syria or Iran, the pact does make a mockery of Iraq's "sovereignty". For the first time, occupying US troops will have a clear mandate straight from Iraq's elected leadership, instead of a United Nations Security Council resolution enacted after Bush invaded Iraq in 2003.
The US has to end all patrols of Iraqi streets by June 2009 - five months into the Obama presidency - and has to fully withdraw by the end of 2011, unless the Iraqi government miraculously asks the US to stay.
From an anti-imperial point of view, the only good thing about the pact is that it does not allow the establishment of permanent US military bases in Iraq - a point that has been stressed ad infinitum by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. Inter Press Service correspondent Gareth Porter, among others, has stressed this is the final nail in the coffin of the neo-conservative, neo-imperial dream of having Iraq at the Middle East center of an empire of bases. In a quirky historical twist, Maliki knocks out US Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Sadrists anyway are not convinced. Last month, Muqtada said, "If they tell you that the agreement ends the presence of the occupation, let me tell you that the occupier will retain its bases. And whoever tells you that it gives us sovereignty is a liar."
So what will the Sadrists do in practice? Before the approval Muqtada, in a statement read out by his spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi at the Kufa mosque, said, "If the American forces remain, I will reinforce the resisters, especially the brigades subsumed under the banner of the Judgment Day," Muqtada rallied all these "Bands of the Eternal Truth" to "enlist behind this mujahid banner". This Sadrist version of special forces would only attack American forces, and not the Iraqi military (controlled by the Maliki government).
By Pepe Escobar
The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's majority Shi'ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it's that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth - including massive nationwide protests - to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.
The proposed Status of Forces Agreement not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal - 2011 - but also puts new restrictions on US combat operations in Iraq starting on January 1 and requires a military pullback from urban areas by June 30. The pact goes before parliament in a week or so.
Sadrist spokesman Ahmed al-Masoudi stressed this Sunday that the pact "did not mean anything" and "hands Iraq over on a golden platter and for an indefinite period".
Masoudi is right on the money when he says the overwhelming majority of popular opinion is against it and the Sadrists and many Sunni parties insist a popular referendum to approve it is essential.
Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's position is and has always been "end the occupation now". That happens to be the same view from Tehran: the pact further extends Iraq's agony as an American colony. But Iranian state TV has been spinning it as a victory for the Maliki government - stressing the US was forced to make concessions (in fact Maliki did not extract all the concessions he wanted in terms of prosecuting US troops for crimes in Iraq).
Last week, a spokesman for the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq said he would "directly intervene" if he felt the pact was against Iraqi sovereignty. In this case, he'd better start intervening this week - when a debate about the pact starts ahead of a vote on November 24. Parliament can vote for or against it, but cannot make any changes to the text.
As for how much of the 275-member parliament in Baghdad is against the pact depends on how much they are in the US pocket - like Maliki's Interior and Defense ministries. As much as US General Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, has charged that Iran has been bribing parliamentarians to reject the pact, the reverse also applies.
Muqtada, make your move
This version of the pact was basically supported by Maliki's Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs and Finance ministries, by the Kurdistan Alliance and by the Sunni Iraqi Accord Front, led by former US intelligence asset and former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. So the backbone of support is Kurdish and "establishment" Shi'ite. That does not account for the crucial leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, very close to Iran, who recently has been less critical of the pact. The SIIC in the end caved in.
In theory, all US troops should be out of Iraq on January 1, 2012. For all practical purposes, this is the new timeline for the end of the occupation - way longer than Obama's 16 months.
Even though the pact allows Iraq limited authority to try US soldiers and the Bush administration-enabled army of defense contractors (only in the case of serious crimes committed off-duty and off-base), and formally forbids the Pentagon to use Iraq as a base to attack Syria or Iran, the pact does make a mockery of Iraq's "sovereignty". For the first time, occupying US troops will have a clear mandate straight from Iraq's elected leadership, instead of a United Nations Security Council resolution enacted after Bush invaded Iraq in 2003.
The US has to end all patrols of Iraqi streets by June 2009 - five months into the Obama presidency - and has to fully withdraw by the end of 2011, unless the Iraqi government miraculously asks the US to stay.
From an anti-imperial point of view, the only good thing about the pact is that it does not allow the establishment of permanent US military bases in Iraq - a point that has been stressed ad infinitum by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. Inter Press Service correspondent Gareth Porter, among others, has stressed this is the final nail in the coffin of the neo-conservative, neo-imperial dream of having Iraq at the Middle East center of an empire of bases. In a quirky historical twist, Maliki knocks out US Vice President Dick Cheney.
The Sadrists anyway are not convinced. Last month, Muqtada said, "If they tell you that the agreement ends the presence of the occupation, let me tell you that the occupier will retain its bases. And whoever tells you that it gives us sovereignty is a liar."
So what will the Sadrists do in practice? Before the approval Muqtada, in a statement read out by his spokesman Salah al-Ubaidi at the Kufa mosque, said, "If the American forces remain, I will reinforce the resisters, especially the brigades subsumed under the banner of the Judgment Day," Muqtada rallied all these "Bands of the Eternal Truth" to "enlist behind this mujahid banner". This Sadrist version of special forces would only attack American forces, and not the Iraqi military (controlled by the Maliki government).
How Did We Ever Let This Guy Get Away with Being a War President?
Go to Original
By Gary Brecher
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can't take the swagger out of a fool.
Compare Bush's eight years to Clinton's, and you see how much he loved to play the soldier. No one expected that from a Republican: Reagan and Bush senior were cautious about betting America's chips. Liberals used to make fun of Reagan for picking on tiny helpless nations that couldn't fight back. Now they are remembering with pure nostalgia Reagan's invasion of Grenada, air raids on Libya, and even our 1984 withdrawal from Beirut.
We'll never know how far W. would have gone to find himself a war because he had all he needed delivered by air on Sept. 11, 2001. Remember how people felt in those days? A friend of mine said, "It was like the aliens had invaded."
We needed our president to be a hero and made him into one, even though it was obvious he wasn't up to the job. He didn't take the first plane to Manhattan, stand there and say, "We're coming for you bastards!" Instead he sat in a roomful of children, reading My Pet Goat, then dropped off the radar for hours before his handlers got him ready.
Maybe there's a lesson here: if the president doesn't cut it in a crisis, we're better off admitting that to ourselves and telling him so instead of pretending he's a great leader. When you make a weakling into a hero, you give him a lot of power. If we'd kept our eyes open and faced the fact that Bush reacted badly to 9/11, we might have been able to ask for a little more detail about his big plans.
Those came courtesy of Cheney and his neocon punks. What a crew these guys were! Like their boss, they were also woofers, boasters -- but of a different variety. Dubya was your standard frat boy loudmouth, but Cheney, with his talk about "working the dark side," was more like the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons nerd. And you couldn't ask Hollywood to serve up a goofier selection of dorks than his neocon staffers, who drifted from the universities to D.C. the way has-been pop singers switch to country and western to leech off a new bunch of suckers.
On the one hand, they were scared to death of Arabs and hated all Muslims. On the other, they were convinced that every Muslim on the planet really wanted, deep in his heart, to be magically turned into an Ohio Republican. That was their theory: take an anti-American Arab country, add an invading army, and voila! a nice fluffy democracy souffle.
So we poured American blood and treasure into the Iraqi dust to prove the half-baked theories of a bunch of tenth-rate professors. The most expensive experiment in the history of the world, all to learn something any 10-year-old could have told them: people don't take to foreign troops on their streets, and not everybody wants to be like us. You know those Ig-Nobel awards they hand out to the dumbest science projects of the year? The Iraq invasion is the all-time winner. Retire the trophy with the names of the winning team: Bush, Cheney, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith.
But first came Afghanistan -- "the graveyard of empires." Every military-history wannabe was conjuring the ghosts of that Victorian British army slaughtered by the Afghans, along with all the propaganda we'd been pushing about the invincible mujahedeen who'd driven out the Soviets. Looking back, what they had routed was a dying Soviet state, and they didn't even manage to do that until we took the risk of giving them Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. But all the pundits' knees were shaking about going into the Afghan haunted house.
We started slow, the way American armies tend to do, taking a while to limber up. There were weeks of bombing the Shomali Plain to no visible effect and a Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar's compound that was more "Naked Gun" than "Top Gun." Then Mazar-i-Sharif in the north fell suddenly, and it turned into the kind of war that Northern Alliance fighters and fighter-bomber pilots both love: hunting down a fleeing enemy.
The campaign went so well, so fast, that it taught Bush and Cheney the wrong lessons. They started exporting democracy to Afghanistan, even hiring a local Pashtun girl to read the Kabul evening news. When you tell a big, backwards tribe like the Pashtun that you're going to turn their whole world upside down for them, you shouldn't expect them to be grateful. But we did, setting ourselves up for a whole lot of trouble later on.
Worse yet, Bush's people figured that since Afghanistan, the tough nut, cracked so easily, their pet project, a second Iraq invasion, would be a cakewalk. This time they would do it right, occupying the Iraqi cities instead of just crushing Saddam's army and withdrawing like Bush senior did.
Nobody wants to recall what Americans believed back then. That's OK: I'll remember it. People thought that Saddam was "connected to" 9/11, and his agents were going to poison our water, nuke our cities, and gas our subways. At least they claimed to believe all that unlikely James Bond stuff. I don't think they really did. There was just so much revenge momentum after 9/11 that it had to burst out somewhere. Everybody wanted payback. It's natural. But most of the time, in your average democracy, cooler heads are in charge. Not this time. Bush and his team were foaming at the mouth far more than the average citizen. It was like a crazed sheriff trying to talk a lukewarm mob into a lynching frenzy. With the help of people who should have known better -- I'm looking at you, Colin Powell -- he got his way.
That, in the short version, is why George W. Bush is about to leave office the most unpopular American president in history. You can spin Iraq a hundred different ways, but it still comes up bad news because once the dust settles, the Iranians are in control of the whole region, and they didn't have to fire a shot. We destroyed their old rival for them.
It's a simple story: we crushed Saddam's army, occupied the cities, and then acted like the whole country would turn itself into a neocon fantasyland. Paul Bremer's cult kids were talking tax reform while the Iraqi army they had sent home unemployed was busy digging up the weapons they had buried in their yards. Bush's counterinsurgency policy was pretending there was no insurgency then pretending it was just Saddam's "deadenders." When Saddam's capture at the end of 2003 didn't slow the insurgency, Bush's defenders stopped acting like they knew what was going on and just settled for blaming the Iranians -- as if it was a nasty surprise that Iran, the country that openly hates America most in the whole world, might get involved in anti-American operations when we occupied Iraq right next door.
People ask what our counterinsurgency strategy was before the surge. Easy: we had none. We were doing nothing but offering the insurgents moving targets. A standard operation for the occupation force in those dark days was patrolling through an alien Sunni neighborhood, waiting for an IED to go off under the lead vehicle or for an RPG or small-arms ambush. When that happens, conventional forces have a grim choice: do nothing, withdrawing while the locals snicker at your dead and wounded, or open fire on everyone in sight. Either way, the insurgents win. If you withdraw, they've hit you with impunity and gained respect in the neighborhood. If you open fire on the slums, you kill civilians and make enemies.
Effective counterinsurgency means not relying on massive firepower the way conventional forces are trained to do. The idea is not to fire until you know exactly who you're up against. It's the opposite of shock and awe. It's discipline and patience. Gen. David Petraeus implemented a set of reforms usually called the surge, though they were about tactics more than reinforcements. All he really did was initiate overdue standard counterinsurgency doctrine. He integrated U.S. units with Iraqi forces then sent them out into the neighborhoods. You can't run any kind of counterinsurgency plan without good street-level intelligence, but Bush's people wouldn't admit that there was an insurgency, so they wouldn't commit to learning about it. Their style was to ignore it and hope it would go away.
That's why Afghanistan went well in the early stages: we didn't go in trying to turn the Afghans into democrats, but trying to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In Iraq, Bush was dreaming from the start, so the whole effort was doomed.
The surge worked about as well as any good counterinsurgency effort could. We know a little about the enemy now, and there's less violence because all the neighborhoods had already been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is now a Shi'ite city. There are a few Sunni enclaves, but the Shia rule the city and the country, with the Kurds fortifying themselves up north and wishing they could saw their territory off and relocate it somewhere in mid-ocean.
That's what Bush's trillion-dollar investment in Iraq has bought. Meanwhile, if you look at the rest of the world map, you get a real shock. Regions like Latin America and Central Asia that eight years ago were American protectorates in all but name have turned against us while we were distracted with Iraq. Many times, the real winners are countries that manage to stay out of a war, the way England benefited by not getting sucked into the Thirty Years' War. Iran is much stronger now, and so is Russia. The Russians, who seemed to be in their "throes" when Clinton left office, just slapped down Georgia, one of our few remaining allies among the old Soviet states, and there wasn't a thing we could do but grumble.
It's no puzzle: we pretended a goon was a hero, let him play out his foolish fantasies about remaking the Middle East, and wasted our strength on a losing effort while the rest of the world drifted out of our power. Our leader was a laughingstock around globe, and he made America the butt of the world's contempt. But Bush got his wish -- he was a war president and then some. The rest of us were the casualties.
By Gary Brecher
What George W. Bush loved best about his job was being a war president. Playing war, that is, as opposed to making war like a grown-up. Remember him strutting onto that carrier in his little flight jacket? You never saw Eisenhower, a real general, playing out his martial fantasies this way. You can take the drink out of the drunk, but you can't take the swagger out of a fool.
Compare Bush's eight years to Clinton's, and you see how much he loved to play the soldier. No one expected that from a Republican: Reagan and Bush senior were cautious about betting America's chips. Liberals used to make fun of Reagan for picking on tiny helpless nations that couldn't fight back. Now they are remembering with pure nostalgia Reagan's invasion of Grenada, air raids on Libya, and even our 1984 withdrawal from Beirut.
We'll never know how far W. would have gone to find himself a war because he had all he needed delivered by air on Sept. 11, 2001. Remember how people felt in those days? A friend of mine said, "It was like the aliens had invaded."
We needed our president to be a hero and made him into one, even though it was obvious he wasn't up to the job. He didn't take the first plane to Manhattan, stand there and say, "We're coming for you bastards!" Instead he sat in a roomful of children, reading My Pet Goat, then dropped off the radar for hours before his handlers got him ready.
Maybe there's a lesson here: if the president doesn't cut it in a crisis, we're better off admitting that to ourselves and telling him so instead of pretending he's a great leader. When you make a weakling into a hero, you give him a lot of power. If we'd kept our eyes open and faced the fact that Bush reacted badly to 9/11, we might have been able to ask for a little more detail about his big plans.
Those came courtesy of Cheney and his neocon punks. What a crew these guys were! Like their boss, they were also woofers, boasters -- but of a different variety. Dubya was your standard frat boy loudmouth, but Cheney, with his talk about "working the dark side," was more like the ultimate Dungeons and Dragons nerd. And you couldn't ask Hollywood to serve up a goofier selection of dorks than his neocon staffers, who drifted from the universities to D.C. the way has-been pop singers switch to country and western to leech off a new bunch of suckers.
On the one hand, they were scared to death of Arabs and hated all Muslims. On the other, they were convinced that every Muslim on the planet really wanted, deep in his heart, to be magically turned into an Ohio Republican. That was their theory: take an anti-American Arab country, add an invading army, and voila! a nice fluffy democracy souffle.
So we poured American blood and treasure into the Iraqi dust to prove the half-baked theories of a bunch of tenth-rate professors. The most expensive experiment in the history of the world, all to learn something any 10-year-old could have told them: people don't take to foreign troops on their streets, and not everybody wants to be like us. You know those Ig-Nobel awards they hand out to the dumbest science projects of the year? The Iraq invasion is the all-time winner. Retire the trophy with the names of the winning team: Bush, Cheney, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith.
But first came Afghanistan -- "the graveyard of empires." Every military-history wannabe was conjuring the ghosts of that Victorian British army slaughtered by the Afghans, along with all the propaganda we'd been pushing about the invincible mujahedeen who'd driven out the Soviets. Looking back, what they had routed was a dying Soviet state, and they didn't even manage to do that until we took the risk of giving them Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. But all the pundits' knees were shaking about going into the Afghan haunted house.
We started slow, the way American armies tend to do, taking a while to limber up. There were weeks of bombing the Shomali Plain to no visible effect and a Special Forces raid on Mullah Omar's compound that was more "Naked Gun" than "Top Gun." Then Mazar-i-Sharif in the north fell suddenly, and it turned into the kind of war that Northern Alliance fighters and fighter-bomber pilots both love: hunting down a fleeing enemy.
The campaign went so well, so fast, that it taught Bush and Cheney the wrong lessons. They started exporting democracy to Afghanistan, even hiring a local Pashtun girl to read the Kabul evening news. When you tell a big, backwards tribe like the Pashtun that you're going to turn their whole world upside down for them, you shouldn't expect them to be grateful. But we did, setting ourselves up for a whole lot of trouble later on.
Worse yet, Bush's people figured that since Afghanistan, the tough nut, cracked so easily, their pet project, a second Iraq invasion, would be a cakewalk. This time they would do it right, occupying the Iraqi cities instead of just crushing Saddam's army and withdrawing like Bush senior did.
Nobody wants to recall what Americans believed back then. That's OK: I'll remember it. People thought that Saddam was "connected to" 9/11, and his agents were going to poison our water, nuke our cities, and gas our subways. At least they claimed to believe all that unlikely James Bond stuff. I don't think they really did. There was just so much revenge momentum after 9/11 that it had to burst out somewhere. Everybody wanted payback. It's natural. But most of the time, in your average democracy, cooler heads are in charge. Not this time. Bush and his team were foaming at the mouth far more than the average citizen. It was like a crazed sheriff trying to talk a lukewarm mob into a lynching frenzy. With the help of people who should have known better -- I'm looking at you, Colin Powell -- he got his way.
That, in the short version, is why George W. Bush is about to leave office the most unpopular American president in history. You can spin Iraq a hundred different ways, but it still comes up bad news because once the dust settles, the Iranians are in control of the whole region, and they didn't have to fire a shot. We destroyed their old rival for them.
It's a simple story: we crushed Saddam's army, occupied the cities, and then acted like the whole country would turn itself into a neocon fantasyland. Paul Bremer's cult kids were talking tax reform while the Iraqi army they had sent home unemployed was busy digging up the weapons they had buried in their yards. Bush's counterinsurgency policy was pretending there was no insurgency then pretending it was just Saddam's "deadenders." When Saddam's capture at the end of 2003 didn't slow the insurgency, Bush's defenders stopped acting like they knew what was going on and just settled for blaming the Iranians -- as if it was a nasty surprise that Iran, the country that openly hates America most in the whole world, might get involved in anti-American operations when we occupied Iraq right next door.
People ask what our counterinsurgency strategy was before the surge. Easy: we had none. We were doing nothing but offering the insurgents moving targets. A standard operation for the occupation force in those dark days was patrolling through an alien Sunni neighborhood, waiting for an IED to go off under the lead vehicle or for an RPG or small-arms ambush. When that happens, conventional forces have a grim choice: do nothing, withdrawing while the locals snicker at your dead and wounded, or open fire on everyone in sight. Either way, the insurgents win. If you withdraw, they've hit you with impunity and gained respect in the neighborhood. If you open fire on the slums, you kill civilians and make enemies.
Effective counterinsurgency means not relying on massive firepower the way conventional forces are trained to do. The idea is not to fire until you know exactly who you're up against. It's the opposite of shock and awe. It's discipline and patience. Gen. David Petraeus implemented a set of reforms usually called the surge, though they were about tactics more than reinforcements. All he really did was initiate overdue standard counterinsurgency doctrine. He integrated U.S. units with Iraqi forces then sent them out into the neighborhoods. You can't run any kind of counterinsurgency plan without good street-level intelligence, but Bush's people wouldn't admit that there was an insurgency, so they wouldn't commit to learning about it. Their style was to ignore it and hope it would go away.
That's why Afghanistan went well in the early stages: we didn't go in trying to turn the Afghans into democrats, but trying to crush the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In Iraq, Bush was dreaming from the start, so the whole effort was doomed.
The surge worked about as well as any good counterinsurgency effort could. We know a little about the enemy now, and there's less violence because all the neighborhoods had already been ethnically cleansed. Baghdad is now a Shi'ite city. There are a few Sunni enclaves, but the Shia rule the city and the country, with the Kurds fortifying themselves up north and wishing they could saw their territory off and relocate it somewhere in mid-ocean.
That's what Bush's trillion-dollar investment in Iraq has bought. Meanwhile, if you look at the rest of the world map, you get a real shock. Regions like Latin America and Central Asia that eight years ago were American protectorates in all but name have turned against us while we were distracted with Iraq. Many times, the real winners are countries that manage to stay out of a war, the way England benefited by not getting sucked into the Thirty Years' War. Iran is much stronger now, and so is Russia. The Russians, who seemed to be in their "throes" when Clinton left office, just slapped down Georgia, one of our few remaining allies among the old Soviet states, and there wasn't a thing we could do but grumble.
It's no puzzle: we pretended a goon was a hero, let him play out his foolish fantasies about remaking the Middle East, and wasted our strength on a losing effort while the rest of the world drifted out of our power. Our leader was a laughingstock around globe, and he made America the butt of the world's contempt. But Bush got his wish -- he was a war president and then some. The rest of us were the casualties.
Operation Enduring Disaster
Go to Original
By Tariq Ali
Breaking with Afghan Policy
By Tariq Ali
Breaking with Afghan Policy
Afghanistan has been almost continuously at war for 30 years, longer than both World Wars and the American war in Vietnam combined. Each occupation of the country has mimicked its predecessor. A tiny interval between wars saw the imposition of a malignant social order, the Taliban, with the help of the Pakistani military and the late Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister who approved the Taliban takeover in Kabul.
Over the last two years, the U.S./NATO occupation of that country has run into serious military problems. Given a severe global economic crisis and the election of a new American president -- a man separated in style, intellect, and temperament from his predecessor -- the possibility of a serious discussion about an exit strategy from the Afghan disaster hovers on the horizon. The predicament the U.S. and its allies find themselves in is not an inescapable one, but a change in policy, if it is to matter, cannot be of the cosmetic variety.
Washington’s hawks will argue that, while bad, the military situation is, in fact, still salvageable. This may be technically accurate, but it would require the carpet-bombing of southern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, the destruction of scores of villages and small towns, the killing of untold numbers of Pashtuns and the dispatch to the region of at least 200,000 more troops with all their attendant equipment, air, and logistical support. The political consequences of such a course are so dire that even Dick Cheney, the closest thing to Dr. Strangelove that Washington has yet produced, has been uncharacteristically cautious when it comes to suggesting a military solution to the conflict.
It has, by now, become obvious to the Pentagon that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his family cannot deliver what is required and yet it is probably far too late to replace him with UN ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. On his part, fighting for his political (and probably physical) existence, Karzai continues to protect his brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, accused of being involved in the country’s staggering drug trade, but has belatedly sacked Hamidullah Qadri, his transport minister, for corruption.
Qadri was taking massive kickbacks from a company flying pilgrims to Mecca. Is nothing sacred?
A Deteriorating Situation
Of course, axing one minister is like whistling in the wind, given the levels of corruption reported in Karzai’s government, which, in any case, controls little of the country. The Afghan president parries Washington’s thrusts by blaming the U.S. military for killing too many civilians from the air. The bombing of the village of Azizabad in Herat province last August, which led to 91 civilian deaths (of which 60 were children), was only the most extreme of such recent acts. Karzai’s men, hurriedly dispatched to distribute sweets and supplies to the survivors, were stoned by angry villagers.
Given the thousands of Afghans killed in recent years, small wonder that support for the neo-Taliban is increasing, even in non-Pashtun areas of the country. Many Afghans hostile to the old Taliban still support the resistance simply to make it clear that they are against the helicopters and missile-armed unmanned aerial drones that destroy homes, and to "Big Daddy" who wipes out villages, and to the flames that devour children.
Last February, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell presented a bleak survey of the situation on the ground to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:
"Afghan leaders must deal with the endemic corruption and pervasive poppy cultivation and drug trafficking. Ultimately, defeating the insurgency will depend heavily on the government’s ability to improve security, deliver services, and expand development for economic opportunity."Although the international forces and the Afghan National Army continue to score tactical victories over the Taliban, the security situation has deteriorated in some areas in the south and Taliban forces have expanded their operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul. The Taliban insurgency has expanded in scope despite operational disruption caused by the ISAF [NATO forces] and Operation Enduring Freedom operations. The death or capture of three top Taliban leaders last year -- their first high level losses -- does not yet appear to have significantly disrupted insurgent operations."
Since then the situation has only deteriorated further, leading to calls for sending in yet more American and NATO troops -- and creating ever deeper divisions inside NATO itself. In recent months, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British Ambassador to Kabul, wrote a French colleague (in a leaked memo) that the war was lost and more troops were not a solution, a view reiterated recently by Air Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the British Defense Chief, who came out in public against a one-for-one transfer of troops withdrawn from Iraq to Kabul. He put it this way:
"I think we would all take some persuading that there would have to be a much larger British contingent there… So we also have to get ourselves back into balance; it’s crucial that we reduce the operational tempo for our armed forces, so it cannot be, even if the situation demanded it, just a one for one transfer from Iraq to Afghanistan, we have to reduce that tempo."
The Spanish government is considering an Afghan withdrawal and there is serious dissent within the German and Norwegian foreign policy elites. The Canadian foreign minister has already announced that his country will not extend its Afghan commitment beyond 2011. And even if the debates in the Pentagon have not been aired in public, it’s becoming obvious that, in Washington, too, some see the war as unwinnable.
Enter former Iraq commander General David Petraeus, center stage as the new CentCom commander. Ever since the "success" of "the surge" he oversaw in Iraq (a process designed to create temporary stability in that ravaged land by buying off the opposition and, among other things, the selective use of death squads), Petraeus sounds, and behaves, more and more like Lazarus on returning from the dead -- and before his body could be closely inspected.
The situation in Iraq was so dire that even a modest reduction in casualties was seen as a massive leap forward. With increasing outbreaks of violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, however, the talk of success sounds ever hollower. To launch a new "surge" in Afghanistan now by sending more troops there will simply not work, not even as a public relations triumph. Perhaps some of the 100 advisers that General Petraeus has just appointed will point this out to him in forceful terms.
Flight Path to Disaster
Obama would be foolish to imagine that Petraeus can work a miracle cure in Afghanistan. The cancer has spread too far and is affecting U.S. troops as well. If the American media chose to interview active-duty soldiers in Afghanistan (on promise of anonymity), they might get a more accurate picture of what is happening inside the U.S. Army there.
I learned a great deal from Jules, a 20-year old American soldier I met recently in Canada. He became so disenchanted with the war that he decided to go AWOL, proving -- at least to himself -- that the Afghan situation was not an inescapable predicament. Many of his fellow soldiers, he claims, felt similarly, hating a war that dehumanized both them and the Afghans. "We just couldn’t bring ourselves to accept that bombing Afghans was no different from bombing the landscape" was the way he summed up the situation.
Morale inside the Army there is low, he told me. The aggression unleashed against Afghan civilians often hides a deep depression. He does not, however, encourage others to follow in his footsteps. As he sees it, each soldier must make that choice for himself, accepting with it the responsibility that going AWOL permanently entails. Jules was convinced, however, that the war could not be won and did not want to see any more of his friends die. That’s why he was wearing an "Obama out of Afghanistan" t-shirt.
Before he revealed his identity, I mistook this young soldier -- a Filipino-American born in southern California -- for an Afghan. His features reminded me of the Hazara tribesmen he must have encountered in Kabul. Trained as a mortar gunner and paratrooper from Fort Benning, Georgia, he was later assigned to the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg. Here is part of the account he offered me:
"I deployed to Southeastern Afghanistan in January 2007. We controlled everything from Jalalabad down to the northernmost areas of Kandahar province in Regional Command East. My unit had the job of pacifying the insurgency in Paktika, Paktia, and Khost provinces -- areas that had received no aid, but had been devastated during the initial invasion. Operation Anaconda [in 2002] was supposed to have wiped out the Taliban. That was the boast of the military leaders, but ridiculed by everyone else with a brain."
He spoke also of how impossible he found it to treat the Afghans as subhumans:
"I swear I could not for a second view these people as anything but human. The best way to fashion a young hard dick like myself -- dick being an acronym for ’dedicated infantry combat killer’ -- is simple and the effect of racist indoctrination. Take an empty shell off the streets of L.A. or Brooklyn, or maybe from some Podunk town in Tennessee… and these days America isn’t in short supply… I was one of those no-child-left-behind products…"Anyway, you take this empty vessel and you scare the living shit out of him, break him down to nothing, cultivate a brotherhood and camaraderie with those he suffers with, and fill his head with racist nonsense like all Arabs, Iraqis, Afghans are Hajj. Hajj hates you. Hajj wants to hurt your family. Hajj children are the worst because they beg all the time. Just some of the most hurtful and ridiculous propaganda, but you’d be amazed at how effective it’s been in fostering my generation of soldiers."
As this young man spoke to me, I felt he should be testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The effect of the war on those carrying out the orders is leaving scars just as deep as the imprints of previous imperial wars. Change we can believe in must include the end of this, which means, among other things, a withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In my latest book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, I have written of the necessity of involving Afghanistan’s neighbors in a political solution that ends the war, preserves the peace, and reconstructs the country. Iran, Russia, India, and China, as well as Pakistan, need to be engaged in the search for a political solution that would sustain a genuine national government for a decade after the withdrawal of the Americans, NATO, and their quisling regime. However, such a solution is not possible within the context of the plans proposed by both present Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President-elect Barack Obama, which focus on a new surge of American troops in Afghanistan.
The main task at hand should be to create a social infrastructure and thus preserve the peace, something that the West and its horde of attendant non-governmental organizations have failed to do. School buildings constructed, often for outrageous sums, by foreign companies that lack furniture, teachers, and kids are part of the surreal presence of the West, which cannot last.
Whether you are a policymaker in the next administration or an AWOL veteran of the Afghan War in Canada, Operation Enduring Freedom of 2001 has visibly become Operation Enduring Disaster. Less clear is whether an Obama administration can truly break from past policy or will just create a military-plus add-on to it. Only a total break from the catastrophe that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld created in Afghanistan will offer pathways to a viable future.
For this to happen, both external and domestic pressures will probably be needed. China is known to be completely opposed to a NATO presence on, or near, its borders, but while Beijing has proved willing to exert economic pressure to force policy changes in Washington -- as it did when the Bank of China "cut its exposure to agency debt last summer," leaving U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson with little option but to functionally nationalize the mortgage giants -- it has yet to use its diplomatic muscle in the region.
But don’t think that will last forever. Why wait until then? Another external pressure will certainly prove to be the already evident destabilizing effects of the Afghan war on neighboring Pakistan, a country in a precarious economic state, with a military facing growing internal tensions.
Domestic pressure in the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan remains weak, but could grow rapidly as the extent of the debacle becomes clearer and NATO allies refuse to supply the shock-troops for the future surge.
In the meantime, they’re predicting a famine in Afghanistan this winter.
Conservative senator: Paulson may have given bailout money to friends
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By Muriel Kane
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is making waves by criticizing Treasury Secretary Paulson’s handling of the bailout and saying that Congress should take back whatever is left of the $700 billion "blank check" it issued to the Bush administration in October.
In a letter posted on his website, Inhofe told his Senate colleagues that he intends to push for immediate legislation that would require Congressional authorization for any further payouts.
The ultra-conservative Oklahoma Republican told the Tulsa World, "It is just outrageous that the American people don’t know that Congress doesn’t know how much money [Paulson] has given away to anyone. ... It could be to his friends. It could be to anybody else. We don’t know. There is no way of knowing. ... He was able to get this authority from Congress predicated on what he was going to do, and then he didn’t do it."
Paulson is a former CEO of the giant investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which is assumed to be a primary beneficiary of the bailout plan. ThinkProgress warned in September, "The conflict of interest provides all the more reason for the bailout legislation in Congress to have more stringent oversight that the administration opposes."
Inhofe notes that he himself was also skeptical about the bailout from the start. "I have learned a long time ago," he said, "when they come up and say this has to be done and has to be done immediately, there is no other way of doing it, you have to sit back and take a deep breath and nine times out of 10 they are not telling the truth. And this is one of those nine times."
The Bible-citing, anti-gay Inhofe has been known primarily as an over-the-top global warming denier and supporter of so-called "enhanced interrogation," and his opposition to the Bush administration on the bailout brings him some strange bedfellows. On Monday, blogger Atrios quoted Inhofe’s comments about Paulson under the heading, "That’s crazy talk. Only insane liberal bloggers say stuff like this."
By Muriel Kane
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is making waves by criticizing Treasury Secretary Paulson’s handling of the bailout and saying that Congress should take back whatever is left of the $700 billion "blank check" it issued to the Bush administration in October.
In a letter posted on his website, Inhofe told his Senate colleagues that he intends to push for immediate legislation that would require Congressional authorization for any further payouts.
The ultra-conservative Oklahoma Republican told the Tulsa World, "It is just outrageous that the American people don’t know that Congress doesn’t know how much money [Paulson] has given away to anyone. ... It could be to his friends. It could be to anybody else. We don’t know. There is no way of knowing. ... He was able to get this authority from Congress predicated on what he was going to do, and then he didn’t do it."
Paulson is a former CEO of the giant investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which is assumed to be a primary beneficiary of the bailout plan. ThinkProgress warned in September, "The conflict of interest provides all the more reason for the bailout legislation in Congress to have more stringent oversight that the administration opposes."
Inhofe notes that he himself was also skeptical about the bailout from the start. "I have learned a long time ago," he said, "when they come up and say this has to be done and has to be done immediately, there is no other way of doing it, you have to sit back and take a deep breath and nine times out of 10 they are not telling the truth. And this is one of those nine times."
The Bible-citing, anti-gay Inhofe has been known primarily as an over-the-top global warming denier and supporter of so-called "enhanced interrogation," and his opposition to the Bush administration on the bailout brings him some strange bedfellows. On Monday, blogger Atrios quoted Inhofe’s comments about Paulson under the heading, "That’s crazy talk. Only insane liberal bloggers say stuff like this."
Stopping Foreclosures With the Right to Rent: One More Time
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By Dean Baker
Politicians often prefer complex solutions to simple problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the long list of complicated and convoluted proposals to address the country's foreclosure crisis.
Millions of people face the loss of their homes over the next few years. While the politicians in Congress have developed a wide variety of complex schemes in order to hold back this flood of foreclosures, including one passed into law last summer that provided up to $300 billion guarantees for new mortgages on homes facing foreclosure, none have had much impact thus far.
The unavoidable problem with these schemes is that it is difficult to design a plan that aids families facing foreclosure without giving an incentive to other homeowners to also default on their mortgage. In addition, it is hard to justify taxing the people who are struggling to keep up with their own mortgages in order to help those who default. It is even harder to justify taxing ordinary people to help out the bank executives, who issued hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans.
As a result, to date these programs have not prevented a tidal wave of foreclosures and evictions. The number of foreclosure filings (there are typically two or more filing for every actual foreclosure) is now approaching 300,000 per month.
For those not offended by simplicity, there is an easy solution. Congress can temporarily modify the rules on foreclosure to give families facing foreclosure the right to rent their homes at the market rate for a substantial period of time. Rep. Raul Grijalva proposed such a change in the Saving Family Homes Act, which would allow homeowners the option to remain as renters for up to 20 years following a foreclosure.
This bill would immediately give families security in their home, so that if they like the home, the neighborhood, the school for their kids, they would have the option to stay in the house for a substantial period of time. This also has the great benefit for the neighborhood that homes will remain occupied.
Perhaps more importantly, this change in foreclosure rules will give banks a real incentive to negotiate conditions under which homeowners can stay in their homes as owners. Banks do not want to become landlords. The bank will own the house after a foreclosure, but a house with a renter is worth much less to them than a house over which it has complete control.
Giving the homeowner the right to stay as a renter hugely increases their bargaining power with the bank. The result of this change in foreclosure rules is that far more homeowners are likely to remain in their homes as owners.
The beauty of this sort of proposal is that it is simple, can take effect immediately, it requires no taxpayer dollars and no new bureaucracy. It also is not giving anyone a big bonanza. Homeowners are not likely to line up for a process that could end up with them being renters. And the banks will obviously not be thrilled about a rule change that will leave them worse off in trying to squeeze money out of homeowners.
While the basic point of the right to rent is simple, it can be extended in various ways to further aid homeowners. Bernard Wasow, at the Century Foundation, has proposed some additional measures to facilitate the transition to rental status or possibly a return to ownership. Daniel Alpert, of Westwood Capital, has a somewhat different version that creates a mechanism for homeowners to buy back their homes after five years.
In short, if people want to add bells and whistles, it is easy to do so. But, the key to stopping people from being thrown out of their homes is simply to change the law that allows people to be thrown out of their homes. That one is so simple that even a policy wonk should be able to understand it.
By Dean Baker
Politicians often prefer complex solutions to simple problems. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the long list of complicated and convoluted proposals to address the country's foreclosure crisis.
Millions of people face the loss of their homes over the next few years. While the politicians in Congress have developed a wide variety of complex schemes in order to hold back this flood of foreclosures, including one passed into law last summer that provided up to $300 billion guarantees for new mortgages on homes facing foreclosure, none have had much impact thus far.
The unavoidable problem with these schemes is that it is difficult to design a plan that aids families facing foreclosure without giving an incentive to other homeowners to also default on their mortgage. In addition, it is hard to justify taxing the people who are struggling to keep up with their own mortgages in order to help those who default. It is even harder to justify taxing ordinary people to help out the bank executives, who issued hundreds of billions of dollars of bad loans.
As a result, to date these programs have not prevented a tidal wave of foreclosures and evictions. The number of foreclosure filings (there are typically two or more filing for every actual foreclosure) is now approaching 300,000 per month.
For those not offended by simplicity, there is an easy solution. Congress can temporarily modify the rules on foreclosure to give families facing foreclosure the right to rent their homes at the market rate for a substantial period of time. Rep. Raul Grijalva proposed such a change in the Saving Family Homes Act, which would allow homeowners the option to remain as renters for up to 20 years following a foreclosure.
This bill would immediately give families security in their home, so that if they like the home, the neighborhood, the school for their kids, they would have the option to stay in the house for a substantial period of time. This also has the great benefit for the neighborhood that homes will remain occupied.
Perhaps more importantly, this change in foreclosure rules will give banks a real incentive to negotiate conditions under which homeowners can stay in their homes as owners. Banks do not want to become landlords. The bank will own the house after a foreclosure, but a house with a renter is worth much less to them than a house over which it has complete control.
Giving the homeowner the right to stay as a renter hugely increases their bargaining power with the bank. The result of this change in foreclosure rules is that far more homeowners are likely to remain in their homes as owners.
The beauty of this sort of proposal is that it is simple, can take effect immediately, it requires no taxpayer dollars and no new bureaucracy. It also is not giving anyone a big bonanza. Homeowners are not likely to line up for a process that could end up with them being renters. And the banks will obviously not be thrilled about a rule change that will leave them worse off in trying to squeeze money out of homeowners.
While the basic point of the right to rent is simple, it can be extended in various ways to further aid homeowners. Bernard Wasow, at the Century Foundation, has proposed some additional measures to facilitate the transition to rental status or possibly a return to ownership. Daniel Alpert, of Westwood Capital, has a somewhat different version that creates a mechanism for homeowners to buy back their homes after five years.
In short, if people want to add bells and whistles, it is easy to do so. But, the key to stopping people from being thrown out of their homes is simply to change the law that allows people to be thrown out of their homes. That one is so simple that even a policy wonk should be able to understand it.
Is Israel Deliberately Strengthening Hamas?
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By Amira Hass
Let's not be dragged into calculating how many tons of rice, flour and cooking oil there are in the Gaza Strip 10 days after Israel once again hermetically sealed all the crossings into the enclave. Let's not count the number of children who wait for a nutritious meal at UN Relief and Works Agency schools, and the number of families to whose doorstep Hamas delivers boxes filled with grocery staples. (There are those who swear that these groceries are only given to Hamas members and supporters.) Let's not calculate the number of people dependent on their families for sustenance. There is food in the Gaza Strip, and there will continue to be. Does anyone really think that Israel, the state of the Jews, would allow 1.5 million people to be tossed, crowded and crammed, behind the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers surrounding the narrow strip and starve to death?
Let's leave aside the stories of darkness, of how children do (or don't do) their homework by the light of a candle or kerosene lantern. Let's even put off the discussion on the serious environmental hazards - pollution of the groundwater and sea - posed to the people of Gaza and Ashkelon alike as a direct consequence of the intentional fuel shortage, or of Israel's refusal to permit the entry of pipes to upgrade the water and sewage infrastructure. Let's not go now into descriptions of how the sewage flows directly into the sea because there's not enough electricity to operate the sewage treatment plant. Let's not talk about fears that sewers will back up in the winter and flood residential neighborhoods because parts needed to fix the treatment plant were not brought in.
Let's not get dragged into that number crunching, into reducing the Palestinians' lives to a near-animal level, to a humanitarian problem that is easy to prove is not as bad as it can be.
The deliberations over the Palestinians and the methods of coping with the blockade should be converted into a discussion about the Israelis - about those who make policy and the many diligent people who carry it out, about the many citizens who support and encourage it. Instead of discussing quantities of diesel fuel and flour, the talk should be of the logic behind the siege and those who impose it.
People in the Israeli cabinet, Defense Ministry and Shin Bet security service know full well what they are doing when they prohibit anything other than essential food or medicines from passing through the checkpoints, when they prohibit the entry of raw materials and the exit of agricultural and industrial products and prevent normal human traffic for studies, medical care, work or family. Don't underestimate them and don't belittle their judgment. They knew perfectly well when they decided more than two years ago on the tightest closure of the Gaza Strip since the closure policy began in 1991, that industry would collapse, agriculture would wither, tens of thousands of young people would join the jobless and hopeless, that it would be hard for schools to operate and education would suffer, that sewage would back up and seep into the drinking water, that water would no longer reach the upper floors of apartment buildings.
This policy was presented to the Israeli public in a semiofficial manner as a justified punishment of the Palestinians for electing Hamas (and to hell with international law). "Quarterofficially" we know there was an expectation, or a prediction, that the siege would cause the Gazans to loathe Hamas and end its government in Gaza (after it lost its official grip on the West Bank). That was certainly the hope of the Ramallah government.
Gazans have a bellyful of complaints, and rightfully so, about the Hamas regime. It has already proven itself - mainly to Fatah members - as a regime of fear and repression. But the kind of punishment tactic currently in force is exactly what strengthens Hamas. Instead of the movement being judged according to its ability to run a government and meet its governmental obligations to ensure its citizens' welfare, it can blame the emergency situation created by the siege for every manifestation of immaturity and unprofessionalism.
The public feels that the government is part of it. Like the public, the government is a target for the occupation's cruelty. The brutal siege also saves Hamas from having to cope with the contradiction between its platform (the liberation of all of Palestine) and its integration, despite its denials, into the institutions created by the Oslo Accords. If Israel jeopardizes the lives of premature babies and causes business owners, including supporters of Oslo and Yasser Arafat, to go broke, the Hamas government can present itself as resisting the occupation by its very nature. The extraordinary conditions of the extreme siege and the disconnection between Gaza and the West Bank (another intentional Israeli policy) have made the possibility of holding new Palestinian general elections a very distant one. Hamas can thus bolster its rule with coercion, wages, charity and the consoling power of religion.
And perhaps that is exactly what the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces and government want?
By Amira Hass
Let's not be dragged into calculating how many tons of rice, flour and cooking oil there are in the Gaza Strip 10 days after Israel once again hermetically sealed all the crossings into the enclave. Let's not count the number of children who wait for a nutritious meal at UN Relief and Works Agency schools, and the number of families to whose doorstep Hamas delivers boxes filled with grocery staples. (There are those who swear that these groceries are only given to Hamas members and supporters.) Let's not calculate the number of people dependent on their families for sustenance. There is food in the Gaza Strip, and there will continue to be. Does anyone really think that Israel, the state of the Jews, would allow 1.5 million people to be tossed, crowded and crammed, behind the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers surrounding the narrow strip and starve to death?
Let's leave aside the stories of darkness, of how children do (or don't do) their homework by the light of a candle or kerosene lantern. Let's even put off the discussion on the serious environmental hazards - pollution of the groundwater and sea - posed to the people of Gaza and Ashkelon alike as a direct consequence of the intentional fuel shortage, or of Israel's refusal to permit the entry of pipes to upgrade the water and sewage infrastructure. Let's not go now into descriptions of how the sewage flows directly into the sea because there's not enough electricity to operate the sewage treatment plant. Let's not talk about fears that sewers will back up in the winter and flood residential neighborhoods because parts needed to fix the treatment plant were not brought in.
Let's not get dragged into that number crunching, into reducing the Palestinians' lives to a near-animal level, to a humanitarian problem that is easy to prove is not as bad as it can be.
The deliberations over the Palestinians and the methods of coping with the blockade should be converted into a discussion about the Israelis - about those who make policy and the many diligent people who carry it out, about the many citizens who support and encourage it. Instead of discussing quantities of diesel fuel and flour, the talk should be of the logic behind the siege and those who impose it.
People in the Israeli cabinet, Defense Ministry and Shin Bet security service know full well what they are doing when they prohibit anything other than essential food or medicines from passing through the checkpoints, when they prohibit the entry of raw materials and the exit of agricultural and industrial products and prevent normal human traffic for studies, medical care, work or family. Don't underestimate them and don't belittle their judgment. They knew perfectly well when they decided more than two years ago on the tightest closure of the Gaza Strip since the closure policy began in 1991, that industry would collapse, agriculture would wither, tens of thousands of young people would join the jobless and hopeless, that it would be hard for schools to operate and education would suffer, that sewage would back up and seep into the drinking water, that water would no longer reach the upper floors of apartment buildings.
This policy was presented to the Israeli public in a semiofficial manner as a justified punishment of the Palestinians for electing Hamas (and to hell with international law). "Quarterofficially" we know there was an expectation, or a prediction, that the siege would cause the Gazans to loathe Hamas and end its government in Gaza (after it lost its official grip on the West Bank). That was certainly the hope of the Ramallah government.
Gazans have a bellyful of complaints, and rightfully so, about the Hamas regime. It has already proven itself - mainly to Fatah members - as a regime of fear and repression. But the kind of punishment tactic currently in force is exactly what strengthens Hamas. Instead of the movement being judged according to its ability to run a government and meet its governmental obligations to ensure its citizens' welfare, it can blame the emergency situation created by the siege for every manifestation of immaturity and unprofessionalism.
The public feels that the government is part of it. Like the public, the government is a target for the occupation's cruelty. The brutal siege also saves Hamas from having to cope with the contradiction between its platform (the liberation of all of Palestine) and its integration, despite its denials, into the institutions created by the Oslo Accords. If Israel jeopardizes the lives of premature babies and causes business owners, including supporters of Oslo and Yasser Arafat, to go broke, the Hamas government can present itself as resisting the occupation by its very nature. The extraordinary conditions of the extreme siege and the disconnection between Gaza and the West Bank (another intentional Israeli policy) have made the possibility of holding new Palestinian general elections a very distant one. Hamas can thus bolster its rule with coercion, wages, charity and the consoling power of religion.
And perhaps that is exactly what the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces and government want?
The Real Goal of Israel’s Blockade
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By Jonathan Cook
The latest tightening of Israel’s chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation crisis are expected to follow.
And on Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a spokesman said.
In a further blow, Israel’s large Bank Hapoalim said it would refuse all transactions with Gaza by the end of the month, effectively imposing a financial blockade on an economy dependent on the Israeli shekel. Other banks are planning to follow suit, forced into a corner by Israel’s declaration in Sept 2007 of Gaza as an “enemy entity”.
There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also turned back.
Israel has blamed the latest restrictions of aid and fuel to Gaza on Hamas’s violation of a five-month ceasefire by launching rockets out of the Strip. But Israel had a hand in shattering the agreement: as the world was distracted by the US presidential elections, the army invaded Gaza, killing six Palestinians and provoking the rocket fire.
The humanitarian catastrophe gripping Gaza is largely unrelated to the latest tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas and Israel. Nearly a year ago, Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the UN’s refugee agency, warned: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution”.
She blamed Gaza’s strangulation directly on Israel, but also cited the international community as accomplice. Together they began blocking aid in early 2006, following the election of Hamas to head the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The US and Europe agreed to the measure on the principle that it would force the people of Gaza to rethink their support for Hamas. The logic was supposedly similar to the one that drove the sanctions applied to Iraq under Saddam Hussein through the 1990s: if Gaza’s civilians suffered enough, they would rise up against Hamas and install new leaders acceptable to Israel and the West.
As Ms AbuZayd said, that moment marked the beginning of the international community’s complicity in a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies such treatment of civilians as a war crime.
The blockade has been pursued relentlessly since, even if the desired outcome has been no more achieved in Gaza than it was in Iraq. Instead, Hamas entrenched its control and cemented the Strip’s physical separation from the Fatah-dominated West Bank.
Far from reconsidering its policy, Israel’s leadership has responded by turning the screw ever tighter – to the point where Gazan society is now on the verge of collapse.
In truth, however, the growing catastrophe being unleashed on Gaza is only indirectly related to Hamas’s rise to power and the rocket attacks.
Of more concern to Israel is what each of these developments represents: a refusal on the part of Gazans to abandon their resistance to Israel’s continuing occupation. Both provide Israel with a pretext for casting aside the protections offered to Gaza’s civilians under international law to make them submit.
With embarrassing timing, the Israeli media revealed at the weekend that one of the first acts of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister elected in 2006, was to send a message to the Bush White House offering a long-term truce in return for an end to Israeli occupation. His offer was not even acknowledged.
Instead, according to the daily Jerusalem Post, Israeli policymakers have sought to reinforce the impression that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”. On this thinking, collective punishment is warranted because there are no true civilians in Gaza. Israel is at war with every single man, woman and child.
In an indication of how widely this view is shared, the cabinet discussed last week a new strategy to obliterate Gazan villages in an attempt to stop the rocket launches, in an echo of discredited Israeli tactics used in south Lebanon in its war of 2006. The inhabitants would be given warning before indiscriminate shelling began.
In fact, Israel’s desire to seal off Gaza and terrorise its civilian population predates even Hamas’s election victory. It can be dated to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement of summer 2005, when Fatah’s rule of the PA was unchallenged.
An indication of the kind of isolation Mr Sharon preferred for Gaza was revealed shortly after the pull-out, in Dec 2005, when his officials first proposed cutting off electricity to the Strip.
The policy was not implemented, the local media pointed out at the time, both because officials suspected the violation of international law would be rejected by other nations and because it was feared that such a move would damage Fatah’s chances of winning the elections the following month.
With the vote over, however, Israel had the excuse it needed to begin severing its responsibility for the civilian population. It recast its relationship with Gaza from one of occupation to one of hostile parties at war. A policy of collective punishment that was considered transparently illegal in late 2005 has today become Israel’s standard operating procedure.
Increasingly strident talk from officials, culminating in February in the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai’s infamous remark about creating a “shoah”, or Holocaust, in Gaza, has been matched by Israeli measures. The military bombed Gaza’s electricity plant in June 2006, and has been incrementally cutting fuel supplies ever since. In January, Mr Vilnai argued that Israel should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza and two months later Israel signed a deal with Egypt for it to build a power station for Gaza in Sinai.
All of these moves are designed with the same purpose in mind: persuading the world that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is over and that Israel can therefore ignore the laws of occupation and use unremitting force against Gaza.
Cabinet ministers have been queuing up to express such sentiments. Ehud Olmert, for example, has declared that Gazans should not be allowed to “live normal lives”; Avi Dichter believes punishment should be inflicted “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians”; Meir Sheetrit has urged that Israel should “decide on a neighbourhood in Gaza and level it” – the policy discussed by ministers last week.
In concert, Israel has turned a relative blind eye to the growing smuggling trade through Gaza’s tunnels to Egypt. Gazans’ material welfare is falling more heavily on Egyptian shoulders by the day.
The question remains: what does Israel expect the response of Gazans to be to their immiseration and ever greater insecurity in the face of Israeli military reprisals?
Eyal Sarraj, the head of Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme, said this year that Israel’s long-term goal was to force Egypt to end the controls along its short border with the Strip. Once the border was open, he warned, “Wait for the exodus.”
By Jonathan Cook
The latest tightening of Israel’s chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation crisis are expected to follow.
And on Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a spokesman said.
In a further blow, Israel’s large Bank Hapoalim said it would refuse all transactions with Gaza by the end of the month, effectively imposing a financial blockade on an economy dependent on the Israeli shekel. Other banks are planning to follow suit, forced into a corner by Israel’s declaration in Sept 2007 of Gaza as an “enemy entity”.
There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also turned back.
Israel has blamed the latest restrictions of aid and fuel to Gaza on Hamas’s violation of a five-month ceasefire by launching rockets out of the Strip. But Israel had a hand in shattering the agreement: as the world was distracted by the US presidential elections, the army invaded Gaza, killing six Palestinians and provoking the rocket fire.
The humanitarian catastrophe gripping Gaza is largely unrelated to the latest tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas and Israel. Nearly a year ago, Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the UN’s refugee agency, warned: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution”.
She blamed Gaza’s strangulation directly on Israel, but also cited the international community as accomplice. Together they began blocking aid in early 2006, following the election of Hamas to head the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The US and Europe agreed to the measure on the principle that it would force the people of Gaza to rethink their support for Hamas. The logic was supposedly similar to the one that drove the sanctions applied to Iraq under Saddam Hussein through the 1990s: if Gaza’s civilians suffered enough, they would rise up against Hamas and install new leaders acceptable to Israel and the West.
As Ms AbuZayd said, that moment marked the beginning of the international community’s complicity in a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies such treatment of civilians as a war crime.
The blockade has been pursued relentlessly since, even if the desired outcome has been no more achieved in Gaza than it was in Iraq. Instead, Hamas entrenched its control and cemented the Strip’s physical separation from the Fatah-dominated West Bank.
Far from reconsidering its policy, Israel’s leadership has responded by turning the screw ever tighter – to the point where Gazan society is now on the verge of collapse.
In truth, however, the growing catastrophe being unleashed on Gaza is only indirectly related to Hamas’s rise to power and the rocket attacks.
Of more concern to Israel is what each of these developments represents: a refusal on the part of Gazans to abandon their resistance to Israel’s continuing occupation. Both provide Israel with a pretext for casting aside the protections offered to Gaza’s civilians under international law to make them submit.
With embarrassing timing, the Israeli media revealed at the weekend that one of the first acts of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister elected in 2006, was to send a message to the Bush White House offering a long-term truce in return for an end to Israeli occupation. His offer was not even acknowledged.
Instead, according to the daily Jerusalem Post, Israeli policymakers have sought to reinforce the impression that “it would be pointless for Israel to topple Hamas because the population [of Gaza] is Hamas”. On this thinking, collective punishment is warranted because there are no true civilians in Gaza. Israel is at war with every single man, woman and child.
In an indication of how widely this view is shared, the cabinet discussed last week a new strategy to obliterate Gazan villages in an attempt to stop the rocket launches, in an echo of discredited Israeli tactics used in south Lebanon in its war of 2006. The inhabitants would be given warning before indiscriminate shelling began.
In fact, Israel’s desire to seal off Gaza and terrorise its civilian population predates even Hamas’s election victory. It can be dated to Ariel Sharon’s disengagement of summer 2005, when Fatah’s rule of the PA was unchallenged.
An indication of the kind of isolation Mr Sharon preferred for Gaza was revealed shortly after the pull-out, in Dec 2005, when his officials first proposed cutting off electricity to the Strip.
The policy was not implemented, the local media pointed out at the time, both because officials suspected the violation of international law would be rejected by other nations and because it was feared that such a move would damage Fatah’s chances of winning the elections the following month.
With the vote over, however, Israel had the excuse it needed to begin severing its responsibility for the civilian population. It recast its relationship with Gaza from one of occupation to one of hostile parties at war. A policy of collective punishment that was considered transparently illegal in late 2005 has today become Israel’s standard operating procedure.
Increasingly strident talk from officials, culminating in February in the deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai’s infamous remark about creating a “shoah”, or Holocaust, in Gaza, has been matched by Israeli measures. The military bombed Gaza’s electricity plant in June 2006, and has been incrementally cutting fuel supplies ever since. In January, Mr Vilnai argued that Israel should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza and two months later Israel signed a deal with Egypt for it to build a power station for Gaza in Sinai.
All of these moves are designed with the same purpose in mind: persuading the world that Israel’s occupation of Gaza is over and that Israel can therefore ignore the laws of occupation and use unremitting force against Gaza.
Cabinet ministers have been queuing up to express such sentiments. Ehud Olmert, for example, has declared that Gazans should not be allowed to “live normal lives”; Avi Dichter believes punishment should be inflicted “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians”; Meir Sheetrit has urged that Israel should “decide on a neighbourhood in Gaza and level it” – the policy discussed by ministers last week.
In concert, Israel has turned a relative blind eye to the growing smuggling trade through Gaza’s tunnels to Egypt. Gazans’ material welfare is falling more heavily on Egyptian shoulders by the day.
The question remains: what does Israel expect the response of Gazans to be to their immiseration and ever greater insecurity in the face of Israeli military reprisals?
Eyal Sarraj, the head of Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme, said this year that Israel’s long-term goal was to force Egypt to end the controls along its short border with the Strip. Once the border was open, he warned, “Wait for the exodus.”
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