Muslims hate our foreign policies

While I don't agree with Scheuer on everything -- most important, I don't agree that Muslim extremists pose an existential threat to the United States -- he is correct that Muslim extremists hate America for its actions, not for its "freedom." Until we accept the truth that popular Muslim hatred is blowback from U.S. foreign policies, we will never be able to stem the tide of extremism.

And it only further enrages Muslims when Bush -- whose "freedom agenda" for the world's oppressed peoples figured so highly in his speeches, and was a major reason (proclaimed ex post facto) for his invasion of Iraq -- picks & chooses which democracies he (i.e. America) will recognize as legitimate. If democracy for the world is our goal, then we must accept the results of free & fair elections everywhere, no matter who gets elected.

Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy
By Bernd Debusmann
March 7, 2008 | Reuters

It would be hard to believe if it didn't come from the man who ran the unit charged with capturing Osama bin Laden.

Preparations at one point included lawyers from several branches of the U.S. intelligence community. Their task? "To examine rolls of masking, duct and medical-adhesive tape and determine which had the right amount of stickiness to ensure that bin Laden's face and beard would not be excessively irritated if his mouth had to be taped shut after capture."

This comes in a footnote in an angry book by an angry man, Michael Scheuer, a 20-year veteran of CIA covert-action operations who left the agency in 2004 and became a vocal critic of what he sees as the failure of successive U.S. administrations to take seriously the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The beard-and-tape episode dates back to 1998 when, he says, "CIA engineers were required to produce an ergonomically correct chair for bin Laden to be seated in after he was captured. Likewise, well-padded restraint devices were manufactured to avoid chafing his skin."

So much for the ruthless, brutal, cold-hearted officials of popular lore.

The operation was called off because the Clinton administration feared a huge backlash if bin Laden had been killed by accident in the attempt to snatch him.

Also at play, according to Scheuer, was "the first question always asked by the agency's senior-most managers, 'Will it pass the Washington Post giggle test?' " He added that no "operation could be considered if the Post and other media would ridicule it if it failed and became public knowledge."

The giggle test, Scheuer says, was applied throughout his service with the CIA, which included arming Afghan mujahedeen in their fight against Soviet occupation. He was one of the architects of the CIA's controversial rendition program under which Qaeda suspects are seized and taken to third countries.

Bin Laden is still on the run, more than six years after hijackers under his command rammed airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people.

In his recently published book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq," Scheuer argues that the United States faces more trouble because its leaders refuse to recognize what drives terrorism.

President George W. Bush argues that terrorists "hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote." But polls show that the bedrock of support for militancy among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims is the detestation of U.S. foreign policies.

Scheuer faults U.S. leaders for failing to acknowledge the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: (1) the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula; (2) unqualified support for Israel; (3) U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; (4) U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil; and (5) U.S. support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes.

There is no reason to believe that the United States is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region where politics and religion are intertwined and where many believe that the "war on terror" is really a war on Islam.

Foreign policy has not been much of a subject in the U.S. presidential election campaign. The candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would take the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups have used to attract recruits.

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and the rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have all pledged commitment to Israel and none of them is likely to loosen Washington's embrace of Saudi Arabia or push President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt toward greater democracy.

Polls show that radicals - potential suicide bombers and hostage takers - and moderate Muslims are in favor of moving toward more democracy, a process stifled in many places by authoritarian rulers who enjoy the backing of the United States.

America cemented its reputation as the superpower of hypocrites after one of the very few democratic elections in Middle Eastern history, the 2006 vote in which Palestinians opted for the Islamist party Hamas over Fatah, the corrupt ruling bureaucracy built up by Yasser Arafat. The closely monitored election was deemed free and fair.

The United States responded by boycotting Hamas and backing Fatah.

Al Qaeda can't conquer anything

I've said all of this before, but since nobody listens to little old me....

Iraq Will Not Be Qaedistan
By Olivier Roy
March 7, 2008 | International Herald Tribune

One of the key questions in the U.S. presidential race is what will happen if U.S. troops leave Iraq.

Of course nobody knows for sure. But I can say this: Al Qaeda will not take power and establish an Islamic state.

Too many in the West persist in seeing Al Qaeda as a territorialized Middle East organization bent on expelling the Christians and Jews from the region in order to create a "Dar al-Islam" (land of Islam) under the umbrella of a caliphate.

Al Qaeda is not a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or Hezbollah. It is a non-territorial global entity which has never tried to implement an Islamic state, even in Afghanistan, where it found sanctuary in the 1990s.

It is pointless thinking of Al Qaeda as a political organization seeking to conquer and rule a territory. Al Qaeda recruits among disenfranchised youth, most of them without direct connections with the embattled countries of the Middle East.

Second-generation Western Muslims, converts, Saudis, Egyptians and Moroccans make up the bulk of the Al Qaeda traveling jihadists - not Afghans, Palestinians or Iraqis. Al Qaeda does not have the necessary local rooting for taking power.

Al Qaeda's strategy is first to to confront the big boys - or rather the big boy, the United States - directly, relying not on the actual damage inflicted (financial cost, number of dead) but on image, media impact and the terror effect.

The mirror effect of those who claim a clash of civilizations, of course, intensifies the impact. In fact, Al Qaeda needs those who demonize it, because it makes it what it is not: the vanguard of the "Muslim wrath."

Al Qaeda goes where the Americans are while the U.S. Army goes where Washington thinks Qaeda might be . . . one day.

Secondly, Al Qaeda seeks to hijack existing conflicts and make them part of the global jihad against the West.

However, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and now Iraq, the Islamist internationalist groups have been unsuccessful in diverting local and national conflicts, playing only the role of auxiliaries. The key actors of the local conflicts are the local actors: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the different Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups are not under the leadership of Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda has managed only to implant foreign volunteers into these struggles, volunteers who usually do not understand local politics and find support among the local population only as long as they fight a common enemy, such as American troops in Iraq.

But their respective agenda is totally different: Local actors, Islamist or not, want a political solution on their own terms. They do not want chaos or global jihad. As soon as there is a discrepancy between "the policy of the worst" waged by Al Qaeda and a possible local political settlement, the local actors choose the local settlement.

The Bosnians got rid of the radical foreign fighters once they achieved their independence; the Taliban rank-and-file refused to die for Al Qaeda when the Western forces landed in Afghanistan after 9/11.

In Iraq, many among the Sunnis, including the Salafists, resent not only Al Qaeda's tactics of indiscriminate suicide bombings, but also the strategy of confronting the Shiites.

The fact is Al Qaeda plays a role in the deterioration of the conflicts but is unable to succeed in coordinating them. Local, national, tribal or sectarian religious channels are stronger.

Al Qaeda may recruit some local organizations, acting within a limited area or linguistic region, with their own history. These groups then claim affiliation with Al Qaeda. They are to be found in Indonesia (Jemah Islamiyya); in the northern Sahel (the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which in January 2007 changed its name to the Al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb); Northern Lebanon (third-generation but still uprooted Palestinian refugees); in the Sunni triangle of Iraq (with the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group); and in Saudi Arabia and Yemen ("Al-Qaeda Organization in the Arabic Peninsula").

But these organizations do not need Al Qaeda in order to recruit or operate. If they have rallied to it, it is because they have difficulty in defining or achieving a local objective (an Islamic state, for example). They become globalized therefore by default.

In short, there may be good reasons for the United States to remain in Iraq, but they have nothing to do with Al Qaeda; they have more to do with a damage-control operation. If the U.S. troops leave, there might be a civil war, there might be a growing Iranian influence, Iraq might be turned into a battlefield by proxies between Saudi Arabia and Iran. There could be a Sunni-controlled area, a Shiite state and an independent Kurdistan, but no Qaedistan.

It would have been better to concentrate the Western forces on Afghanistan, which has been the real cradle of Al Qaeda. If only part of the brains and armor devoted to the "surge" in Iraq had been devoted to Afghanistan, instead of the incessant turnover of disparaged NATO troops with little knowledge of the country, things would have been better.

But in Afghanistan, as anywhere else in the greater Middle East, there is no military solution, only a political solution by dealing with the local actors, and dropping the senseless idea of a "global war on terror."

Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, is author of "Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah" and "Islamist Networks: The Pakistan-Afghan Connection." A Global Viewpoint article.

Opportunity cost of Iraq's $2-3 trillion price tag

If death, destruction, and misery don't bother you, then maybe this ($$$) will....


The $2 trillion nightmare
By Bob Herbert
March 4, 2008 | International Herald Tribune

We Americans have been hearing a lot about "Saturday Night Live" and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.

There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war - not just the cost to taxpayers - will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. "For a fraction of the cost of this war," said Stiglitz, "we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more."

Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put "on a more sustainable basis." And he cited the committee's own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we're getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war.

These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.

Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first Gulf War, which lasted just one month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

"Imagine then," said Stiglitz, "what a war that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at VA hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems."

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through "emergency" appropriations that get far less scrutiny.

Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by.

Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Bilmes called "The Three Trillion Dollar War," said they had to go to veterans' groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.

Stiglitz and Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

"Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war," Hormats told the committee. "Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good. . . And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War."

Said Stiglitz: "Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits.

"The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself. . . By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion."

Some former presidents - Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century.

That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of the campaign.

It's a new era.

Obama's race doesn't matter?

I'm not quite as hopeful as the Thernstroms when it comes to white voters' new willingness to vote for black candidates. But I do believe Obama's campaign represents a big step toward equal consideration of black candidates.

My personal view is that Obama is an exceptional black public figure. He is the male Oprah: Just as suburban white women feel better about themselves for loving Oprah, so do white voters feel proud of themselves for supporting Obama. But people don't love Oprah or Obama first for their race; they love them for their personal traits and what they represent. Their race is secondary, but still very important: guilt-ridden whites are eager for opportunities to embrace "worthy" blacks.

As I've argued for more than a year now, if Obama wins, we are much closer to a day when a candidate's race doesn't matter as much as his message. We ought to elect a black president simply to dispel the myth of its impossibility. This myth looms large in the psyche of whites and blacks alike.

Ironically, a win for Obama would help Republicans in the long run, by eroding political and judicial support for "majority-minority" districts, and public support for Affirmative Action-type remedies to racial discrimination. Look, they'd say, Obama is living proof that Affirmative Action and gerrymandering of districts along racial lines is no longer necessary. (This is my bet for the topic of Rush Limbaugh's opening monologue the day after Obama is elected).


Is race out of the race?
White voters' support for Obama suggests a dramatic change in the electorate.

By Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom
March 2, 2008 | Los Angeles Times

One of the most notable -- yet unremarked-on -- lessons of this year's Democratic presidential nominating contest is the demolition of the long-held belief that whites simply won't vote for black candidates for higher office. Before the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, who could have predicted the remarkable outpouring of white support for Sen. Barack Obama?

As recently as 2006, when Congress held hearings on the renewal of the expiring parts of the Voting Rights Act, civil rights advocates delivered a united message, echoed by the House Judiciary Committee. "It is rare that white voters will cross over to elect minority preferred candidates," the committee's report concluded -- a statement from which there was no congressional dissent.

The 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, it seemed, were living proof of this. Overwhelmingly, they had been elected in "majority-minority" districts drawn specifically for African American candidates; only a handful had been elected in districts in which most voters were not black or some combination of black and Latino.

So it's not surprising that, as the 2008 presidential race got underway, many observers -- white and African American alike -- thought Obama's chances of winning the Democratic nomination were very poor. Robert Ford, a black state senator in South Carolina, for instance, told a Time magazine reporter in January 2007 that "Obama would need 43% of the white vote in some states to win, and that's humanly impossible." Southern blacks "don't believe this country is ready to vote for a black president," he added. Jesse Jackson argued that "a white female has an advantage over a black male." And after the first three contests, political scientist Philip Klinkner was ready to say that there was a "ceiling" on white support for Obama of about 35%.

Polling data suggested otherwise. In 2003, for instance, only 7% of Americans said they were unwilling to vote for a "qualified African American candidate," according to a Gallup Organization survey. But many analysts refused to believe such polls, preferring to note racism's long history in American politics or to suggest that white voters were not telling the truth to pollsters.

After nearly two dozen primaries, we now know beyond dispute that the pessimists were wrong. Obama won the majority of white votes in Virginia, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah, and he received extremely high vote totals among whites in the other states he's run in as well.

Forget, for a moment, about white women, many of whom have been drawn to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton through a strong sense of sisterhood. Look instead at white men. In a remarkable number of states, according to exit polls, Obama won more than 40% of the white male vote. Those states included Clinton's home state of New York (where Obama got 43%), Arizona (45%) and, most remarkably, the Deep South state of Georgia (46%). Indeed, in Connecticut, New Mexico, Illinois, California, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin, his support from white men was in the quite amazing range of 56% to 64%.

What's more, Obama would probably have won similar levels of support from white female voters -- if he hadn't ended up in a race against a woman. After all, there's no evidence to suggest that white women are less likely to vote for an African American candidate than white men are. If Clinton weren't running (and pulling away votes based on her gender), there's no reason why Obama's numbers among white women wouldn't be as high as his numbers among white men.

The numbers above, of course, do not reflect the entire American electorate. These primaries have been held mostly among Democratic voters, and we don't yet know how Republicans will respond when faced with an African American candidate. Still, the numbers suggest that something has changed dramatically, and that it may be time to rethink some of our most basic assumptions about voters and race.

The Voting Rights Act, 43 years after its original passage, still calls for the creation of majority-minority districts in order to encourage the election of nonwhite candidates. In 1995, awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of racially gerrymandered districts to ensure minority office-holding, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's Ted Shaw warned: "If we lose these cases, the Congressional Black Caucus will be meeting in the back seat of a taxicab." Rep. Mel Watt, a black Democrat from North Carolina, took the point a step further. "Without these districts," he said, "you're not going to have minority representation in Congress. It's just that simple."

But even then, it wasn't "just that simple." And indeed, when the court struck down the Georgia race-based district in question as unconstitutional -- a geographical "monstrosity," said the court -- African Americans still did very well in the newly configured districts. The Congressional Black Caucus does not meet in a taxicab; it is stronger than ever.

Today, it is even clearer that race has become less of a factor in voting. The high level of white votes for Obama strongly suggests that other black candidates facing overwhelmingly white constituencies can do well.

[Umm... I'm not sure I'm ready to go that far just yet. Obama is the male Oprah. Not just any black candidate can follow in his footsteps! -- J]

In 2002, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) spoke eloquently of racial change in his state. "There has been a transformation. It's a different state, it's a different political climate, it's a different political environment," he said. "It's a different world we live in. ... We have changed. We've come a great distance. ... It's not just in Georgia but in the American South. I think people are preparing to lay down the burden of race."

The enormous and heartening appeal of Obama among white voters certainly suggests that is the case. Whites refusing to vote for black candidates has finally gone the way of segregated water fountains. Or so we hope.

Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Stephan Thernstrom is a professor of history at Harvard University. They are the coauthors of "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible," published in 1997.

USA! USA! We're #1!

In your face, China!


Record-High Ratio of Americans in Prison
By N.C. Aizenman
February 28, 2008 | The Washington Post

More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released today.

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.

The ballooning prison population is largely the result of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been hit particularly hard: One in nine black men age 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women age 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 white women in the same age group.

While studies generally find that imprisoning more offenders reduces crime, the effect is influenced by changes in the unemployment rate, wages, the ratio of police officers to residents, and the share of young people in the population.

In addition, when it comes to preventing repeat offenses by nonviolent criminals -- who make up about half of the incarcerated population -- alternative punishments such as community supervision and mandatory drug counseling that are far less expensive may prove just as or more effective than jail time.

Florida, which nearly doubled its prison population over the past 15 years, has experienced a smaller drop in crime than New York, which, after a brief increase, reduced its number of inmates to below the 1993 level.

"There is no question that putting violent and chronic offenders behind bars lowers the crime rate and provides punishment that is well deserved," said Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project and one of the study's authors. "On the other hand, there are large numbers of people behind bars who could be supervised in the community safely and effectively at a much lower cost -- while also paying taxes, paying restitution to their victims, and paying child support."

About 91 percent of incarcerated adults are under state or local jurisdiction, and the report documents the tradeoffs state governments have faced as they have devoted ever larger shares of their budgets to house them. For instance, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased by 127 percent, while spending on higher education rose by 21 percent. For every dollar Virginia spends on higher education, it now spends about 60 cents on corrections. Maryland spends 74 cents on corrections per higher-education dollar.

Despite reaching its latest milestone, the nation's incarcerated population has actually been growing far more slowly since 2000 than during the 1990s, when the spate of harsher sentencing laws began to take effect. These included a 1986 federal law mandating prison terms for crack cocaine offenses that were up to eight times as long as for those involving powder cocaine. In the early 1990s, states across the nation adopted "three-strikes-you're-out" laws and curtailed the discretion parole boards have in deciding when to release an inmate. As a result, between 1990 and 2000, the prison population swelled by about 80 percent, increasing by as much as 86,000 per year.

By contrast, from 2007 to 2008, the prison population increased by 25,000 -- a 2 percent rise. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has issued decisions giving judges more leeway under mandatory sentencing laws, and a number of states, including Texas, are seeking to reduce their incarcerated population by adopting alternative punishments.

"Some of these [measures] would have been unthinkable five years ago," noted Gelb. "But the bottom line is that states have to balance their budgets.