Well we have a reach and range for you this week starting with the Special section which profiles the father of Cognitive Emotive Therapy and the conservative Jewish Cardinal. Ideas and values matter greatly in the scheme of things and we often forget how much and how they develop. An interesting review of how this played out in the Industrial Revolution is included  and some modern consequences in China & India’s development with growing skill shortages follow. The CIA took some deserved hammering this week with both an inspector’s review and a book plus we’ve reached back to two longer and deeply insightful assessments – the question to ask however is to what extent the CIA dysfunctional because we made it so ? Mostly I’d argue. An interesting article on the rise of the Middle Class in Latin America is followed by some reviews on the Marshall Plan as well as another reach back to the best work on post-WW1 history. Compare and contrast, if you would, the brilliance and courage of the Marshall Plan which was the primary driver of the world we know today and represented unparalleled historical generosity with the revanchist (get even, eye for an eye,…) policy that dictated Versailles and the consequences of each. And then ask how much the architecture created in Europe and extended over the world but particularly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan is now being played out on a much larger scale in the BRICs.

The links on Iraq and the ME are interesting with a growing awareness of the seriousness of abandonment, success in the surge coupled with the same challenges in creating governance and civic society that are the necessary barriers to cross. Hopefully someone will notice the relationships between what’s trying to be done in Iraq and the historical examples I’ve just cited. Which brings us to US politics where the Dems just had a major debate that, after listening to a bunch of it, convinced that there wasn’t all that much difference on substance, they’re all decent, bright people and are struggling to tell home truths to an audience that doesn’t want to hear it.

Finally there are some very good articles in the Science section. In case noone has noticed in the last 10-15 years our views of the Universe have been upended by the discover that we’re aware of and understand maybe 5% of it’s structure while the other 95% is mysterious. It turns out to be a more wonderful and magical place than we thought it was going to be. We’re also making similar revolutionary strides in brain science in the same time period. Not to long ago the notions that drove our views of ourselves was a) that the brain grew for a certain period and then became frozen and b) that most of our decisions were programmed into us and we were unwitting victims. Now we know that the brain is plastic, grows and rewires itself constantly – allowing enormous adjustments around injury for example, though with enormous difficulty and discipline – and that conscious thought actually changes the wiring of the brain. Which brings us full circle back to Albert Ellis and Cognitive Emotive Therapy.

There are also two interesting articles on climate change and modeling – which may seem like a dry…dry topic until you realize how much the results of models are the consequences of the assumptions and approaches built into them. Still to dry – consider this then: all of the global warming debates are wrapped up in models of how climate evolves. And oh yeah, the entire world economy just about imploded last week (literally btw), because of mistaken theoretical frameworks and mis-specified statistical parameter estimation in Wall St’s investment models. Gee, ideas matter, even when they’re just glitzy mathematical transcriptions and computerized games based on our own flawed – nor not – fantasies about how the world works. Better to get it write (that’s deliberate btw) than knot I suppose

Interestingly enough Ellis drew on the great Stoic philosophers, particularly Epictetus, for the inspiration to his work. You’ll find many parallels with Buddhist practice as well. And even more interesting, to me at least, is that William James work on physiological psychology and the formation of habits and attitudes foreshadows most of what we’re re-learning. May I strong recommend his “Talks to Teachers” in the American Library edition of his collected works. And this year saw a great biography come out as part of this small revival: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism . Finally let me close with one of my favorite sayings of Epictetus:

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Special & General

(5*!!) Albert Ellis The late Albert Ellis, the foul-mouthed father of cognitive therapy, was a modern Diogenes. In this, his last interview, he explains how he found himself at odds with the institute he founded, and why he remains convinced of the value of Stoic wisdom.

The Conservative Revolutionary Brilliant, blunt and bold, French Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger was the quintessential John Paul II bishop, an evangelical Catholic who saw conversion of culture as the order of the day. Lustiger, who died Sunday in Paris after a two-year struggle with cancer, embraced Christianity's minority status in ultrasecular France, seeing it not as a way station along the path to oblivion but rather as an invitation to beat secular intellectuals at their own game by making an aggressive case for the philosophical truth of Christian doctrines. Lustiger's revolution was to proclaim classic Catholic principles in the context of pluralism and religious freedom, being at once modern and traditional. In an era in which faith has to be a matter of personal conviction rather than an accident of birth, Lustiger brashly proclaimed, "We're really at the dawn of Christianity." He was utterly at home with laïcité (secularism), yet convinced that, without Christianity, French culture was fated to dissolution.

·         Cardinal Lustiger 

The merits of genteel poverty WHY did the Industrial Revolution begin in the 18th century? Why did it start in Britain, a medium-sized island in north-west Europe? And, once the revolution had occurred, why did the gains accrue so disproportionately to countries in Europe and North America? These are questions that have kept economists busy for decades. Gregory Clark, of the University of California, Davis, thinks the answers lie in the nature of European societies. “Millennia of living in stable societies, under tight Malthusian pressures that rewarded effort, accumulation and fertility limitation, encouraged the development of cultural forms—in terms of work inputs, time preference and family formation—which facilitated modern economic growth,” he contends.

·         In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence

Capturing talent Despite its booming economies and huge numbers of people, Asia is suffering a big shortage of skills. And it is about to get worse.IT SEEMS odd. In the world's most populous region the biggest problem facing employers is a shortage of people. Asia has more than half the planet's inhabitants and is home to many of the world's fastest-growing economies. But some businesses are being forced to reconsider just how quickly they will be able to grow, because they cannot find enough people with the skills they need. In a recent survey, 600 chief executives of multinational companies with businesses across Asia said a shortage of qualified staff ranked as their biggest concern in China (see chart 1) and South-East Asia. It was their second-biggest headache in Japan (after cultural differences) and the fourth-biggest in India (after problems with infrastructure, bureaucracy and wage inflation). Across almost every industry and sector it was the same. Old Asia-hands may find it easy to understand why there is such concern. The region's rapid economic growth has fished out the pool of available talent, they would say. But there is also a failure of education. Recent growth in many parts of Asia has been so great that it has rapidly transformed the type of skills needed by businesses. Schools and universities have been unable to keep up.

 

Values & Attitudes

 

(4*) Hatred Begins at Home A woman came out. She was 35 or 40, her short hair standing up, uncombed. It was late afternoon, but she was in an old robe, and you could tell it was the robe she lived in. She stood there and smirked as the soldiers went by. She'd come out to register her dislike for the Brits, and to show the children she approved of their protest. As I watched this nothing sort of scene, I thought: That's where it comes from. That's what keeps it alive. I knew what kind of person she was. She was lost, neglectful; she was what would come to be called dysfunctional, and whichever of the kids were hers you could tell she wasn't giving them order or safety, not often. But here at this moment she was being responsive to something -- the presence of the enemy. And she was showing an emotion: hatred. I remembered the woman in Northern Ireland this week while reading the New York City Police Department's report "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat." It is an interesting piece of work

·         http://nyc.gov/html/nypd/pdf/dcpi/NYPD_Report-Radicalization_in_the_West.pdf

The Politics of God After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics — to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect that the rest of the world — the Islamic world in particular — will follow.

• Getting Religion

Learning from the 'Long Gray Line' In business, I find, there's an enormous demand for courage, mostly moral. Moral courage in business requires saying, "Folks, this is what we're going to do, we're going to go through some difficult times, we're going to have competition that really puts us to the test, we may not find ourselves successful for a while because of the things we have invested that are not paying off the way we had first calculated, but we're going to keep doing that." There's faith involved obviously. As the picture grows darker, in certain times, it takes real moral courage to come to work every day and say, "I believe this is the right thing."

·         Pretzels with the FT: Jeffrey R. Immelt. I wonder, though, whether in this new gilded age, today’s Jeff Immelts are still choosing GE. Immelt insists they are. His biggest competitor for people is private equity. And while he concedes that the titans of that business are “immensely talented”, Immelt warns potential GE recruits that “going to private equity is the dumbest thing they could ever do”. “If you just want to pick something up one year and dump it three years from now and get paid a lot, I am the wrong place to come,” he tells job-hunters. But if “you’re curious about whether or not there’ll ever be an electronic medical record in healthcare ... if you’re curious about what form digital media will take ... you ought to be with a company that’s going to finish the job, and that’s me ... I’m going to sell my butt off that this is the only place somebody can come to live their dreams.”

·         Colleges stress moral leadership Ethical lapses in society are prompting universities to try to turn out students who are more socially responsible. Higher education's mission has always stretched beyond academics. But how do colleges make concrete the stuff of vision statements? Motivated in part by concerns about student cheating and broader ethical lapses in society, colleges and universities are increasingly exploring ways to prepare students to be moral exemplars and socially responsible leaders. As the world becomes more interconnected, they're also stepping up efforts to turn out graduates who are engaged global citizens

Int’l Affairs

On top of everything else, not very good at its job The United States has not, even in the eyes of well-disposed critics, been well served by its main intelligence agency MANY books have sought to show how badly the Central Intelligence Agency behaves. In this thorough and persuasive study, Tim Weiner describes how poorly it does its job. As a New York Times journalist who has covered espionage for many years, Mr Weiner knows what he is talking about. He does not play down the seamier side—for example, the opening of letters, snooping on critics, trying out drugs on Russian prisoners, plotting to kill foreign leaders and so on. Yet illegality and immorality are secondary concerns. His principal charge is incompetence, and this he pursues with the zeal of a prosecutor. The most powerful country in the world, he complains, has yet to develop “a first-rate spy service”.

(4*)What Became of the CIA Bureaucratic reshuffling does not begin to address the intelligence agency's problems.

·         A REPORT FAULTED CIA leaders for failing to halt al Qaeda before 9/11. The review by the agency's inspector general concluded that ex-director Tenet "bears ultimate responsibility" for lack of a plan to counter Osama bin Laden.

·        The CIA Follies (Cont'd.) The spy agency's record of failure, bad enough before George Tenet, is now beyond question. Can it be repaired?

Why China Must Rule the Waves: The enthusiasm in China for building a larger navy is not aimed at the United States, but at the enormous, and growing, vulnerability of its maritime commerce. For example, over 80 percent of the oil China imports comes through the Straits of Malacca. This is the busiest waterway in the world (about 130 ships a day). Other nations have an interest in keeping these straights (which are the easiest way of moving between the Indian and Pacific oceans) open. Japan and South Korea, for example. Both, like China, move most of the oil, and much of their trade, through those straights. The nations immediately adjacent to the straights (Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia) conduct joint patrols to keep pirates and terrorists under control. But if some other nation wanted to hurt China, all they have to do is block those straights. You could do that by sinking large ships in the narrowest parts  of the straights, or putting a superior naval force there.

The Generals Dodge a Bullet The growing scandal over tainted food and toys, mostly for export, have revealed to the the world what most Chinese have long known. The government is unable to regulate production standards. Thus China is where the U.S. was a century ago, in terms of unscrupulous manufacturers selling shoddy goods to unsuspecting consumers. It's all made worse by very active government efforts to suppress news of the problem. A classic example of this occurred last week, when  the collapse of a bridge under construction killed fifty people, and the government tried to keep it out of the news. Police physically attacked journalists, and drove them from the scene. But the news got out anyway, with cell phone pictures and text messages quickly circulating. One thing the government will publicize is the arrest and prosecution of those who use the web or cell phones to spread the news, in violation of government bans.

British Civics Class Asks, What Would Muhammad Do? In the long haul, the British government hopes that such civics classes, which use the Koran to answer questions about daily life, will replace the often tedious and sometimes hard-core religious lessons taught in many mosques across the land. Often, these lessons emphasize rote learning of the Koran and are taught by imams who were born in Pakistan and speak little English and have little contact with British society. Written by a Bradford teacher, Sajid Hussain, 34, who holds a degree from Oxford, the new curriculum is being taught in some religious classes here in a city that is increasingly segregated between South Asians and whites. The pilot effort in Bradford has the backing and the financing from the Labor government as part of a hearts-and-minds campaign that it hopes will eventually spread to other cities and help better integrate the country’s mainstream Muslims into British culture. Approximately two million Muslims, mostly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, live in Britain.

As Japan and India Forge Economic Ties, a Counterweight to China Is Seen As Beijing’s influence around the world has grown, common interests have forced Tokyo and New Delhi to begin warming their historically chilly relationship.

Adiós to poverty, hola to consumption Faster growth, low inflation, expanding credit and liberal trade are helping to create a new middle class. While poverty is measurable, the word “middle-class” is subjective. The kind of people who call themselves middle-class in Latin America tend to be at the top of the scale: prosperous professionals with several servants, children at private schools and holidays in Europe or Miami. From the 1940s to the 1970s, state-led industrialisation and the growth of public employment saw the rise in some Latin American countries of a middle class of managers, bureaucrats and a labour aristocracy of skilled workers. But the policies that pushed them up proved unsustainable; they were abandoned after the 1982 debt crisis, which triggered a decade of mediocre growth and high inflation (see chart 1). Since then, partly because protected industries were subjected to privatisation and import competition, this group has struggled. Marcio Pochmann, an economist at the University of Campinas, reckons that in Brazil 7m people dropped out of the middle class after 1980 (although 3m moved into the upper class). The middle class that is emerging now is very different. It is more accurately described as a lower-middle class. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a former president of Brazil who is also a sociologist, points out that this class is related more to the market than the state. Many of its members have small businesses, like Mr Gonçalves. Others act as consultants to larger concerns. José Roberto Mendonça de Barros, an economist in São Paulo, points to a plethora of small service companies which advise large Brazilian farms on computing and biotechnology. The difference is summed up by the changes in São Bernardo do Campo. A generation ago it was the heart of Brazil's car industry, where Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country's president, once led the metalworkers union in strikes. Today the car factories have shrunk or moved away, and São Bernardo lives mainly from services.

(5*) Dollar Diplomacy How much did the Marshall Plan really matter?

To answer that question, as Behrman’s diligent research shows, we need to go back to the speech at Harvard. More than two years after the end of the Second World War in Europe, Marshall bluntly informed his audience that “the rehabilitation of the economic structure of Europe” would “require a much longer time and greater effort than had been foreseen.” The division of labor between town and country was “threatened with breakdown” in Europe because “town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer.” Consequently, European governments were obliged to import essentials from the United States, using precious hard-currency reserves that would be better spent on capital goods for reconstruction. Four things are especially striking about Marshall’s speech, which he read (Behrman tells us) in a barely audible monotone from a seven-page typescript. The first is its economic premise: Europe urgently needed American aid so that urban consumers could be fed without exhausting hard-currency reserves, but the longer-term objective should be to restore European confidence, productivity, and self-sufficiency. The second is its disavowal of unilateralism: this was an invitation to Europeans to specify the help they needed. The third is the European scope of the speech: victors and vanquished were henceforth to be regarded as an integral unit. The fourth is Marshall’s thinly veiled allusion to the Soviet Union and to Communism: anyone who opposed this new policy would get short shrift.To gauge the true importance of the Marshall Plan, it is crucial to get a sense of the amounts involved. Behrman writes, “From June 1947 to its termination at the end of 1951, the Marshall Plan provided approximately $13 billion to finance the recovery . . . of Western Europe.” This was less than half the Europeans’ initial request and four billion dollars less than President Truman’s initial proposal to Congress, but it was still serious money. Behrman computes that, in today’s dollars, “that sum equals roughly $100 billion, and as a comparable share of U.S. Gross National Product it would be in excess of $500 billion.” That’s actually an understatement. In fact, the total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech, or 1.1 per cent spread over the whole period of the program, which, technically, dated from April, 1948, when the Foreign Assistance Act was passed, to June, 1952, when the last payment was made. A Marshall Plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars. If there had been a Marshall Plan between 2003 and 2007, it would have cost five hundred and fifty billion. Yet even these calculations understate the magnitude of the Marshall Plan. There had been American economic assistance to Europe before, through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which spent about $2.5 billion, and ad-hoc measures like the loan of $3.75 billion to Britain that was negotiated in 1946. But none of these expedients addressed the fundamental problem of the “dollar gap”—the fact that an exhausted Europe could not earn the foreign exchange it needed to pay for indispensable U.S. imports. As Behrman demonstrates, Marshall Aid solved this problem. A French farmer who needed an American-manufactured tractor would buy it with French francs. The Economic Cooperation Administration (the Plan’s executive arm) would then vet the transaction in consultation with the French government. If it was approved, the U.S. tractor manufacturer would be paid out of Marshall Plan funds. The French farmer’s francs, meanwhile, would go to the French central bank, enabling the French government to spend the money on reconstruction. Marshall Aid thus did “double duty,” relieving the pressure on the French balance of payments while at the same time channelling money into the French government’s own recovery plan. It thereby had a “multiplier effect,” a term borrowed from John Maynard Keynes. According to one contemporary, each dollar of Marshall cash stimulated four to six dollars’ worth of additional European production.

·        'Postwar': Picking Up the Pieces  Sometimes it's hard to believe that just 20 years ago the eastern half of Europe was in the grip of governments so hopelessly incapable of dealing with the present, let alone providing for the future, that only the continual erasure of history could provide them with a semblance of success. With a stroke of the censor's pen, yesterday's disasters never happened.

 

·        Guide to How Not to Alter the World The subtitle of Margaret MacMillan's rich new history of the negotiations that followed World War I — "Six Months That Changed the World," referring to the Versailles Peace Conference — may represent one of the more overused phrases in historical writing, but in the case of her illuminating and engrossing "Paris 1919," it is unarguably justifiable. The six-month session in Paris that took place between January and June 1919 and involved representatives of 29 countries drew many of the boundaries of Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans that exist to this day, recreated Poland, set the terms by which the major powers would attempt to live with one another and forged the model for the future United Nations, among many other things. But while the conference changed the world, events were to prove in spectacularly disastrous fashion 20 years later that it did not achieve its main objective, which was to design an international structure that would keep the peace.

·         We'll Always Have Paris

India's Singh Faces Biggest Test Manmohan Singh has always tried to separate passion from his politics.

As India's finance minister in the early 1990s, he helped stave off a national financial crisis by mapping out pragmatic market-opening policies. As prime minister for the past three years, he has given speeches heavy on technical details and light on political rhetoric, sounding more like the cost-benefit analyses of the sober economist that he is. But a very different Indian prime minister has emerged in recent weeks as he faces the biggest fight of his political life. With opposition hardening among his government's coalition partners against a nuclear deal with the U.S. that was supposed to form the bedrock of a new U.S.-India relationship, Mr. Singh is finding that his quest for nuclear power has unexpectedly endangered his political power.

China Pays Steep Price As Textile Exports Boom The Situation: Some textile factories in China are accused of dumping dye wastes into rivers to cut costs. The Debate: While China's river pollution worsens, U.S. companies that use the textiles are coming under fire for not taking a hard enough line against suppliers in China. What's Next: Activists in China are trying to make the supply-chain link to U.S. clothing companies more clear, to raise pressure on factories accused of dumping waste. In the more than two decades since international companies began turning to Chinese factories to churn out the cheap T-shirts, jeans and sneakers that people around the world wear daily, China's air, land and water have paid a heavy price. China has faced harsh criticism in recent months over the safety of exports ranging from tainted toothpaste to toxic toys. But environmental activists and the Chinese government are increasingly pointing to the flip side: the role multinational companies play in China's growing pollution by demanding ever-lower prices for Chinese products.

RUSSIA: Reviving the Red Army Back in 1991, the Russian (or, rather, Soviet Union) armed forces had five million troops. Today, there are about a million troops. Fifteen years of starvation budgets, little training and less procurement have left the Russian armed forces demoralized and, well, defeated. But the Cold War generation of officers and troops are passing from the scene. The best of them got out as the civilian economy boomed with opportunities in the 1990s. The worst officers and NCOs are being pensioned off, and the armed forces are being rebuilt. But this process will take a decade, or more, and will produce a smaller, more "Western" military.This revival of military power will cost several hundred billion dollars, take at least a decade, and is expected to revive the Russian arms and military equipment industries. Right now, most of the military equipment is at least two decades out of date. On paper, Russia has a lot of the same systems found in the West (like smart bombs and phased array radars). But in practice, much of this arsenal actually consists of production prototypes, laboratory models or stuff that was manufactured, but never worked terribly well, and couldn't even find an export customer.

Iraq & ME

 Don't Bank On It: The threats to the government are many, varied and growing. Arrests of trade union leaders are on the increase. Strikes are considered un-Islamic, and a threat to the clerical dictatorship. But the unions are striking, demonstrating and agitating anyhow. The reason is the growing poverty. The government admits that eleven percent of Iran's 71 million people live in poverty, and the actual figure is believed larger because the government has been fudging economic statistics (especially the inflation rate, which is probably over 20 percent a year, not the 17 percent the government claims.) The government just fired the ministers most responsible (those of Oil and Industry), and refuses to make any basic changes. The firings quickly resulted in criticism from senior religious officials, revealing splits in the government. Despite the high price of oil, much of the government income goes to keeping itself in power. That means lots of money for the ten percent of the population that benefits from the religious dictatorship. Most annoying to Iranians are the billions spent on Syria and Lebanon. 

The War as We Saw It VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.) The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

Gambling on tomorrow Modelling the Earth's climate mathematically is hard already. Now a new difficulty is emerging. Climate models have lots of parameters that are represented by numbers—for example, how quickly snow crystals fall from clouds, or for how long they reside within those clouds. Actually, these are two different ways of measuring the same thing, so whether a model uses one or the other should make no difference to its predictions. And, on a single run, it does not. But models are not given single runs. Since the future is uncertain, they are run thousands of times, with different values for the parameters, to produce a range of possible outcomes. The outcomes are assumed to cluster around the most probable version of the future. The particular range of values chosen for a parameter is an example of a Bayesian prior assumption, since it is derived from actual experience of how the climate behaves—and may thus be modified in the light of experience. But the way you pick the individual values to plug into the model can cause trouble.
Maliki Faces Fresh Doubts, Tests U.S. Troop Surge in Iraq Creates Opportunity to Reconcile Divisions. Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq are increasingly divided over whether Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his weak coalition are capable of making the necessary compromises that might help end the fighting in the country. Although some -- including the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus -- say Mr. Maliki is starting to take small steps needed to build a multisectarian state, or at least should be given more time, a growing number of officers say they are concerned the current U.S. strategy of "surging" troops into Baghdad and its environs won't produce lasting gains unless he is replaced. The issue is whether Mr. Maliki's frail coalition is either able -- or willing -- to use this opportunity to reconcile the divisions tearing apart the country. So far, the drop in violence hasn't been matched by any progress on the key political benchmarks outlined by Congress to prod Iraqis to compromise. The expectations placed on Mr. Maliki are considerable. His government is riven by ethnic- and religious-based parties dominated by Shiite Muslims who, as a majority were repressed for decades by the Sunni Muslim minority, are reluctant to cede much power. Meanwhile, Sunnis ousted by the 2003 U.S. invasion have waged an insurgency against American and Iraqi forces and a terror campaign against non-Sunni Iraqis.

• Another Vietnam? President Bush's analogy to Iraq is not inaccurate, just incomplete.
• Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam (Melvin R. Laird ) During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.
• Divided They Stand, but on Graves There’s just one problem — make that three — with comparing Iraq 2007 to Bosnia 1995. The three conditions that made Bosnia susceptible to peace under the Dayton accords simply do not exist for Iraq.That’s why you don’t hear American generals in Baghdad, many of whom earned patches as officers in the Balkans, talking about an achievable partition. They say no partition would be “soft.” Rather, it would be repressive and murderous. And a huge setback for American foreign policy.
• The French foreign minister paid an unannounced and highly symbolic visit to Baghdad on Sunday - a gesture to the American effort in Iraq after years of icy relations over the U.S.-led invasion. Bernard Kouchner said Paris wanted to “turn the page” and look to the future. A top American general, meanwhile, said Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard had 50 men training Shiite militiamen in remote camps south of Baghdad. Kouchner said he was not in Iraq to offer initiatives or proposals but to listen to ideas on how his country might help stop the devastating violence.

No One To Talk To: An interesting aspect of the counter-terror campaign in Afghanistan is that, when there are attempts negotiate with the enemy, it's often impossible to find anyone to talk to. This happened recently when health workers tried to contact the Taliban and al Qaeda to arrange safe passage for health workers seeking to immunize children against polio. This is urgent, because Afghanistan is one of the few places where the polio virus survives. Radical Islamic clerics in Pakistan, Nigeria and a few other places have been pushing the idea that vaccinations for diseases are a Western plot to poison Moslem children. This particular fantasy has been rattling around for nearly a decade, and has prevented an international effort from wiping out polio. Like small pox (which was wiped out in the 1970s), once there are no people with polio, the disease is gone for good (it can only survive in a human host).

Politics and Policies

The 'Security Thing' The Democratic Party's hopes of winning back the presidency in 2008 and building a sustainable governing majority will ultimately ride on a single subject: national security. As of now, security is the only substantive issue on which the party could lose next year's election. It is also an issue with unequalled capacity to overwhelm all others. On matters of security, the public knows that it's the executive -- not the legislature -- that matters most. As for the polls, it is still not hard to find misgivings about Democrats' ability to keep the country safe, especially among swing voters.

·         Neomania Apparently the "big idea" in Matt Bai's new book is that all this work on improving the infrastructure of progressive politics won't work unless progressives also bring to bear some new ideas. This seems like a good time to link once again to Jon Chait's case against new ideas which, I think, thoroughly demolished the notion that new ideas are really integral to political success. Matt Stoller's rhetorical question is also a good one: "What about caring about ideas because ideas are, you know, good things to care about? What about caring about ideas because good ideas can promote justice, tolerance, and a better world?" Right. I think it's worth saying that there's a real danger here in policy terms. Just as all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, there are about a million different ways drastic new policy initiatives can make things worse. If you say to yourself, "okay, we need a big new idea" and then start thinking about the merits of various big new ideas there's a decent chance that you'll settle on a very bad idea. My guess is that this is part of the problem with things like the "concert of democracies" scheme -- it seems to people that there ought to be some new ideas, so they came up with this one because it's a new idea rather than because it's a good idea. Obviously, in politics you need to have ideas of some sort. But there are some perfectly good old ideas out there. Progressive taxation, universal health care, public provision for retirement, and the U.N. Charter are all perfectly good ideas. Sometimes we just need to apply an old idea like emissions regulations to a new area like carbon dioxide. Sometimes a good old idea needs a new level of commitment plus some tweaking -- I'd put the Non-Proliferation Treaty in this category. Practical politicians, of course, have an interest in making their ideas appear exciting, but that's different from saying that it's actually necessary to be constantly trying to devise non-circular wheels just for fun.

Clinton, Obama Fail to Disagree on Iraq, Taxes in Iowa Fight  The Iowa State Fair is a standard stop for presidential candidates, and Hillary Clinton worked it the standard way. While their approaches set them apart, the front-runners for the Democratic nomination have almost no differences on issues. In a Des Moines debate, both said they want to gradually withdraw troops from Iraq. In speeches to labor leaders in Waterloo, both promised universal health care. Both would also repeal President George W. Bush's tax cuts for wealthy Americans and raise levies for hedge funds and private-equity firms.

The dazzler that dimmed IT IS hard to believe now, but as recently as the spring of 2005 Condoleezza Rice was being touted for the presidency of the United States. She had just been appointed secretary of state in succession to Colin Powell at the start of George Bush's second term, and a world tour was going well. Ms Rice's star, which rose so fast, has plunged back into obscurity, and the reason is easy for anyone reading this pair of biographies to see. As secretary of state, she has mostly failed in grappling with a web of problems that she herself helped to create when she was turning out to be a notably weak national security adviser. Mr Powell presciently said of Iraq, “If you break it, you own it.” That might serve as an epitaph for Ms Rice's career at the top of American policymaking.

A Fearsome Gang and Its Wannabes THE grim execution-style shootings that killed three college students in a Newark schoolyard two weeks ago bore many hallmarks of gangland slayings, and the culprits clearly wanted it that way. Three of the four victims, two women and two young men aged 18 to 20, were forced to kneel facing a wall before being shot in the head. Both women, one of whom survived, were slashed in the face with a machete or knife. And the MySpace page of one of the six suspects, a 16-year-old who is still at large, pays loving homage to one of the country’s most feared and hyped gangs: La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a Central American gang that has become synonymous with bloodthirstiness.

Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-5 The average income in 2005 was $55,238, nearly 1 percent less than the $55,714 in 2000, after adjusting for inflation.

Science and Culture

 Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale? Current cosmological theory rests on a disturbingly small number of independent observations. It appears that everybody is interested in cosmology. In one anthropological study, every one of the more than 60 separate cultures examined was found to have several common characteristics, including "faith healing, luck superstitions, propitiation of supernatural beings, … and a cosmology." Apparently, to be human is to care how the physical world came to be, whether it has boundaries and what is to become of it. Modern cosmology is a highly sophisticated subject funded by governments with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is unquestionably interesting, but is it, even in its modern guise, convincing?

An Introduction to Abstract Math

(**) Phys Ed: Lobes of Steel Now an expanding body of research shows that exercise can improve the performance of the brain by boosting memory and cognitive processing speed. Exercise can, in fact, create a stronger, faster brain. This theory emerged from those mouse studies at the Salk Institute. After conducting maze tests, the neuroscientist Fred H. Gage and his colleagues examined brain samples from the mice. Conventional wisdom had long held that animal (and human) brains weren’t malleable: after a brief window early in life, the brain could no longer grow or renew itself. The supply of neurons — the brain cells that enable us to think — was believed to be fixed almost from birth. As the cells died through aging, mental function declined. The damage couldn’t be staved off or repaired.Up until the point of death, the mice were creating fresh neurons. Their brains were regenerating themselves. All of the mice showed this vivid proof of what’s known as “neurogenesis,” or the creation of new neurons. But the brains of the athletic mice in particular showed many more. These mice, the ones that scampered on running wheels, were producing two to three times as many new neurons as the mice that didn’t exercise.

Sleights of Mind  A recurring theme in experimental psychology is the narrowness of perception: how very little of the sensory clamor makes its way into awareness. Earlier in the day, before the magic show, a neuroscientist had demonstrated a phenomenon called inattentional blindness with a video made at the Visual Cognition Laboratory at the University of Illinois.Secretive as they are about specifics, the magicians were as eager as the scientists when it came to discussing the cognitive illusions that masquerade as magic: disguising one action as another, implying data that isn’t there, taking advantage of how the brain fills in gaps — making assumptions, as The Amazing Randi put it, and mistaking them for facts. Sounding more like a professor than a comedian and magician, Teller described how a good conjuror exploits the human compulsion to find patterns, and to impose them when they aren’t really there. “Allow people to make assumptions and they will come away absolutely convinced that assumption was correct and that it represents fact,” Mr. Randi said. “It’s not necessarily so.”

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature 

Gambling on tomorrow Modelling the Earth's climate mathematically is hard already. Now a new difficulty is emerging. Climate models have lots of parameters that are represented by numbers—for example, how quickly snow crystals fall from clouds, or for how long they reside within those clouds. Actually, these are two different ways of measuring the same thing, so whether a model uses one or the other should make no difference to its predictions. And, on a single run, it does not. But models are not given single runs. Since the future is uncertain, they are run thousands of times, with different values for the parameters, to produce a range of possible outcomes. The outcomes are assumed to cluster around the most probable version of the future. The particular range of values chosen for a parameter is an example of a Bayesian prior assumption, since it is derived from actual experience of how the climate behaves—and may thus be modified in the light of experience. But the way you pick the individual values to plug into the model can cause trouble.

Tomorrow and tomorrow Until now, when climate modellers began to run one of their models on a computer, they would “seed” it by feeding in a plausible, but invented, set of values for its parameters. Which sets of invented parameter-values to use is a matter of debate. But Dr Smith thought it might not be a bad idea to start, for a change, with sets that had really happened. He therefore gave his models a series of decade-long tests beginning with the real climatic conditions (level of solar radiation, ocean temperature and so on) on 80 different start dates from 1982 to 2001. It reproduced what had happened over the courses of the decades in question as much as 50% more accurately than the results of runs based on arbitrary starting conditions

Discovering How the Maya Fed the Multitude Archaeologists have reported finding what could be the earliest evidence for domestication of manioc in the Americas.

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At this point you’ve probably seen a lot about the slowness and continued failures of re-construction in New Orleans but there’s now a long enough timeline for the broader community to discover what several of us said at the time – to wit New Orleans was the most dysfunctional 3^rd world community in America and the majority of its’ problems were self-induced. On a more cheerful note we introduce a new feature of reaching back into the softclip grab-bag to point out several older articles and/or link older to new ones. The article on applying economics to happiness is once such, which will surprise you. And the importance of the healthcare debates caused us to reach back to some superb writing by Malcolm Gladwell. A key starred entry, in addition to those three (New Orleans, Happiness and Healthcare) that’s really interesting is a discussion between the architectut/product designer/engineer Chuck Holderman and Lisa Randell on how they think about complex problems. In our book this one is really worth pondering. And it perfectly pairs with the two other starred reviews. One on Benjamin Graham’s value investing methodology which is included both for it’s own sake as well as a perfect model of how to think about the deeper characteristics of a problem (btw – if you’ve never read Graham he’s an elegant, witty and polished writer in the tradition of the great American essayists who learned when it was a discipline). And the article on Science vs Religion starts to put the problem the way it ought to be put.

Special & General

The long, strange resurrection of New Orleans  Hurricane Katrina was the biggest natural disaster in US history - and its aftermath became the biggest management disaster in history as well. A year later, Fortune lays bare this surreal tale of incompetence, political cowardice...and rebirth.

• New Orleans' biggest problem isn't failing levees 
• The next energy crisis

The Threatening Storm The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn't a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city's defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment "Heckuva job, Brownie." The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city's man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government's response, but they still haven't come to grips with the government's responsibility for the catastrophe.

Time Returns to New Orleans

 

Values & Attitudes

 

(4*) Remembering a Classic Investing Theory More than 70 years ago, two Columbia professors named Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd came up with a simple investing idea that remains more influential than perhaps any other. In the wake of the stock market crash in 1929, they urged investors to focus on hard facts — like a company’s past earnings and the value of its assets — rather than trying to guess what the future would bring. A company with strong profits and a relatively low stock price was probably undervalued, they said. Their classic 1934 textbook, “Security Analysis,” became the bible for what is now known as value investing. Warren E. Buffett took Mr. Graham’s course at Columbia Business School in the 1950s and, after working briefly for Mr. Graham’s investment firm, set out on his own to put the theories into practice. Mr. Buffett’s billions are just one part of the professors’ giant legacy. Yet somehow, one of their big ideas about how to analyze stock prices has been almost entirely forgotten. The idea essentially reminds investors to focus on long-term trends and not to get caught up in the moment. Unfortunately, when you apply it to today’s stock market, you get even more nervous about what’s going on.

(5*)The sacred and the human 

Today's atheist polemics ignore the main insight of the anthropology of religion—that religion is not primarily about God, but about the human need for the sacred. As René Girard argues, religion is not the cause of violence, but the solution to it The attempt by Nietzsche and Wagner to understand the concept of the sacred was taken forward not by anthropologists but by theologians and critics—Rudolf Otto in Das Heilige (1917), Georges Bataille in L'Érotisme (1957), Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane (1957), and, most explicitly and shockingly, René Girard in La violence et le sacré (1972). It is Girard's theory, it seems to me, that most urgently needs to be debated, now that atheist triumphalism is sweeping all nuances away. For it helps us understand questions that even atheists must confront, and that their dogmatic certainties otherwise obscure: what is religion; what draws people to it; and how is it tamed? Girard begins from an observation no impartial reader of the Hebrew Bible or the Koran can fail to make, which is that religion may offer peace, but has its roots in violence. The God presented in these writings is often angry, given to fits of destruction and seldom deserving of the epithets bestowed upon him in the Koran—al-rahmân al-rahîm, "the compassionate, the merciful." He makes outrageous and bloodthirsty demands—such as the demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. He is obsessed with the genitals and adamant that they should be mutilated in his honour—a theme that has been explored by Jack Miles in his riveting book God: A Biography (1995). Thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens conclude that religion is the cause of this violence and sexual obsession, and that the crimes committed in the name of religion can be seen as the definitive disproof of it. Not so, argues Girard. Religion is not the cause of violence but the solution to it. The violence comes from another source, and there is no society without it since it comes from the very attempt of human beings to live together. The same can be said of the religious obsession with sexuality: religion is not its cause, but an attempt to resolve it.

 

Monks, Not McMansions, May Hold the Key to Happiness Most people think economists study money. In fact, economists use various analytic tools to predict behavior. True, the majority of economists' predictions deal with financial matters. When economists talk about new houses, for example, their focus is invariably on the factors that determine prices, such as mortgage interest rates. But some economists have gone in a different direction. Rather than study dollars and cents, they have used the tools of their discipline to explain other phenomena, such as why people make certain choices. In the past, economists assumed that an individual's choices were always guided by rational self-interest. Today they recognize that human foibles, biases and our hunter-gatherer origins can often be critical factors. University of Chicago economists Luis Rayo and Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate, have carried this approach one step further and used economics tools to predict which choices make people happy. Their research is based in part on study of recent developments in psychology, biology, evolution and neuroscience, including brain scans. What is the scientific proof that a modest lifestyle is the path to happiness? Rayo said one example is Buddhist monks. They eat the same food and wear the same clothes every day. With years of meditation they lose interest in the "next new thing and the moving target," he said. "And their brain scans show that they are happier than most people in a scientifically measurable way."

Int’l Affairs

`Godfather' Helps Explain Asia's Economic Plight: For high-society folks and wannabes in Asia, few honors seem to outrank being pictured among the magazine's pages. Not surprisingly, most of the photos feature tycoons and business magnates and their well-coifed families. One wonders how many locals leafing through such glossies realize the extent to which these billionaires can control the fates of their economies -- and not for the better. While many of these business barons may not be familiar even to regular Wall Street Journal readers, their influence in Asia often seems godlike. Many have a direct line to national leaders, a jarring ability to trump the concerns of mere mortals and a knack for scoring government favors.

In Liberia, an Army Unsullied by Past After 14 years of civil war, Liberia is getting a military built from scratch. The U.S. pledged $200 million to help, using former Army and Marine drill instructors. Recruits must pass a literacy test, HIV test and a war-crimes test.

How Vietnam Venture Proved Costly One American businessman's trip to jail after a business dispute with his Vietnamese government partners turned into a police investigation highlights one of the big risks for the foreign investors who have been flocking to Vietnam, which is widely regarded as the developing world's hottest emerging market after China and India.

Politics Is the New Star of India’s Classrooms— Quietly, a great upheaval is taking place inside Indian high schools. For the first time, the messy brawl that is modern Indian politics, including some of its ugliest and most controversial episodes, is being taught in political science class. It is part of a broader revision of the school curriculum, with potentially long-lasting implications for how Indian children grasp the workings of their nation and its place in the world. Using cartoons, newspaper clippings and questions that invite classroom debate on thorny contemporary issues, the new curriculum comes at a time when democracy has firmly rooted itself in Indian soil and is indeed one of the nation’s principal selling points as it tries to assert itself in the world. India marks the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain on Wednesday.

'Peace Mission' The world will understandably have some questions this Thursday when Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian leader Vladimir Putin meet at Garrison Chebarkul in Russia to review troops from both their countries, as well as four states of former Soviet Central Asia. The event will mark the end of maneuvers called Peace Mission 2007, and it raises some important questions. Does this exercise signal a stepping up of already substantial military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing? And if it does, cooperation against what or whom? The answer to the first question is clearly yes, cooperation is increasing. Less clear is against what or whom the show of force was directed. In practice, however, the organization's priorities have evolved over time, and its top mission now seems to be to stop overt Islamic identification among the peoples of the region, who are mostly ethnically Turkic and traditionally Muslim.

Eat the Fish—Or Else! Our trade debate with China has taken a turn for the absurd. Perhaps it’s just the stupefying heat of August, but U.S.-Chinese economic relations are devolving into confusion. Last week, American authorities identified another shipment of tainted seafood from China. Then there were reports of Chinese threats to dump their holdings of American bonds—the so-called “nuclear option”—in response to American trade protection. This caused at least one news outlet to draw a causal link. Selling $400 billion in bonds would certainly be an escalation over the standard response to a failure to clean your plate. In fact, it is not only casual observers who are getting entangled in the burgeoning conflicts between the countries. Chinese media and officials have also conflated two disputes that really ought to be kept separate—Congressional outrage over China’s undervalued currency and public concern about the safety of Chinese products. The misguided nature of Congress’ currency crusade could be responsible for the mess. The Chinese may have concluded that America’s obsession with the bilateral trade deficit is causing Americans to question the purity of their produce. Alarmed by the deficit and the decline in manufacturing employment, Congress has been demanding an appreciation of the Chinese currency for years. Such a move would make American goods look cheaper to Chinese and would make Chinese goods appear more expensive to Americans. The Chinese are threatening to do what Congress wants, unless Congress relents.

Water Wars: Myths and Realities This week, we examine security threats around the globe. With water scarcity becoming a worldwide security concern, Andrew Biro explores whether fears of geopolitical chaos over water scarcity are justified. Also, Malou Innocent looks at how the United States can best mitigate Iranian threats to its interests in the Middle East. And David Apgar argues that the only remaining hope for a peaceful Iraq might lie with firebrand cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Iraq & ME

On the Road to Jalalabad Sen. Hillary Clinton has cynically charged that we are "losing the fight to al Qaeda and bin Laden" in Afghanistan. But on my eighth trip to Afghanistan (last month) I saw that the trend lines are up, not down. The first encouraging sign came in Dubai as I boarded my flight for Kabul. Afghanistan's main private air carrier, Kam Air, has recently added a second daily round trip between Kabul and Dubai.I spotted similarly hopeful trends in three heavily Pashtun provinces -- Nangarhar, Laghman and Khost -- in eastern Afghanistan. But first, it's important to note that to talk about "reconstruction" is the biggest lie in Afghanistan. Before the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was long one of the poorest countries in the world and has never had a lot of infrastructure. There are ruins in the country, of course, but 95% of them are in or near Kabul itself. Most of Afghanistan lives much as it always has, subsisting on small-scale farming and trading. We can do nothing about many of Afghanistan's barriers to development. For starters, 86% of its land area is non-arable. It has also never had a broad distribution of income or land. According to Afghan-Australian historian Amin Saikal, up until the early 1920s when King Amanullah gave crown lands to the poor, only 20% of peasants worked their own properties. This is why many foreign development experts working in Kabul say privately that if in a couple of decades Afghanistan reaches the level of Bangladesh -- which in 2006 had a per capita GDP of about $419 per year, one of the lowest in the world -- then they will judge their time in the country a success.

• Syrian Survey Despite powerful anti-American feelings and support for Iraqi fighters, 63% of Syrians still favor Syria working with the United States to help resolve the Iraq war. This is the most stunning finding of a new and unprecedented nationwide survey of Syria by Terror Free Tomorrow. It was conducted from a country in the region by phone during July, and more than a thousand people were interviewed across all 13 provinces of Syria.
• The United Nation Returns to Iraq Four years after an explosives-packed suicide cement truck blew up and destroyed the U.N. headquarters building in Baghdad, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously to expand its operation in Iraq. The Aug. 19, 2003, terror bombing wounded over a hundred people and murdered 22. The dead included the distinguished Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was serving as the United Nations' "special representative" in post-Saddam Iraq. Then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan had prevailed on de Mello to take the job. De Mello viewed himself as a diplomat with a lot of experience in "the field" -- which he once described in an essay as a place where he had "seen the best and worst of what we have to offer each other." Everyone who has worked in the world's various hells understands that confronting them requires charity, mercy, discipline, courage and sacrifice. That was de Mello's point and why he went to Iraq. In the wake of the 2003 massacre, the United Nations effectively withdrew from Iraq, maintaining an office in Jordan and a flickering presence in Baghdad. Arguably, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546 (passed on June 8, 2004) ratified the general thrust of U.S. political development policy in Iraq. It mapped a route to full Iraqi sovereignty and stated that the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) would play a leading role in elections, "consensus building," national reconciliation, and judicial and legal reform.
• Fantasies and Competence Coexist Shia warlord Moqtada al Sadr appears to have fled back to Iran once more, apparently in reaction to increased military pressure on his armed followers. The U.S. knows who al Sadr's key military lieutenants are, and these guys are being arrested, or killed while trying to avoid capture. When American and Iraqi forces raid Sadr's people, they often find Iranians (who claim to be religious pilgrims). There are 2,760 foreigners in Iraqi jails, including 800 Iranians. Most of the rest are Arabs. Iraq would like some cooperation from the countries these people, most of them terrorism suspects, came from. The Iranians deny any involvement, despite incriminating documents and the confessions of some of their agents. Iraqis are getting tired of Iranian involvement, especially after Iran sponsors the assassination of popular Iraqi Shia politicians, as recently happened with the  anti-Iranian governor of Qadisiya province. Sunni Arab politicians are openly pleading with neighboring Sunni nations to rescue Iraqi Sunnis from Iranian-backed attacks. These pleas have been made before, and are largely ignored now. No one wants to back a loser, especially a loser that kills Moslem women and children.

·        Professors on the Battlefield The Human Terrain System. It embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders.The Human Terrain System is part of a larger trend: Nearly six years into the war on terror, there is reason to believe that the Vietnam-era legacy of mistrust -- even hostility -- between academe and the military may be eroding. This shift in the zeitgeist is embodied by Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq. Gen. Petraeus, who holds a doctorate from Princeton University in international relations, made a point of speaking on college campuses between his tours in Iraq because he believes it is critical that America "bridge the gap between those in uniform and those who, since the advent of the all-volunteer force, have had little contact with the military."

 Iranian Unit to Be Labeled 'Terrorist' The United States has decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country's 125,000-strong elite military branch, as a "specially designated global terrorist," according to U.S. officials, a move that allows Washington to target the group's business operations and finances. The Bush administration has chosen to move against the Revolutionary Guard Corps because of what U.S. officials have described as its growing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its support for extremists throughout the Middle East, the sources said. The decision follows congressional pressure on the administration to toughen its stance against Tehran, as well as U.S. frustration with the ineffectiveness of U.N. resolutions against Iran's nuclear program, officials said.

• Big German Banks to Sever Most Iran Ties Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG, the two largest European banks to continue doing business with Iran despite recent U.S. pressure, say they will end most of their ties to Iranian companies. The loss of ties to the two German banks could prove a serious blow to Iran unless it can quickly line up other banks to facilitate the country's international commerce. Iran transfers money through euro-denominated accounts at the two German banks and relies on them to finance trade deals, according to counterterrorism officials who monitor the global financial system.
• Iran's Role Iran's influence in Iraq took center stage, amid both an Iraqi diplomatic push and a U.S. military raid aimed at Shiite militias allegedly linked to the Islamic Republic. Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with Iranian officials Wednesday in Tehran to discuss tamping down violence in his war-torn country.. The military action followed a stepped-up series of up assertions that Iranian-linked weapons have been playing a key role in deadly attacks against U.S. troops
• Why Europe Has Leverage With Iran European resistance to American triumphalism has its uses. But with respect to Iran, Europe's behavior is downright dangerous. Our welcome guest, French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- who just visited President Bush in Maine after vacationing in New Hampshire -- could change this. Here's the problem: The U.S. stopped investing in Iran's energy industry in the 1990s thanks to sanctions imposed during Bill Clinton's presidency. Unfortunately, Europe stepped in to fill the void, with state-owned oil firms providing capital and energy technology. Today 80% of the Iranian government's revenue comes from oil exports and sales. Without Europe's support, the theocracy's fiscal lifeline would be a very thin thread. That provides a little context to the lament common from the European Union that Iranian nuclear weapons are "inevitable," as if they were unrelated to energy investments from their member governments. Europe has sacrificed regional stability for profit before. In 1983, as a global recession wracked France, then-President François Mitterrand pondered "the banker's dilemma" -- whether to extend credit to a troubled debtor in hope of rescuing prior loans. The debtor was Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran. Iraq had become France's best arms customer.

·        As U.S. Steps Up Pressure on Iran, Aftereffects Worry Allies America's allies are increasingly concerned about the Bush administration's plans to unilaterally escalate pressure on Iran, fearing that an evolving strategy may also set in motion a process that could lead to military action if Iran does not back down, according to diplomats and officials of foreign countries. Although they share deep concern about Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions, European and Arab governments are particularly alarmed about new U.S. moves, including plans to cite Iran's entire Revolutionary Guard Corps as a "specially designated global terrorist." The move would block the elite unit's assets and pressure foreign companies doing business with its vast commercial network. Allies are less concerned about that step than they are about the new momentum behind it, and the potential for spillover in a region reeling with multiple conflicts. "If the region is strewn with crises, then there's potential for real disaster. There's a fear that they will all merge into a super-emergency bigger than any one country can deal with," a leading Arab envoy said.

FBI Stalks the Big One About the same time the American FBI revealed that it has gone out and tried to count the number of PCs that have been taken over by criminals for use in computer crime (as botnets for spamming, DDOS attacks to shut down web sites, etc) or Cyber War activities (like the current Chinese attacks against U.S. military networks), the biggest botnet ever seen was being built. The Storm computer virus had been spreading since early in the year, grabbing control of PCs around the world. By August, Storm had infected nearly two million computers with a secret program that turned those PCs into unwilling slaves (or "zombies") of those controlling this network (or botnet) of computers. Many of you may have noticed a lot of recent spam directing you to look at an online greeting card, or accompanied by pdf files. That was Storm, the largest single spam campaign ever.  

Meanwhile, the FBI announced that Operation Bot Roast had, so far, identified over a million compromised PCs, in scores of botnets. The FBI is trying to get in touch with as many of these computer users as possible, and direct them to organizations and companies that can help them clean the zombie software out of their computers. Help can be had for free, although many of the compromised PCs were found to be clogged with all manner of malware (illegal software hidden on your machine to feed you ads or simply track what you do).

Politics and Policies

ROVE'S EXIT LEAVES Republicans without their best strategist and raises the question of whether the party will continue his hardball tactics. For Bush, it leaves little chance for new political victories.

Global Warming Simplicities We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. A recent Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It's an object lesson on how viewing the world as "good guys vs. bad guys" can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story. Global warming has clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it. If you missed Newsweek's story, here's the gist. A "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change." This "denial machine" has obstructed action against global warming and is still "running at full throttle." The story's thrust: Discredit the "denial machine," and the country can start the serious business of fighting global warming. The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading. The global-warming debate's great unmentionable is this: We lack the technology to get from here to there. Just because Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 doesn't mean it can happen. At best, we might curb the growth of emissions.

Cost Control for Dummies Reducing health-care spending isn't hard: Just give the government control over the national health-care budget and you'll see spending decline. Access to physicians and hospitals, the newest technology, important therapies and the best medications will also decline over time. But that's the trade-off society makes when the government controls health-care spending. It's remarkable how gullible people are who claim, "Canada (or England, or France, etc.) manages to provide universal coverage for much less than the U.S. spends on health care." They seem to think these other countries have reached some sort of economic nirvana. These countries spend less -- usually between 8% to 10% of GDP versus nearly 16% in the U.S. -- simply because health-care spending isn't a function of consumer demand; it's a function of political demand.

·         Health Care and the R Word Here's a question to ask any presidential candidate from either political party: How do you plan to ration health care? If the answer is "I won't," then he or she doesn't understand health care. Or, more likely, they understand health care and aren't in any mood to talk straight about it. "Rationing" has a bad connotation, which is odd, because we ration just about everything. In fact, that's what capitalism does best. Not everyone gets an S-Class Mercedes-Benz or courtside tickets to the NBA playoffs or roses on Valentine's Day. Who does? People who are willing to pay for them. Health care is similar to German cars and basketball tickets -- not everyone gets everything they want. But health care is obviously different in a crucial respect: People who don't get what they want may become sick, stay sick, or even die. Unlike roses or Lakers tickets, health care is literally a life-and-death matter. As a result, the most fundamental policy question related to health care is who gets what kind of care -- or, put another way, how we choose to ration resources. Forget all the other complications, like aging baby boomers, malpractice lawyers, greedy drug companies, shockingly fat Americans, insurance forms in triplicate, and so on.

• The Moral-Hazard Myth DEPT. OF PUBLIC POLICY about the “moral-hazard” theory behind America's failed health-care system. Several years ago, 2 Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, “Uninsured in America.”

Pelosi, Bush, Clinton Stir Up Their Own Katrina -- This week Nancy Pelosi is leading a Democratic delegation to New Orleans. It's a blunt move to recall the Bush administration's failure to curtail the recovery costs of Hurricane Katrina.Now in time for the second Katrina-versary comes a study confounding many of these assumptions. Authors Peter Boettke, Daniel M. Rothschild and Emily Chamlee-Wright of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University provide evidence for what most of us suspected: New Orleans was uniquely vulnerable to the chaos of a disaster. Their study of aid since 2005 shows the solutions for the Gulf Coast are local ones, not city, state, or federal. If federal money is in the picture, the study suggests, the most important thing is that citizens know where that money comes from, how much is available, and when it will arrive. The amount matters less than the certainty. The tedious left-right debate about whether disaster aid ought to be more generous (the Democrats) or less generous (the Republicans) is less relevant. The aid-and-tax-break combo, a favorite of both parties, is likewise of dubious value.

Science and Culture

(4*) Chuck Hoberman + Lisa Randall CHUCK HOBERMAN: You present yourself as a "model builder" in your book. That was something that stuck with me. You're a scientist doing advanced physics, but is there some aspect of your work where model building is really a kind of design? LISA RANDALL: That's an interesting way of thinking about it. It's funny, because when we design physics models we'll often talk about it in those words—designing models or creating models. But what we're really doing is trying to reproduce reality by guessing what's out there and searching for ways to test those hypotheses. We're asking, "what are the underlying design principles that actually exist in nature?" CH: Right. What does "reproduce" mean in that sense? Because you're not reproducing it, you're making a model. LR: Well, in science, we make certain assumptions about what the relevant elements are in order to make predictions that match what we're able to observe. So, if we identify the correct starting point—the correct ingredients, the correct laws, or forces—then we should be able to reproduce relationships that would perhaps otherwise be mysterious. We take theoretical ideas, work out their consequences, and then see if the consequences are observable. CH: So that would be a key criterion for model building—you want a model that has close-term predictive consequences?

Steaming into the future 200 years ago, Robert Fulton defied the skeptics and changed America. The creation of the age of steam meant many things to America. At the end of the century, historian Henry Adams, in assessing Fulton's feat that day, marked it "as the beginning of a new era in America -- a date which separated the colonial from the independent stage of growth," for the U.S. was alone in possessing such a vessel and would be for decades. He added that "the problem of steam navigation, so far as it applied to rivers and harbors, was settled, and for the first time America could consider herself mistress of her vast resources."  North America, unlike Europe, was a huge continent of long rivers, and the conquest of them in a land of few roads and many mountains meant that the Ohio and Mississippi valleys could be settled and become the basis of prosperous economies -- agriculture and industry in the North, plantations and slavery in the South. In the 20 years after the first steamboat on the Mississippi, more people were drawn to middle America -- 2.4 million -- than the original colonies had attracted in 200 years. A hundred years on, Mark Twain could take the full measure of Fulton's achievement: "He made the vacant oceans and the idle rivers useful. He found these properties a liability; he left them an asset.

The Puzzle of Hidden Ability - Even their parents struggle to draw the tiniest hint of emotion or social connection from autistic children, so imagine what happens when a stranger sits with the child for hours to get through the standard IQ test. For 10 of the test's 12 sections, the child must listen and respond to spoken questions. Since for many autistics it is torture to try to engage with someone even on this impersonal level, it's no wonder so many wind up with IQ scores just above a carrot's (I wish I were exaggerating; 20s are not unknown). More precisely, fully three quarters of autistics are classified as having below-normal intelligence, with many deemed mentally retarded. It's finally dawning on scientists that there's a problem here. Testing autistic kids' intelligence in a way that requires them to engage with a stranger "is like giving a blind person an intelligence test that requires him to process visual information," says Michelle Dawson of Rivière-des-Prairies Hospital in Montreal. She and colleagues therefore tried a different IQ test, one that requires no social interaction. As they report in the journal Psychological Science, autistic children's scores came out starkly different than on the oral, interactive IQ test—suggesting a burning intelligence inside these kids that educators are failing to uncover. The disparity in scores was striking. One autistic child's Wechsler result meant he was mentally retarded (an IQ below 70); his Raven's put him in the 94th percentile. Overall, the autistics (all had full-blown autism, not Asperger's) scored around the 30th percentile on the Wechsler, which corresponds to "low average" IQ. But they averaged in the 56th percentile on the Raven's. Not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence" range on the Wechsler; on the Raven's, one third did. Healthy children showed no such disparity.

The Numbers Behind Rubik’s Cube Scientists are coming closer to solving the mysteries of the Rubik’s Cube, a toy first sold in Hungary 30 years ago. But the daunting numbers spawned by the seemingly simple, multicolored, three-by-three-by-three cube may keep mathematicians and computer scientists occupied for several decades.

Blows Against the Empire Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick’s books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series—owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.

Goldman Backer Broad Says Hedge-Fund Losses Will Cut Art Prices -- Billionaire Eli Broad, who'll help shore up Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Global Equity Opportunities Fund, said art prices will decline as a result of losses by hedge funds and other large contemporary art collectors. ``Many of the buyers of contemporary art have been hedge-fund managers and other investors who obviously are having a difficult time and have lost lots of money,'' the California collector said in an Aug. 15 e-mail sent by a spokeswoman. ``The art market will soften, and an adjustment in values will take place, but it may not happen for six months to a year.''

Posted by dblwyo at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another interesting week of readings with some of the key ones place in the special section to draw your attention. The notion of being able to cope with dangerous ideas is particularly interesting as the real state of the economy (the US is still a world manufacturing and export power btw – in fact the major one). Edward Luttwack’s review of Jeanne Kirpatrick’s last work is also worth your time. This week the biggest section is in Politics & Policy with interesting comments on the demographics of social programs vs. the aging boomers, the needs for accountability in higher education (but how do you measure it ? J ) and pithy comments on energy and health policy.

Special & General

In defense of dangerous ideas Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men? Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage? Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape? Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence? Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Perhaps you can feel your blood pressure rise as you read these questions. Perhaps you are appalled that people can so much as think such things. Perhaps you think less of me for bringing them up. These are dangerous ideas -- ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, nor because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order. Think about it. By "dangerous ideas" I don't have in mind harmful technologies, like those behind weapons of mass destruction, or evil ideologies, like those of racist, fascist or other fanatical cults. I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age. The ideas listed above, and the moral panic that each one of them has incited during the past quarter century, are examples. Writers who have raised ideas like these have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened and in some cases physically assaulted.

They shall overcome—but perhaps not always In many places, non-violent protest is the only kind that has any hope of succeeding. But it can still fail. For a growing community of activists and experts on the technique of non-violent action, the differences are secondary. The point, they say, is this: any authoritarian power can be shamed, discomfited, made to change course and ultimately overthrown if “people power” and shrewd tactics are combined. If this idea has had one big success, it is the “orange revolution” in Ukraine, where protests (see above) continue to be colourful. In an electronic age, it is easy for opposition movements around the world to compare notes without help from others. But if protesters of many hues are meeting and cross-fertilising, that is in large part thanks to two groups based in Washington, DC, which help and publicise the work of non-violent campaigners. One is Freedom House, best known for an annual index that classifies countries as “free”, “partly free” or “not free”. Its core concern is liberty—defined as elected, accountable government, the rule of law and human rights—rather than the means by which liberty advances. More narrowly focused on peaceful campaigns for change (including boycotts and strikes) is the International Centre on Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), whose books, seminars, films and other products—including a game in which players test their wits against an imaginary tyrant—have provided tips for protest movements (and, presumably, for their oppressors) in many countries. As their output is translated into more languages, the two institutions are in many ways at the peak of their influence. But in authoritarian countries—from Russia to Iran to Venezuela—whose leaders trade on xenophobia, protest movements with an American input (however indirect) are denounced as traitors; and their American advisers as ill-disguised agents for their country's government.

The Myth of Deindustrialization It's been a quarter-century since author John Naisbitt blithely described manufacturing as a "declining sport" that Americans could easily offshore to Asia. Since then obituaries for U.S. manufacturing, both mournful and enraged, have been written many times. The reports of death are premature. Many of the most vibrant economic regions in this country -- from the deep South to the Pacific Northwest -- are still making and transporting real goods. The success of America's "material boys" suggests that the old economy and its blue-collar workers -- so often patronized and pitied -- can still more than hold their own in today's global economy. Manufacturing's role in promoting job and income growth is often understated. Although overall industrial jobs have diminished by almost five million since the late 1970s, the loss has been concentrated largely in lower-skilled positions. The number of higher-skilled positions, with a median hourly wage of $24, jumped by more than 36% between 1983 and 2002 to nearly 4.5 million, according to a 2006 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. These skilled workers remain in great demand across much of the country -- 80% of manufacturers in a recent survey conducted by Deloitte consulting expected a shortfall in their numbers over the next three years. Construction, logistics management and trucking are particularly important in part because they provide a path to upward mobility for people with less than four-year college degrees. The jobs include welders, machinists and tool-and-die makers.

Chicken-and-Egg Economics Shows Serious Cracks:  There's something counterintuitive about that proposition, and repeating it often enough (it's one of economists' favorite palliatives) doesn't make it true. I mean, businesses don't hire out of the goodness of their heart or to earn humanitarian awards. Quite simply, they hire people to produce the goods and services consumers want to buy, hopefully turning a profit in the process. The problem with this line of reasoning is that business executives don't wake up one morning and arbitrarily decide to lay off 10 percent of the work force. They take their cues from something else, and that something else is demand. Relying on business hiring to support consumer spending is one of those chicken-and-egg issues, except in this case, the egg (demand) clearly comes before the chicken (hiring).

 

Int’l Affairs

Doublespeak: Gordon Brown told the truth about Britain's relationship with America—both of them. Neither the prime minister nor his young foreign secretary, David Miliband, who promenaded under the hot Camp David sun with Condoleezza Rice, his opposite number, has much experience of foreign affairs. But in his own idiosyncratic way, Mr Brown displayed an assured grasp of the feints, unspoken put-downs and subliminal messages of summitry. Invoking Churchill, he was warm about America and sounded resolute over Iraq and al-Qaeda: in an interview for American television, he said the fight with terrorism was “a struggle for the soul of the 21st century”—an ingratiating phrase, even if it was borrowed from Bill Clinton. In return, Mr Bush heaped praise on Mr Brown, not all of it double-edged: the prime minister, he said, was a principled, “glass half-full”, can-do kinda guy who “gets it”. Mr Brown said precious little about Mr President, as he called his host, despite Mr Bush's efforts to relax into first names and his ice-breaking larks in Golf Cart One. Mr Brown described their talks as “full and frank”—old diplomatic code for “tense”—and semaphored a differing view of the world and its problems. He identified Afghanistan, rather than Iraq, as “the front line against terrorism”; Mr Bush was left to ventriloquise Mr Brown's alleged thoughts on the importance of success on the Tigris. Insisting that Britain would discharge its responsibilities in Basra, Mr Brown also made it clear that Britain would itself determine when those obligations had been met.

 

Piercing The Golden Shield August 5, 2007: In China, foreign intelligence agencies are finding they have an increasingly difficult time getting into government, and commercial computers. While better use of computer security tools (firewalls, intrusion detection software, etc) has something to do with this, the main reason is the 30,000 Ministry of Public Security employees working for the Golden Shield Project (known unofficially as The Great Firewall of China). The main job of these cops is to monitor Internet use throughout the country, and prevent "troublesome" Internet data from getting in, or out, of China. Since 1998, over a billion dollars has been spent on this effort. This has inspired other police states, like North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and Myanmar to do the same. All this is not just to control Internet use by locals, but to provide a major tool for protecting state secrets.

Stop Listening to Terrorists, Or Else: If you ever wondered why people viewed leaks about intelligence programs as bad, why not take a look at how a series of leaks in the global war on terror have affected the intelligence gathered. Recent reports indicate that the amount of intelligence collected has dropped by as much as two-thirds. This is the result of not just the leaks, but some of the consequences of the leaks. Perhaps the most famous of these leaks was the New York Times article concerning the NSA's efforts to listen in on terrorist conversations. The result was a major firestorm. While some were upset that a classified program was revealed, others were upset that the NSA was listening in on phone conversations (never mind that there was no credible evidence of abuse). The result was lawfare targeting technical intelligence, and very heated debate. The problem with that is that leaks – and the ensuing controversy – tend to let people know they are being listened to. Once a person, group, or country find out that they are of interest to an intelligence agency, two things happen. First, they tend to become very careful with regards to communications – they take steps to throw off surveillance efforts, and they will even shift to means that cannot be intercepted (like couriers or flying for face-to-face meetings). al Qaeda has done this in the past. Second, they begin to wonder how the information is acquired – and try to cut off the flow. If they find out enough of what an intelligence agency knows (usually through a process of elimination), they will have an idea of who might be a source. If the intelligence service is lucky, they can extract the compromised source, but they lose the ability to get future information. If said source is caught, he usually ends up dead or mutilated.

Power and Prudence (A Review by Edward N. Luttwak ): Jeane J. Kirkpatrick became famous as the Reagan administration's combative ambassador to the United Nations from 1981 to 1985, but few believed that the almost gamine former college professor could have much of a voice in shaping foreign policy, what with tough guy Al Haig and ­big man George Shultz in command at the State Department, and successive National Security Advisers happy to keep her in New York making noisy speeches while they quietly made policy in the White House. The implicit assumption of that line of reasoning was that the late-to-rise and early-to-bed Ronald Reagan himself was not all that important in the Reagan administration, so that even if it were true that he had a particular regard for Kirkpatrick, it would hardly matter. Besides, few believed the tale that Reagan had appointed her after reading her pieces in Commentary -- that magazine's articles run to several pages, after all, and Reagan supposedly read so little that as president he even received his daily intelligence briefing in the form of bite-sized videos. With Reagan a mere cipher manipulated by his handlers, Kirkpatrick could have no White House support against powerful men with bureaucracies to serve them, and therefore no power. The newly published Reagan diaries overturn all of the above. We encounter a shrewd and watchful president who treated Kirkpatrick as a valuable colleague in reforming the status quo at the United Nations, in which the members of the "non-aligned bloc" collected their American aid before firmly aligning their votes with the Soviet Union on almost every issue, decorating the proceedings with frequent diatribes against the United States. Observing today's ultra-tame United Nations, where inferiority complexes are vented only in such hopeless sub-venues as the Human Rights Council (China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia are members, the United States is not), one can scarcely imagine the General Assembly follies of those days, in which the perfumed representatives of smelly dictatorships competed in devising new accusations against the United States. The State Department thought all this was inevitable and harmless, and it vehemently opposed any strong response at the United Nations, let alone bilateral reprisals such as cutting aid. But Reagan did not agree, and he firmly supported Kirkpatrick's counter-attacks:

Iraq & ME

Arming its friends and talking peace In short, a new sort of cold war stalks the region WITH America determined to thwart Iran's possibly nuclear-tipped ambitions, and the Islamic Republic set on blocking the superpower's regional sway, some are calling the contest between Iran and the United States a new cold war. As in the last one, the adversaries have mostly shied from hitting each other directly, preferring propaganda, proxy fighters and subtler pressures. In contrast to the last one, America has so far fared badly. Its burden in Iraq refuses to lighten, and its strategy of pacifying the region by (vainly) encouraging the Arabs to democratise has alienated allies almost as much as its support for Israel. Meanwhile, Iran is enriching uranium in defiance of the UN Security Council and basking in the reflected glory of its clients, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Shia militias in Iraq. The beleaguered Bush administration, looking for a comeback strategy, has now reverted to more traditional ways of rallying its friends. What appears to be a charm offensive began with President Bush's call, in mid-July, for a regional peace meeting to address the Arab-Israeli conflict. Arab leaders had long demanded such an event, both to placate their restless publics and to undercut Iran, which is working hard to exploit the Palestinian cause to bolster its image as a protector of Muslim rights. Whether the meeting, expected late this year, can achieve a real breakthrough in the peace process remains to be seen. But at least the Bush administration is showing signs of engagement.

Domestic Terror in Iran It is early dawn as seven young men are led to the gallows amid shouts of "Allah Akbar" (Allah is the greatest) … A few minutes later, the seven are hanged as a mullah shouts: "Alhamd li-Allah" (Praise be to Allah). The scene was Wednesday in Mashad, Iran's second most populous city, where a crackdown against "anti-Islam hooligans" has been under way for weeks. The Mashad hangings, broadcast live on local television, are among a series of public executions ordered by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month as part of a campaign to terrorize an increasingly restive population. Over the past six weeks, at least 118 people have been executed, including four who were stoned to death. According to Saeed Mortazavi, the chief Islamic prosecutor, at least 150 more people, including five women, are scheduled to be hanged or stoned to death in the coming weeks. The latest wave of executions is the biggest Iran has suffered in the same time span since 1984, when thousands of opposition prisoners were shot on orders from Ayatollah Khomeini.

 

Politics and Policies

Pelosi Risks Losing Support by Funding Pet Projects U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last year that she would be happy to ``do away with'' the practice of funding members' pet projects, though she knew it wasn't ``realistic.'' This year proves how right she was. Thousands of so-called earmarks still adorn spending bills, including 15 from Pelosi in a defense measure. Their continued popularity shows how difficult it is to change a system that allows members to bring federal money home for their constituents. Polls show Democrats aren't getting credit for what they say is a major overhaul of the earmark system. Democrats, who never promised to abolish the practice altogether, say they have cut the number of earmarks and for the first time the names of the sponsors and the companies that stand to gain are all being made public. Ethics watchdog groups, pointing to spotty disclosure rules, say more needs to be done.

The downside of diversity A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth? IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger. But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite.

The Democrats Dither on Trade Democratic presidential candidates like to talk about "turning a page" in America's relations with the rest of the world. But what does that mean, in practical terms, on bread-and-butter issues such as trade? Are today's Democrats a party of open markets and economic development, or of market restrictions and job protection? The answer is that leading Democrats seem to want both -- they favor economic development overseas but not at the cost of U.S. jobs. That sounds like a coherent position until you begin to look carefully at the political choices in Latin America, a part of the world where U.S. trade policies are tightly interwoven with national security interests. Tougher trade policies could embolden the anti-Americanism embodied by Venezuela's rabble-rousing president, Hugo Chávez.

Samuelson: Paying for Aging Baby Boomers If you haven't noticed, the major presidential candidates—Republican and Democratic—are dodging one of the thorniest problems they'd face if elected: the huge budget costs of aging baby boomers. In last week's CNN/YouTube debate, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson cleverly deflected the issue. "The best solution," he said, "is a bipartisan effort to fix it." Brilliant. There's already a bipartisan consensus: do nothing. No one plugs cutting retirement benefits or raising taxes, the obvious choices.Consider the outlook. From 2005 to 2030, the 65-and-over population will nearly double to 71 million; its share of the population will rise to 20 percent from 12 percent. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—programs that serve older people—already exceed 40 percent of the $2.7 trillion federal budget. By 2030, their share could hit 75 percent of the present budget, projects the Congressional Budget Office. The result: a political impasse. The 2030 projections are daunting. To keep federal spending stable as a share of the economy would mean eliminating all defense spending and most other domestic programs (for research, homeland security, the environment, etc.). To balance the budget with existing programs at their present economic shares would require, depending on assumptions, tax increases of 30 percent to 50 percent—or budget deficits could quadruple. A final possibility: cut retirement benefits by increasing eligibility ages, being less generous to wealthier retirees or trimming all payments.

·        Better red than dead Will the inexorable rise in medical costs around the world someday pose a major challenge to contemporary capitalism? I submit that in the not-so-distant future, moral, social, and political support for capitalism will be severely tested as would-be egalitarian health systems face ever-rising costs.Rising incomes, population ageing, and new technologies for extending and enhancing life, have caused health costs to rise 3.5% faster than overall income for many decades now in the United States. Some leading economists project that health expenditures, which already constitute 16% of the US economy, will rise to 30% of GDP by 2030, and perhaps approach 50% later in the century. Other rich and middle-income countries, although typically spending only half what the US does today, won't lag far behind.

Zakaria: Amory Lovins tells how we can leave the age of gas pumps profitably and painlessly.Amory B. Lovins talks big. He proposes to wean America off oil by the 2040s, touts ultralight cars and tells some of the most powerful corporate executives in the world, like those at Wal-Mart and Texas Instruments, how to behave more efficiently. But perhaps a former Oxford don—one who built a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer in his basement during high school, anticipated global warming in 1976 and lives in a house that can run on the same amount of energy as a conventional light bulb—is allowed to be bold. In the first of a series of conversations with thinkers and executives about the future of energy, NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to the Rocky Mountain Institute's cofounder and chairman to see how this optimist makes sense of the world's energy woes.

Accountability 101: State Colleges Prepare To Measure Their Own Performance The American medical and higher-education systems regularly boast, with some justification, that they are the best in the world. But in recent years they have been forced to confront tough questions: How do we know we're getting our money's worth? How do you know you're doing such a good job? Is there some way to measure your performance that the rest of us can understand? In health care, publicly available measures of quality are increasingly common. Some were forced on doctors and hospitals by insurers. Some were promoted by those who want Americans to shop for health care the way they shop for cars. Some were pushed by insiders looking for levers to improve quality. Then the spotlight moved to colleges. President Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, and Texas investor Charles Miller, whom she picked to lead a commission on colleges, beat the higher-education establishment with a bat. Having imposed testing on K-12 schools through the No Child Left Behind Act, Ms. Spellings and Mr. Miller a few years ago began pushing colleges to measure and report performance. "If the academy doesn't do it," Mr. Miller says, "it's going to be done for them."

Posted by dblwyo at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're well into August and by and large it's been a lovely summer for us here in Ct. A bit warm on many days but nothing like in prior years; and it cools down at night so the house can be opened up. Quite a bit of rain from time-to-time but many blue and beautiful days. Not only can't complain but actually should celebrate the Summer. Which brings it's own slate of events and occurences besides somewhat predictable weather. Not least of which is the 4th of July. In my little corner of the world that means fireworks, parades (in my little town it's a few veterans, a band or two, lots of Cub/Brownie Scouts, some firetrucks) and picnics. All in in all nothing special. But it is. When you really stop and think, it's very...very special.

Here's a little exercise for you - next time you're driving around your neighborhood imagine a couple or three things. Let's assume folks are pretty decently off - whatever that means to you - so they have jobs, homes, families. None of that happened by accident nor alone. They had to make some effort to get to where they're at - and renew that effort every day. And nobody makes the doors, windows,shingles, cars, food, etc. etc. etc. in all those houses. In fact that's true for all of us - we're comfortably inter-twined in this crazy-quilt network of mutual dependencies and exchanges. And all better off for it by far. If you ever saw some of those History Channel specials, say Iron Age House for example, you have some small glimmer of the efforts involved in just getting a bucket of water.

Now, just supposed you're driving down the street waving at your neighbors and somebody pops around the side of their house and cuts loose with an AK-47 ? A joke ? Unimaginable? Well, not in many places in the world. The fact that we have a shot at making a decent living, in nice neighborhoods filled with the physical things of a good life and are secure from attack and in our families, possessions and rights is not ordained by the fundamental nature of the Universe.

It is a result of a lot of hard work and sacrifice by a lot of folks for a long time - from your neighbors and your efforts to the folks in the local Firehouse to our servicefolk around the world. And all the folks like them for hundres of years back who kept on keeping on. But is particularly due to the efforts of some folks who made extraordinary efforts and sacrifices in those years. And if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to share some reflections on a few and what we owe them. 

Let me start with the founding of the country and, obviously, the founding fathers (& mothers). Having read a bit of history it's been a great learning experience for me to get some glimmer of what they went thru - we were gifted with an extraordinary group of talented, energetic, hard-working and principled folks. For example it was literally thru Washington's force of will that we preserved and kept the Army together (In particularly I've never been able to grasp his dedication that winter at Valley Forge). Equally important was his taking the Presidency (having refused the crown and been called the greatest man in history by no less than George III) because without it the country wouldn't have held together. Consider that his contemporary was Napoleon - who made himself Emporer ! But even in the early years (the book to read is Founding Brothers ) post-Washington there were many crisis. The thing to keep in mind that no Republic in history had held together as a republic for long - though Rome, Venice and Holland gave it darn good runs. And NONE had covered the geographic size and complexity of populations - this was truly an experiment.

Of the several stories that Founding Brothers tells which illustrate how fragile the early years were one especially resonates with me: Hamilton's duel with Burr when the former labeled the latter Catilene. Which in the Roman metaphor vernacular the founders used meant a talented & brilliant politician who would act only in his own interest. A charge deadly to Burr's career, later confirmed and which Hamilton refused to withdraw. I've paced the distance of their duel and it would have been hard to miss. Hamilton fired in the air with his shot while Burr aimed to kill. In other words Hamilton considered the establishment of the principle of public-minded integrity so important he was willing to die to protect it - and did, and he did. Burr's career was finished by that episode and the principle of public virute built into our DNA.

Four score and seven years afterwards the principles of government by the people, of the people and for the people were tested again. In a world where NOONE believed it was workable or sustainable in the long-haul; and for which the Civil War was the crucible. Perhaps no man did as much as Lincoln to make it work - nor are their many in history with his combination of characeristics that could have (the wonderful book to read is Team of Rivals). And the Gettysburg Address is well worth re-reading and thinking about - once you understand what it is you're reading. My understanding of the Address and what the last "full measure of devotion" entailed was honed by the movie Gettysburg - which is (within limits) as historically accurate as possible and captures both the battlefield, the terrible command decisions, crucial points and the terrible pressures. It helps to know that Lee kept attacking because, on good information, he thought that a peace offer was pending that would have been accepted by the Union, especially if he won. And this was the first time since the beginning that the Union Army stood ! What would you gamble ? Of many great scenes the one that chills my blood is where the commander of one of Pickett's brigades explains that 3-year veterans are going to charge across a mile of open field KNOWING that most of them will die miserably on the off chance of breaking the Union line. KNOWING exactly what they're facing and what the consequences are. But let me let Sgt. Buster Kilrain sum it all up:

There's many a man alive of no more of value than a dead dog. Believe me. When you've seen them hang each other the way I have back in the Old Country. Equality? What I'm fighting for is to prove I'm a better man than many of them. Where have you seen this "divine spark" in operation, Colonel? Where have you noted this magnificent equality? No two things on Earth are equal or have an equal chance. Not a leaf, not a tree. There's many a man worse than me, and some better... But I don't think race or country matters a damn. What matters, Colonel... Is justice. Which is why I'm here. I'll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I'm Kilrain... And I damn all gentlemen. There is only one aristocracy... And that is right here.
[points to his head] 

Strangely enough with the war swirling around them it was Lincoln and the Republicans of the time who passed the Transcontinental RR act which created a continental nation, set up the Homestead Act which helped settle it, land-grant Universities which laid the foundations for both educating it and making science and research key to our prosperity and many other critically significant innovations. There was little difference between the way things were done in America in 1830 and Florence in 1230 - a businessman could have changed places easily. But neither could have gone to 1870 or 1890 or beyond because the railroads created a national economy.

Between 1880 and 1920, or so, we started as a nation of isolated villages and became an urban, industrialized nation that was the greatest economic power on earth. And went thru enormous changes in social structure, economics and business and political and administrative organization. Now a lot of people played many and great roles in bringing this all about - too many to discuss. And not as dramatic as the Founding or the Civil War. Nonetheless the Progressive Era was as much a crisis that threatened the existence of the Republic as either of those two crisis. A good book to read is The Search for Order which is still the best comprehensive synthesis across the period though Wikipedia has a nice starting point, albeit brief. But the more important hint is to check out the list of Presidential Rankings and notice where Roosevelt and Wilson rank; and ask yourself what was required that two of our greatest served back-to-back. Let us, again, let TR speak for himself and for us:

In our complex industrial civilization of today the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations. There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships.

The re-structuring of American society was obviously not our only challenge. It was followed by WW1, the Great Depression (did you know by-the-way that there was a right-wing plot against Roosevelt which aimed to replace him with Gen. Smedley Butler, Commandant of the USMC, organized by several of the richest men in the nation ? Rather similar to how Hitler was funded and came to power, don't you know ?). Obviously we owe a great deal to a great many people not least of whom were Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. AND the members of the greatest generation. For anybody who's seen "Saving Private Ryan" the gist of the problem is pretty clear but let me recommend without qualification that you see "Band of Brothers" - the magnificent HBO TV series. As a closing note though I'd like to pass on one key statistic - as best I recollect it. If you've seen Private Ryan you have some feel for the risks - front-line combat troops had, over the course of the European campaign, a casulty rate of some 120%, wounded or killed. I'm not quite sure about that figure. However the bomber crews of the 8th Air Force, who had to complete 25 missions, stood approximately 0% chance of doing so. Can you imagine getting up in the morning, eating breakfast, gearing up and smiling as you climbed into your bomber KNOWING that your chances of coming back were less than 50% on that mission ? And that you had to do it again tomorrow ? And the day after ? And the day after, until you didn't come back. 

Moving beyond WW2 and into the modern era we endured many tumultuous events from Civil Rights and the Riots, on. Yet at the same time it was a period of unrivaled prosperities - the first widespread rise of a large middle-class in history (Halberstam's "The Fifeties" is a superb grounding in all the changes and innovations that set the entire framework since then. Very highly recommended.). One of the things that passed most people by however was the Cold War, which was a real war, cost real resources and lives, changed  many parts of the world (how well would Africa be doing now without having been a battleground for the covert war). The book to read is The Cold War: A New History by  the dean of  Cold War historians John Lewis Gaddis. His most, among many, telling quotes is "that it was not a conflict where victory was pre-ordained" (paraphrasing). Which many (almost all of us, forgot, or never knew). The Pentagon desperately needs cultural experts for today's conflicts yet they are widely unavailable - partly because their parents raised them in the false belief that the entire thing was a fabrication of the Pentagon ! A true story. Well the movie that is as gut-wrenching as Private Ryan in it's own ways, and also a fairly accurate composite of many of the major crisis of the early Cold War as well as the general War in the Shadows is the Good Shepherd. Well written, acted and directed - almost unfortunately so. It's one moral crisis after another - each of which exceeds any I've, or most of us, ever faced in scope and consequences.

Yet that was only a small part of everything that went on. We're forty years on from the "Summer of Love" when all the fundamental shibboleths (look it up...please) were thrown up for re-consideration. As Andrew Shepherd put, "it's all about character, Bob". Have you considered what this country would have been like if instead of Martin Luther King we'd had a Yasser Arafat ? His dedication to the fundamental principles for which, and on which, this country was founded was and is extraordinary. And we're just now coming to the end of the first wave of aftershocks and re-building our society based on the incorporation and inclusion of all the people. Not done yet, though ! It's well worth watching King's "I Have a Dream" speech with that in mind.

Let me close this rather longish post (essay :) ) with a final note. It'd be an appropriate and obvious choice to point to all our troops scatterred in far-away places going in "Harm's Way". Taking nothing whatsoever from those folks (& pointing to the prior post on Medal of Honor winners) though let me point you to another Halberstam book "Firehouse" about a firehouse in Mid-town Manhatten that lost 1/2 the house on 911 (everybody on the engine and ladder trucks but one guy who was severely injured and survived only by a fluke). The dedication to service, the sacrifices and the continuing struggles of their families, friends and survivors can stand for all the efforts of all the folks, just ordinary ones like ourselves, who live their lives from day-to-day yet make what efforts are necessary. 

And, finally one last little touch to put it all into emotional perspective let me look to Alan Jackson as he asks, "where were you...", but add in all the other times and places: 

Posted by dblwyo at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Henninger of the WSJ has a deeply moving review of an even more deeply moving play (which I haven't and won't be able to see right now...SADLY) which if you get a chance to see it sounds as if you should. The highly respected WSJ theater/arts critic Terry Teachout briefly reviews it on his blog though and we reproduce part of it here: (the show information is Beyond Glory )

TT: Southern fried gothic Today's Wall Street Journal drama column contains the first fruit of my recent travels, a rave review of a rare revival of Tobacco Road by Triad Stage, a company based in Greensboro, N.C. I also review the New York premiere of Stephen Lang's Beyond Glory and a production of Pirates! (an updated version of The Pirates of Penzance) at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J.:

It took long enough, but "Beyond Glory," Stephen Lang's fire-eating portrayal of eight recipients of the Medal of Honor, has finally opened Off Broadway two years after I saw it at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. "Mr. Lang's one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving," I wrote in this space in 2005. "It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I've seen in my theatergoing life." I went back to see it again last week, and I stand by every word of my original review....

Lang's play is based on the book Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty and takes eight of the 24 stories contained in as it's source material. And in that spirit here's Henninger's column reproduced in full. At the bottom the Online WSJ video interview with him is embedded and a couple of the projects that the NEW/NPR have organized are referenced, including Operation Homecoming. The goal of that project was to get great writers to hold workshops for the troops so they could tell their own stories.

Faith and Fiber 

The American people may have "Iraq fatigue," but that doesn't mean they've stopped paying attention. A few days ago, the Gallup/USA Today poll reported that, over the past four weeks, belief that the extra troops in Iraq were "making the situation better" rose to 31% from 22%. The percentage who say the new troops don't matter dropped to 41% from 51%. Somehow people have found their way to reports that Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy is toting up gains on the ground. Here in the U.S., any such news a half-world away from the troops in Iraq will be processed immediately into the chopped meat of our politics. Example: If the Iraq commitment turns steadily positive, the Democratic leadership's domestic antiwar strategy may leave the party's candidates on thin ice as they slip and slide toward the primary season. This ensures that the war, the one in the U.S., will be fought with recrimination and accusation. Imagine the surprise, then, when the most cathartic experience I've had recently in matters of war or peace was seeing a stage play about . . . war. The play is "Beyond Glory," written and performed by Stephen Lang at the Roundabout Theater in New York. 

In barest outline, Mr. Lang, who originated the role of the accused Marine colonel in the Broadway production of "A Few Good Men," brings to life eight recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor from World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Without interruption for 80 minutes, Mr. Lang recreates eight different men, who relate the hellish events that earned them the Medal of Honor. As described recently by Journal theater critic Terry Teachout, this is "acting of the highest imaginable quality, a performance that will sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after." An understatement. After seeing "Beyond Glory" the first time a month ago, curiosity sent me to the Web to learn more. New York theatergoers normally would expect to wait 'til Manhattan turned red for a play about the Medal of Honor. And as always, you're waiting for the inevitable footlight political lecture. Never came. Stephen Lang plays it straight. No "message." In a conversation about the play last weekend, Mr. Lang said this play's about "humility." So how did this happen? What emerged from the effort to reverse-engineer "Beyond Glory" were so many "good news" stories, all tied to the subject few want to think about nowadays -- war -- that one hardly knows where to begin. The beginning itself was just luck. Several years ago Mr. Lang came across a new book by a suburban New York basketball buddy, Larry Smith. A former managing editor of Parade magazine, Mr. Smith had managed to draw forth first-hand oral histories from 24 recipients of the Medal of Honor, an astonishing feat given the traditional reluctance of veterans to talk about the details of combat experience. So for starters there was this fine book, published in 2003 by W.W. Norton, called "Beyond Glory." Stephen Lang transformed eight of them into dramas to tell out loud. The play, "Beyond Glory," opened in 2004 on the edge of Arlington Cemetery, at a small theater inside the Women in Military Service Memorial. Some nights only three people showed up. He played on. Then he got a strong review, and lots of people started attending. One was a program director at the National Endowment for the Arts, Jon Peede. Mr. Peede had been asked to direct a new NEA program called Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. Its intention was to help soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, or their families, to put their experiences into writing -- fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The idea was suggested to NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, a poet, by Connecticut poet Marilyn Nelson, who'd recently served as a visiting writer at West Point. Good for the poets. Reluctant to wait years for Congressional funding or to divert money from other NEA programs, Chairman Gioia sought private funding for Operation Homecoming. Quietly, the Boeing Company stepped up, ultimately giving $1.2 million. The soldiers' tutors at NEA's workshops included writers such as Barry Hannah, Tobias Wolff, Mark Bowden, Victor Davis Hanson and Tom Clancy. The result is a book, "Operation Homecoming" (Random House), which -- again some understatement -- is breathtakingly good. One of the chanted mantras of our time is, "But I support the troops." Terrific. Now read "Operation Homecoming" to find out who they are, what they think, feel, want, have learned, won and lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stand in a bookstore and start with chapter five, "This Is Not a Game." But we're ahead of the story. Jon Peede told Chairman Gioia he'd just seen a pretty amazing play about Medal of Honor recipients that would make a nice fit with "Operation Homecoming." Result: Stephen Lang was able to put the Medal of Honor's reality in front of soldier audiences all over the world -- in Europe, at Pearl Harbor, the DMZ in Korea and of course in the Middle East, memorably aboard the aircraft carrier USS Vinson in the Persian Gulf. He performed on the Vinson three times in a day, losing 10 pounds. Two shows were done on the flight deck, each time before 500 to 600 sailors. In the evening he did it in a smaller room for about 100 officers. Some wept. Here's why one person wept at "Beyond Glory." I didn't know who the eight MoH soldiers and Marines were the first time I saw the play. The fourth man portrayed is Adm. James Stockdale. In the 1980s, I worked with Jim Stockdale (and later met him several times) to shape a long, remarkable feature that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal on the meaning of his seven years as a prisoner during Vietnam at Hoa Lo, the Hanoi Hilton. Stephen Lang, using Stockdale's words, revealed the reality of Hoa Lo prison -- the torture known as "the ropes," the years in isolation, the ruined but never-broken man. When Stockdale/Lang slits his wrists to avoid being "taken down," and describes why, it is unbearable. Last Saturday after he'd finished the matinee performance (the play closes a week from Sunday), I asked Stephen Lang: You've now spent several years with these eight guys; what do you think "Beyond Glory" is about. "For the longest time," he said, "I couldn't give it a name. I finally concluded that what binds these men is faith and fiber." Pretty simple. Faith and fiber.

Posted by dblwyo at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well another busy week on several fronts. In fact there was so much news that we’ve split out the standard Weekly Reader into an Int’l/Iraq section and this one with the key articles I particular want to draw your attention to as well as the Politics/Policy, Values, and Science/Culture sections here. In the Special section two articles are highly ranked not because they got a lot of attention but because of their l.t. implications. One of our biggest domestic and foreign policy problems is dealing with the influx of immigrant labor and drugs from Latin America. The article on the new Mexican President’s tackling some of these difficult issues head-on is valuable reading as is the growing protectionist backlash and the 1028 economists who signed a petition against it (the number is historically significant because it’s the same number who signed a similar petition against the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act which triggered a trade war in the 30s and was partly responsible for the conditions which encouraged WW2). Finally there is the NYT editorial from Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack reporting on their recent survey trip to Iraq where the found that serious progress is being made as the result of the Surge. Considering both have been intelligent and grounded critics and were writing in the NYT it’s quite a piece of work.

In the Culture section I particularly want to draw your attention to the new Harry Potter moview and the reactions to it and the general phenomenon. A superb movie (played a little hooky this week) but fast becoming a major morality tale and less & less a kid's series. There's also a potpourii of interesting cultural links, especially to NPR's "Live Concert" series which is well worth exploring. 

Special & General

 

(5*!) The Latest Mexican War Mexico is at war. No, not a war with the United States over immigration, though the war for stability and modernity Mexico is waging has profound effects on that hot-button North American issue. Let's take Mexico's figurative battle first, the "political fight for modernization." Figurative, however, doesn't mean without the threat of severe civil disorder. Conducting legitimate elections is certainly a "front" in Mexican modernization. So is navigating the storm of post-election partisan rivalry, massive street demonstrations and threatened violence.

A retrospective look at the July 2006 presidential election and its dicey aftermath suggests Mexico is maturing as a democracy. That is good news. The election pitted moderate-conservative National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon against left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Calderon won by an angstrom -- 244,000 votes out of 41 million ballots cast. Lopez Obrador, however, declared himself the "legitimate president" and led huge demonstrations in Mexico City that shut down businesses. International observers, however, said the vote was fairly conducted and Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) certified the election results. In December 2006, Lopez Obrador and PRD activists tried to frustrate Calderon's inauguration. Eight months later, Lopez Obrador continues to claim the presidency -- but last year's bellow is this year's pathetic echo. The consensus view is the IFE demonstrated real institutional integrity and ran a clean election. President Calderon has certainly impressed the Mexican electorate. Combating corruption is another front in the fight for modernization, and Calderon is attacking that complex, debilitating and pervasive problem. Calderon is pursuing judicial and police reform. His government is reportedly in the midst of a "corruption purge" of its federal police. Two hundred eighty-four Mexican police commanders and sub-commanders will be replaced. Not all of these suspect cops will be arrested, however. An interesting policy wrinkle is a "rehabilitation" course.

 

(4*) Economists Against Protectionism On May 4, 1930, 1,028 economists signed a petition urging Congress and President Herbert Hoover to reject the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, arguing that "increased restrictive duties would . . . operate, in general, to increase the prices which domestic consumers would have to pay." Neither Congress nor the president listened, but the stock market certainly did.Unfortunately, Congress is suffering from a bad case of amnesia. Over the past several months, protectionism has reached a fever pitch with lawmakers in both Houses clamoring to attach their names to as many as 50 anti-trade bills.

·         1,028 economists...  ...signed this petition.

·         The New Protectionism This is bad news:

Passed by a vote of 20-1, the Senate Finance Committee's measure would allow U.S. companies to seek anti-dumping duties on goods from any country that maintains a "fundamentally misaligned" exchange rate after being formally cited by the United States.

The Top Three Economic Concepts I organized my principles text to put the most important concepts toward the front of the book. If I had limited time to teach a basic course, I would try to get through the first 10 chapters (out of 36 in the book), perhaps skipping chapter 2 on methodology and 5 on elasticity. Summarizing these chapters in three big ideas is hard, but here goes:

1. Comparative advantage and the gains from trade.

2. Supply, demand, and the efficiency of market equilibrium.

3. Market failure, such as externalities, and the role for government.

The lesson is that we can all gain from economic interdependence and that markets are a good, but not always perfect, way to coordinate people in an interdependent world.

(4*) A War We Just Might Win VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place. Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.

·         Recalibration It's a cardinal rule in Washington, for reporters and politicians: never let yourself fall behind a scandal, story or trend. That's why we're starting to see a "recalibration" on Iraq by members of the mainstream media, and even some Democrats in Congress. As El Rushbo detailed yesterday, a shift appears to be underway inside the Beltway, with reporters and pols saying things about Iraq that were unimaginable just a few weeks ago. Look for more to join their ranks in the coming weeks, ahead of the September report by our top ground commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus.

Values & Attitudes

Rich Man, Boor Man :So we are agreed. We are living in the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth. In the West, the mansion after mansion with broad and rolling grounds; in the East, the apartments with foyers in which bowling teams could play. Or, on another level, the week's vacation in Disneyland or Dublin with the entire family -- this in a nation in which, well within human memory, people with a week off stayed home and fixed things in the garage, or drove to the beach for a day and sat on a blanket from one of the kid's beds and thought: This is the life. You leave the floor for the street and meet the woman with the clipboard. "Do you have two seconds for the environment?" Again, not a soft question but a challenge. Her question is phrased so that if you don't stop and hear her spiel, you are admitting you won't give two seconds for the environment, or two cents for it either. You give the half-smile-nod, shake your head, walk on. She looks at you as if you're the reason the Earth is going to hell. Do they know they're being manipulative? If they have a brain they do. Their trainers certainly know. Do they know it's also why no one quite trusts them? Do they care? Why would they? They're the manipulators on the street.

(4*) The man is the message

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. – Cal Ripken Jr. began his Baseball Hall of Fame induction speech on a steamy 82-degree day here Sunday with a story about a 10-year-old boy he was teaching hitting to recently.

When the lesson was finished, the boy asked Ripken if he had played baseball. Ripken answered, "Yes, I played professionally."

"Oh yeah, for what team?"

"I played with the Baltimore Orioles for 21 years."

"What position?"

"Mostly shortstop with a little third base at the end."

As the boy walked away, he asked, "Should I know you?"

 

Politics and Policies

Campaigns Hunt Votes Among `Anxious Xers,' `Angry Independents' -- ``Anxious Xers'' and ``angry independents'' may replace ``soccer moms'' as the object of desire for presidential candidates in 2008.  It's the time in the campaign season when Washington's legions of pollsters, policy wonks and political consultants go looking for that elusive bloc of swing voters large enough in number and cohesive enough in outlook to make the difference in a close election. Some of the nominees for the target group of 2008 include ``anxious Xers,'' members of the so-called Generation X worried about job security, income inequality and the environment, ``angry independents,'' those non-aligned voters fed up with the government, ``populist conservatives,'' working-class voters worried about their jobs in the global economy, and ``waitress moms,'' economically struggling single parents. ``Finding out what the next big thing in politics is is critical, because you want to ride the next big wave before it engulfs you,'' said John Feehery, a onetime top aide to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert who now runs his own lobbying firm. The focused hunt for the voter group that can swing an election became a fascination for political operatives with the publication in 1970 of the ``The Real Majority,'' a study of the electorate. Authors Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg dubbed the ``Dayton housewife'' the archetype of the Middle American voter whose support was crucial to a victory. She was middle class and upset with the social upheaval of the 1960s -- war protests, racial unrest, drugs and rock and roll.

`King of Pork' Craved Lifestyles of the Rich When someone like Senator Ted Stevens ends up with his house raided by federal agents, I'm left wondering why in the world people like him aren't satisfied with the hand they've been dealt when they've been dealt such a good one. Yet more than a dozen present and former members of Congress are currently under investigation. Stevens, an Alaska Republican, makes $165,200 a year and gets a generous annual stipend for travel and expenses. He has experts to do his homework, aides to do his bidding, and people with planes panting to have him on board. He has an elegant house in the capital and a chalet in ski country in his home state. In Alaska, where an airport is named after him, he's doubled the state's take of federal money to more than $8 billion in the last decade. He's known far and wide as ``Uncle Ted.'' In Washington, Stevens, 83, the longest-serving Republican member of the world's most exclusive club, is more often called the ``King of Pork'' than Uncle Anything. Though admired for his shameless mining of the public trough, he's generally more feared than loved. One year, Alaska got more homeland security dollars than New York. ``I am guilty of asking the Senate for pork, and proud of the Senate for giving it to me,'' he once said.

America's Economic Mood: Gloomy Americans are feeling decidedly sour about the economy and those in charge of it, fueling Democratic efforts to target business interests in the 2008 election campaign.

More than two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. economy is either in recession now or will be in the next year, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows. That assessment comes despite the fact the economy has experienced sustained growth with low inflation and unemployment and generally rising stock values ever since the recession that ended early in President Bush's tenure. In addition, the poll shows a lack of confidence in economic leaders. That includes not just Mr. Bush and Congress, both of whom have the approval of fewer than one-third of all Americans, but the financial industry, large corporations in general and energy, drug and insurance companies in particular.

New Orleans Hasn’t Gotten Any Safer Despite a vast and expensive effort to protect the Louisiana coastline from another storm, New Orleans is no safer now than it was before Hurricane Katrina, says Michael Grunwald in Time. Misguided policies and poor engineering left New Orleans vulnerable to the devastation of Katrina two years ago, he says. Today, government programs aimed primarily at establishing a physical bulwark against major storms risk repeating mistakes of the past few decades. In particular, he says, policy makers and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are undertaking grand engineering projects including building bigger levees in sparsely populated areas at the expense of more effective natural defenses. Mr. Grunwald agrees bigger levees are necessary. But he laments that the Corps has spent almost all of the $7 billion it has received since Katrina on traditional engineering projects meant to “control rather than preserve nature.”

 

Science and Culture

In a Strange Universe, We Stick to Search For Familiar Life : In this universe, life is not just stranger than we know. It may be stranger than we can imagine. Would we recognize it, if we ever did chance upon alien life?

Researchers recently found water on a world outside our solar system for the first time, offering the firmest evidence yet that life as we know it may be possible elsewhere in the universe. As astronomers continue to find more planets -- 246 by latest count -- revolving around suns beyond our own, the discovery of water on one of them strikes a hopeful note.Using NASA's $720 million Spitzer Space Telescope, astrophysicist Giovanna Tinetti and her colleagues at the European Space Agency in Paris detected water molecules on a planet 370 trillion miles away, they reported recently in Nature. This world, known only as HD 189733b, orbits a cool, dim star in the constellation Vulpecula, a stellar landmark so remote that its light takes about 64 years to reach us.

In the atmosphere of this giant planet, water may exist only as steam in boiling skies. Slightly larger than Jupiter, the planet is just 1/30th the distance to its star than Earth is to the Sun, the scientists said. Consequently, its normal temperature is 1,700° Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt silver. Our knowledge of the universe we call home -- and the search for water worlds hospitable to life -- is expanding almost as quickly as the cosmos itself. Life, the panel speculated, might arise as readily in seas of liquid methane, in streams of ammonia, or in caverns of nitrogen ice.

• Web site for The Spitzer Space Telescope.
• Mapping Exotic Worlds

·        How to Map a Very Faraway Planet

Growing up with Harry: J. K. ROWLING was standing in front of me. Even at age 10, I was aware of what a surreal experience it was. I was aware of how small and ordinary she appeared, how impossible it seemed that such a colossus had sprung from the very mind that hovered 3 feet from me. I was also aware of how remarkable it was that she had graced the Framingham Barnes & Noble with her distinguished presence, and -- oh, God, here's my five seconds with her, what to say, what to say. . .

·         Movie Mom's Review

Movie Stardom May Await If Lohan Can Grow Up

buildings (frozen music) will be temporary like concerts

'India After Gandhi': profile of a titan on the rise

'Inside the Red Mansion' goes behind China's new facade

 

NPR “Live in Concert”. NPR has a series of live concerts archived and streamed here. While it’s always worth checking out there are several concerts that are worth digging into, depending on your tastes. The Brit folk-rock legend Richard Thompson or Gogol Bordello – the latter are a particularly eclectic mix of worldwide music styles and genres and personnel (think of it as a small-scale lab for the world culture that could emerge if we’re all lucky. And what might have been if things go the way they usually do). But the real treat, in a way, is the live concert from the principles of the indie move Once which I can’t recommend highly enough. Go see it.

First-Time Director's Story: How Iraq Went Awry: Charles Ferguson talks about how his film differs from other Iraq war documentaries.

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There's so much news this week that we've split off the Int'l and Iraq sections in this seperate entry. The strategic challenges in Pakistan are mounting rapidly and may be a future serious problem but the two articles I want to particlarly draw attention to are on the changes in world population demographics and the rapid emergence of Sovereign Wealth Funds and what it means for the future of the int'l system. There's also extensive coverage of Iraq, the ME and some excerpts from some wry "inside baseball" data from StrategyPage on Iran that would be more amusing if it weren't so sad.

International Affairs

 

Pakistan: Endgame for Musharraf? A suspected suicide bomber killed at least 13 people near Islamabad's Red Mosque on Friday, two weeks after security forces expelled Islamic militants in a weeklong siege that killed 100 people. The violence underscores a U.S. intelligence report issued earlier this month warning that al Qaeda and the Taliban had reconstituted in the semiautonomous tribal areas on Pakistan's northwestern border. Meanwhile, the country's Supreme Court dealt a blow to Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, two weeks ago when it reinstated Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. The middle class loudly protested the government's removal of the judge in March in one of the sharpest challenges yet to Gen. Musharraf's authority. The timing couldn't be worse for Gen. Musharraf, a key ally of the U.S., as he tries to placate radicals and moderates ahead of elections this fall. Here's a closer look:

(***)How to deal with a falling population Worries about a population explosion have been replaced by fears of decline (this also points to several country studies !!)

THE population of bugs in a Petri dish typically increases in an S-shaped curve. To start with, the line is flat because the colony is barely growing. Then the slope rises ever more steeply as bacteria proliferate until it reaches an inflection point. After that, the curve flattens out as the colony stops growing. Overcrowding and a shortage of resources constrain bug populations. The reasons for the growth of the human population may be different, but the pattern may be surprisingly similar. For thousands of years, the number of people in the world inched up. Then there was a sudden spurt during the industrial revolution which produced, between 1900 and 2000, a near-quadrupling of the world's population. Numbers are still growing; but recently—it is impossible to know exactly when—an inflection point seems to have been reached. The rate of population increase began to slow. In more and more countries, women started having fewer children than the number required to keep populations stable. Four out of nine people already live in countries in which the fertility rate has dipped below the replacement rate. Last year the United Nations said it thought the world's average fertility would fall below replacement by 2025. Demographers expect the global population to peak at around 10 billion (it is now 6.5 billion) by mid-century. As population predictions have changed in the past few years, so have attitudes. The panic about resource constraints that prevailed during the 1970s and 1980s, when the population was rising through the steep part of the S-curve, has given way to a new concern: that the number of people in the world is likely to start falling.

(**)Keep your T-bonds, we'll take the bank The governments of China and Singapore take stakes in Barclays, giving some clues about how sovereign investors plan to operate
Although CDB is a state-owned bank, most governments buy their foreign assets through state-run investment pools, known as sovereign-wealth funds. These funds are getting bigger and bolder. They have some $1.5-2.5 trillion to play with, according to America's Treasury, a sum expected to grow fast. Although sovereign funds began investing conservatively, the Barclays deal shows that they can provide an attractive source of funding for mergers and acquisitions. Some sovereign funds are also getting into the buy-out business. Delta Two, a fund backed by the government of Qatar, is currently bidding for Sainsbury's, a British supermarket. Yet despite making their presence felt in financial markets, little is known about these funds. To understand them, it helps to think about where their money comes from. Many emerging markets, notably China, have built up vast reserves of foreign exchange. Such reserves are traditionally invested in liquid assets like Treasury bonds, which could be sold quickly if the central bank had to prop up the currency. But many countries have far more reserves than they need for this purpose. And China is in any case protected by capital controls. That leaves the government free to buy more exciting things where it might make a better return. Earlier this year China decided to set up a sovereign fund.

U.K. Labour Party Lead Widens to Biggest in 20 Months Britain's ruling Labour Party widened its opinion-poll lead to 9 percentage points over the opposition Conservatives, extending a turnaround that began when Gordon Brown became prime minister a month ago. Labour would have the support of 41 percent of voters if an election were held today, compared with 32 percent for the Conservatives, according to a YouGov Plc poll in today's Daily Telegraph. The margin of error is 2 percentage points. The lead is the biggest in any poll since November 2005, the month before David Cameron became leader of the Conservatives. It is the ninth to put Labour ahead since Brown took over from Tony Blair on June 27, marking a reversal from the previous 15 months during which the Conservatives were more popular.

 

External affairs Old assumptions are being challenged as the outsourcing industry matures
For a start, the industry is growing less rapidly than before. Offshore work is a component of most outsourcing contracts, but jobs no longer flow only from richer countries to poorer ones. Cost savings are still the principal motivation to outsource, but performance is becoming the main battleground between providers. Even the language is changing. Vendors refer to themselves as partners. Labour arbitrage is out; “intellectual arbitrage” is in. Some even recoil from the word “outsourcing” itself. “It gives the impression of just throwing something over the wall,” says Ross Perot Jr, chairman of Perot Systems, a computer-services firm based in Plano, Texas. Start with the numbers. The latest quarterly report on the state of global outsourcing from TPI, a consultancy, was published earlier this month. It showed that both the number and value of contracts awarded during the first half of this year had declined in comparison with the same period in 2006. In 2007 the total value of contracts awarded in the first six months was the lowest since 2001 (see chart).

 

Deals With The Devil: India, and Bangladesh have made an informal deal with Myanmar to drive rebels from each others borders. Over the last few years, the three countries have worked out these deals, to rid themselves of rebel groups that had been driven to the border, and only survived because they could flee across the border and set up camp until the troops hunting them were gone.  For decades, Myanmars neighbors avoided such cooperative relations, as a form of protest against the military dictatorship in Myanmar. But now, the need to deal with various rebel organizations has overcome this distaste. India is also selling weapons to Myanmar, to obtain a little more enthusiastic cooperation in the anti-rebel department.

China Racks Up Points as Bush Team Snubs Asia: -- First came word that George W. Bush was blowing off Southeast Asia. Then Condoleezza Rice did the same. Next comes counting the costs of the U.S. ignoring the world's most vibrant economic region. U.S. President Bush last month postponed talks with Southeast Asian leaders in September in Singapore. A week later, Secretary of State Rice scrapped her trip to Manila, where the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is meeting this week. ASEAN confabs often are inane talkfests that achieve little. If the average American knows about the group, it may be from viewing the YouTube clip of Rice's predecessor, Colin Powell, singing the Village People's ``YMCA'' at a 2004 ASEAN gathering. And Bush and Rice are focused on shoring up support for the war in Iraq. Yet now is hardly the time for the U.S. to be slighting and alienating Asia's fast-growing economies. U.S. complacency toward Asia is enabling China to make greater inroads into a region that once was near the top of America's commercial and foreign-policy agendas. China has been beset by bad public relations of late. Its product-safety scandal is a case in point. So are concerns that worsening pollution will derail the economy. And then, there are the actual growth figures. China advanced 11.9 percent in the second quarter, fanning concerns about overheating. Two decades from now, when the Bush administration's legacy is debated by historians, how the U.S. lost Asia will probably receive prominent attention. The U.S. is by far the world's largest economy and it's likely to hold that title 20 years from now. Yet the Asian vacuum of the Bush years is doing potentially irreparable harm in a region still smarting over the 1997-1998 crisis. Back then, a slow response to meltdowns in Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea convinced many that the U.S. didn't care about Asia. Justified or not, that impression persists today. By sending deputy John Negroponte in her place to Manila, Rice is buttressing the perception the U.S. is turning its back on the world's most promising economies.

On the Roads of War: A Soviet Cavalryman on the Eastern Front: To the Russians, World War II is the Great Patriotic War, and as far as they’re concerned, they were chiefly responsible for winning it. They certainly did most of the dying, at least in Europe. The Red Army lost over ten million dead fighting the Germans. The titanic struggle on the Eastern front has long fascinated military historians, and a great many books have been written about it. But memoirs written by Russian frontline soldiers are hard to some by in English translation. The experience of the Red Army soldiers who turned back the Nazi onslaught and then slogged all the way to Berlin is, perhaps, one of the least documented aspects of the Second World War, at least for American readers. On the Roads of War, by Ivan Yakushin, is a memoir of what it meant to be up at the sharp end in the grimmest, bloodiest, and most terrible campaign of World War II. What makes the book especially interesting is the range and variety of Yakushin’s experience. He survived the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Kursk, and later fought his way into Germany as an officer in a Guards Cavalry unit.

The lesson from Turkey Islamist parties that follow the rules should be allowed to win elections THE decisive victory by Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party in the general election of July 22nd shows every sign so far of having been an excellent result. Big political rows, threats of military intervention, talk of invading northern Iraq, resurgent nationalism and discouraging relations with Europe and America: all that plus a mildly Islamist government in a fiercely secular republic could have been a recipe for trouble, coups, internal strife, you name it. But in fact Turkey has seen a thoroughly democratic election, not too much violence, a big turnout and a clear result (see article). Among other things this seems a strong rebuke by voters to the army, which had hinted at interfering in the AK's choice of a presidential candidate. Though Turks still respect their army, most do not feel it should intervene in politics. They are also rewarding a government that has delivered good results and punishing opposition parties that offered incoherent and unconvincing policies. That is exactly how democracy should work. The army has absolutely no cause to intervene, though if the government is wise it will continue to be cautious about an Islamist agenda. Many Turkish voters may want to end the ban on the veil, but they show little appetite for more radical moves away from secularism.

Iraq & ME

General Petraeus Needs Time 'This [Iraq] war is lost," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has stated emphatically and without qualification. "There's simply no evidence that the escalation is working," he said recently. It requires "blind hope, blind trust" to believe in progress of any sort. Sen. Reid is now in the position of having to deny facts on the ground in order to sustain his bleak judgments. And his job is getting more difficult all the time. Shiite death-squad activity and executions in Baghdad have significantly decreased since January. In Anbar Province and increasingly in Diyala Province, tribal sheikhs have turned against al Qaeda and are now siding with American and Iraqi Security Forces (these are examples of "bottom-up" political reconciliation for which we had been hoping). Attack levels in Anbar have reached a two-year low. Ramadi, once among the most dangerous cities in Iraq, is now dramatically safer. Violence in Fallujah has declined. Al Qaeda's networks and safe havens are being disrupted beyond anything we have seen before. Perhaps this attitude is rooted in war weariness. The Iraq war has been a long and difficult struggle. Mistakes and misjudgments have been made, false summits have dashed early hopes, and more than 3,600 American military lives have been lost, causing unspeakable grief for families and friends of the fallen. Yet tragically, more often than not, this is the nature of war, which involves unexpected costs and awful sacrifices. There comes a point in many wars, maybe in most wars, where the single most important issue is whether a nation can summon the resolve and courage to see a good cause through to the end. We are now at that point in the Iraq war. We have in place the right team, pursuing the right strategy. The thing Gen. Petraeus needs above all else, he says, is time. The American political class can give him that time, if it chooses. We are not passive actors in this clash of force and wills, and defeat is not fated. We can still shape the outcome of the war, and with it, the future of the Middle East.

·         Pentagon May Find Bombs, Heat, Vietnam Lessons Extend Iraq Exit The Pentagon, under pressure to start planning for an Iraq withdrawal whether it begins in two months or two years, may find that getting out will take a lot longer than getting in. U.S. troops will have to contend with terrorist bombs, wilting heat, dangerous roads and logistical logjams that even critics of the war say will make a rapid pullout impossible. ``I thought it would take six months,'' said Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who first advocated withdrawal in 2005. ``I found out since then it will take longer than that, the footprint is so much bigger.'' Calls are building in Congress and among Democratic presidential candidates for a drawdown of U.S. forces and for the Pentagon to begin planning how to do it. Two senior Republican senators, John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana, want to see such a plan by Oct. 16, and Democrats such as Senator Hillary Clinton of New York also have raised the issue. While the administration has opposed the Warner-Lugar legislation, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in a July 25 letter to Clinton, said the Pentagon is doing ``contingency planning'' for how the U.S. would withdraw from Iraq ``at the right time.'' The pressure to change course in Iraq is likely to peak in September, when Congress gets a report from two top U.S. officials in Iraq that all sides in the debate have identified as a pivotal moment.

·         Joint Chiefs Nominee Questioned on Iraq The Navy admiral nominated to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday that American military efforts in Iraq would fail unless Iraqi leaders did more to bridge sectarian divides. But he also warned that a rapid exit of American troops could turn Iraq into a “cauldron” for broader Middle East strife. The failure of the Iraqis to make progress toward political unity imperils Iraq, said the nominee, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, who said that unless things changed, “no amount of troops in no amount of time will make much of a difference.” He said he believed that the American troop increase this year in Iraq had helped tamp down violence, saying security was “not great, but better.” But he also said that the United States risked breaking the Army if the Pentagon decided to maintain escalated troop levels in Iraq beyond next spring.

Catch and Release Doesn't Work: In the past week, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay blew himself up rather than be captured by Pakistani security police. This was the latest released detainee to have returned to combat on the side of al Qaeda, and been caught in the act. In essence, this incident is just the latest example of why these detainees should not have access to normal courts, and it also should refute claims from many human rights groups about the detainees. In the past, over a dozen other released detainees have returned to fight for al Qaeda. One of the most notable was Rasul Kudayev, detained by Russian security forces for his part in planning attacks on police in the Kabardino-Balkariya region in the Northern Caucasus, which killed 45 people (not counting the 94 attackers). The U.S. Department of Defense is aware of at least a dozen other terror suspects who have been re-captured, having re-joined al Qaeda in its fight against coalition forces in the war on terror. This is something often ignored in the media, which has pushed the "prisoner abuse" issue at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq (most notably the Abu Ghraib scandal). Human rights groups will probably not discuss the 45 deaths that a former detainee is responsible for, nor will they even admit that there is another side to the issue of detainees. In fact, they will continue to work to get these terrorists access to courts, which now forces the U.S. to make a decision. Do they withhold evidence, and risk the terrorists going free – possibly to carry out more attacks, or do they put them on trial, and risk aiding al-Qaeda's counterintelligence efforts?

Saudi Arabia Says It May Meet Israel Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said Wednesday that his country would consider attending President Bush’s planned Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the fall, which would put Saudi officials publicly at the same table as their Israeli counterparts for the first time since 1991. But Saudi officials said a precondition of its attendance was that the conference tackle the four big “final status” issues that had bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979: the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced to flee their homes in Israel, mostly before or during the 1948 war; the status of Jerusalem; the borders of a Palestinian state; and the dismantlement of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Reality Bites/Bytes (brief excerpts from StrategyPage.com )

As Screwed Up As Ever August 1, 2007:  A recently leaked video shows that the military operation to rescue school children three years ago in Belsan, was botched by the military. At the time, the government said it was the Islamic terrorists inside the school building that set off explosives, killing many of the 330 children who died. But the video shows army engineers examining the terrorists explosive devices, that had not gone off. Another portion of the video shows commandos setting off explosions outside the school, to make breaches in the walls. Those explosions, and subsequent gunfire, killed most of the kids.

July 26, 2007:  Military intelligence has discovered why eleven prominent hostages were killed by FARC last month. The hostages were ordered killed when the FARC commander mistook approaching gunmen, from another FARC unit, for soldiers known to be operating in the area. Believing his hideout was about to be overrun, he followed his orders not to allow the hostages to be liberated by the army. FARC tried to blame the death of the hostages on crossfire from a clash between FARC and the army. 

Iran Looks For a Fight In Iran, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is rapidly losing popularity and respect. It's feared that his only option is to somehow get the United States to attack Iran. This would instantly boost Ahmadinejad's popularity, and save his political career. For a while, anyway. Why is this happening?  Ahmadinejad has made a fool of himself, with his constant calls for the destruction of Israel and, worse yet, claims that he would turn the economy around and reduce corruption. Ahmadinejad has been inept in running the economy, and has made things worse. He has not been able to make a dent in the corruption, because so many of the dirty officials are senior clerics. These fellows have no intention of getting prosecuted and jailed, and have been able to fend off Ahmadinejad. The grass roots support Ahmadinejad has is largely gone. People openly mock him in the streets. The few pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations are obviously paid for. Ahmadinejad indulges in some corrupt practices himself by busing in some poor rural supporters he still has. The dress and demeanor of these people is obvious in the media coverage given to these demonstrations. Many of the demonstrators, after talking to the locals, go away anti-Ahmadinejad, now that they know how screwed up things are throughout the country, and how their hero has lied to them.

·         July 21, 2007:  A recent opinion survey showed that 58 percent of Iranians would support a foreign invasion to overthrow the current religious dictatorship. However, nearly 70 percent would prefer a popular, but non-violent, revolution, like the one that tossed out European communist dictatorships in 1989-90. Worse, 92 percent do not approve of how their government operates. Only eleven percent oppose democracy, and 72 percent did not support the "Islamic Revolution" that has dominated the country for 28 years. Still, most Iranians are not willing to fight, knowing that the minority of Iranians who do support the government are armed and willing to kill Iranians that oppose them.  The survey also showed that 78 percent of Iranians believe the country should have nuclear power, but only 46 percent believed they should have nuclear weapons. Interestingly, 52 percent believed that Western Europe would accept Iran having nuclear power. People are not happy with the government foreign policy, with 60 percent opposing support of Hizbollah, 56 percent oppose support for Hamas, and 70 percent oppose the destruction of Israel. However, a third of the population agreed with president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contention that the World War II German death camp program, that killed six million Jews, never happened.  

 

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