Illustration by Peter Schrank
IT IS obvious to anyone that the patient is ill. But the physicians agree on little else: not the underlying cause, certainly not the appropriate course of treatment and least of all which among them is best qualified to administer it. As they argue, the patient just gets sicker.
Health care, along with the economy in general, immigration and the whole alarming nexus of war, terror and security is, according to pretty much every poll, one of the issues that American voters consider most important. And next year, in both the primaries and the general election, it will have particular resonance. Iraq may even fade as an election subject, if the number of Americans killed in action continues to decline as a result of the “surge” of troops into the area around Baghdad. Meanwhile, uncertainties about the economy tend to feed through into a preoccupation with health care. A majority of Americans (around 54% last year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a Washington, DC, think-tank) get their tax-exempt health insurance through their employers, so losing a job often means losing cover. Even for those who remain in work, tightening market conditions are forcing employers to downgrade the insurance they offer.
But when it comes to health care—as opposed to the economy, or security—voters are at least being offered clear choices. All the Democratic candidates, for instance, and none of the Republicans, are proposing some version of universal health coverage in an attempt to end the anomaly whereby some 47m people, a sixth of the population of the world's most powerful nation, have no health insurance. A YouGov/Polimetrix poll for The Economist this week shows that half of all voters would like to see everyone get coverage, even if that means a tax increase, with only 36% opposed (see chart). On the campaign trail in New Hampshire recently John Edwards, a Democrat, won waves of applause every time he threatened to take away the health insurance of members of Congress if they did not provide something similar for all Americans.
There is, however, no consensus among Democrats on how to achieve universal cover. In fact, health has become a lively battleground in the increasingly edgy war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—so much so that Robert Reich, who was labour secretary in Bill Clinton's administration, publicly rebuked her this week, adding that he thinks Mr Obama's model for reform is better than hers. Mrs Clinton (along with Mr Edwards, the third-ranked Democrat, but unlike Mr Obama) has proposed a detailed plan that relies on a “mandate”—a legal requirement that everyone have an approved form of insurance, just as they are required to have if they drive a car.
The idea is to make sure that younger people, who may feel they are unlikely to get ill and can do without cover, are required to join the insurance pool, making it healthier and supposedly bringing down premiums. They will also be more likely to get preventive treatment at an early stage if they do get ill, rather than becoming expensive emergency cases later on.
Mr Obama's supporters contend that there are problems with this model. First, people often simply ignore the mandate—usually because they cannot afford health insurance. Subsidies are to be made available under the Clinton and Edwards plans: but they will not cover everyone. And independent voices like Robert Reischauer's at the Urban Institute, another Washington think-tank, complain that many of the complexities in both these plans have yet to be worked out. Who will resolve disputes, of which there are certain to be many, between patients and government-approved insurance providers? What if people default on their payments? And will costs really come down? The experience in the only state to run a universal mandate so far, Massachusetts, has not been wholly positive (see article).
And, of course, mandates are perceived as bossy, which is why Republicans, in particular, hate them. Mr Obama's refusal to prescribe one may serve him well with centrist voters with bad memories of Mrs Clinton's first attempt at health-care reform in 1993-94, a political disaster on an epic scale. Mr Obama's plan focuses on providing a larger pot of cash to help the uninsured take out insurance, rather than trying to force them to do it.
To Republicans, the Democrats' insistence on concentrating on universal care is perplexing. Of the 47m uninsured, perhaps 10m are illegal immigrants. Of the others, many will be younger people who simply choose not to have insurance. Others are only uninsured temporarily. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who set up its universal health scheme, does not want to extend it to the whole country now that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination rather than election in a liberal state. Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor, favours mandates; but he is not running for the top job.
Republicans prefer to concentrate on the cost side of health insurance, which makes sense. Health-care costs have risen, on average, 2.5 percentage points faster than GDP annually for four decades. That means, among other things, that the costs of the government-funded medical programmes—Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor—will bust the budget unless they are radically reformed. The Republicans further charge that Democratic plans to stop insurers excluding people with pre-existing medical conditions will hugely increase the cost of premiums.
Republicans focus much more closely than the Democrats do on using market mechanisms to bring down costs. John McCain, for instance, suggests allowing more competition across state borders. Along with Rudy Giuliani and Mr Romney, he also favours a much wider use of tax deductions. This would allow more people than just those lucky enough to have jobs that offer health insurance to benefit from what is, in effect, a large government subsidy. Mr Giuliani, for instance, would allow those without employer-provided insurance a tax deduction of $15,000 to help buy it.
Voters think cost is a bigger problem than coverage. But none of the Republicans is stressing health to the same extent as the Democrats are. Maybe that is why our poll shows almost twice as many people prefer the Democrats on the issue.
Friday, December 7, 2007
The wind goes out of the revolution
ON REFERENDUM night, December 2nd, a giant, inflatable Chávez doll lay face-down and semi-deflated on a Caracas street. Nothing better summed up the moment. As workers dismantled the stage that was to serve as the scene of his triumph, letting the air out of the doll, Hugo Chávez was grappling with how to respond to his first-ever defeat at the polls.
Were Venezuela the dictatorship that some of his more radical opponents claim, its people might have spent the night toppling bronze statues of the Leader as he fled the country. Were it a parliamentary democracy, the government would surely have resigned. As it is, Mr Chávez still has the chance to pump some air back into his project and serve out the remainder of his presidency—which now must end in early 2013. But there is no doubt that his plan to install what he calls “21st century socialism” in what was once, in the 1970s, the richest country in Latin America has been badly punctured. And that setback may also take much of the momentum out of his industrious efforts to form a regional block of allies and client states.
Voters had been asked for a yes or no on changes to 69 of the 350 articles in the 1999 constitution. Their effect would have been to concentrate almost all power in an already top-heavy executive. The pluralism enshrined in the current constitution would have been replaced with obligatory “socialism”. And two decades of decentralisation would have been reversed: elected state governors and mayors would have been eclipsed by an unelected “popular power” dependent on the presidency.
On any reasonable interpretation of the 1999 constitution (itself drafted and promoted by the chavistas), such fundamental changes should have been submitted to a separately elected assembly. Instead, Mr Chávez had them drafted in secret and rubber-stamped by a parliament which, thanks to the opposition's boycott of the election in 2005, is overwhelmingly composed of his unconditional supporters.
But by a tiny majority, of around 1.4% according to the official figures, Venezuelans said no. Many supporters of the president stayed at home. Only a year ago he had won a new six-year term with 7.3m votes or 63% of the total; by contrast, only 4.4m voted yes in the referendum.
It is a result that redraws Venezuela's political map. Hitherto, the president has been blessed with an incompetent opposition, tainted by the failures of the 1980s and 1990s, when low oil prices pushed many Venezuelans into poverty. Having sought to overthrow Mr Chávez, first in an abortive coup and then through a general strike-cum-lock-out, many of the opposition's leaders were too easily dismissed as spoiled “oligarchs”.
But since his re-election last year, Mr Chávez has overreached himself and provoked some more dangerous opponents. His first mistake came last January, when he summoned the four parties in his coalition and ordered them to merge into a single Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV), loosely modelled on Cuba's Communist Party. Podemos, a social-democratic party, and two other smaller groups refused. Then, in May, Mr Chávez decided not to renew the broadcasting licence of the main opposition television channel, ostensibly because it had supported the 2002 coup attempt. This was unpopular with ordinary Venezuelans and was opposed by a new and energetic student movement, which went on to take the lead in the No campaign.
The president's drive to turn the armed forces into a tool of his socialist project aroused the weighty opposition of General Raúl Isaías Baduel, who stepped down as defence minister in July and who is a hero to the chavista grassroots for his role in restoring Mr Chávez after the 2002 coup. Installed in a sleek glass office block in Caracas, General Baduel, a man as serene as the president is intemperate, has spent the past few weeks telling Venezuelans that the proposed reform amounted to another coup.
On top of that, many chavista politicians were unenthusiastic, since the reform would have let Mr Chávez run indefinitely for president but banned re-election for other posts. The chavista movement suffered “a top-to-bottom split, from state governors down to the grassroots”, said Ismael García, the leader of Podemos.
The emergence of what Mr García calls a “third pole” between the government and the traditional opposition allowed many of the president's supporters to vote no, or at least to abstain, without feeling that they were betraying their leader. The students did much of the hard work of bringing out voters and watching over ballot boxes. And when it seemed that Mr Chávez might be tempted to claim victory, General Baduel played a key role, with an—at least implicit—threat to reject such a result and split the armed forces.
The economy boils over
It is not hard to see what lies behind the decision of many chavistas not to vote. Their continuing loyalty to their comandante is being eroded by mounting economic distortions and the corruption and incompetence of his government.
It was Mr Chávez's good fortune to preside over a massive increase in the oil price (to which he made a modest contribution by cancelling plans under which private investment would have doubled Venezuela's oil output). The result has been a wild economic boom (see chart 1). This has prompted a sharp drop in the number of Venezuelans living in poverty, from 43% in 1999 to 27.5% earlier this year, according to government figures. Hundreds of thousands of new cars have turned Caracas into an all-day traffic jam.
The boom has been fuelled mainly by public spending, which has risen from around 20% of GDP in the late 1990s to some 38% last year (including several off-budget funds controlled by the president). It has been amplified by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. To check inflation, the official exchange rate has been pegged at 2,150 bolívares to the dollar. That has been possible hitherto because revenues from oil exports have risen dramatically, from $17 billion in 1999 to $58 billion last year.
The result is known to economists as Dutch disease: an overvalued exchange rate favours imports but makes life hard for manufacturers and farmers. In Venezuela's case this has been exacerbated by Mr Chávez's ideological hostility to the private sector, which has involved selective nationalisation and intermittent threats to private property. While many private companies (and banks) have done well out of the boom, they have been loth to make long-term investments. Imports have risen fourfold over the past four years, while GDP has expanded by only half over the same period.
José Manuel Puente, an economist at IESA, a business school in Caracas, sees four warning lights for the economy: oil output, inflation, fiscal problems and a growing shortage of dollars. Since Mr Chávez took direct control of PDVSA, the state oil company, after the crippling strike of 2002-03, production of crude has declined. That is partly because PDVSA has slashed investment in order to pay for social programmes, and partly because its payroll has doubled to 90,000 in the past four years. The government's policy of maximising its share of oil revenues by obliging foreign companies to become minority partners in joint ventures appears to have intensified the trend. Oil output has fallen for six consecutive quarters, according to the Central Bank. Although officials still insist that oil production is 3.3m barrels per day (b/d), even OPEC, of which Venezuela is a founder member, does not believe this: in October it slashed Venezuela's production quota to 2.5m b/d.
The second warning light is inflation (see chart 2). In November prices rose by 4.4%, the highest monthly figure for four years, taking the annual rate to 21%, the highest in Latin America. Food prices have risen even faster, by 29%—despite price controls. Because of those controls, staples such as milk, eggs, black beans and cooking oil are in such short supply that shoppers sometimes fight for them.
To try to slow inflation the government slashed VAT earlier this year, from 14% to 9%. To plug the resulting fiscal gap, in November it imposed a tax on financial transactions—one reason for that month's spike in inflation. Another clear sign of strain is a surge in the parallel-market price of the dollar. Even if oil prices remain at current levels, many economists believe the government will have to devalue and start to cool the economy early next year.
The frustrations of collectivism
That will strain political loyalty further. After nine years of the Bolivarian revolution (named after Símon Bolívar, the South American independence hero) Venezuelans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with its corrupt inefficiency. Look behind the ubiquitous billboards proclaiming the government's social projects, and everywhere the failures and frustrations are palpable.
Take, for example, a model collective farm near the village of Buenos Aires in the coastal plain of Barlovento, an area with a large black population east of Caracas. Set up in 2002, it looks like a neat suburban estate, its one-storey houses for 144 families grouped in 12 circular cul-de-sacs. Three tractors, from China and Iran, are parked nearby. But farming the project's 108 hectares (267 acres) “did not go as we wanted”, says Jacobo Pacheco, one of the community's leaders, with quiet understatement.
Mr Pacheco, who is 62 and whose red beret has an image of Che Guevara, says he continues to support Mr Chávez. But he paints a devastating picture of government mismanagement. Agronomists from the National Lands Institute (INTI), which is responsible for the project, advised the collective's farmers to plant half a dozen different fruits; all but the lemons failed, either because the land was unsuitable or because of defects in the irrigation system. The water supply to the houses has been cut off because a pump doesn't work. None of six promised workshops, providing training and employment in carpentry, metalworking and the like, has been built. The local branch of Mercal, the government's subsidised supermarket chain, has been closed for the past year.
The farm's members have to take outside work to make ends meet. Mr Pacheco says that collective farming doesn't suit Venezuelans. He wants INTI to divide the land into individual plots. He has other grievances, too. When invited to an exhibition about the project at the presidential palace he saw pictures and plans of the houses, showing that they should have been equipped to a higher standard. He has seen receipts for the household equipment and says that between them the officials and supplier involved pocketed 1 billion bolívares ($465,000).
This story rings true. Many government projects are either misconceived, or unfinished, or both—like the gleaming new fish-processing plant along the coast at Boca de Uchire that has stood empty for a year because a planned wharf remains on the drawing board, while just three carpenters work on the beach building the fishing fleet designed to supply it. Two out of three of the Mercal branches in Caracas have closed, reckons Jésus Torrealba, a former opposition activist who now runs a radio programme on the problems of the poor barrios.
Officials point with pride to the Cuban-designed social programmes known as misiones implemented by Mr Chávez when oil revenues picked up in 2003. Certainly, a primary-health programme called Barrio Adentro, which is mainly staffed by Cuban doctors and dentists, seems to work well, and is valued by residents in poorer neighbourhoods. Yet such evaluations as exist of these programmes suggest they have had little overall impact.
AP
Oil at record prices, but food in short supplyMr Chávez declared in 2005 that thanks to Misión Robinson, a scheme to teach adults to read and write, Venezuela had eradicated illiteracy, a boast quickly parroted by UNESCO officials. But the government was later forced to withdraw the claim after its own surveys suggested that over 1m adults are still illiterate. Perhaps the most successful educational policy has been one to extend the school day and provide meals. This was devised by a previous government, though to his credit Mr Chávez implemented it.
Despite the apparent success of Barrio Adentro, a recent decline in infant mortality merely mimics the historical trend in Venezuela, according to a study by Francisco Rodríguez, chief economist at the National Assembly from 2000-04 and now at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The incidence of stunting and malnutrition in children has even slightly increased, from 8.4 per thousand in 1999 to 9.1 in 2006 according to government data. That points to the deterioration of public hospitals under Mr Chávez.
Strip away the propaganda, and the government's socio-economic policies do not particularly favour the poor. Much of the extra public spending has gone on arms purchases, bureaucracy (public employment has doubled) and infrastructure (some of it useful, to be sure).
The government also spends money on indiscriminate subsidies. These mean, for example, that a tank of petrol costs less than $2, and that all credit-card holders get a quota of cheap dollars. Such policies favour the better off—including the new chavista elite of military officers, political leaders and favoured businessmen. According to the Central Bank, the distribution of income has become less equal under Mr Chávez. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, has risen from 44.1 in 2000 to 48 in 2005. Over the same period, income distribution has become more equal in Brazil, Mexico and Chile.
A different landscape
Margarita López Maya, a social scientist at the Central University of Venezuela, points to the Bolivarian revolution's success in bringing the poor into politics and giving them a sense of citizenship, partly through a network of neighbourhood councils. Had the constitutional reform been approved, this would have been jeopardised, she says, since the councils would have depended directly on the president and his largesse.
That sense of inclusion remains Mr Chávez's prime political asset. He still controls almost all the country's institutions, has billions of dollars to spend at will, and for the next nine months—thanks to an enabling law—can rule by decree over wide swathes of national life. He is a man whose political skills have frequently been underestimated, and who could yet bounce back from defeat.
After his reverse, Mr Chávez insisted that his project had not been derailed, merely shunted into a siding “for now”. That was a deliberate echo of the phrase he used after leading a failed military coup in 1992; seven years later, he was president. Maybe the country was not yet “ripe” for socialism, but “there will be no step back”, he said. “You should know that I am not withdrawing a single comma of this proposal.” He promised to reintroduce some bits of the reform by other means.
Nevertheless, the referendum marks a watershed. Mr Chávez “has been winged—he's passed his peak,” says Teodoro Petkoff, a centrist opposition leader and newspaper editor. For the first time in nearly a decade it is possible for Venezuelans to envisage life after Mr Chávez.
The opposition victory, and the admission of defeat by the president, ought to convince radicals on both sides that the only solution to the country's bitter political polarisation is peaceful and electoral. The emergence of the “third pole”, composed of Podemos, General Baduel and the student movement, should in itself herald a less polarised politics. Some talk of calling a constituent assembly to claw power back from the president. Others are looking ahead to elections for mayors and governors next year.
The referendum defeat means Mr Chávez cannot legally run again for the presidency. His aura of invincibility has gone, and the battle for the succession seems bound to begin soon. In the ruling party, political survival no longer demands unquestioning loyalty to the comandante. Fractures have already begun to appear in the supreme court and the parliament.
“This is not a 100-metre sprint, it's a marathon,” cautions Mr Petkoff. But its direction is clear. “Venezuelans have woken up” is a phrase often used by supporters of Mr Chávez to describe the political mobilisation of the poor. The referendum suggests that many of them are waking up to the shortcomings of his revolution.
Were Venezuela the dictatorship that some of his more radical opponents claim, its people might have spent the night toppling bronze statues of the Leader as he fled the country. Were it a parliamentary democracy, the government would surely have resigned. As it is, Mr Chávez still has the chance to pump some air back into his project and serve out the remainder of his presidency—which now must end in early 2013. But there is no doubt that his plan to install what he calls “21st century socialism” in what was once, in the 1970s, the richest country in Latin America has been badly punctured. And that setback may also take much of the momentum out of his industrious efforts to form a regional block of allies and client states.
Voters had been asked for a yes or no on changes to 69 of the 350 articles in the 1999 constitution. Their effect would have been to concentrate almost all power in an already top-heavy executive. The pluralism enshrined in the current constitution would have been replaced with obligatory “socialism”. And two decades of decentralisation would have been reversed: elected state governors and mayors would have been eclipsed by an unelected “popular power” dependent on the presidency.
On any reasonable interpretation of the 1999 constitution (itself drafted and promoted by the chavistas), such fundamental changes should have been submitted to a separately elected assembly. Instead, Mr Chávez had them drafted in secret and rubber-stamped by a parliament which, thanks to the opposition's boycott of the election in 2005, is overwhelmingly composed of his unconditional supporters.
But by a tiny majority, of around 1.4% according to the official figures, Venezuelans said no. Many supporters of the president stayed at home. Only a year ago he had won a new six-year term with 7.3m votes or 63% of the total; by contrast, only 4.4m voted yes in the referendum.
It is a result that redraws Venezuela's political map. Hitherto, the president has been blessed with an incompetent opposition, tainted by the failures of the 1980s and 1990s, when low oil prices pushed many Venezuelans into poverty. Having sought to overthrow Mr Chávez, first in an abortive coup and then through a general strike-cum-lock-out, many of the opposition's leaders were too easily dismissed as spoiled “oligarchs”.
But since his re-election last year, Mr Chávez has overreached himself and provoked some more dangerous opponents. His first mistake came last January, when he summoned the four parties in his coalition and ordered them to merge into a single Venezuelan United Socialist Party (PSUV), loosely modelled on Cuba's Communist Party. Podemos, a social-democratic party, and two other smaller groups refused. Then, in May, Mr Chávez decided not to renew the broadcasting licence of the main opposition television channel, ostensibly because it had supported the 2002 coup attempt. This was unpopular with ordinary Venezuelans and was opposed by a new and energetic student movement, which went on to take the lead in the No campaign.
The president's drive to turn the armed forces into a tool of his socialist project aroused the weighty opposition of General Raúl Isaías Baduel, who stepped down as defence minister in July and who is a hero to the chavista grassroots for his role in restoring Mr Chávez after the 2002 coup. Installed in a sleek glass office block in Caracas, General Baduel, a man as serene as the president is intemperate, has spent the past few weeks telling Venezuelans that the proposed reform amounted to another coup.
On top of that, many chavista politicians were unenthusiastic, since the reform would have let Mr Chávez run indefinitely for president but banned re-election for other posts. The chavista movement suffered “a top-to-bottom split, from state governors down to the grassroots”, said Ismael García, the leader of Podemos.
The emergence of what Mr García calls a “third pole” between the government and the traditional opposition allowed many of the president's supporters to vote no, or at least to abstain, without feeling that they were betraying their leader. The students did much of the hard work of bringing out voters and watching over ballot boxes. And when it seemed that Mr Chávez might be tempted to claim victory, General Baduel played a key role, with an—at least implicit—threat to reject such a result and split the armed forces.
The economy boils over
It is not hard to see what lies behind the decision of many chavistas not to vote. Their continuing loyalty to their comandante is being eroded by mounting economic distortions and the corruption and incompetence of his government.
It was Mr Chávez's good fortune to preside over a massive increase in the oil price (to which he made a modest contribution by cancelling plans under which private investment would have doubled Venezuela's oil output). The result has been a wild economic boom (see chart 1). This has prompted a sharp drop in the number of Venezuelans living in poverty, from 43% in 1999 to 27.5% earlier this year, according to government figures. Hundreds of thousands of new cars have turned Caracas into an all-day traffic jam.
The boom has been fuelled mainly by public spending, which has risen from around 20% of GDP in the late 1990s to some 38% last year (including several off-budget funds controlled by the president). It has been amplified by expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. To check inflation, the official exchange rate has been pegged at 2,150 bolívares to the dollar. That has been possible hitherto because revenues from oil exports have risen dramatically, from $17 billion in 1999 to $58 billion last year.
The result is known to economists as Dutch disease: an overvalued exchange rate favours imports but makes life hard for manufacturers and farmers. In Venezuela's case this has been exacerbated by Mr Chávez's ideological hostility to the private sector, which has involved selective nationalisation and intermittent threats to private property. While many private companies (and banks) have done well out of the boom, they have been loth to make long-term investments. Imports have risen fourfold over the past four years, while GDP has expanded by only half over the same period.
José Manuel Puente, an economist at IESA, a business school in Caracas, sees four warning lights for the economy: oil output, inflation, fiscal problems and a growing shortage of dollars. Since Mr Chávez took direct control of PDVSA, the state oil company, after the crippling strike of 2002-03, production of crude has declined. That is partly because PDVSA has slashed investment in order to pay for social programmes, and partly because its payroll has doubled to 90,000 in the past four years. The government's policy of maximising its share of oil revenues by obliging foreign companies to become minority partners in joint ventures appears to have intensified the trend. Oil output has fallen for six consecutive quarters, according to the Central Bank. Although officials still insist that oil production is 3.3m barrels per day (b/d), even OPEC, of which Venezuela is a founder member, does not believe this: in October it slashed Venezuela's production quota to 2.5m b/d.
The second warning light is inflation (see chart 2). In November prices rose by 4.4%, the highest monthly figure for four years, taking the annual rate to 21%, the highest in Latin America. Food prices have risen even faster, by 29%—despite price controls. Because of those controls, staples such as milk, eggs, black beans and cooking oil are in such short supply that shoppers sometimes fight for them.
To try to slow inflation the government slashed VAT earlier this year, from 14% to 9%. To plug the resulting fiscal gap, in November it imposed a tax on financial transactions—one reason for that month's spike in inflation. Another clear sign of strain is a surge in the parallel-market price of the dollar. Even if oil prices remain at current levels, many economists believe the government will have to devalue and start to cool the economy early next year.
The frustrations of collectivism
That will strain political loyalty further. After nine years of the Bolivarian revolution (named after Símon Bolívar, the South American independence hero) Venezuelans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with its corrupt inefficiency. Look behind the ubiquitous billboards proclaiming the government's social projects, and everywhere the failures and frustrations are palpable.
Take, for example, a model collective farm near the village of Buenos Aires in the coastal plain of Barlovento, an area with a large black population east of Caracas. Set up in 2002, it looks like a neat suburban estate, its one-storey houses for 144 families grouped in 12 circular cul-de-sacs. Three tractors, from China and Iran, are parked nearby. But farming the project's 108 hectares (267 acres) “did not go as we wanted”, says Jacobo Pacheco, one of the community's leaders, with quiet understatement.
Mr Pacheco, who is 62 and whose red beret has an image of Che Guevara, says he continues to support Mr Chávez. But he paints a devastating picture of government mismanagement. Agronomists from the National Lands Institute (INTI), which is responsible for the project, advised the collective's farmers to plant half a dozen different fruits; all but the lemons failed, either because the land was unsuitable or because of defects in the irrigation system. The water supply to the houses has been cut off because a pump doesn't work. None of six promised workshops, providing training and employment in carpentry, metalworking and the like, has been built. The local branch of Mercal, the government's subsidised supermarket chain, has been closed for the past year.
The farm's members have to take outside work to make ends meet. Mr Pacheco says that collective farming doesn't suit Venezuelans. He wants INTI to divide the land into individual plots. He has other grievances, too. When invited to an exhibition about the project at the presidential palace he saw pictures and plans of the houses, showing that they should have been equipped to a higher standard. He has seen receipts for the household equipment and says that between them the officials and supplier involved pocketed 1 billion bolívares ($465,000).
This story rings true. Many government projects are either misconceived, or unfinished, or both—like the gleaming new fish-processing plant along the coast at Boca de Uchire that has stood empty for a year because a planned wharf remains on the drawing board, while just three carpenters work on the beach building the fishing fleet designed to supply it. Two out of three of the Mercal branches in Caracas have closed, reckons Jésus Torrealba, a former opposition activist who now runs a radio programme on the problems of the poor barrios.
Officials point with pride to the Cuban-designed social programmes known as misiones implemented by Mr Chávez when oil revenues picked up in 2003. Certainly, a primary-health programme called Barrio Adentro, which is mainly staffed by Cuban doctors and dentists, seems to work well, and is valued by residents in poorer neighbourhoods. Yet such evaluations as exist of these programmes suggest they have had little overall impact.
AP
Oil at record prices, but food in short supplyMr Chávez declared in 2005 that thanks to Misión Robinson, a scheme to teach adults to read and write, Venezuela had eradicated illiteracy, a boast quickly parroted by UNESCO officials. But the government was later forced to withdraw the claim after its own surveys suggested that over 1m adults are still illiterate. Perhaps the most successful educational policy has been one to extend the school day and provide meals. This was devised by a previous government, though to his credit Mr Chávez implemented it.
Despite the apparent success of Barrio Adentro, a recent decline in infant mortality merely mimics the historical trend in Venezuela, according to a study by Francisco Rodríguez, chief economist at the National Assembly from 2000-04 and now at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The incidence of stunting and malnutrition in children has even slightly increased, from 8.4 per thousand in 1999 to 9.1 in 2006 according to government data. That points to the deterioration of public hospitals under Mr Chávez.
Strip away the propaganda, and the government's socio-economic policies do not particularly favour the poor. Much of the extra public spending has gone on arms purchases, bureaucracy (public employment has doubled) and infrastructure (some of it useful, to be sure).
The government also spends money on indiscriminate subsidies. These mean, for example, that a tank of petrol costs less than $2, and that all credit-card holders get a quota of cheap dollars. Such policies favour the better off—including the new chavista elite of military officers, political leaders and favoured businessmen. According to the Central Bank, the distribution of income has become less equal under Mr Chávez. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, has risen from 44.1 in 2000 to 48 in 2005. Over the same period, income distribution has become more equal in Brazil, Mexico and Chile.
A different landscape
Margarita López Maya, a social scientist at the Central University of Venezuela, points to the Bolivarian revolution's success in bringing the poor into politics and giving them a sense of citizenship, partly through a network of neighbourhood councils. Had the constitutional reform been approved, this would have been jeopardised, she says, since the councils would have depended directly on the president and his largesse.
That sense of inclusion remains Mr Chávez's prime political asset. He still controls almost all the country's institutions, has billions of dollars to spend at will, and for the next nine months—thanks to an enabling law—can rule by decree over wide swathes of national life. He is a man whose political skills have frequently been underestimated, and who could yet bounce back from defeat.
After his reverse, Mr Chávez insisted that his project had not been derailed, merely shunted into a siding “for now”. That was a deliberate echo of the phrase he used after leading a failed military coup in 1992; seven years later, he was president. Maybe the country was not yet “ripe” for socialism, but “there will be no step back”, he said. “You should know that I am not withdrawing a single comma of this proposal.” He promised to reintroduce some bits of the reform by other means.
Nevertheless, the referendum marks a watershed. Mr Chávez “has been winged—he's passed his peak,” says Teodoro Petkoff, a centrist opposition leader and newspaper editor. For the first time in nearly a decade it is possible for Venezuelans to envisage life after Mr Chávez.
The opposition victory, and the admission of defeat by the president, ought to convince radicals on both sides that the only solution to the country's bitter political polarisation is peaceful and electoral. The emergence of the “third pole”, composed of Podemos, General Baduel and the student movement, should in itself herald a less polarised politics. Some talk of calling a constituent assembly to claw power back from the president. Others are looking ahead to elections for mayors and governors next year.
The referendum defeat means Mr Chávez cannot legally run again for the presidency. His aura of invincibility has gone, and the battle for the succession seems bound to begin soon. In the ruling party, political survival no longer demands unquestioning loyalty to the comandante. Fractures have already begun to appear in the supreme court and the parliament.
“This is not a 100-metre sprint, it's a marathon,” cautions Mr Petkoff. But its direction is clear. “Venezuelans have woken up” is a phrase often used by supporters of Mr Chávez to describe the political mobilisation of the poor. The referendum suggests that many of them are waking up to the shortcomings of his revolution.
In the bleak midwinter
THE Bank of England rarely moves interest rates in December. But on December 6th the central bank, under Mervyn King, its governor, broke with habit and brought down the base rate by a quarter-point, from 5.75% to 5.5%. Shortly afterwards, the European Central Bank (ECB) kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged at 4.0%. The contrasting decisions reflected differing worries in Britain and the euro area about the balance of risk between slowing GDP growth and rising inflation.
Both central banks faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the credit crunch resulting from the worldwide financial turmoil of the past few months will slow growth next year. New forecasts on Thursday from the OECD suggested that growth in Britain would slow from 3.1% in 2007 to 2.0% in 2008; in the euro area from 2.6% to 1.9%.
On the other hand, recent sharp rises in oil and food prices are likely to push up inflation. In a statement accompanying the decision, the Bank of England said that higher energy and food prices were expected to keep inflation above the 2.0% target (it is currently 2.1%) in the short-term. The central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) gave warning that “upside risks to inflation remain”.
However, its decision to cut rates was based on its concerns about a slowdown in growth, where it worried about “downside risks” caused by deteriorating conditions in financial markets and a tightening in the supply of credit to households and businesses.
Two recent pieces of evidence had underlined the risk of an abrupt slowdown. On Wednesday a survey of the big services sector reported an unexpectedly sharp drop in business activity, which weakened in November to its lowest level since May 2003. Arguably, the CIPS survey highlighted the central bank’s dilemma, since it also showed a pick-up in price pressures. But it came on the same day that the housing market became enveloped in yet more gloom. House prices fell by 1.1% in November, according to the Halifax index compiled by HBOS, a bank. It was the third month running that prices had slipped.
The clearest signs of deteriorating financial conditions have been in the money markets, where banks lend to each other. The three-month interbank rate is normally a bit higher than the base rate. At the height of the financial crisis in September, it rose to 6.9%. It then dropped a bit, but more recently rose again, to 6.6%.
This three-month rate is an important benchmark for much lending, especially to companies, thus monetary conditions have tightened since the MPC’s November meeting. This is likely to make firms trim planned investments. But the biggest threat is probably from slower consumer spending, the mainstay of the sustained economic expansion of the past decade.
Over the past few years rising house prices have emboldened consumers to save much less than usual. The danger is that a downturn in the housing market will prompt a sudden change of heart as consumers become thriftier and spend less. The sharper the downturn, the more spending will slacken. In 2005, when house prices stalled for a few months, consumption growth slowed to 1.5% and the economy grew by only 1.8%. If house prices fall next year, the damage is likely to be greater.
By contrast, the ECB is managing an economy that has relied much less heavily on rising house prices to fuel consumption. As Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB’s president, made clear on December 6th, the main worry is about higher inflation, which is currently at 3.0%, well above the target of a bit below 2%, rather than lower growth. Mr Trichet hammered home an uncompromising message that the ECB would not tolerate “second-round effects”, whereby the inflationary impetus from higher food and oil prices leads to an upward spiral in prices and wages.
Financial economists are now expecting the Bank of England to follow through with more rate cuts next year. Judging by Mr Trichet’s comments, the ECB is in no mood to follow suit.
Both central banks faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the credit crunch resulting from the worldwide financial turmoil of the past few months will slow growth next year. New forecasts on Thursday from the OECD suggested that growth in Britain would slow from 3.1% in 2007 to 2.0% in 2008; in the euro area from 2.6% to 1.9%.
On the other hand, recent sharp rises in oil and food prices are likely to push up inflation. In a statement accompanying the decision, the Bank of England said that higher energy and food prices were expected to keep inflation above the 2.0% target (it is currently 2.1%) in the short-term. The central bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) gave warning that “upside risks to inflation remain”.
However, its decision to cut rates was based on its concerns about a slowdown in growth, where it worried about “downside risks” caused by deteriorating conditions in financial markets and a tightening in the supply of credit to households and businesses.
Two recent pieces of evidence had underlined the risk of an abrupt slowdown. On Wednesday a survey of the big services sector reported an unexpectedly sharp drop in business activity, which weakened in November to its lowest level since May 2003. Arguably, the CIPS survey highlighted the central bank’s dilemma, since it also showed a pick-up in price pressures. But it came on the same day that the housing market became enveloped in yet more gloom. House prices fell by 1.1% in November, according to the Halifax index compiled by HBOS, a bank. It was the third month running that prices had slipped.
The clearest signs of deteriorating financial conditions have been in the money markets, where banks lend to each other. The three-month interbank rate is normally a bit higher than the base rate. At the height of the financial crisis in September, it rose to 6.9%. It then dropped a bit, but more recently rose again, to 6.6%.
This three-month rate is an important benchmark for much lending, especially to companies, thus monetary conditions have tightened since the MPC’s November meeting. This is likely to make firms trim planned investments. But the biggest threat is probably from slower consumer spending, the mainstay of the sustained economic expansion of the past decade.
Over the past few years rising house prices have emboldened consumers to save much less than usual. The danger is that a downturn in the housing market will prompt a sudden change of heart as consumers become thriftier and spend less. The sharper the downturn, the more spending will slacken. In 2005, when house prices stalled for a few months, consumption growth slowed to 1.5% and the economy grew by only 1.8%. If house prices fall next year, the damage is likely to be greater.
By contrast, the ECB is managing an economy that has relied much less heavily on rising house prices to fuel consumption. As Jean-Claude Trichet, the ECB’s president, made clear on December 6th, the main worry is about higher inflation, which is currently at 3.0%, well above the target of a bit below 2%, rather than lower growth. Mr Trichet hammered home an uncompromising message that the ECB would not tolerate “second-round effects”, whereby the inflationary impetus from higher food and oil prices leads to an upward spiral in prices and wages.
Financial economists are now expecting the Bank of England to follow through with more rate cuts next year. Judging by Mr Trichet’s comments, the ECB is in no mood to follow suit.
Can a Mormon be president?
IT WAS a fine and patriotic speech, full of ennobling rhetoric about liberty and tolerance. But it was not a speech about Mitt Romney's particular religion, and so it may not help his cause. Mr Romney, a Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts, is a Mormon. Because many Americans regard Mormonism with suspicion, his religion has always been considered a political liability. For months Mr Romney has publicly wrestled with whether to address this situation. On Thursday December 6th he did so, but without going into the detail of his personal faith.
Polls (such as a September survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) suggest that perhaps a quarter of Americans have reservations about voting for a Mormon. The number is higher among evangelicals, a particularly important constituency in Republican primaries. The Florida televangelist Bill Keller, for example, once e-mailed his followers to give warning that “a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan.” Few would go so far, but many evangelists do consider Mormonism pernicious, an imposter religion that keeps people from proper Christianity.
For many months the Romney campaign had calculated that it was better not to confront the religion question. But in the past few weeks the race for the Republican nomination has changed because of a sudden surge from Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. He has displaced Mr Romney as the leading candidate in Iowa. Mr Huckabee is a Southern Baptist and faith is a central selling point of his campaign. Iowa's caucuses will be held on January 3rd. Religion could determine the fate of Mr Romney's candidacy. With time running out, a bold move seemed like a good bet.
The historical model for Mr Romney's speech was John Kennedy. In 1960, faced with questions about whether a Catholic president would inevitably be wrapped up with the Vatican, Mr Kennedy went to Houston and gave a landmark speech defending religious pluralism. Mr Romney also took his case to Texas. He spoke at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station and was warmly received. As with Kennedy, Mr Romney rejected the idea that his candidacy should be defined by his faith. But in contrast to Kennedy, Mr Romney did not tackle specific questions about his religion.
In fact, the much-anticipated “Mormon speech” mostly avoided mention of Mormonism. Mr Romney acknowledged it briefly: “I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavour to live by it.” Later he made a reference to Brigham Young, who led the fledgling church to Utah. At one point he spoke of other faiths and their admirable features, such as “the profound ceremony of the Catholic mass” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” He did not cite any appealing feature of Mormonism.
Mr Romney has always been reluctant to answer specific questions about his religion, and this time he said he would not discuss doctrine. To do so, he said, “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” (He did take a moment to say that he believes in Jesus Christ as the saviour of mankind. That might be construed as a bid to pass what evangelicals consider an important test.)
Such reticence is not exactly secretive, but it seems oddly defensive, and it will not help his campaign. Mr Romney has a certain formal reserve. He might object to people rummaging around in his beliefs, but presidential candidates must expect to endure a certain amount of prodding. Sincere questions about religious belief should not be considered an impertinence. Mr Romney's speech acknowledged as much; he praised America for “the diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue.” But he might have done better to add his own voice to that dialogue, and he should not be surprised that people have questions about his faith. Mormonism is, after all, not particularly well understood. As Mr Romney noted, it is not a candidate’s job to be spokesman for a religion. But it is a candidate’s job to be a spokesman for himself.
Polls (such as a September survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) suggest that perhaps a quarter of Americans have reservations about voting for a Mormon. The number is higher among evangelicals, a particularly important constituency in Republican primaries. The Florida televangelist Bill Keller, for example, once e-mailed his followers to give warning that “a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan.” Few would go so far, but many evangelists do consider Mormonism pernicious, an imposter religion that keeps people from proper Christianity.
For many months the Romney campaign had calculated that it was better not to confront the religion question. But in the past few weeks the race for the Republican nomination has changed because of a sudden surge from Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. He has displaced Mr Romney as the leading candidate in Iowa. Mr Huckabee is a Southern Baptist and faith is a central selling point of his campaign. Iowa's caucuses will be held on January 3rd. Religion could determine the fate of Mr Romney's candidacy. With time running out, a bold move seemed like a good bet.
The historical model for Mr Romney's speech was John Kennedy. In 1960, faced with questions about whether a Catholic president would inevitably be wrapped up with the Vatican, Mr Kennedy went to Houston and gave a landmark speech defending religious pluralism. Mr Romney also took his case to Texas. He spoke at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station and was warmly received. As with Kennedy, Mr Romney rejected the idea that his candidacy should be defined by his faith. But in contrast to Kennedy, Mr Romney did not tackle specific questions about his religion.
In fact, the much-anticipated “Mormon speech” mostly avoided mention of Mormonism. Mr Romney acknowledged it briefly: “I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavour to live by it.” Later he made a reference to Brigham Young, who led the fledgling church to Utah. At one point he spoke of other faiths and their admirable features, such as “the profound ceremony of the Catholic mass” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” He did not cite any appealing feature of Mormonism.
Mr Romney has always been reluctant to answer specific questions about his religion, and this time he said he would not discuss doctrine. To do so, he said, “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” (He did take a moment to say that he believes in Jesus Christ as the saviour of mankind. That might be construed as a bid to pass what evangelicals consider an important test.)
Such reticence is not exactly secretive, but it seems oddly defensive, and it will not help his campaign. Mr Romney has a certain formal reserve. He might object to people rummaging around in his beliefs, but presidential candidates must expect to endure a certain amount of prodding. Sincere questions about religious belief should not be considered an impertinence. Mr Romney's speech acknowledged as much; he praised America for “the diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue.” But he might have done better to add his own voice to that dialogue, and he should not be surprised that people have questions about his faith. Mormonism is, after all, not particularly well understood. As Mr Romney noted, it is not a candidate’s job to be spokesman for a religion. But it is a candidate’s job to be a spokesman for himself.
Can a Mormon be president?
IT WAS a fine and patriotic speech, full of ennobling rhetoric about liberty and tolerance. But it was not a speech about Mitt Romney's particular religion, and so it may not help his cause. Mr Romney, a Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts, is a Mormon. Because many Americans regard Mormonism with suspicion, his religion has always been considered a political liability. For months Mr Romney has publicly wrestled with whether to address this situation. On Thursday December 6th he did so, but without going into the detail of his personal faith.
Polls (such as a September survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) suggest that perhaps a quarter of Americans have reservations about voting for a Mormon. The number is higher among evangelicals, a particularly important constituency in Republican primaries. The Florida televangelist Bill Keller, for example, once e-mailed his followers to give warning that “a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan.” Few would go so far, but many evangelists do consider Mormonism pernicious, an imposter religion that keeps people from proper Christianity.
For many months the Romney campaign had calculated that it was better not to confront the religion question. But in the past few weeks the race for the Republican nomination has changed because of a sudden surge from Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. He has displaced Mr Romney as the leading candidate in Iowa. Mr Huckabee is a Southern Baptist and faith is a central selling point of his campaign. Iowa's caucuses will be held on January 3rd. Religion could determine the fate of Mr Romney's candidacy. With time running out, a bold move seemed like a good bet.
The historical model for Mr Romney's speech was John Kennedy. In 1960, faced with questions about whether a Catholic president would inevitably be wrapped up with the Vatican, Mr Kennedy went to Houston and gave a landmark speech defending religious pluralism. Mr Romney also took his case to Texas. He spoke at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station and was warmly received. As with Kennedy, Mr Romney rejected the idea that his candidacy should be defined by his faith. But in contrast to Kennedy, Mr Romney did not tackle specific questions about his religion.
In fact, the much-anticipated “Mormon speech” mostly avoided mention of Mormonism. Mr Romney acknowledged it briefly: “I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavour to live by it.” Later he made a reference to Brigham Young, who led the fledgling church to Utah. At one point he spoke of other faiths and their admirable features, such as “the profound ceremony of the Catholic mass” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” He did not cite any appealing feature of Mormonism.
Mr Romney has always been reluctant to answer specific questions about his religion, and this time he said he would not discuss doctrine. To do so, he said, “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” (He did take a moment to say that he believes in Jesus Christ as the saviour of mankind. That might be construed as a bid to pass what evangelicals consider an important test.)
Such reticence is not exactly secretive, but it seems oddly defensive, and it will not help his campaign. Mr Romney has a certain formal reserve. He might object to people rummaging around in his beliefs, but presidential candidates must expect to endure a certain amount of prodding. Sincere questions about religious belief should not be considered an impertinence. Mr Romney's speech acknowledged as much; he praised America for “the diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue.” But he might have done better to add his own voice to that dialogue, and he should not be surprised that people have questions about his faith. Mormonism is, after all, not particularly well understood. As Mr Romney noted, it is not a candidate’s job to be spokesman for a religion. But it is a candidate’s job to be a spokesman for himself.
Polls (such as a September survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life) suggest that perhaps a quarter of Americans have reservations about voting for a Mormon. The number is higher among evangelicals, a particularly important constituency in Republican primaries. The Florida televangelist Bill Keller, for example, once e-mailed his followers to give warning that “a vote for Romney is a vote for Satan.” Few would go so far, but many evangelists do consider Mormonism pernicious, an imposter religion that keeps people from proper Christianity.
For many months the Romney campaign had calculated that it was better not to confront the religion question. But in the past few weeks the race for the Republican nomination has changed because of a sudden surge from Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. He has displaced Mr Romney as the leading candidate in Iowa. Mr Huckabee is a Southern Baptist and faith is a central selling point of his campaign. Iowa's caucuses will be held on January 3rd. Religion could determine the fate of Mr Romney's candidacy. With time running out, a bold move seemed like a good bet.
The historical model for Mr Romney's speech was John Kennedy. In 1960, faced with questions about whether a Catholic president would inevitably be wrapped up with the Vatican, Mr Kennedy went to Houston and gave a landmark speech defending religious pluralism. Mr Romney also took his case to Texas. He spoke at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station and was warmly received. As with Kennedy, Mr Romney rejected the idea that his candidacy should be defined by his faith. But in contrast to Kennedy, Mr Romney did not tackle specific questions about his religion.
In fact, the much-anticipated “Mormon speech” mostly avoided mention of Mormonism. Mr Romney acknowledged it briefly: “I believe in my Mormon faith, and I endeavour to live by it.” Later he made a reference to Brigham Young, who led the fledgling church to Utah. At one point he spoke of other faiths and their admirable features, such as “the profound ceremony of the Catholic mass” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” He did not cite any appealing feature of Mormonism.
Mr Romney has always been reluctant to answer specific questions about his religion, and this time he said he would not discuss doctrine. To do so, he said, “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” (He did take a moment to say that he believes in Jesus Christ as the saviour of mankind. That might be construed as a bid to pass what evangelicals consider an important test.)
Such reticence is not exactly secretive, but it seems oddly defensive, and it will not help his campaign. Mr Romney has a certain formal reserve. He might object to people rummaging around in his beliefs, but presidential candidates must expect to endure a certain amount of prodding. Sincere questions about religious belief should not be considered an impertinence. Mr Romney's speech acknowledged as much; he praised America for “the diversity of our cultural expression, and the vibrancy of our religious dialogue.” But he might have done better to add his own voice to that dialogue, and he should not be surprised that people have questions about his faith. Mormonism is, after all, not particularly well understood. As Mr Romney noted, it is not a candidate’s job to be spokesman for a religion. But it is a candidate’s job to be a spokesman for himself.
The Iran NIE
Tom Joscelyn at the Weekly Standard asks five important questions, with the most disturbing being number three:
[H]ow did the [Intelligence Community] draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?
In the very first footnote the authors of the NIE explain: "For the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."
So, is the IC then assuming that Iran’s "declared civil work" is necessarily benign? One of the key issues with respect to Iran’s "civilian" nuclear program is its capacity, with some tweaking here and there, to be used for military purposes. For example, according to the New York Times in early 2006, the IAEA concluded that there was evidence suggesting "links between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles." Indeed, the authors of the NIE explicitly recognize the possibility of the civilian program being diverted for military uses:
Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications—some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.
So, then, the NIE’s conclusions apply strictly to Iran’s alleged halt of its military and clandestine programs. As we know, however, uranium enrichment is the most important component of developing the bomb and Iran indisputably has the capacity. (Again, with some tweaking, Iran can use its declared enrichment facilities at some point to make weapons-grade material.)
Now, some thoughts of my own:
1) The publication of the NIE brings into the light a long-running and mysterous internal debate within the Bush administration. For many months, there has been a huge discrepancy between the president's words and the administration's actions on the subject of Iran. The president talked fierce - but the administration acted very cautiously. Now we understand why.
This discrepancy underlay my often-repeated contention in this space that there would be no military strike against Iran during the Bush administration. Basically, I extrapolated from my observations of the struggle over the president's "democracy agenda": The president issued bold declarations that meant little in practice, either because he never really meant them or because he lacked the means to enforce his will upon his government. Either way, I expected the same pattern to hold good with regard to Iran policy, and so it has.
2) There has been a lot of foolish talk about how this release must somehow be unwelcome to the president, the administration, or "neocons" within the administration. That seems very unconvincing to me. On the contrary, given that the administration has no clear idea of what to do about Iran, a document that effectively takes them off the hook has to be highly welcome. Far from chomping at the opportunity for conflict with Iran, the Bush administration has persistently and consistently sought to avoid it - not only in the nuclear area, but also by downplaying Iranian support for the insurgency in Iraq.
3) No question, any slowdown in the Iranian nuclear program counts as good news. But the release of this NIE may function as "self-liquidating" good news. Release of the NIE will likely undercut international support for sanctions and other pressures on Iran - and that may in turn undermine Iranian compliance.
4) At the same time, the release of the report creates some very real opportunities for US policy. A US strie on Iran was bound to be a hugely costly policy - perhaps necessary, but costly. If it is right that we face no immediate need for such a strike, those costs can be postponed.
The real strategic center of gravity in Iran has never been the nuclear program, but always Iranian public opinion. Iran is a textbook illustration of Abraham Lincoln's dictum that the best way to eliminate an enemy is to turn him into a friend. We want to position the US as the advocate for and liberator of Iran's oppressed population - not a threatening presence lusting for an excuse to bomb them. If the nuclear issue moves down the agenda, that opens the way for human rights, democracy, and terrorism to climb higher.
5) Joe Klein and others have opined that the NIE helps the Democratic candidates for president by refocusing the election on domestic issues. Maybe. Equally though it relieves the stress on the Republican field by reassuring Americans that a vote for the GOP in 2008 is not automatically a vote for war with Iran.
[H]ow did the [Intelligence Community] draw its line between a "civilian" nuclear program and a military one?
In the very first footnote the authors of the NIE explain: "For the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment."
So, is the IC then assuming that Iran’s "declared civil work" is necessarily benign? One of the key issues with respect to Iran’s "civilian" nuclear program is its capacity, with some tweaking here and there, to be used for military purposes. For example, according to the New York Times in early 2006, the IAEA concluded that there was evidence suggesting "links between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful nuclear program and its military work on high explosives and missiles." Indeed, the authors of the NIE explicitly recognize the possibility of the civilian program being diverted for military uses:
Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications—some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.
So, then, the NIE’s conclusions apply strictly to Iran’s alleged halt of its military and clandestine programs. As we know, however, uranium enrichment is the most important component of developing the bomb and Iran indisputably has the capacity. (Again, with some tweaking, Iran can use its declared enrichment facilities at some point to make weapons-grade material.)
Now, some thoughts of my own:
1) The publication of the NIE brings into the light a long-running and mysterous internal debate within the Bush administration. For many months, there has been a huge discrepancy between the president's words and the administration's actions on the subject of Iran. The president talked fierce - but the administration acted very cautiously. Now we understand why.
This discrepancy underlay my often-repeated contention in this space that there would be no military strike against Iran during the Bush administration. Basically, I extrapolated from my observations of the struggle over the president's "democracy agenda": The president issued bold declarations that meant little in practice, either because he never really meant them or because he lacked the means to enforce his will upon his government. Either way, I expected the same pattern to hold good with regard to Iran policy, and so it has.
2) There has been a lot of foolish talk about how this release must somehow be unwelcome to the president, the administration, or "neocons" within the administration. That seems very unconvincing to me. On the contrary, given that the administration has no clear idea of what to do about Iran, a document that effectively takes them off the hook has to be highly welcome. Far from chomping at the opportunity for conflict with Iran, the Bush administration has persistently and consistently sought to avoid it - not only in the nuclear area, but also by downplaying Iranian support for the insurgency in Iraq.
3) No question, any slowdown in the Iranian nuclear program counts as good news. But the release of this NIE may function as "self-liquidating" good news. Release of the NIE will likely undercut international support for sanctions and other pressures on Iran - and that may in turn undermine Iranian compliance.
4) At the same time, the release of the report creates some very real opportunities for US policy. A US strie on Iran was bound to be a hugely costly policy - perhaps necessary, but costly. If it is right that we face no immediate need for such a strike, those costs can be postponed.
The real strategic center of gravity in Iran has never been the nuclear program, but always Iranian public opinion. Iran is a textbook illustration of Abraham Lincoln's dictum that the best way to eliminate an enemy is to turn him into a friend. We want to position the US as the advocate for and liberator of Iran's oppressed population - not a threatening presence lusting for an excuse to bomb them. If the nuclear issue moves down the agenda, that opens the way for human rights, democracy, and terrorism to climb higher.
5) Joe Klein and others have opined that the NIE helps the Democratic candidates for president by refocusing the election on domestic issues. Maybe. Equally though it relieves the stress on the Republican field by reassuring Americans that a vote for the GOP in 2008 is not automatically a vote for war with Iran.
What Now?
Unaccustomed and apparently unwelcome as such things are in the sour winter of 2007, we should recognize the just published National Intelligence Estimate on Iran as a partial success and a significant opportunity.
The success is only partial because - despite the attempts at mind-reading by the Estimate's authors - no country that continues enriching uranium to weapons-grade can be said to have "abandoned" its nuclear program.
Yet the success is also real because - thanks to the various pressures brought to bear on Iran in 2002 and 2003 - we now seem to have more time than previously projected to deal with the Iran problem. Since we have more time, we can proceed in a more deliberate and strategic way. This is our opportunity. How shall we use it?
First, let's have a realistic appraisal of where we are.
Iran has not been transmuted into a benign actor by this estimate. It remains a terror-supporting state, an outlaw regime that continues to regard kidnap torture and assassination as legitimate tools of external policy - above and beyond its appalling human rights record at home. Most immediately disturbing, Iran is waging a proxy guerilla war against the US inside Iraq. And of course the nuclear program can be restarted at any time - next time from a much more sophisticated base of knowledge and with an ampler supply of nuclear fuel.
Hopes of some kind of "grand bargain" with this regime seem illusory. Nor is it clear why the US should wish such a grand bargain. The regime seems massively unpopular with its people. It will not last forever. Critics of US foreign policy are always warning us about the odium the US contracts when it "props up" regimes like those of the former shah of Iran. If it was unwise to associate the US with the shah, how can it make sense for the US to become a partner of the even more detested mullahs - even supposing such a thing were possible? Especially since the thing we are most often (rightly or wrongly) told the mullahs want - a US security guarantee - would promote the US from being the mullahs' partner to being their guarantor.
In dealing with an authoritarian regime, it's always a challenge to balance your short-term interest in stable relations with your long-term interests in not being contaminated with the regime's unpopularity with its own people. Different experts will arrive at different balances in each case, and I am nothing like an Iran expert. (To read some assessments by the real thing, click here.)
That conceded, here's what I'd propose as the next steps in US policy.
1. With the present downgrading of the Iran threat, the US occupies a sudden - probably short-lived - position of strength vis a vis the Iranian rulers. This is the perfect moment to clarify US military intentions in a way that will reassure potential friends among the Iranian people that the US will do everything it can to avoid a violent resolution of the confrontation between Iran and the rest of the world. This is the moment to take force off the table in all but the most extreme situations. The US should declare now that so long as the Iranian nuclear program remains demonstrably suspended, it guarantees no first use of military force against the territory of Iran. (Iranian agents in other countries, including Iraq, will of course remain fair game.)
2. The US should issue clear and specific guidelines about the steps Iran needs to take to rejoin the civilized world. Many of these will of course be intolerable to the present regime. But they can serve as inspirations to those who would reform or replace the regime. They should include a total end to terrorism and support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and an end to subversive activities inside Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish territories.
3. The US should aid democratic forces inside Iran - but in a more effective and intelligent way. We should greatly increase US support for professional and independent broadcasting into Iran. There is a long-running debate about US public diplomacy: how closely should US-supported broadcasters follow US government policy? Conservatives tend to take the view that policy should prevail. I think this view is wrong. US services broadcasting into Iran should substitute for the independent, credible media that Iran lacks. These media should have budgets for reporting, especially on issues like corruption, human rights abuse, family and sexuality, environmental degradation, and religion - topics on which the regime would most like to suppress discussion. US-supported broadcasters should serve as models of what a free Iranian society might look like. While of course US taxpayers should never subsidize a terror-glamorizing pseudo-independent network like Al Jazeera, US broadcasting into Iran should focus on what Iranians want to hear, not what Americans wish to say. There should be room for Marxists, environmentalists, radical feminists - not because the US government necessarily likes them, but because a free society has room for them. Oh, and there should be a heavy commitment to music and comedy as well. Especially comedy.
4. We should aid those democratic forces too by promoting human rights as an issue. Not democratization - much as we would wish to see democratization occur - because the official stance of the US government should be that Iran's future form of government is a matter for Iranians to decide. But we should take up on an individual basis first cases of foreign or dual nationals who have been detained and abused inside Iran - and then move from there to publicizing and denouncing in public fora abuses of Iranian nationals too.
Given recent history, it will take a sustained campaign over many years for the US voice on these issues to regain credibility. But with 3 to 5 years of steady and consistent work, the powerful voice of the US government can impress this issue on the awareness of the world and the Iranian people. We should be preparing that public to see America as their advocate against their authoritarian government - and the natural friend of a future and more accountable Iranian regime.
5. The US and Iran have not had direct bilateral relations since 1979. It was Iran that breached this relationship, and we have no reason to think that Iran wishes to restore those relations. So ... why don't we start proposing them? Iran will surely say "no." Good. Let's make a propaganda issue of that, inside Iran, underscoring to Iranians how radical and intransigent their government is, how their present costly isolation is their own government's.
Note that proposing direct relations is a very different thing from inviting Iran into regional talks, in the way Baker-Hamilton recommended. Baker-Hamilton proposed to legitimize Iranian intervention in the internal affairs of its neighbors. That is like opening the door to the parakeet's cage while the cat stalks the room. But making it clear that it is the present Iranian regime, not the US, that is invested in bad US-Iran relations? That's a very different matter.
To be continued ....
The success is only partial because - despite the attempts at mind-reading by the Estimate's authors - no country that continues enriching uranium to weapons-grade can be said to have "abandoned" its nuclear program.
Yet the success is also real because - thanks to the various pressures brought to bear on Iran in 2002 and 2003 - we now seem to have more time than previously projected to deal with the Iran problem. Since we have more time, we can proceed in a more deliberate and strategic way. This is our opportunity. How shall we use it?
First, let's have a realistic appraisal of where we are.
Iran has not been transmuted into a benign actor by this estimate. It remains a terror-supporting state, an outlaw regime that continues to regard kidnap torture and assassination as legitimate tools of external policy - above and beyond its appalling human rights record at home. Most immediately disturbing, Iran is waging a proxy guerilla war against the US inside Iraq. And of course the nuclear program can be restarted at any time - next time from a much more sophisticated base of knowledge and with an ampler supply of nuclear fuel.
Hopes of some kind of "grand bargain" with this regime seem illusory. Nor is it clear why the US should wish such a grand bargain. The regime seems massively unpopular with its people. It will not last forever. Critics of US foreign policy are always warning us about the odium the US contracts when it "props up" regimes like those of the former shah of Iran. If it was unwise to associate the US with the shah, how can it make sense for the US to become a partner of the even more detested mullahs - even supposing such a thing were possible? Especially since the thing we are most often (rightly or wrongly) told the mullahs want - a US security guarantee - would promote the US from being the mullahs' partner to being their guarantor.
In dealing with an authoritarian regime, it's always a challenge to balance your short-term interest in stable relations with your long-term interests in not being contaminated with the regime's unpopularity with its own people. Different experts will arrive at different balances in each case, and I am nothing like an Iran expert. (To read some assessments by the real thing, click here.)
That conceded, here's what I'd propose as the next steps in US policy.
1. With the present downgrading of the Iran threat, the US occupies a sudden - probably short-lived - position of strength vis a vis the Iranian rulers. This is the perfect moment to clarify US military intentions in a way that will reassure potential friends among the Iranian people that the US will do everything it can to avoid a violent resolution of the confrontation between Iran and the rest of the world. This is the moment to take force off the table in all but the most extreme situations. The US should declare now that so long as the Iranian nuclear program remains demonstrably suspended, it guarantees no first use of military force against the territory of Iran. (Iranian agents in other countries, including Iraq, will of course remain fair game.)
2. The US should issue clear and specific guidelines about the steps Iran needs to take to rejoin the civilized world. Many of these will of course be intolerable to the present regime. But they can serve as inspirations to those who would reform or replace the regime. They should include a total end to terrorism and support for terrorist groups like Hezbollah and an end to subversive activities inside Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish territories.
3. The US should aid democratic forces inside Iran - but in a more effective and intelligent way. We should greatly increase US support for professional and independent broadcasting into Iran. There is a long-running debate about US public diplomacy: how closely should US-supported broadcasters follow US government policy? Conservatives tend to take the view that policy should prevail. I think this view is wrong. US services broadcasting into Iran should substitute for the independent, credible media that Iran lacks. These media should have budgets for reporting, especially on issues like corruption, human rights abuse, family and sexuality, environmental degradation, and religion - topics on which the regime would most like to suppress discussion. US-supported broadcasters should serve as models of what a free Iranian society might look like. While of course US taxpayers should never subsidize a terror-glamorizing pseudo-independent network like Al Jazeera, US broadcasting into Iran should focus on what Iranians want to hear, not what Americans wish to say. There should be room for Marxists, environmentalists, radical feminists - not because the US government necessarily likes them, but because a free society has room for them. Oh, and there should be a heavy commitment to music and comedy as well. Especially comedy.
4. We should aid those democratic forces too by promoting human rights as an issue. Not democratization - much as we would wish to see democratization occur - because the official stance of the US government should be that Iran's future form of government is a matter for Iranians to decide. But we should take up on an individual basis first cases of foreign or dual nationals who have been detained and abused inside Iran - and then move from there to publicizing and denouncing in public fora abuses of Iranian nationals too.
Given recent history, it will take a sustained campaign over many years for the US voice on these issues to regain credibility. But with 3 to 5 years of steady and consistent work, the powerful voice of the US government can impress this issue on the awareness of the world and the Iranian people. We should be preparing that public to see America as their advocate against their authoritarian government - and the natural friend of a future and more accountable Iranian regime.
5. The US and Iran have not had direct bilateral relations since 1979. It was Iran that breached this relationship, and we have no reason to think that Iran wishes to restore those relations. So ... why don't we start proposing them? Iran will surely say "no." Good. Let's make a propaganda issue of that, inside Iran, underscoring to Iranians how radical and intransigent their government is, how their present costly isolation is their own government's.
Note that proposing direct relations is a very different thing from inviting Iran into regional talks, in the way Baker-Hamilton recommended. Baker-Hamilton proposed to legitimize Iranian intervention in the internal affairs of its neighbors. That is like opening the door to the parakeet's cage while the cat stalks the room. But making it clear that it is the present Iranian regime, not the US, that is invested in bad US-Iran relations? That's a very different matter.
To be continued ....
A Public Service Announcement
We interrupt work on Part 2 of my response to the Iran NIE to bring you a link to the latest by Mrs. Frum - a series of blogposts on her experience of a week of life in an abaya. I post this with hesitation, because the series opens with a domestic anecdote that seemed to this reader at least to offer Too Much Information ....
'I wonder what it's like to wear Arabic dress?" I said one day to my husband.
His eyes sparked with interest. "You mean as in 'I Dream of Jeannie'?"
"No. I mean those black cover-ups they wear in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries."
"Oh." He looked disappointed.
"Seriously. What must it be like to wear something like that day in, day out? Never being able to show your face in public — or to a man who is not your husband. I don't think Western women appreciate how oppressive that must be."
My husband was not paying attention. "That filmy, translucent fabric, the little sequined top ... If I could impose dress on women, that's what I'd impose." He paused. "Maybe not all women ..."
I ignored him, warming to my rant. "And yet, you never hear a peep of protest about it from the feminist groups over here. They protest the war in Iraq. But the idea that there are people right here who want to shroud women ... to make us all submissive and invisible ... where's the outrage over that?
"And we shouldn't kid ourselves. It's coming here too. It already is here."
Anyway you can read the first post here and the second here with accompanying video here. The series originates with the National Post and is being carried in the US by the Huffington Post. It seems to have thrown some HuffPo readers into gasping outrage. After all, as is well known, the real oppression of women occurs in the West, source of all evil ....
'I wonder what it's like to wear Arabic dress?" I said one day to my husband.
His eyes sparked with interest. "You mean as in 'I Dream of Jeannie'?"
"No. I mean those black cover-ups they wear in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries."
"Oh." He looked disappointed.
"Seriously. What must it be like to wear something like that day in, day out? Never being able to show your face in public — or to a man who is not your husband. I don't think Western women appreciate how oppressive that must be."
My husband was not paying attention. "That filmy, translucent fabric, the little sequined top ... If I could impose dress on women, that's what I'd impose." He paused. "Maybe not all women ..."
I ignored him, warming to my rant. "And yet, you never hear a peep of protest about it from the feminist groups over here. They protest the war in Iraq. But the idea that there are people right here who want to shroud women ... to make us all submissive and invisible ... where's the outrage over that?
"And we shouldn't kid ourselves. It's coming here too. It already is here."
Anyway you can read the first post here and the second here with accompanying video here. The series originates with the National Post and is being carried in the US by the Huffington Post. It seems to have thrown some HuffPo readers into gasping outrage. After all, as is well known, the real oppression of women occurs in the West, source of all evil ....
That Dog Won't Hunt
Sorry to dissent from my colleagues on the Corner, but once the murmurs over the oratory subside, people are going to realize: that speech did not work. Here's why:
"There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance."
To be blunt, Romney is saying:
It is legitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the son of God?"
But it is illegitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the brother of Lucifer?"
It is hard for me to see a principled difference between these two questions, and I think on reflection that the audiences to whom Romney is trying to appeal will also fail to see such a difference. Once Romney answered any question about the content of his religious faith, he opened the door to every question about the content of his religious faith. This speech for all its eloquence will not stanch the flow of such questions.
Bad move - and one with very unfair results to a candidate who all must acknowledge is a man who has proven that his mind actually operates in a highly empirical, data-driven, and uncredulous way.
Had he focused instead on simply arguing that presidents need only prove themselves loyal to American values, he would have been on safe ground. Instead, he over-reached, super-adding to his civic appeal an additional appeal to voters who demand faith in Jesus as a requirement in a president. That is an argument that will not work - and a game Mitt Romney cannot win.
"There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance."
To be blunt, Romney is saying:
It is legitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the son of God?"
But it is illegitimate to ask a candidate, "Is Jesus the brother of Lucifer?"
It is hard for me to see a principled difference between these two questions, and I think on reflection that the audiences to whom Romney is trying to appeal will also fail to see such a difference. Once Romney answered any question about the content of his religious faith, he opened the door to every question about the content of his religious faith. This speech for all its eloquence will not stanch the flow of such questions.
Bad move - and one with very unfair results to a candidate who all must acknowledge is a man who has proven that his mind actually operates in a highly empirical, data-driven, and uncredulous way.
Had he focused instead on simply arguing that presidents need only prove themselves loyal to American values, he would have been on safe ground. Instead, he over-reached, super-adding to his civic appeal an additional appeal to voters who demand faith in Jesus as a requirement in a president. That is an argument that will not work - and a game Mitt Romney cannot win.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Crucial Test For Ethics Reform
Unfortunately, the task force headed by Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., is already under fire for failing to genuinely strengthen the House's moribund ethics panel, officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.
By all accounts, Capuano's task force plans to recommend setting up an independent investigative body that will have the power to conduct preliminary investigations. Reform advocates both on and off Capitol Hill have long called for outsiders to be brought into the ethics process through some form of independent agency.
The problem with the task force plan is that it fails to give these outside ethics investigators any form of subpoena power. That means that little will actually change in how the ethics panel operates, critics say. The task force, which has been laboring for months and has repeatedly delayed taking action, is now expected to release its recommendations sometime in December.
"The problem has always been lack of enforcement, and that hasn't changed," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
"If there were indeed an independent office that could conduct serious investigations, that would fundamentally alter the ethics process," concurred Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen. Instead, said Holman, the task force is "really hamstringing this office so it can't conduct any serious investigations."
Capuano is sanguine about such criticisms. "There's nothing in the world that will ever satisfy everybody, and that was not my intent," he said. "My intent was to improve the process in Congress." Capuano declined to go into detail about what the task force will ultimately recommend, but confirmed that it will, indeed, include some form of outside investigative body.
"It's a significant step forward," he said of the plan under consideration. Another key element of the plan, Capuano said, will be to bring more transparency to ethics deliberations, which are now shrouded in the strictest secrecy and confidentiality.
"None of us knows whether the ethics process works, because it is not transparent," he said. "That has always been my biggest concern."
Whatever the task force ultimately recommends, it's unlikely that the debate over ethics enforcement will end there. Reform advocates argue that the sweeping ethics and lobbying law enacted earlier this year will mean little if it is never enforced. If the ethics task force's recommendations prove too tepid, as many now predict, Public Citizen and its allies plan to approach House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders to lobby for more-sweeping changes.
"We will appeal to them to develop a little more vibrant package when the House actually considers these options," said Holman.
The debate over the ethics panel isn't the only area where pro-reform activists are lobbying to ensure that the new law, officially the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, is fully carried out. A coalition of reform groups recently wrote to the House Clerk and the Secretary of the Senate to urge them to fully implement the new law's disclosure requirements.
These include new rules that require lobbyists to disclose the financial benefits and favors that they provide to members of Congress, as well as disclosure of events that honor or recognize certain elected or federal officials and disclosure requirements for so-called stealth coalitions.
Also at issue is the Federal Election Commission's implementation of the new law's bundling provisions, which will require lawmakers to report the contributions that lobbyists round up on their behalf. The FEC has received public comments on its bundling regulations, and is expected to take public action in the coming weeks.
As the new law continues to take effect, and as lobbyists and lawmakers adjust to living under the new rules, these questions of implementation and enforcement will be crucial.
"So far there have been great accomplishments in the ethics rules and lobbying laws that were enacted," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. "But in order for them to accomplish their goals, they have to be properly interpreted, implemented and enforced. So we're now at a critical stage here."
Indeed, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act will be nothing but a piece of paper if it is never actually carried out. As Holman put it: "I learned long ago that passage of legislation is just half the battle."
By all accounts, Capuano's task force plans to recommend setting up an independent investigative body that will have the power to conduct preliminary investigations. Reform advocates both on and off Capitol Hill have long called for outsiders to be brought into the ethics process through some form of independent agency.
The problem with the task force plan is that it fails to give these outside ethics investigators any form of subpoena power. That means that little will actually change in how the ethics panel operates, critics say. The task force, which has been laboring for months and has repeatedly delayed taking action, is now expected to release its recommendations sometime in December.
"The problem has always been lack of enforcement, and that hasn't changed," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
"If there were indeed an independent office that could conduct serious investigations, that would fundamentally alter the ethics process," concurred Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen. Instead, said Holman, the task force is "really hamstringing this office so it can't conduct any serious investigations."
Capuano is sanguine about such criticisms. "There's nothing in the world that will ever satisfy everybody, and that was not my intent," he said. "My intent was to improve the process in Congress." Capuano declined to go into detail about what the task force will ultimately recommend, but confirmed that it will, indeed, include some form of outside investigative body.
"It's a significant step forward," he said of the plan under consideration. Another key element of the plan, Capuano said, will be to bring more transparency to ethics deliberations, which are now shrouded in the strictest secrecy and confidentiality.
"None of us knows whether the ethics process works, because it is not transparent," he said. "That has always been my biggest concern."
Whatever the task force ultimately recommends, it's unlikely that the debate over ethics enforcement will end there. Reform advocates argue that the sweeping ethics and lobbying law enacted earlier this year will mean little if it is never enforced. If the ethics task force's recommendations prove too tepid, as many now predict, Public Citizen and its allies plan to approach House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders to lobby for more-sweeping changes.
"We will appeal to them to develop a little more vibrant package when the House actually considers these options," said Holman.
The debate over the ethics panel isn't the only area where pro-reform activists are lobbying to ensure that the new law, officially the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, is fully carried out. A coalition of reform groups recently wrote to the House Clerk and the Secretary of the Senate to urge them to fully implement the new law's disclosure requirements.
These include new rules that require lobbyists to disclose the financial benefits and favors that they provide to members of Congress, as well as disclosure of events that honor or recognize certain elected or federal officials and disclosure requirements for so-called stealth coalitions.
Also at issue is the Federal Election Commission's implementation of the new law's bundling provisions, which will require lawmakers to report the contributions that lobbyists round up on their behalf. The FEC has received public comments on its bundling regulations, and is expected to take public action in the coming weeks.
As the new law continues to take effect, and as lobbyists and lawmakers adjust to living under the new rules, these questions of implementation and enforcement will be crucial.
"So far there have been great accomplishments in the ethics rules and lobbying laws that were enacted," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21. "But in order for them to accomplish their goals, they have to be properly interpreted, implemented and enforced. So we're now at a critical stage here."
Indeed, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act will be nothing but a piece of paper if it is never actually carried out. As Holman put it: "I learned long ago that passage of legislation is just half the battle."
Bipolarization
By Brian Friel, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 30, 2007
The nation's political class has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. On one shoulder is an inner voice of bipartisanship, pleading for compromise and moderation. In his November farewell speech from the House floor, Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who is retiring, channeled that voice. "We each have a responsibility to be passionate about our beliefs," the former House speaker said. "That is healthy government. But we also have a responsibility to be civil, to be open-minded, and to be fair, to listen to one another, to work in good faith to find solutions to the challenges facing this nation." On the other shoulder is partisanship, demanding unvarnished stands and their vigorous defense. Hastert's former deputy, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, channeled that voice in his June 2006 farewell speech. "For all its faults, it is partisanship, based on core principles, that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream, and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders," said DeLay, who resigned eight months after a Texas grand jury indicted him in a campaign finance probe. "All we can say is that partisanship is the worst means of settling fundamental political differences -- except for all the others."
Bipartisan compromise. Partisan principle. Which is the devil? Which is the angel?
At least when polled, lawmakers and political operatives usually attach the horns to polarization and the halo to centrism. When National Journal surveyed more than 200 of our Congressional and Political Insiders for this special issue, both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly said that bipartisan legislation is better. "Compromise in its best form is taking the best ideas from both sides and advancing a policy of moderation built on pragmatism, not ideology," a Republican Congressional Insider declared. Majorities on both sides of the aisle also said they would prefer redistricting that created House districts that were not so overwhelmingly skewed toward one party or the other. "It's a big problem for our country," a Democratic Political Insider warned, "that our Congress is more polarized than the voters."
But by their actions, America's politicians hand the harp to partisanship and the pitchfork to bipartisanship. Members of Congress tend to vote along party lines. Their leaders hold votes on bills and amendments designed to draw distinctions between the majority and the minority -- and often refuse to allow votes on compromise legislation. Members of Congress and other political players lambaste the opposite side of the aisle in speeches, press releases, floor statements, television ads, fundraising fliers, and op-eds. And with rare exception, they support only their own partisans in election battles. "One thing you have to start with is a healthy degree of skepticism" when quizzing pols about partisanship, said Marc Hetherington, a political science associate professor at Vanderbilt University. "It is not socially desirable for people to tell you that they think bipartisanship is a bad thing."
The morning of the 21st century may not be the most polarized time in American history, but the Republicans and Democrats who govern the country in 2007 are nonetheless mired in disagreements on nearly all major (and many minor) issues facing the nation, from the Iraq war to the Iranian threat, from health care to Social Security, from a trillion-dollar tax proposal to a million-dollar museum earmark. "There's still this horrible tendency in this place to define success by the failure of the other side," says Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a newcomer to Washington. "When your success is the other side's failing, then that is not a productive work environment."
National Journal's seven-question survey of Democratic and Republican Insiders -- members of Congress and party stalwarts -- found considerable fear and self-loathing among the nation's partisans. We asked them questions that gauged whether they think that bipartisanship and moderation are good or bad for the nation and whether partisanship rules today. We also asked them to assess the outlook for bipartisan cooperation following the already high-gear 2008 election cycle.
In the articles that follow, we'll examine how the tension between partisanship and bipartisanship has played itself out in recent years, and we'll explore what Insiders expect when they look beyond next November.
If you believe that now is the time for partisanship, for the parties to offer clear choices to the electorate, albeit at the price of little legislative accomplishment in the next year, then you'll probably roll your eyes at the "good government" impulses that the Insiders claim to possess in the coming pages. If you think that the time has come for bipartisanship -- as most of the Insiders profess -- then you will see a portrait of pessimism. But you'll also see a glimmer of hope that the country's leaders will emerge in January 2009 from a polarized dark age to finally seek common ground on the issues of the day.
Legislative Stagnation
By dint of its rules and traditions, the majority in the House can, and often does, ram through legislation over the minority's objections. But the majority in the Senate, unless it controls 60 of 100 votes -- which it rarely has in recent years -- can do little without the consent of the minority. So legislation with majority-only support in the House will most likely die in the Senate. "Bipartisanship results in legislation," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. By that rule, then, partisanship results in dead bills.
Congressional Insiders are naturally well aware of this fact of life. More than 80 percent of congressional respondents from each party said that legislation is better when it results from bipartisan compromise. "If the alternative is nothing, then bipartisan cooperation is better," a congressional Democrat remarked. Of course, both parties' lawmakers routinely refer to legislation as "bipartisan" even if only one or two outlier members of the other party favor it. "Most legislation can be improved with true bipartisan compromise, 'true' meaning more than a few nontypical members of the opposite party," a Republican lawmaker said. But that lawmaker and many others put a caveat on their support for bipartisanship on issues involving substantive ideological differences. "On those issues, there should be a clear divide so that the general public has an unambiguous choice," the lawmaker said.
Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, recounted a conversation that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., had with a Democrat. "[Lott] said, 'To you, bipartisanship means we do what you want,' " Bennett recalled. Bennett said that too much legislation is now designed to draw partisan lines rather than to solve problems. "There's nothing wrong with vigorous partisanship, standing up for what you believe in. But what I object to is the posturing -- when you're not trying to pass anything; you're just trying to make a headline to embarrass the other side."
Proponents of bipartisan legislative compromises regularly point to big-ticket bills like the Social Security and tax packages of the early 1980s, welfare reform in the 1990s, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit in this decade as testimony to the power of setting party differences aside. This year has been a bust as far as such major legislation, and partisanship is widely blamed. "You'd have a hard case to make that the Congress is doing its job properly," says former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who since leaving Congress has been vice chairman of the 9/11 commission and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group. "It's not dealing with the problems that are most on the minds of the American people."
Among Political Insiders (who are not members of Congress), support for bipartisan legislation is a bit weaker than among Congressional Insiders. About one-quarter of Democratic Political Insiders and a third of Republican Political Insiders see more value in partisan policy-making than in bipartisanship. Some point out that the comprehensive immigration proposal that tanked in the Senate this year was a result of bipartisan compromise. Others note the same of the No Child Left Behind law, which is being trashed by Democratic presidential candidates and conservative thinkers, alike. "Voters think they like bipartisanship and when we 'work together,' " a Democratic Political Insider said. "But policy is always wimpy when you do that."
Drawing the Lines
In the 1950s, the American Political Science Association lamented the lack of distinctions between the two parties. The association pushed for creation of party platforms that offered voters clear choices on policy issues. The public would then find it easier to hold their representatives accountable each Election Day, because they would know who was responsible for which policies, the argument went. Partisanship, to the association, was good. Bipartisanship was bad.
Today's Political and Congressional Insiders generally say the opposite. For example, they largely support the idea of redistricting congressional seats so that they are less reliably Democratic or less reliably Republican. An increase in the number of truly competitive districts would arguably send more moderate lawmakers to Capitol Hill, ostensibly increasing the likelihood of bipartisan policy-making. Current district lines instead guarantee that the only voters who matter are those in the district's majority party, reformers say. And Hamilton says that the parties have taken partisan gerrymandering to new heights. "These computers today are so sophisticated that if you had a house with a husband and wife of different parties, they would split the house," he jokes.
"What that means is, the elected representatives are more beholden to the extremes, liberal in the Democratic Party, conservative in the Republican Party. That certainly increases the polarization."
Proponents of redistricting changes argue that the American electorate is by and large more moderate than are the representatives whom the current district maps send to Congress. "What the public carries around in their mind is that there are a set of commonsense solutions that any group of reasonable people can get together and pass," Hetherington said. "They don't believe in hyperpartisanship."
Nearly 80 percent of Democratic Insiders and more than 70 percent of Republican Insiders support making redistricting less partisan. (Congressional Insiders are more tepid than their Political counterparts in supporting that idea -- a quarter of Democratic lawmakers and 41 percent of Republican lawmakers oppose it.)
Self-interest may, of course, play a significant role in the thinking on both sides of the issue, because more-competitive districts would benefit Democrats in some states, Republicans in others. But many opponents of making House seats less likely to be deep red or deep blue said either that the system isn't broken or that changing it wouldn't matter. Some opponents said that lawmakers are already accountable to voters, pointing to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and the 2006 Democratic reversal as proof. Others said that redistricting would exacerbate other sources of polarization, such as interest-group money in campaigns, leaving Congress more or less where it is today. Still others said that candidates should not be encouraged to moderate their positions this year. "We need a clear-choice election like we had in '72," a congressional Republican explained, "individualism versus socialism."
Hetherington noted that even though the Senate is not subject to redistricting or gerrymandering, it has, like the House, become more deeply divided along partisan lines in recent decades. "That means another set of explanations are at root," he said.
Insiders have many theories about other causes of polarization. Lawmakers, for example, spend less time than they used to in Washington, giving them fewer opportunities to socialize with members of the other party. Their workweeks are also filled with partisan events, leaving them fewer chances to get to know the other side.
Indeed, while the results of National Journal's Insiders Poll show that it is still socially acceptable to speak highly of bipartisanship in the abstract, in practice social stigmas attach to interparty cooperation. "If you're a member of the minority and you try to be responsible, which means cooperate with the majority, you run the risk of being attacked by your own folks as a squish," Bennett said. Sen. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., nearly lost his seat because of his support for President Bush's policies in Iraq. Lieberman won the 2006 general election as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, who continually accused the incumbent of being too close to Bush. Liberal activists frequently replayed a scene from Bush's 2005 State of the Union address in which the president embraced Lieberman and gave him what looked to be a kiss but which Lieberman said was simply words of encouragement. Similarly, many Democratic activists have harshly criticized Lieberman for supporting the re-election of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who faces a potentially tough challenge from Democratic Rep. Tom Allen.
Is Lieberman listening to the devil or the angel on his shoulder? The answer probably depends on the tenor of the times. Hetherington notes that partisanship thrived throughout much of American history, pointing to the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and of the Civil War as two obvious examples when polarization was more pronounced than it is today. One of the rare times of bipartisanship began in the late 1940s, amid the postwar economic boom and the broad agreement over the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Although today's political insiders yearn for that supposedly golden era, it's worth remembering that political thinkers at the time pined for partisanship.
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Nov. 30, 2007
The nation's political class has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. On one shoulder is an inner voice of bipartisanship, pleading for compromise and moderation. In his November farewell speech from the House floor, Rep. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., who is retiring, channeled that voice. "We each have a responsibility to be passionate about our beliefs," the former House speaker said. "That is healthy government. But we also have a responsibility to be civil, to be open-minded, and to be fair, to listen to one another, to work in good faith to find solutions to the challenges facing this nation." On the other shoulder is partisanship, demanding unvarnished stands and their vigorous defense. Hastert's former deputy, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, channeled that voice in his June 2006 farewell speech. "For all its faults, it is partisanship, based on core principles, that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream, and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders," said DeLay, who resigned eight months after a Texas grand jury indicted him in a campaign finance probe. "All we can say is that partisanship is the worst means of settling fundamental political differences -- except for all the others."
Bipartisan compromise. Partisan principle. Which is the devil? Which is the angel?
At least when polled, lawmakers and political operatives usually attach the horns to polarization and the halo to centrism. When National Journal surveyed more than 200 of our Congressional and Political Insiders for this special issue, both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly said that bipartisan legislation is better. "Compromise in its best form is taking the best ideas from both sides and advancing a policy of moderation built on pragmatism, not ideology," a Republican Congressional Insider declared. Majorities on both sides of the aisle also said they would prefer redistricting that created House districts that were not so overwhelmingly skewed toward one party or the other. "It's a big problem for our country," a Democratic Political Insider warned, "that our Congress is more polarized than the voters."
But by their actions, America's politicians hand the harp to partisanship and the pitchfork to bipartisanship. Members of Congress tend to vote along party lines. Their leaders hold votes on bills and amendments designed to draw distinctions between the majority and the minority -- and often refuse to allow votes on compromise legislation. Members of Congress and other political players lambaste the opposite side of the aisle in speeches, press releases, floor statements, television ads, fundraising fliers, and op-eds. And with rare exception, they support only their own partisans in election battles. "One thing you have to start with is a healthy degree of skepticism" when quizzing pols about partisanship, said Marc Hetherington, a political science associate professor at Vanderbilt University. "It is not socially desirable for people to tell you that they think bipartisanship is a bad thing."
The morning of the 21st century may not be the most polarized time in American history, but the Republicans and Democrats who govern the country in 2007 are nonetheless mired in disagreements on nearly all major (and many minor) issues facing the nation, from the Iraq war to the Iranian threat, from health care to Social Security, from a trillion-dollar tax proposal to a million-dollar museum earmark. "There's still this horrible tendency in this place to define success by the failure of the other side," says Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a newcomer to Washington. "When your success is the other side's failing, then that is not a productive work environment."
National Journal's seven-question survey of Democratic and Republican Insiders -- members of Congress and party stalwarts -- found considerable fear and self-loathing among the nation's partisans. We asked them questions that gauged whether they think that bipartisanship and moderation are good or bad for the nation and whether partisanship rules today. We also asked them to assess the outlook for bipartisan cooperation following the already high-gear 2008 election cycle.
In the articles that follow, we'll examine how the tension between partisanship and bipartisanship has played itself out in recent years, and we'll explore what Insiders expect when they look beyond next November.
If you believe that now is the time for partisanship, for the parties to offer clear choices to the electorate, albeit at the price of little legislative accomplishment in the next year, then you'll probably roll your eyes at the "good government" impulses that the Insiders claim to possess in the coming pages. If you think that the time has come for bipartisanship -- as most of the Insiders profess -- then you will see a portrait of pessimism. But you'll also see a glimmer of hope that the country's leaders will emerge in January 2009 from a polarized dark age to finally seek common ground on the issues of the day.
Legislative Stagnation
By dint of its rules and traditions, the majority in the House can, and often does, ram through legislation over the minority's objections. But the majority in the Senate, unless it controls 60 of 100 votes -- which it rarely has in recent years -- can do little without the consent of the minority. So legislation with majority-only support in the House will most likely die in the Senate. "Bipartisanship results in legislation," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. By that rule, then, partisanship results in dead bills.
Congressional Insiders are naturally well aware of this fact of life. More than 80 percent of congressional respondents from each party said that legislation is better when it results from bipartisan compromise. "If the alternative is nothing, then bipartisan cooperation is better," a congressional Democrat remarked. Of course, both parties' lawmakers routinely refer to legislation as "bipartisan" even if only one or two outlier members of the other party favor it. "Most legislation can be improved with true bipartisan compromise, 'true' meaning more than a few nontypical members of the opposite party," a Republican lawmaker said. But that lawmaker and many others put a caveat on their support for bipartisanship on issues involving substantive ideological differences. "On those issues, there should be a clear divide so that the general public has an unambiguous choice," the lawmaker said.
Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, recounted a conversation that Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., had with a Democrat. "[Lott] said, 'To you, bipartisanship means we do what you want,' " Bennett recalled. Bennett said that too much legislation is now designed to draw partisan lines rather than to solve problems. "There's nothing wrong with vigorous partisanship, standing up for what you believe in. But what I object to is the posturing -- when you're not trying to pass anything; you're just trying to make a headline to embarrass the other side."
Proponents of bipartisan legislative compromises regularly point to big-ticket bills like the Social Security and tax packages of the early 1980s, welfare reform in the 1990s, and the Medicare prescription drug benefit in this decade as testimony to the power of setting party differences aside. This year has been a bust as far as such major legislation, and partisanship is widely blamed. "You'd have a hard case to make that the Congress is doing its job properly," says former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who since leaving Congress has been vice chairman of the 9/11 commission and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group. "It's not dealing with the problems that are most on the minds of the American people."
Among Political Insiders (who are not members of Congress), support for bipartisan legislation is a bit weaker than among Congressional Insiders. About one-quarter of Democratic Political Insiders and a third of Republican Political Insiders see more value in partisan policy-making than in bipartisanship. Some point out that the comprehensive immigration proposal that tanked in the Senate this year was a result of bipartisan compromise. Others note the same of the No Child Left Behind law, which is being trashed by Democratic presidential candidates and conservative thinkers, alike. "Voters think they like bipartisanship and when we 'work together,' " a Democratic Political Insider said. "But policy is always wimpy when you do that."
Drawing the Lines
In the 1950s, the American Political Science Association lamented the lack of distinctions between the two parties. The association pushed for creation of party platforms that offered voters clear choices on policy issues. The public would then find it easier to hold their representatives accountable each Election Day, because they would know who was responsible for which policies, the argument went. Partisanship, to the association, was good. Bipartisanship was bad.
Today's Political and Congressional Insiders generally say the opposite. For example, they largely support the idea of redistricting congressional seats so that they are less reliably Democratic or less reliably Republican. An increase in the number of truly competitive districts would arguably send more moderate lawmakers to Capitol Hill, ostensibly increasing the likelihood of bipartisan policy-making. Current district lines instead guarantee that the only voters who matter are those in the district's majority party, reformers say. And Hamilton says that the parties have taken partisan gerrymandering to new heights. "These computers today are so sophisticated that if you had a house with a husband and wife of different parties, they would split the house," he jokes.
"What that means is, the elected representatives are more beholden to the extremes, liberal in the Democratic Party, conservative in the Republican Party. That certainly increases the polarization."
Proponents of redistricting changes argue that the American electorate is by and large more moderate than are the representatives whom the current district maps send to Congress. "What the public carries around in their mind is that there are a set of commonsense solutions that any group of reasonable people can get together and pass," Hetherington said. "They don't believe in hyperpartisanship."
Nearly 80 percent of Democratic Insiders and more than 70 percent of Republican Insiders support making redistricting less partisan. (Congressional Insiders are more tepid than their Political counterparts in supporting that idea -- a quarter of Democratic lawmakers and 41 percent of Republican lawmakers oppose it.)
Self-interest may, of course, play a significant role in the thinking on both sides of the issue, because more-competitive districts would benefit Democrats in some states, Republicans in others. But many opponents of making House seats less likely to be deep red or deep blue said either that the system isn't broken or that changing it wouldn't matter. Some opponents said that lawmakers are already accountable to voters, pointing to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and the 2006 Democratic reversal as proof. Others said that redistricting would exacerbate other sources of polarization, such as interest-group money in campaigns, leaving Congress more or less where it is today. Still others said that candidates should not be encouraged to moderate their positions this year. "We need a clear-choice election like we had in '72," a congressional Republican explained, "individualism versus socialism."
Hetherington noted that even though the Senate is not subject to redistricting or gerrymandering, it has, like the House, become more deeply divided along partisan lines in recent decades. "That means another set of explanations are at root," he said.
Insiders have many theories about other causes of polarization. Lawmakers, for example, spend less time than they used to in Washington, giving them fewer opportunities to socialize with members of the other party. Their workweeks are also filled with partisan events, leaving them fewer chances to get to know the other side.
Indeed, while the results of National Journal's Insiders Poll show that it is still socially acceptable to speak highly of bipartisanship in the abstract, in practice social stigmas attach to interparty cooperation. "If you're a member of the minority and you try to be responsible, which means cooperate with the majority, you run the risk of being attacked by your own folks as a squish," Bennett said. Sen. Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., nearly lost his seat because of his support for President Bush's policies in Iraq. Lieberman won the 2006 general election as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, who continually accused the incumbent of being too close to Bush. Liberal activists frequently replayed a scene from Bush's 2005 State of the Union address in which the president embraced Lieberman and gave him what looked to be a kiss but which Lieberman said was simply words of encouragement. Similarly, many Democratic activists have harshly criticized Lieberman for supporting the re-election of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who faces a potentially tough challenge from Democratic Rep. Tom Allen.
Is Lieberman listening to the devil or the angel on his shoulder? The answer probably depends on the tenor of the times. Hetherington notes that partisanship thrived throughout much of American history, pointing to the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and of the Civil War as two obvious examples when polarization was more pronounced than it is today. One of the rare times of bipartisanship began in the late 1940s, amid the postwar economic boom and the broad agreement over the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Although today's political insiders yearn for that supposedly golden era, it's worth remembering that political thinkers at the time pined for partisanship.
Follow the Leaders
Regime change was one of the stated goals of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Unlike cleansing the place of weapons of mass destruction and breaking up the alleged Baghdad-Al Qaeda nexus, it was a reality-based goal; and, unlike the other two (which were as unattainable and unnecessary as ridding the moon of green cheese), it was actually accomplished. Saddam Hussein’s regime has indeed been changed—though what it has been changed into, of course, is not quite what was intended.
And regime change, it turns out, is infectious—a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration’s Mesopotamian misadventure. The contagion set in less than a year into the war, when, three days after the Madrid terrorist bombings of March 11, 2004, Spain’s conservative government, which had sent thirteen hundred soldiers to Iraq, was defeated at the polls. The soldiers were out within three months. In May of 2005, it was the turn of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, President Bush’s loudest West European supporter, who had sent three thousand troops; his successor, Romano Prodi, brought them home. In June of this year, Tony Blair was finally obliged to relinquish his grip on Britain’s Labour government, largely because of Iraq; the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has signalled that he intends to withdraw Britain’s troops—some five thousand of the original commitment of forty-five thousand remain—by the end of 2008. Six weeks ago, Poland’s premier, the twin brother of the country’s President, lost to an opponent whose platform included bringing back the nine hundred Polish troops that are still in Iraq. Other countries whose voters have dispensed with the services of leaders who enrolled them in Bush’s “coalition of the willing” include Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia.
A week ago last Saturday, John Howard, the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, became the newest casualty of this political epidemic. Howard’s case is unusual, both for the slavishness with which he has followed Bush’s lead and for the comprehensiveness of his defeat. After a decade in office, and at a time of widespread economic contentment, his center-right coalition was decisively ousted at every level of government. He even lost his parliamentary seat. His fealty to Bush, not only on Iraq but also, and at least as important, on climate change, was, of course, not the only factor. But it colored everything.
Two episodes helped solidify the public’s fed-upness. As close observers of our own election campaign may recall, the Australian Prime Minister greeted Barack Obama’s entry into the Presidential race—and his proposal, at about the same time, for an American withdrawal from Iraq by next March—with a sneer. “If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Howard said, “I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.” Kevin Rudd, then the leader of Australia’s opposition, now Prime Minister-elect, gave him hell for this. But the crispest rebuke came from Obama himself, who, after calling the attack flattering, said, “I would also note that we have close to a hundred and forty thousand troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed fourteen hundred. So if he’s ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another twenty thousand Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.” This point, which an Australian politician might find it awkward to make, exposed the gap between Howard’s talk of the civilizational imperative of victory in Iraq and the relative paltriness of his commitment to that victory. Australian troops have suffered zero combat deaths in Iraq to date. Rudd plans to get them out before any occur. He also plans to sign the Kyoto climate-change protocol in Bali this week, leaving the United States isolated as the only major Western country to reject it.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisThen, in early September, Bush decided to drop in on the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group to give his old mate an electoral boost. The event, which officially described itself as “the most significant international gathering of an economic kind that Australia has hosted,” was supposed to be the zenith of Howard’s premiership. It turned out to be the nadir. He was humiliated when Kevin Rudd chatted with the President of China in perfect Mandarin. He was humiliated when a popular TV satire troupe called the Chaser mounted a fake motorcade, flying a Canadian flag and featuring a rented limo with an actor dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat, and got within ten yards of Bush’s hotel, making a mockery of an elaborate, war-on-terror-inspired security lockdown that had encased downtown Sydney in a “ring of steel.” Bush, for his part, made a fool of himself (and, by extension, of his host) by calling APEC “OPEC” and Australian troops “Austrian troops.” The Bush boost was a Bush bust.
They don’t much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia’s Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes’s “America Against the World” (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners “found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable.” An avalanche of new international polls—from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others—show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. “Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us,” Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about “world opinion,” wrote recently in the Washington Post. “Count that—along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment—as another cost of the war.”
Last week’s gathering of Israeli and (Sunni) Arab leaders at Annapolis was a sign that it has finally dawned on the Bush Administration that its six-year policy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian morass has aggravated America’s troubles in the Middle East. The President may at last have realized that while the issue is not the sole cause of Islamist extremism, it cannot continue to fester––for the sake not only of Israeli survival and justice for the Palestinians but also of beginning to restore some of the global influence and esteem this Administration has squandered. But in suddenly capping six years of obtuse neglect with a one-year timeline, President Bush has probably dithered too long to have any hope of solving the world’s most complicated and persistent rebus. His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war. Those costs keep mounting, and they’re not likely to abate until there’s regime change a little closer to home.
And regime change, it turns out, is infectious—a militarily transmittable disease, almost invariably fatal, so far, to any political party or head of government so careless of hygiene as to have had intimate relations with the Bush Administration’s Mesopotamian misadventure. The contagion set in less than a year into the war, when, three days after the Madrid terrorist bombings of March 11, 2004, Spain’s conservative government, which had sent thirteen hundred soldiers to Iraq, was defeated at the polls. The soldiers were out within three months. In May of 2005, it was the turn of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy, President Bush’s loudest West European supporter, who had sent three thousand troops; his successor, Romano Prodi, brought them home. In June of this year, Tony Blair was finally obliged to relinquish his grip on Britain’s Labour government, largely because of Iraq; the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has signalled that he intends to withdraw Britain’s troops—some five thousand of the original commitment of forty-five thousand remain—by the end of 2008. Six weeks ago, Poland’s premier, the twin brother of the country’s President, lost to an opponent whose platform included bringing back the nine hundred Polish troops that are still in Iraq. Other countries whose voters have dispensed with the services of leaders who enrolled them in Bush’s “coalition of the willing” include Hungary, Ukraine, Norway, and Slovakia.
A week ago last Saturday, John Howard, the second-longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, became the newest casualty of this political epidemic. Howard’s case is unusual, both for the slavishness with which he has followed Bush’s lead and for the comprehensiveness of his defeat. After a decade in office, and at a time of widespread economic contentment, his center-right coalition was decisively ousted at every level of government. He even lost his parliamentary seat. His fealty to Bush, not only on Iraq but also, and at least as important, on climate change, was, of course, not the only factor. But it colored everything.
Two episodes helped solidify the public’s fed-upness. As close observers of our own election campaign may recall, the Australian Prime Minister greeted Barack Obama’s entry into the Presidential race—and his proposal, at about the same time, for an American withdrawal from Iraq by next March—with a sneer. “If I was running Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Howard said, “I would put a circle around March, 2008, and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats.” Kevin Rudd, then the leader of Australia’s opposition, now Prime Minister-elect, gave him hell for this. But the crispest rebuke came from Obama himself, who, after calling the attack flattering, said, “I would also note that we have close to a hundred and forty thousand troops on the ground now, and my understanding is that Mr. Howard has deployed fourteen hundred. So if he’s ginned up to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he call up another twenty thousand Australians and send them to Iraq. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.” This point, which an Australian politician might find it awkward to make, exposed the gap between Howard’s talk of the civilizational imperative of victory in Iraq and the relative paltriness of his commitment to that victory. Australian troops have suffered zero combat deaths in Iraq to date. Rudd plans to get them out before any occur. He also plans to sign the Kyoto climate-change protocol in Bali this week, leaving the United States isolated as the only major Western country to reject it.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisThen, in early September, Bush decided to drop in on the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group to give his old mate an electoral boost. The event, which officially described itself as “the most significant international gathering of an economic kind that Australia has hosted,” was supposed to be the zenith of Howard’s premiership. It turned out to be the nadir. He was humiliated when Kevin Rudd chatted with the President of China in perfect Mandarin. He was humiliated when a popular TV satire troupe called the Chaser mounted a fake motorcade, flying a Canadian flag and featuring a rented limo with an actor dressed as Osama bin Laden in the back seat, and got within ten yards of Bush’s hotel, making a mockery of an elaborate, war-on-terror-inspired security lockdown that had encased downtown Sydney in a “ring of steel.” Bush, for his part, made a fool of himself (and, by extension, of his host) by calling APEC “OPEC” and Australian troops “Austrian troops.” The Bush boost was a Bush bust.
They don’t much like our President in the land Down Under. In the most recent poll by Australia’s Lowy Institute, huge majorities disapproved of American foreign policy in general (sixty-three per cent) and of George W. Bush in particular (sixty-nine per cent). But similar majorities take a positive view of America (sixty per cent) and Americans (seventy-six per cent). The rest of the world, alas, is not so discriminating. According to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes’s “America Against the World” (2006), based on the Pew Global Attitudes Project, there was a time, not so long ago, when foreigners “found it easy to say their problem with America was really President Bush, not a considered judgment of the American people. But the results of the 2004 U.S. presidential election made that rationalization untenable.” An avalanche of new international polls—from Pew, the German Marshall Fund, the BBC, and others—show that anti-Americanism has reached astronomical levels almost everywhere and has solidified even in the Northern European belt from Britain to Poland. “Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us,” Anne Applebaum, a conservative commentator not given to sentimentality about “world opinion,” wrote recently in the Washington Post. “Count that—along with the lives of soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment—as another cost of the war.”
Last week’s gathering of Israeli and (Sunni) Arab leaders at Annapolis was a sign that it has finally dawned on the Bush Administration that its six-year policy of ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian morass has aggravated America’s troubles in the Middle East. The President may at last have realized that while the issue is not the sole cause of Islamist extremism, it cannot continue to fester––for the sake not only of Israeli survival and justice for the Palestinians but also of beginning to restore some of the global influence and esteem this Administration has squandered. But in suddenly capping six years of obtuse neglect with a one-year timeline, President Bush has probably dithered too long to have any hope of solving the world’s most complicated and persistent rebus. His late awakening is yet another cost of the Iraq war. Those costs keep mounting, and they’re not likely to abate until there’s regime change a little closer to home.
The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer
New York State’s notorious resistance to efficient governance owes a lot to geography. The state is vast, by Eastern standards, and its cities are far-flung. Seen one way, it is a rural state, with a right-angled corridor of denser settlement and industry which more or less follows the course of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, from Manhattan to Lake Erie. Imagine a backward, rotated L, or a mirror image of a long-division tableau. In recent decades, Buffalo, at one end, has suffered a steep decline, while New York City, at the other, has flourished, as though good fortune had flowed down along the L, draining Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica along the way. The capital, Albany, is at the joint of the L, and seems to benefit—thrive would be too strong a word—whichever way the fortune flows, but it is still remote, in the way of capitals, like Brasília or Canberra, that were designed not to favor one constituency over another, except perhaps the one in residence. As such, Albany is the arbiter in New York’s ceaseless upstate-downstate tug-of-war, which simultaneously pits rural Republicans against big-city liberals, and Rust Belt Democrats against supply-side suburbanites. The proliferation of cross-purposes and strange bedfellows makes for pernicious and complicated arbitrating. This is one (but far from the only) reason that Albany is home to what may be the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.
A year ago, Eliot Spitzer, the real-estate scion and crusading attorney general, won a lightly contested race for governor, against a Republican named John Faso, by promising to put an end to that dysfunction. Since then, Albany has in many ways become more dysfunctional than ever. The addition of an aggressive personality with an ambitious agenda has, perversely, gummed up the works. The acrimony between Spitzer and his enemies, born of scandal, policy disagreement, political desperation, tactical blundering, and personal animus, has all but stalled the workings of the government, or at least those which require the collaboration of the executive chamber and the Legislature.
The Governor’s aides like to refer to “the Spitzer brand.” Before his first year in office, Eliot Spitzer was a populist avenger, a media darling, a rising Democratic star, a progressive’s Rudy Giuliani, a panacea-in-waiting, a front-runner in the first-Jewish-President race. Somehow, he’s become an unpopular governor careering from mess to mess. Allegations that his office used the state police to smear Joseph Bruno for misusing state aircraft (an affair known as Troopergate), and a doomed proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, have compromised the brand. His head shot has appeared repeatedly in the Post over the words “DIRTY TRICKS.” Lou Dobbs spent a month ridiculing him on CNN. The throngs of Wall Streeters who despised him for his unyielding prosecutions when he was attorney general have been joined by scores of affronted political professionals, whose egos, customs, or survival instincts demand that they indulge their negative reactions to his way of doing things. Against Faso, he got sixty-nine per cent of the vote; a few weeks ago, a poll found that only twenty-five per cent would vote for him if an election were held today. The common perception—the dominant story line—is that Spitzer doesn’t have the collaborative temperament or the tactical elasticity to be a governor. To his critics, who complained that he exploited the attorney general’s office to gain the governor’s mansion, he was too political to be a prosecutor and yet is now too prosecutorial to be a politician.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisBut amid all the rancor, the bad press, and the souring of his prospects, the Governor has kept at it, admitting little in the way of doubt or regret, and seeing the “pushback,” as he and his circle describe it, as evidence of headway. He has continued to conduct whatever business he can, drawing on the ample power granted him by the office, while travelling around the state, announcing initiatives and presiding at groundbreakings, as though taking refuge in the expanse of his obligations and the far reaches of his domain. He has not spent a great deal of time in Albany, the epicenter of his troubles, availing himself of the state-owned air fleet—a source and symbol of geographic freedom and power (and of its occasional abuses). As the early astronauts observed, altitude and distance bring a certain cohesion into view.
“The enormity of this state, it’s awesome,” Spitzer said one afternoon in October, while passing over it in an airplane, on his way from Buffalo to LaGuardia Airport—an Albany-less trip along the L’s hypotenuse. The plane, a twin-turboprop Beechcraft King Air, can seat eight passengers comfortably. Gray cloud cover around Lake Erie had given way to clear skies and sprawling inland vistas in high-autumn orange. “I think we’re seeing the Finger Lakes right up here,” Spitzer said, looking out his window. “Sometimes you can see the windmills.” He unfolded a tattered highway map. “I’ve had this in my briefcase going on nine years now. It’s from back when I was driving myself around, campaigning for attorney general, in ’97, ’98.” He pointed out where he thought we were (near Geneva), as well as where he’d been the day before (Albany, Potsdam, Camden), where he’d started in the morning (Syracuse, to speak at a conference of entrepreneurs), where he’d flown next (Buffalo, to make the first in a blitz of announcements of “City-by-City” upstate development projects), and where his family’s farm was (on a crease in the map, in Columbia County). The map was dense with gubernatorial significance and opportunities for Spitzer to demonstrate a prodigious grasp of policy detail.
A year ago, Eliot Spitzer, the real-estate scion and crusading attorney general, won a lightly contested race for governor, against a Republican named John Faso, by promising to put an end to that dysfunction. Since then, Albany has in many ways become more dysfunctional than ever. The addition of an aggressive personality with an ambitious agenda has, perversely, gummed up the works. The acrimony between Spitzer and his enemies, born of scandal, policy disagreement, political desperation, tactical blundering, and personal animus, has all but stalled the workings of the government, or at least those which require the collaboration of the executive chamber and the Legislature.
The Governor’s aides like to refer to “the Spitzer brand.” Before his first year in office, Eliot Spitzer was a populist avenger, a media darling, a rising Democratic star, a progressive’s Rudy Giuliani, a panacea-in-waiting, a front-runner in the first-Jewish-President race. Somehow, he’s become an unpopular governor careering from mess to mess. Allegations that his office used the state police to smear Joseph Bruno for misusing state aircraft (an affair known as Troopergate), and a doomed proposal to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, have compromised the brand. His head shot has appeared repeatedly in the Post over the words “DIRTY TRICKS.” Lou Dobbs spent a month ridiculing him on CNN. The throngs of Wall Streeters who despised him for his unyielding prosecutions when he was attorney general have been joined by scores of affronted political professionals, whose egos, customs, or survival instincts demand that they indulge their negative reactions to his way of doing things. Against Faso, he got sixty-nine per cent of the vote; a few weeks ago, a poll found that only twenty-five per cent would vote for him if an election were held today. The common perception—the dominant story line—is that Spitzer doesn’t have the collaborative temperament or the tactical elasticity to be a governor. To his critics, who complained that he exploited the attorney general’s office to gain the governor’s mansion, he was too political to be a prosecutor and yet is now too prosecutorial to be a politician.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisBut amid all the rancor, the bad press, and the souring of his prospects, the Governor has kept at it, admitting little in the way of doubt or regret, and seeing the “pushback,” as he and his circle describe it, as evidence of headway. He has continued to conduct whatever business he can, drawing on the ample power granted him by the office, while travelling around the state, announcing initiatives and presiding at groundbreakings, as though taking refuge in the expanse of his obligations and the far reaches of his domain. He has not spent a great deal of time in Albany, the epicenter of his troubles, availing himself of the state-owned air fleet—a source and symbol of geographic freedom and power (and of its occasional abuses). As the early astronauts observed, altitude and distance bring a certain cohesion into view.
“The enormity of this state, it’s awesome,” Spitzer said one afternoon in October, while passing over it in an airplane, on his way from Buffalo to LaGuardia Airport—an Albany-less trip along the L’s hypotenuse. The plane, a twin-turboprop Beechcraft King Air, can seat eight passengers comfortably. Gray cloud cover around Lake Erie had given way to clear skies and sprawling inland vistas in high-autumn orange. “I think we’re seeing the Finger Lakes right up here,” Spitzer said, looking out his window. “Sometimes you can see the windmills.” He unfolded a tattered highway map. “I’ve had this in my briefcase going on nine years now. It’s from back when I was driving myself around, campaigning for attorney general, in ’97, ’98.” He pointed out where he thought we were (near Geneva), as well as where he’d been the day before (Albany, Potsdam, Camden), where he’d started in the morning (Syracuse, to speak at a conference of entrepreneurs), where he’d flown next (Buffalo, to make the first in a blitz of announcements of “City-by-City” upstate development projects), and where his family’s farm was (on a crease in the map, in Columbia County). The map was dense with gubernatorial significance and opportunities for Spitzer to demonstrate a prodigious grasp of policy detail.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, US agencies say
Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 and has not restarted it since, a stunning new assessment released yesterday by intelligence agencies in the United States has found.
The findings contradict an assessment by US intelligence officials two years ago that Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons and appear to undercut President Bush’s repeated warnings about Iran becoming a nuclear power.
As recently as August Mr Bush warned that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology could lead to a holocaust and that the US “will confront this danger before it is too late”. In October he said that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to a third world war.
Last night, however, Mr Bush’s closest aides claimed that the finding was vindication for the White House’s muscular but diplomatic approach. Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush’s National Security Advisor, said that the White House was only told last week about the new assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme.
Related Links
Neighbours still fear Tehran threat
Nuclear watchdog: Iran a year away from bomb
Iran charges ex-negotiator with spying for UK
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report — the consensus view of all 16 US intelligence agencies — says that Iran continues to enrich uranium, which means it might be able to develop a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015 if it restarts its weapons programme. It also said that Iran’s ultimate goal is still to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.
But it adds: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” Two years ago the NIE stated with “high confidence” that Iran was pursuing the nuclear bomb.
Yesterday’s report said that Iran’s ultimate intentions about acquiring a nuclear weapon are unclear, but that Tehran’s decisions “are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.
“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might, if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons programme.”
The assessment comes five years after the release of another report by the NIE which claimed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing the nuclear bomb. The report was one of the main pieces of evidence used by the White House to justify the invasion of Iraq.
It also comes amid a presidential campaign in which the issue of Iran has eclipsed Iraq as the most pressing foreign policy challenge facing the US. Several leading Republican candidates have been bellicose on the issue.
The report addresses claims by President Ahmadinejad of Iran that Tehran has 3,000 centrifuges enriching uranium. It says that Iran might have the centrifuges, but is having difficulties in making them work.
Mr Hadley said: “It [the report] confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. The intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.
“It suggests the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate.”
Last month the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog, reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges. But it said it was unclear if Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon.
The findings contradict an assessment by US intelligence officials two years ago that Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons and appear to undercut President Bush’s repeated warnings about Iran becoming a nuclear power.
As recently as August Mr Bush warned that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology could lead to a holocaust and that the US “will confront this danger before it is too late”. In October he said that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to a third world war.
Last night, however, Mr Bush’s closest aides claimed that the finding was vindication for the White House’s muscular but diplomatic approach. Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush’s National Security Advisor, said that the White House was only told last week about the new assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme.
Related Links
Neighbours still fear Tehran threat
Nuclear watchdog: Iran a year away from bomb
Iran charges ex-negotiator with spying for UK
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report — the consensus view of all 16 US intelligence agencies — says that Iran continues to enrich uranium, which means it might be able to develop a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015 if it restarts its weapons programme. It also said that Iran’s ultimate goal is still to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.
But it adds: “Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons programme suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005.” Two years ago the NIE stated with “high confidence” that Iran was pursuing the nuclear bomb.
Yesterday’s report said that Iran’s ultimate intentions about acquiring a nuclear weapon are unclear, but that Tehran’s decisions “are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.
“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways might, if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons programme.”
The assessment comes five years after the release of another report by the NIE which claimed that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing the nuclear bomb. The report was one of the main pieces of evidence used by the White House to justify the invasion of Iraq.
It also comes amid a presidential campaign in which the issue of Iran has eclipsed Iraq as the most pressing foreign policy challenge facing the US. Several leading Republican candidates have been bellicose on the issue.
The report addresses claims by President Ahmadinejad of Iran that Tehran has 3,000 centrifuges enriching uranium. It says that Iran might have the centrifuges, but is having difficulties in making them work.
Mr Hadley said: “It [the report] confirms that we were right to be worried about Iran seeking to develop nuclear weapons. The intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon remains a very serious problem.
“It suggests the President has the right strategy: intensified international pressure along with a willingness to negotiate.”
Last month the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog, reported that Iran was operating 3,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges. But it said it was unclear if Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Relax? Don't. Iran can still build its bomb
Iran says that a newly published US intelligence report proves that its intentions for its nuclear programme are benign. So does Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the United Nations watchdog, who has greeted the report as if it confirms what he has always maintained – that a resolution of the row with Iran is within reach. However, the offers no reassurance; on the contrary, it supports fears that Iran could soon have nuclear weapons. It argues that Iran has been deterred from pursuing them mainly by the fear of US military action, a fear that has now faded.
That may seem like support for the case for tough action against Iran, and yesterday Downing Street and President Bush were keen to emphasise the seriousness of the threat. But it seems that the report’s conclusions will be even more easily appropriated by the doves, partly because ElBaradei has thrown his weight behind that interpretation.
That is regrettable. The report makes clear the seriousness of the threat, not the opposite. But one rider is necessary: the report would have far more power to convince if it included evidence of the weapons programme that it says existed. Such evidence has eluded UN inspections, and there must be a whisper of doubt – which, after Iraq, the US cannot afford – that the US does not possess it in solid form. The National Intelligence Estimate, compiled from reports by US spies, says that Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq. That marks a shift from two years ago, when a similar report concluded that Iran was still pursuing such efforts in secret, as well as the civilian work it openly discloses.
As diplomatic accusations go, this is something like “Did you stop beating your wife in 2003?” But Iran has appeared delighted to be challenged in this way, focusing only on the assertion that it has now stopped a programme whose existence it has never admitted to. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Foreign Minister, said that the report showed that “the current trend of Iran’s nuclear activities is peaceful”.
That isn’t quite what the report says, but it is a pity that it doesn’t say more. The unclassified summary, released on Monday, says that US agencies have concluded that Iran halted work to design a nuclear weapon in 2003 and that they are “moderately confident” that it has not resumed.
Iran, which has always denied military ambitions, says that its current work is designed to make reactor fuel. But alarm has risen because of its long history of concealment, its continued obstruction of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and its mastery of uranium enrichment, which can make fuel but also fissile material for bombs.
It is a mystery how ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, can think that the report “will help defuse the current crisis”. He added that the US “has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons programme”. Nor does he, as his reports never fail to say. But the IAEA does have a record of consistent obstruction by Iran; ElBaradei’s latest report said that the IAEA’s confidence about the current state of the work had fallen.
It is hard to see why he can be so sanguine about the view that in the very recent past Iran had hopes of nuclear weapons. Or, come to that, about the deduction that the fear of military attack was what persuaded Iran to stop. In the past four years, Iran has become more confident, and its Government more hardline.
There are many good reasons to argue that diplomatic pressure on Iran could yet reap rewards. But the NIE report does not support that stance in the way that ElBaradei and Iran claim; instead, it is a warning of the result of failure.
That may seem like support for the case for tough action against Iran, and yesterday Downing Street and President Bush were keen to emphasise the seriousness of the threat. But it seems that the report’s conclusions will be even more easily appropriated by the doves, partly because ElBaradei has thrown his weight behind that interpretation.
That is regrettable. The report makes clear the seriousness of the threat, not the opposite. But one rider is necessary: the report would have far more power to convince if it included evidence of the weapons programme that it says existed. Such evidence has eluded UN inspections, and there must be a whisper of doubt – which, after Iraq, the US cannot afford – that the US does not possess it in solid form. The National Intelligence Estimate, compiled from reports by US spies, says that Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq. That marks a shift from two years ago, when a similar report concluded that Iran was still pursuing such efforts in secret, as well as the civilian work it openly discloses.
As diplomatic accusations go, this is something like “Did you stop beating your wife in 2003?” But Iran has appeared delighted to be challenged in this way, focusing only on the assertion that it has now stopped a programme whose existence it has never admitted to. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Foreign Minister, said that the report showed that “the current trend of Iran’s nuclear activities is peaceful”.
That isn’t quite what the report says, but it is a pity that it doesn’t say more. The unclassified summary, released on Monday, says that US agencies have concluded that Iran halted work to design a nuclear weapon in 2003 and that they are “moderately confident” that it has not resumed.
Iran, which has always denied military ambitions, says that its current work is designed to make reactor fuel. But alarm has risen because of its long history of concealment, its continued obstruction of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and its mastery of uranium enrichment, which can make fuel but also fissile material for bombs.
It is a mystery how ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, can think that the report “will help defuse the current crisis”. He added that the US “has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons programme”. Nor does he, as his reports never fail to say. But the IAEA does have a record of consistent obstruction by Iran; ElBaradei’s latest report said that the IAEA’s confidence about the current state of the work had fallen.
It is hard to see why he can be so sanguine about the view that in the very recent past Iran had hopes of nuclear weapons. Or, come to that, about the deduction that the fear of military attack was what persuaded Iran to stop. In the past four years, Iran has become more confident, and its Government more hardline.
There are many good reasons to argue that diplomatic pressure on Iran could yet reap rewards. But the NIE report does not support that stance in the way that ElBaradei and Iran claim; instead, it is a warning of the result of failure.
George Bush sent the Palestinian moderates home with little to show and less to sell
BETTER than nothing. For now, that is the most that can be said of the new Arab-Israeli “peace process” George Bush inaugurated in Annapolis on November 27th. After weeks of negotiation, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations did at the last minute approve 437 words for the American president to read out, but this was the sort of declaration that makes the phrase “lowest common denominator” sound generous. It commits both sides to the goal of two states but is utterly silent on borders, Jerusalem, Israel's West Bank settlements and the fate of the Palestinian refugees—all the issues, in fact, that have confounded previous bouts of peacemaking.
The pious hope of this newspaper that America's president might fill the gap was confounded too (see article). Annapolis showed that for all its woes in the Middle East the United States still has pulling power. Saudi Arabia, Syria and a dozen other Arab countries turned up. Had Mr Bush wanted to signal what sort of deal America wanted, this was his chance. Yet his own speech was almost miraculously content-free. There was the ghost of a reference to 1967 and a call for Israel to stop expanding settlements. But saying out loud (as Bill Clinton did) that the border would have to be based on that of 1967, or that the two states would have to share Jerusalem, was evidently too daring for this deadbeat White House.
So Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president Annapolis was intended to strengthen against the rejectionists of Hamas, returns to Ramallah with little to show except the promise of a year of bi-weekly meetings with Ehud Olmert. He has already met the Israeli prime minister umpteen times and they have been unable to agree on any of the substantive issues. Mr Olmert may feel that he came out better from Annapolis. But what a barren victory: how can he or any other Israeli centrist persuade Israel's religious hawks to accept the need to give ground on Jerusalem, for example, while America has a president who is not willing to make such a demand?
It is of course better that the two sides talk, even if their chances of making a breakthrough unaided are nil. Talking is better than killing. Talks might also prepare the ground for the day when America does have a president who is genuinely willing to spend political capital on Palestine. Having a peace process under way should also make it easier to take practical steps to improve the economic conditions of the Palestinians.
And it could get worse
On the other hand, history teaches that the start of even unpromising peace talks galvanises the spoilers from both sides. Right now, with the Gaza Strip under the control of Hamas, the prospects of escalation are all too real. As soon as one of the many rockets that Hamas fires routinely and indiscriminately into Israel's southern towns hits a school or synagogue and kills a large number of Israelis, Mr Olmert will come under intense pressure to send his army back into the Gaza Strip, from which Ariel Sharon controversially extracted it in 2005. That could lead to a war no less brutal than the one Israel fought against Hizbullah in Lebanon last year.
In the White House, Mr Bush's speechwriters are no doubt congratulating him on a good week's work. They appear to think that simply attracting a big crowd of Arabs to Annapolis and talking loftily about an independent Palestine strengthens the region's moderates against the extremists of Hamas and Hizbullah, and the Iranians behind them. But in asking Mr Abbas to lead his exhausted and sceptical people back into the tunnel of negotiations, and neglecting to switch on a light at the end of it, Mr Bush is asking a lot of the Palestinian moderates. If they fail, he will deserve a big share of the blame.
The pious hope of this newspaper that America's president might fill the gap was confounded too (see article). Annapolis showed that for all its woes in the Middle East the United States still has pulling power. Saudi Arabia, Syria and a dozen other Arab countries turned up. Had Mr Bush wanted to signal what sort of deal America wanted, this was his chance. Yet his own speech was almost miraculously content-free. There was the ghost of a reference to 1967 and a call for Israel to stop expanding settlements. But saying out loud (as Bill Clinton did) that the border would have to be based on that of 1967, or that the two states would have to share Jerusalem, was evidently too daring for this deadbeat White House.
So Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president Annapolis was intended to strengthen against the rejectionists of Hamas, returns to Ramallah with little to show except the promise of a year of bi-weekly meetings with Ehud Olmert. He has already met the Israeli prime minister umpteen times and they have been unable to agree on any of the substantive issues. Mr Olmert may feel that he came out better from Annapolis. But what a barren victory: how can he or any other Israeli centrist persuade Israel's religious hawks to accept the need to give ground on Jerusalem, for example, while America has a president who is not willing to make such a demand?
It is of course better that the two sides talk, even if their chances of making a breakthrough unaided are nil. Talking is better than killing. Talks might also prepare the ground for the day when America does have a president who is genuinely willing to spend political capital on Palestine. Having a peace process under way should also make it easier to take practical steps to improve the economic conditions of the Palestinians.
And it could get worse
On the other hand, history teaches that the start of even unpromising peace talks galvanises the spoilers from both sides. Right now, with the Gaza Strip under the control of Hamas, the prospects of escalation are all too real. As soon as one of the many rockets that Hamas fires routinely and indiscriminately into Israel's southern towns hits a school or synagogue and kills a large number of Israelis, Mr Olmert will come under intense pressure to send his army back into the Gaza Strip, from which Ariel Sharon controversially extracted it in 2005. That could lead to a war no less brutal than the one Israel fought against Hizbullah in Lebanon last year.
In the White House, Mr Bush's speechwriters are no doubt congratulating him on a good week's work. They appear to think that simply attracting a big crowd of Arabs to Annapolis and talking loftily about an independent Palestine strengthens the region's moderates against the extremists of Hamas and Hizbullah, and the Iranians behind them. But in asking Mr Abbas to lead his exhausted and sceptical people back into the tunnel of negotiations, and neglecting to switch on a light at the end of it, Mr Bush is asking a lot of the Palestinian moderates. If they fail, he will deserve a big share of the blame.
How the candidates would handle the rest of the world
“WHO among us understands what to do about Pakistan?” Joe Biden asks a good question. No plausible contender for the presidency has much foreign-policy experience. On the Democratic side, Mr Biden himself, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Bill Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, are both experts. But neither will win the nomination. Among Republicans, Senator John McCain has lots of experience but poor prospects. The front-runners are less solidly prepared. Yet as the news from Baghdad, Beirut, Karachi and Annapolis often reminds voters, the next president will have no time to learn on the job. And the voters care: the Iraq war and security issues generally top their list of concerns.
Of the first-tier candidates, Hillary Clinton probably knows the most about foreign affairs. Name a country or a crisis and she can shoot back with a carefully formulated position on it. But her experience of grappling with foreign powers is slighter than she often implies. Racking up airmiles as first lady is not quite the same as negotiating a treaty. She makes much of her speech to the UN women's conference in Beijing in 1995, but a president has to grapple with tougher problems than that.
Mrs Clinton's foreign policies are mostly dull but sensible. She says America “must be guided by a preference for multilateralism, with unilateralism as an option when absolutely necessary”. She thinks international institutions such as the UN are “tools rather than traps”. She favours carrots and sticks to cajole Iran and North Korea into abandoning their nuclear ambitions. She says she will not hesitate to use force when America's vital national interests are threatened. Her critics call this cautious and unimaginative. Many of her supporters think that is a good thing—America is tired of recklessness abroad.
Of the other leading Democrats, Barack Obama has probably thought the hardest about foreign policy. When replying to questions, he tries to answer them, rather than simply shooting out scripted sound-bites. He says he will talk directly to America's enemies, a promise Mrs Clinton calls naive. Noting that he grew up partly in Indonesia, he claims a better understanding of foreign cultures than his rivals have. Mrs Clinton scoffs at the idea that four years abroad as a child counts as foreign-policy experience. Mr Obama retorts (with some justification) that he showed better judgment than her in predicting the debacle in Iraq even as she was voting to authorise it.
Among the leading Republicans, Rudy Giuliani is the anti-Hillary. Like five other candidates, he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs about his foreign policies. Whereas Mrs Clinton's is soporific, Mr Giuliani's makes the reader sit up and gasp. “We are all members of the 9/11 generation,” says the man who led New York when the twin towers fell. “Civilisation itself” is under attack. A president's first task is to defend it against “radical Islamic fascism”. America can win in Iraq, he reckons, as it would have won in Vietnam had the politicians not lost their nerve. If you feel that George Bush has been spineless overseas, Mr Giuliani is undoubtedly your man.
Mitt Romney, who leads the Republican race in Iowa and New Hampshire, sounds less confrontational. His habit of listening to both sides of every argument, say his supporters, bodes well. He wants to re-organise the agencies that conduct foreign policy just as he once re-organised private firms, to make them leaner and more focused on specific goals. He sees radical Islam as a grave threat. His response would be to boost the military budget, and to forge a partnership with moderate Muslim states to promote non-radical schools, microcredit, the rule of law, basic health care and human rights in the Muslim world. When campaigning, however, he sometimes resorts to less technocratic sound-bites. His promise during a debate to “double Guantánamo” alarmed civil libertarians.
Of all the candidates, Mr McCain has staked out the clearest principles and stuck to them most doggedly. He stoutly defends free trade to protectionist audiences. He loudly opposes torture while his Republican colleagues prevaricate. He called for extra American troops in Iraq before it was fashionable, and warns war-weary listeners of the terrible consequences of premature withdrawal. The senator's bluntness wins him many admirers, but other things, such as his age, are against him.
A world of trouble
On the big foreign challenges likely to face a new president, Democrats and Republicans offer contrasting approaches. All the Democrats want to end the war in Iraq, but know it will not be simple. Pressed, neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr Obama nor John Edwards will commit to removing all American troops by 2013. But clearly Democrats would try harder than Republicans to bring more troops home faster. Mr Obama says he would pull out all but those who protect American diplomats and civilians or fight terrorists, and he opposes any permanent American military bases in Iraq. Mrs Clinton also opposes permanent bases, but says a residual American force may have to linger, perhaps based in the Kurdish region.
The Republican candidates say America must win in Iraq before it withdraws. Mr Giuliani, Mr Romney and Mr McCain all cite the recent fall in violence there as evidence that the “surge” of American troops is working. But they disagree as to how to seize this opportunity to help Iraqis build a stable democracy. Mr Romney wants to press neighbouring Arab regimes to help. Mr McCain doubts that Iran or Syria can be persuaded. Mr Giuliani has less to say about nation-building.
Both Democrats and Republicans are alarmed at Iran's apparent plan to build nuclear weapons. But their emphasis is different. Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama and Mr Edwards all refuse to rule out the use of force against Iran. But all stress diplomacy and sanctions to dissuade it from bomb-building, and caution against a rush to war. After Mrs Clinton voted to label as terrorists Iran's Revolutionary Guards, her rivals accused her of smoothing Mr Bush's path to start another war. Republicans are more hawkish. Mr Giuliani will not rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iranian nuclear sites. Mr Romney favours sanctions so tight that Iranian leaders would start to feel like those who upheld apartheid in South Africa. Concerning Pakistan, all the candidates deplore General Pervez Musharraf's declaration of martial law. But the Republicans tend to take a softer line on what to do about it, since Pakistan is an ally against al-Qaeda.
Overall, the two parties have much in common. Neither will put much pressure on Israel, nor move as fast to curb global warming as Europeans demand. Most candidates of both parties want to increase the size of the armed forces. But their differences do matter. The Democrats are more protectionist, though Mrs Clinton's promise of “a little time-out” on trade deals commits her to little. The Republicans are more comfortable with using force, and likely to stay longer in Iraq. And Mr Giuliani is far more bellicose than any other candidate. But as to competence, that depends on the individual candidate—and, since none of the leaders has much of a foreign-affairs record, voters will have to guess about that.
Of the first-tier candidates, Hillary Clinton probably knows the most about foreign affairs. Name a country or a crisis and she can shoot back with a carefully formulated position on it. But her experience of grappling with foreign powers is slighter than she often implies. Racking up airmiles as first lady is not quite the same as negotiating a treaty. She makes much of her speech to the UN women's conference in Beijing in 1995, but a president has to grapple with tougher problems than that.
Mrs Clinton's foreign policies are mostly dull but sensible. She says America “must be guided by a preference for multilateralism, with unilateralism as an option when absolutely necessary”. She thinks international institutions such as the UN are “tools rather than traps”. She favours carrots and sticks to cajole Iran and North Korea into abandoning their nuclear ambitions. She says she will not hesitate to use force when America's vital national interests are threatened. Her critics call this cautious and unimaginative. Many of her supporters think that is a good thing—America is tired of recklessness abroad.
Of the other leading Democrats, Barack Obama has probably thought the hardest about foreign policy. When replying to questions, he tries to answer them, rather than simply shooting out scripted sound-bites. He says he will talk directly to America's enemies, a promise Mrs Clinton calls naive. Noting that he grew up partly in Indonesia, he claims a better understanding of foreign cultures than his rivals have. Mrs Clinton scoffs at the idea that four years abroad as a child counts as foreign-policy experience. Mr Obama retorts (with some justification) that he showed better judgment than her in predicting the debacle in Iraq even as she was voting to authorise it.
Among the leading Republicans, Rudy Giuliani is the anti-Hillary. Like five other candidates, he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs about his foreign policies. Whereas Mrs Clinton's is soporific, Mr Giuliani's makes the reader sit up and gasp. “We are all members of the 9/11 generation,” says the man who led New York when the twin towers fell. “Civilisation itself” is under attack. A president's first task is to defend it against “radical Islamic fascism”. America can win in Iraq, he reckons, as it would have won in Vietnam had the politicians not lost their nerve. If you feel that George Bush has been spineless overseas, Mr Giuliani is undoubtedly your man.
Mitt Romney, who leads the Republican race in Iowa and New Hampshire, sounds less confrontational. His habit of listening to both sides of every argument, say his supporters, bodes well. He wants to re-organise the agencies that conduct foreign policy just as he once re-organised private firms, to make them leaner and more focused on specific goals. He sees radical Islam as a grave threat. His response would be to boost the military budget, and to forge a partnership with moderate Muslim states to promote non-radical schools, microcredit, the rule of law, basic health care and human rights in the Muslim world. When campaigning, however, he sometimes resorts to less technocratic sound-bites. His promise during a debate to “double Guantánamo” alarmed civil libertarians.
Of all the candidates, Mr McCain has staked out the clearest principles and stuck to them most doggedly. He stoutly defends free trade to protectionist audiences. He loudly opposes torture while his Republican colleagues prevaricate. He called for extra American troops in Iraq before it was fashionable, and warns war-weary listeners of the terrible consequences of premature withdrawal. The senator's bluntness wins him many admirers, but other things, such as his age, are against him.
A world of trouble
On the big foreign challenges likely to face a new president, Democrats and Republicans offer contrasting approaches. All the Democrats want to end the war in Iraq, but know it will not be simple. Pressed, neither Mrs Clinton nor Mr Obama nor John Edwards will commit to removing all American troops by 2013. But clearly Democrats would try harder than Republicans to bring more troops home faster. Mr Obama says he would pull out all but those who protect American diplomats and civilians or fight terrorists, and he opposes any permanent American military bases in Iraq. Mrs Clinton also opposes permanent bases, but says a residual American force may have to linger, perhaps based in the Kurdish region.
The Republican candidates say America must win in Iraq before it withdraws. Mr Giuliani, Mr Romney and Mr McCain all cite the recent fall in violence there as evidence that the “surge” of American troops is working. But they disagree as to how to seize this opportunity to help Iraqis build a stable democracy. Mr Romney wants to press neighbouring Arab regimes to help. Mr McCain doubts that Iran or Syria can be persuaded. Mr Giuliani has less to say about nation-building.
Both Democrats and Republicans are alarmed at Iran's apparent plan to build nuclear weapons. But their emphasis is different. Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama and Mr Edwards all refuse to rule out the use of force against Iran. But all stress diplomacy and sanctions to dissuade it from bomb-building, and caution against a rush to war. After Mrs Clinton voted to label as terrorists Iran's Revolutionary Guards, her rivals accused her of smoothing Mr Bush's path to start another war. Republicans are more hawkish. Mr Giuliani will not rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Iranian nuclear sites. Mr Romney favours sanctions so tight that Iranian leaders would start to feel like those who upheld apartheid in South Africa. Concerning Pakistan, all the candidates deplore General Pervez Musharraf's declaration of martial law. But the Republicans tend to take a softer line on what to do about it, since Pakistan is an ally against al-Qaeda.
Overall, the two parties have much in common. Neither will put much pressure on Israel, nor move as fast to curb global warming as Europeans demand. Most candidates of both parties want to increase the size of the armed forces. But their differences do matter. The Democrats are more protectionist, though Mrs Clinton's promise of “a little time-out” on trade deals commits her to little. The Republicans are more comfortable with using force, and likely to stay longer in Iraq. And Mr Giuliani is far more bellicose than any other candidate. But as to competence, that depends on the individual candidate—and, since none of the leaders has much of a foreign-affairs record, voters will have to guess about that.
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