Suicide by Israel

A policeman's nightmare is the prospective suicide who forces the constable to shoot in self-defense. No matter how justified the killing, others always will wonder whether the shooter had an opportunity to avoid a fatal outcome.

Peoples commit suicide as much as do individuals. The geopolitical cognate of "suicide by policeman" is Hamas' attempted suicide by Israel. Israel's objective is to eliminate Hamas rule. There are only two ways to do that: destroy Hamas' international support, or make its rule in Gaza insupportable.

I hate to be the one to bring up the unpleasant things that no one else wants to talk about, but just what do you do when a substantial group of people would rather die on their feet than live on their knees? For Hamas, to live on one's knees would be to accept a permanent Jewish presence in the historic land of Israel, an outcome which Hamas was formed to prevent in the first place.
One answer is that a slow-motion humanitarian disaster will gradually erode the fighting capacity and morale of Hamas and its popular base in Gaza, presuming that external sources of support can be throttled. What the International Red Cross calls "a full-blown humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is, in a certain sense, part of the solution, not part of the problem. A million and a half people have no way to live in Gaza except on the dole of the international community, in a Petrie dish for Islamist extremism.

As the pro-Israeli analyst Martin Kramer observes in his blog, economic sanctions against Gaza - that is, pressure on the civilian population - are an integral and entirely legitimate aim of Israeli policy. "Were Israel to lift the economic sanctions," Kramer writes, "It would transform Hamas control of Gaza into a permanent fact, solidify the division of the West Bank and Gaza, and undermine both Israel and Abbas by showing that violent 'resistance' to Israel produces better results than peaceful compromise and cooperation. Rewarding 'resistance' just produces more of it. So Israel's war aim is very straightforward, and it is not simply a total ceasefire. At the very least, it is a total ceasefire that also leaves the sanctions against Hamas in place. This would place Israel in an advantageous position to bring about the collapse of Hamas rule some time in the future - its long-term objective."

Israel's alternative would be to ignore Hamas, and instead attack Iran or Syria, Hamas' main supporters in the Muslim world. A humiliating blow against the state sponsors of Hamas would make it harder for an organization that represents itself as a non-state player to continue fighting. Last April, Israel had the opportunity to deal such a blow to Syria, and had it taken pre-emptive action against Syria at the time, it is unlikely that the present attack on Gaza would have been necessary. (Please see Ehud Olmert on the Damascus road Asia Times Online, April 15, 2009.)

War with Syria or Iran, to be sure, entails far more risk for the Jewish state. As Barak Ravid wrote in Ha'aretz: "Defense Minister Ehud Barak told [a December 20 conference in Tel Aviv] that Israel is strong enough to take down the Assad regime in case of war with Syria ... However, even if Israel strikes a severe blow, he told the conference, Syria 'even when battered and weak has a significant ability to inflict damage, as a result of the weapons it has and its capacity to use Hezbollah'. Barak emphasized that in the case of a confrontation with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah would also likely join the fighting, and that it is exceedingly difficult to forecast how another war in the Middle East would play out."

It is hard to fault Israel for not taking the risk of war with numerically larger, if technologically inferior, opponents, when those risks are very difficult to assess from the outside. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Israel chose to attack Gaza as a low-risk alternative. Hamas is a far softer opponent than Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon War. Hezbollah had received massive military support from Iran in building tunnel defenses and deploying sophisticated weapons. Hamas does not even appear to have night-vision equipment. A risk-averse strategic posture does not show Israel in a particularly strong light, whatever the merits or demerits of its present policy.

If the world had wanted Israel to adopt an alternative defense strategy, it should have encouraged an Israeli attack on Iran, or Syria, or both. Both the Bush administration as well as the Barack Obama transition team (via Obama's Middle East advisor Robert Malley) favored "engaging Syria", as did Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. That idea may have reached its best-used-by-date. As Lee Smith wrote December 24 on the Hudson Institute website, "The goal of trying to wedge Syria away from Iran is to return it to the so-called 'Sunni fold,' which includes, most importantly, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The problem, however, is that over the last several years Damascus has alienated the Sunni powers, especially Saudi, whose King Abdullah has suffered multiple insults at the hands of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. When enmity becomes personal, as it often does in the Middle East, there is no telling how or when it is likely to be resolved. In other words, there is no Sunni fold for the Syrians to return to: the Sunnis are hardly eager to embrace an Arab regime that over the last four years has served as the Persians' pitbull."

For the moment, Israel is treating Hamas as a state rather than as a state actor. As in any war, economic pressure on the civilian population, as well as military operations that kill civilians as collateral damage to the pursuit of military objectives, are legitimate instruments of warfare. It is hypocrisy to pretend otherwise.

To insist that Israel desist entirely from military activities that have a high probability of causing civilian casualties is doubly hypocritical. That would demand, in effect, that Israel value the lives of Palestinian civilians more than those of its own civilians, who are subject to rocket bombardment. That is something no state in the world can do, and it is silly to ask it. Israel has less reason than any other on Earth to heed such a demand. Never has the state of Israel been offered mercy by its enemies, nor has it any reason to expect it. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by following the almost-golden rule: "Do unto others before they do unto you."

Israel is in the unenviable position of mopping up a problem created by the inertia of the international community. Fourth-generation "refugees" living in towns officially designated as "camps" never have existed under international law until the world community found it expedient to defer the "Palestinian problem" into the indefinite future. The Gazans cannot be economically viable on their 139 square miles of sand, and the humiliation of perpetual dependency and poverty makes a political solution unattainable.

The international community could help most by finding better homes for a few hundred thousand Gazans. The best-case scenario would be a parallel to Hurricane Katrina, which forced the mass evacuation of the city of New Orleans during 2005. Displaced to Atlanta, Georgia, Houston, Texas, and other cities with a strong black middle class, the poor African-American refugees soon were earning more and living better than they had in corrupt, backward New Orleans.

I reviewed the good fortune of the New Orleans refugees here (See Katrina and China's whirlwind growth Asia Times Online, April 25, 2006) and observed that the best way to help poor people is to move them out of poor regions into rich ones. The late Sam Kinison's stand-up comedy routine about world hunger applies doubly to Gaza. "You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don't send them another bite, send them U-Hauls ... we've been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS!"

Otherwise, the default recommendation is what I offered five years ago, (See see More killing, please! Asia Times Online, June 12, 2003). As I observed at the time,

A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side. Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.

That is horrifying, but nonetheless true, and the international community simply may have to raise its threshold of horror.

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Author: Spengler
Original Source: Asia Times
Date Published: Jan 8, 2009
Web Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA08Ak01.html
Date Accessed Online: 2009-01-08

Obama et l'islam, délicate équation

L'élection de Barack Obama a soulevé un vent d'espoir aux Etats-Unis, mais aussi dans le monde musulman, où l'Amérique se trouve engagée sur plusieurs fronts depuis les attaques du 11-Septembre.

Barack Obama arrive avec quatre atouts : le fait de succéder à un président honni, George Bush, ne peut que le servir ; le fait que son père l'ait appelé Hussein, son second prénom, qui est celui du petit-fils du prophète, ne peut que susciter la curiosité et la sympathie des musulmans, notamment des chiites ; le fait qu'il ait vécu une partie de son enfance dans des pays musulmans. Enfin, le fait qu'il soit métis rompt avec l'identification de l'Amérique à un pays d'impérialistes blancs. En outre, au cours des primaires, il a promis d'organiser un sommet entre les Etats-Unis et les pays musulmans pour traiter de l'incompréhension qui caractérise leurs relations.

Malgré ces atouts, rien n'est gagné, car la politique internationale est une affaire de rapports de forces. Or, il ne suffit pas d'être beau et sympathique, métis et de père musulman pour réussir dans l'aire arabo-islamique. L'héritage désastreux du président Bush prive en effet son successeur tant de moyens de séduction que de répression. L'état des finances - publiques et privées -, du déficit et de la dette, est tel qu'il plonge les Américains dans le doute. L'onde de choc de la crise financière peut anéantir la croissance mondiale. Quant au recours à la force, on perçoit ses limites avec l'enlisement de l'armée américaine en Afghanistan et en Irak, et avec le discrédit de la puissance américaine au Moyen-Orient face à la montée de l'Iran. Dans ces conditions, il est difficile d'imaginer que l'armée américaine s'engage dans un nouveau conflit.

Pour retrouver une marge de manoeuvre et permettre à l'économie de rebondir, la première mission d'Obama sera de rétablir la confiance chez les Américains. Il n'est donc pas dit que ces derniers continuent d'accepter que leur Etat dépense tant de milliards sur la scène internationale et néglige ses secteurs vitaux, comme la sécurité sociale ou l'enseignement.

Avec la perspective d'un repli sur les préoccupations domestiques, de quels moyens les Etats-Unis disposeront-ils pour s'imposer à l'étranger ? Le candidat Obama a annoncé, avec raison, sa volonté de mobiliser les moyens nécessaires pour remporter la guerre en Afghanistan, et conjointement au Pakistan. Cette approche peut difficilement être contestable.

En revanche, le retrait de l'armée américaine d'Irak en seize mois n'est pas seulement une utopie, ce serait une erreur qui ne manquerait pas de se traduire par une défaite stratégique pour les Etats-Unis. Un retrait prématuré d'Irak, avant qu'une armée nationale ne soit constituée et opérationnelle, livrerait le pays à l'influence de l'Iran et permettrait le retour triomphal d'Al-Qaida, alors même que le général Petraeus est parvenu à retourner la population sunnite contre l'organisation d'Oussama Ben Laden. Un retrait précipité affaiblirait aussi les alliés de l'Amérique dans la région et sonnerait le glas de la présence de bases américaines dans les pétromonarchies, indispensables à la stabilité du Golfe et des approvisionnements pétroliers.

Quant aux négociations "inconditionnelles" avec l'Iran, préconisées par le candidat Obama, elles ne peuvent qu'être sanctionnées par un échec, à l'image de celles entreprises par les Européens et qui n'en finissent pas de jouer les prolongations. Or, pendant ce temps, l'Iran poursuit sa politique du fait accompli dans le domaine nucléaire, de même qu'il renforce son influence dans le "croissant chiite", qui s'étend désormais de la Caspienne à la Méditerranée en comprenant l'Irak post-Saddam, la Syrie alaouite, le Liban dominé par le Hezbollah, et même le Hamas palestinien, pourtant sunnite.

Il faut reconnaître que cette domination iranienne est due aux erreurs de George Bush, dont le deuxième mandat a été marqué par l'affaiblissement de sa politique et par l'échec d'Israël face au Hezbollah en 2006. Le seul point positif est le retrait de l'armée syrienne du Liban, en 2005, obtenu il est vrai grâce à une étroite concertation avec le président Jacques Chirac. Mais cela risque de n'être qu'un repli, puisque Damas rêve de retour et engage des manoeuvres à cet effet. Contrairement aux attentes syriennes, Barack Obama et Nicolas Sarkozy ne doivent pas laisser faire.

En outre, la satisfaction des attentes de l'Iran constituerait une victoire sans appel pour la République islamique. Elle renforcerait la poursuite de l'enrichissement ; la sanctuarisation du régime des mollahs ; la constitution d'un condominium régional, identique à celui qui était jadis en vigueur entre le chah et Washington ; et le retrait des bases américaines de la région. Les relations de Washington avec les monarchies sunnites du Golfe s'en trouveraient perturbées, ces bases permettant aussi d'endiguer l'hégémonie iranienne. Un éventuel repli américain d'Irak et de la région précipiterait ces pays dans l'orbite de Téhéran et permettrait à ce dernier de contrôler les deux tiers des réserves mondiales d'hydrocarbures.

Enfin, Barack Obama a soulevé beaucoup d'espoir chez les Palestiniens - espoir qui s'est émoussé au fil de la campagne avec des positions de plus en plus proches d'Israël. La première nomination du président élu donne déjà le ton : c'est un Israélo-Américain qui a été placé à la tête de l'administration de la Maison Blanche. Il a servi dans l'armée de Tsahal et est connu pour son militantisme. Néanmoins, il n'est pas interdit d'espérer que M. Obama aborde la question israélo-palestinienne sur le terrain politique et non plus exclusivement sécuritaire, ce qui permettra aux Palestiniens de faire valoir leur droit à un Etat, aux côtés d'un Israël sécurisé.

L'agenda des prochains mois n'est pas propice à la recherche de solutions puisque les Israéliens et les Palestiniens ont rendez-vous avec les urnes. En outre, le conflit israélo-palestinien ne devrait pas être la priorité de Barack Obama, d'abord préoccupé par le règlement des conflits où l'armée américaine se trouve déjà engagée. La crédibilité du nouveau président dans le monde musulman dépend pourtant du règlement de cette crise. D'autant plus que la réconciliation entre l'Amérique et les musulmans est indispensable pour mieux isoler et combattre l'idéologie islamiste belliqueuse qui considère la civilisation occidentale comme l'incarnation du "mal absolu".

Finalement, ce qui menace le plus le nouveau président américain est une érosion rapide des espoirs qu'il a soulevés, parce que la conjoncture économique et l'image de Washington sont au plus mauvais et que l'homme arrive à la Maison Blanche dépourvu de la "carotte" et du "bâton" qui, par le passé, ont permis aux Etats-Unis d'asseoir leur puissance.

Antoine Basbous est directeur de l'Observatoire des pays arabes.

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Author: Antoine Basbous
Original Source: LE MONDE
Date Published: 17.11.08
Web Source: http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2008/11/17/obama-et-l-islam-delicate-equation-par-antoine-basbous_1119573_3232.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-18-03

Obama and the War on Brains

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.

As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.

At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”

(It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas. After one of Stevenson’s high-brow speeches, an admirer yelled out something like, You’ll have the vote of every thinking American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That’s not enough. I need a majority!)

Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?

Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited superficiality.

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”)

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.

As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.

James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.

Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

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Author: NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 9, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09kristof.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-11

AL GORE: The Climate for Change

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

Economists across the spectrum — including Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers — agree that large and rapid investments in a jobs-intensive infrastructure initiative is the best way to revive our economy in a quick and sustainable way. Many also agree that our economy will fall behind if we continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign oil every year. Moreover, national security experts in both parties agree that we face a dangerous strategic vulnerability if the world suddenly loses access to Middle Eastern oil.

As Abraham Lincoln said during America’s darkest hour, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” In our present case, thinking anew requires discarding an outdated and fatally flawed definition of the problem we face.

Thirty-five years ago this past week, President Richard Nixon created Project Independence, which set a national goal that, within seven years, the United States would develop “the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources.” His statement came three weeks after the Arab oil embargo had sent prices skyrocketing and woke America to the dangers of dependence on foreign oil. And — not coincidentally — it came only three years after United States domestic oil production had peaked.

At the time, the United States imported less than a third of its oil from foreign countries. Yet today, after all six of the presidents succeeding Nixon repeated some version of his goal, our dependence has doubled from one-third to nearly two-thirds — and many feel that global oil production is at or near its peak.

Some still see this as a problem of domestic production. If we could only increase oil and coal production at home, they argue, then we wouldn’t have to rely on imports from the Middle East. Some have come up with even dirtier and more expensive new ways to extract the same old fuels, like coal liquids, oil shale, tar sands and “clean coal” technology.

But in every case, the resources in question are much too expensive or polluting, or, in the case of “clean coal,” too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate. Indeed, those who spend hundreds of millions promoting “clean coal” technology consistently omit the fact that there is little investment and not a single large-scale demonstration project in the United States for capturing and safely burying all of this pollution. If the coal industry can make good on this promise, then I’m all for it. But until that day comes, we simply cannot any longer base the strategy for human survival on a cynical and self-interested illusion.

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.

Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with “smart” features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid — $400 billion over 10 years — pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Third, we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings — and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

Of course, the best way — indeed the only way — to secure a global agreement to safeguard our future is by re-establishing the United States as the country with the moral and political authority to lead the world toward a solution.

Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.

Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, was the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He founded the Alliance for Climate Protection and, as a businessman, invests in alternative energy companies.

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Author: AL GORE
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 9, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09gore.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-09

What Kind of US President Would Chinese Like?

With Obama having completed his historic path to the White House, we feel a need to let it be known what kind of president Chinese would most welcome.

Over the past decade, every time the White House has changed hands, its relationship with China has hit rough seas. As each president sought to flex their newfound strength, China became one of the victims. Trade protectionism gave way to a new period of relationship repairing. Only by the third or fourth year did relations stabilize.

Bill Clinton and George Bush both spent two terms in the White House. The former at first supported setting limits on China's most favored nation status, while Bush framed China as a competitor. In the end, shared interest forced both countries to shelve their differences, and they were able to establish mutually agreeable terms for cooperation. Because of this, during both the Clinton and Bush era,the two countries benefited economically from the stable bilateral relationship.

This year, we noticed political and academic circles in both countries were more optimistic. They broadly believed that the relationship was entering a period of maturity, and that regardless of who would take office next, they would not be able to dramatically shake this trend. During this year's election, China did not become a major campaign issue, indicating that both sides agree over it more than they disagree.

Meanwhile, with the financial crisis still storming forward, economic issues have taken paramount importance. Two major engines of global economic growth – the US and China – have both begun to exhibit signs of slowdown. In the third quarter, the US economy shrank by 0.3%, while China's economy only recorded 9% growth.

With both countries gearing up to avoid an economic slide, stable relations are especially critical. It should be clear to the new president that both countries are mutually dependent on trade. Before the crisis, China accumulated US dollars through exporting, and spent most of them on Treasury bonds. Americans were able to maintain their consumption levels by borrowing, while also providing a huge market for Chinese products.

The global financial crisis has forced both countries to abandon previous paths for growth. China needs to base its growth on increasing domestic consumption, and the US must forfeit its reliance on heavy financial leverage to spur it. The new president should not simply blame China for a trade imbalance, and blindly demand that the yuan appreciate.

The November 15 G20 meeting is being seen as an opportunity for the US and the international community to jointly solve the financial crisis and build a new global financial system. At this juncture, we should not overly preoccupy ourselves with how to prevent the further deepening of the crisis, but instead focus on how to solve the fundamental and fatal flaws in the financial system. The new president should be willing to courageously take up this cause, and show more self-restraint in the printing of the US dollar.

Regarding other long-standing differences between the US and China, for example, in human rights, Tibet, and other problems, the new president should learn how to be more respectful of China's sovereignty. Countries will inevitably be different, and reckless condemnation will only deepen mistrust between them and leave problems unsolved. Globalization is bringing the hearts of people the world over closer together, and foresightedness and modesty will go a long way towards earning their respect.

China and the US have both affirmed that Taiwan is a part of China. With this significant premise set, the Taiwan question should not be a stumbling block for the two countries' relationship, and instead, be a chance to catalyze a stronger one. The new US president should not continue arms sales to Taiwan, as peace in the strait of Fermosa is of the interest of all parties. With both Taiwanese and mainlanders sharing the same blood and traditions, unification will come sooner or later, and the new president should work towards making this inevitability a more perfect and mature one.

Finally, we want to reiterate that Iraq has become the biggest mistake of the Bush presidency. We are looking forward to a president who does not walk with a big stick, strutting with the air of a haughty soldier. The new president should let the children wearing soldier's uniforms come home soon, and pour their energy into making the US economy flourish once again.

This is the kind of president we would like to see.

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Author: Wen Zhao
Original Source: The Economic Observer
Date Published: 2008-11-05
Web Source: http://www.eeo.com.cn/ens//Observer/2008/11/05/119199.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-03

When Duty Calls: The Value of Voting, Beyond Politics

For those who love the civic cheer and lukewarm coffee of their local polling place, an absentee ballot has all the appeal of a tax form. The paperwork, the miniature type, the search (in some states) for a notary public: it’s a tedium bath, and Pam Fleischaker, a lifelong Democrat from Oklahoma City, had every reason to take a pass this year.

Ms. Fleischaker, 62, was in New York recovering from a heart transplant, for one. And in her home state, the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama, was polling hopelessly behind his opponent, Senator John McCain. She mailed in her absentee packet anyway, and hounded her two children, also in New York, to do the same.

“That one vote isn’t going to be decisive makes no difference to me,” Ms. Fleischaker said in a telephone interview last week. “Your vote is your voice, and there’s more power in it than in most of the things we do. It’s a lost pleasure, the feeling of that power.”

In recent years psychologists and neuroscientists have tried to get a handle on how people make voting decisions. They have taken brain scans, to see how certain messages or images activate emotion centers. They have spun out theories of racial bias, based on people’s split-second reactions to white and black faces. They have dressed up partisan political stereotypes in scientific jargon, describing conservatives as “inordinately fearful and craving order,” and liberals as “open-minded and tolerant.”

None of which has helped predict people’s behavior in elections any more than a half-decent phone survey. The problem is not only sketchy science, some experts say; it’s that researchers don’t agree on the answer to a more fundamental question: Why do people vote at all?

“There’s a longstanding literature looking at why any rational person would vote, when the chances of actually influencing an election are about the same as getting hit by lightning,” said John Londregan, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. “In most theoretical models, it’s hard to get a predicted turnout above one. That is, one voter.”

Yet new models have done better, predicting elections with turnouts closer to the nation’s average of about 50 percent of eligible voters. They have also revealed some of the basic motives underlying both personal and group decisions about when to vote and why.

Casting a ballot clearly provides a value far higher than its political impact. The benefit may include side payments — say, the barbecues and camaraderie of a campaign, or the tiny possibility that a single vote may be decisive.

But recent research suggests that it has more to do with civic duty and the maintenance of moral self-image. In a series of experiments, researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, have had study participants play a simple election game involving monetary rewards. A group of designated voters cast their vote for Choice A, an equal distribution of money among voters and nonvoters in the study; or B, a payout to be split only among the designated voters — a smaller group, so a higher amount. It cost money to vote, and participants could abstain at no cost.

The study authors, led by Sean Gailmard at Berkeley, called Choice A “ethical” and Choice B “selfish.” They found that ethical voting ran highest, at about 20 percent, when individual votes were least likely to affect the outcome. Selfish voting ran highest, also about 20 percent, when individuals’ choices were most likely to change the outcome.

This finding could explain why people might vote against a local tax increase but for a Congressional candidate who was likely to raise their income taxes: their vote carries far less value in a national race than in a local one.

This study and others also imply that there is a core of voters who not only turn out at the polls but also cast their ballot for the candidate or proposal they believe represents the larger good. This makes sense to those who study the evolution of group behavior. Small communities often have a scattering of people who stand up and do the right thing; their compensation is the private knowledge that they are willing to pay some cost to do what they believe is right, even if that price amounts to standing out in the cold for 15 minutes waiting to pull a lever.

“It may be a form of identity construction for individuals,” Dr. Gailmard wrote in an e-mail message. “Or it could be a duty to do the right thing, or a social norm.”

Ms. Fleischaker, the absentee Oklahoma voter, put it this way: “Who are we to ask others to do things for this country, small or very large, like fighting in a war, if we ourselves are not going to take the trouble to vote?”

The military analogy is not overdrawn, Dr. Londregan says. In a 2006 paper, “Voting as a Credible Threat,” he and Andrea Vindigni of Princeton argue from historical and sociological evidence that at times of deep division, elections function as an X-ray into the strength of the opposition, the number of people willing to bear a cost to have their way. In the extreme, election returns prompt factions on the brink of civil war to reassess their chances and negotiate — making communities, small and large, far more stable and adaptive.

“We started to see that elections function as a kind of SAT score to show what kind of guerrilla you’d be,” Dr. Londregan said. “They’re a way to see how many people would actually fight to oppose a policy — and how much is just bravado.”

Dutiful voters know all this, at some level, no matter how they define the larger good. They think more broadly about what others of their stripe will do, spending more effort if they feel their home team will be underrepresented, political scientists have found.

By taking into account such calculations, as well as ethical voting, the costs of casting a ballot and other parameters, Timothy Feddersen and Alvaro Sandroni of Northwestern University — Dr. Gailmard’s co-authors on the ethical voting research — have designed a model that accurately predicted turnout in several local Texas elections.

“The model predicts that in states where the election is close, turnout will be high among all groups,” Dr. Feddersen said, adding that in states where the election is unlikely to be close, “partisans are less likely to vote when they are in the majority and more likely to vote when they are in the minority,” or expect to lose.

In short, expect the race in states like New York and Oklahoma to be closer than polls show, not because of hidden racism or “inordinate fear” but because many people find it satisfying to stand up and be counted — even if they’re doing the counting for themselves.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 5, 2008
Because of an editing error, the Mind column on Tuesday, about psychologists’ efforts to analyze voting behavior, paraphrased incorrectly from a comment by Timothy Feddersen of Northwestern University, who helped devise a model that accurately predicted turnout in several local Texas elections. Dr. Feddersen said that “partisans are less likely to vote when they are in the majority and more likely to vote when they are in the minority” in states where the election is unlikely to be close — not in “toss-up states.”

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Author: BENEDICT CAREY
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 4, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/health/research/04mind.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-03

November 4, 2008

For Many Abroad, an Ideal Renewed

GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

“It allows us all to dream a little,” said Oswaldo Calvo, 58, a Venezuelan political activist in Caracas, in a comment echoed to correspondents of The New York Times on four continents in the days leading up to the election.

Tristram Hunt, a British historian, put it this way: Mr. Obama “brings the narrative that everyone wants to return to — that America is the land of extraordinary opportunity and possibility, where miracles happen.”

But wonder is almost overwhelmed by relief. Mr. Obama’s election offers most non-Americans a sense that the imperial power capable of doing such good and such harm — a country that, they complain, preached justice but tortured its captives, launched a disastrous war in Iraq, turned its back on the environment and greedily dragged the world into economic chaos — saw the errors of its ways over the past eight years and shifted course.

They say the country that weakened democratic forces abroad through a tireless but often ineffective campaign for democracy — dismissing results it found unsavory, cutting deals with dictators it needed as allies in its other battles — was now shining a transformative beacon with its own democratic exercise.

It would be hard to overstate how fervently vast stretches of the globe wanted the election to turn out as it did to repudiate the Bush administration and its policies. Poll after poll in country after country showed only a few — Israel, Georgia, the Philippines — favoring a victory for Senator John McCain.

“Since Bush came to power it’s all bam, bam, bam on the Arabs,” asserted Fathi Abdel Hamid, 40, as he sat in a Cairo coffee house.

The world’s view of an Obama presidency presents a paradox. His election embodies what many consider unique about the United States — yet America’s sense of its own specialness, of its destiny and mission, has driven it astray, they say. They want Mr. Obama, the beneficiary and exemplar of American exceptionalism, to act like everyone else, only better, to shift American policy and somehow to project both humility and leadership.

And there are others who fear that Mr. Obama will be soft in a hard-edged world where what is required is a clear line in the sand to fanatics, aggressors and bullies. Israelis worry that he will talk to Iran rather than stop it from developing nuclear weapons; Georgians worry that he will not grasp how to handle Russia.

An Obama presidency, they say, risks appeasement. It will “reassure Europeans of their defects,” lamented Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the Italian right-wing daily Il Foglio.

Such contradictory demands and expectations may reflect, in part, the unusual makeup of a man of mixed race and origin whose life and upbringing have touched several continents.

“People feel he is a part of them because he has this multiracial, multiethnic and multinational dimension,” said Philippe Sands, a British international lawyer and author who travels frequently, adding that people find some thread of their own hopes and ideals in Mr. Obama. “He represents, for people in so many different communities and cultures, a personal connection. There is an immigrant component and a minority component.”

Francis Nyamnjoh, a Cameroonian novelist and social scientist, said he saw Mr. Obama less as a black man than “as a successful negotiator of identity margins.”

His ability to inhabit so many categories mirrors the African experience. Mr. Nyamnjoh said that for America to choose as its citizen in chief such a skillful straddler of global identities could not help but transform the nation’s image, making it once again the screen upon which the hopes and ambitions of the world are projected.

Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at the People’s University of China, said Mr. Obama’s background, particularly his upbringing in Indonesia, made him suited to understanding the problems facing the world’s poorer nations.

He and others say they hope the next American president will see their place more firmly within the community of nations, engaging in what Jairam Ramesh, junior commerce minister in the Indian government, called “genuine multilateralism and not in muscular unilateralism.”

Assuming Mr. Obama does play by international rules more fully, as he has promised, can his government live up to all the expectations?

“We have so many hopes and wishes that he will never be able to fulfill them,” said Susanne Grieshaber, 40, an art adviser in Berlin who was one of 200,000 Germans to attend a speech by Mr. Obama there in July. She cited action to protect the environment, reducing the use of force and helping the less fortunate. In essence, she wants Mr. Obama to make his country more like hers. But she is sober. “I’m preparing myself for the fact that peace and happiness are not going to suddenly break out,” she said.

Many in less developed countries — especially in the Arab world — agree that Mr. Obama will not carry out their wishes regarding American policy toward Israel and much else, and so they shrug off the results as ultimately making little difference.

“We will be optimistic for two months but that’s it,” predicted Huda Naim, 38, a member of the Hamas parliament here who said her 15-year-old son had watched Mr. Obama’s rise with rapt attention.

But some remain darkly suspicious of the election itself. They doubted that Mr. Obama could be nominated or elected. Now they doubt that he will govern. The skeptics say they believe that American policy is deeply institutionalized and that if Mr. Obama tries to shift it, “they” — the media, the corporate robber barons, the hidden powers — will box him in or even kill him.

“I am afraid for him,” said Alberto Müller Rojas, a retired Venezuelan Army general and the vice president of President Hugo Chávez’s Unified Socialist Party. “The pressures he will face from certain sectors of society, especially from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, will be enormous.”

Part of that fear stems from genuine if distant affection.

“He has charisma, he’s good-looking, he’s very smart, he’s young and he knows how to make people like him, to the point that when he went to bow down to the Israelis, people here still made excuses for him,” said Nawara Negm, an Egyptian writer and blogger.

There is another paradox about the world’s view of the election of Mr. Obama: many who are quick to condemn the United States for its racist past and now congratulate it for a milestone fail to acknowledge the same problem in their own societies, and so do not see how this election could offer them any lessons about themselves.

In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of human rights violation with “But you hang Negroes,” analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain. But they speak of it without reference to their own treatment of ethnic minorities.

“Definitely, this will improve America’s image in Russia,” said Sergey M. Rogov, director of the Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies in Moscow. “There was this perception before of widespread racism in America, deeply rooted racism.”

In Nigeria, a vast, populous and diverse collection of states, Reuben Abati, an influential columnist, has written, “Nigerians love good things in other lands, even if they are not making any effort to reproduce the same at home,” adding, “If Obama had been a Nigerian, his race, color and age would have been an intractable problem.”

So foreigners are watching closely, hoping that despite what they consider the hypocrisies and inconsistencies, the nation they once imagined would stand as a model for the future will, with greater sensitivity and less force, help solve the world’s problems.

There is a risk, however, to all the extraordinary international attention paid to this most international of American politicians: Mr. Obama’s focus will almost certainly be on the reeling domestic economy, housing and health care. Will he be able even to lift his head and gaze abroad to all those with such high expectations?

Reporting was contributed by Rachel Donadio from Rome; Steven Erlanger from Paris; Nazila Fathi from Tehran; Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem; Nicholas Kulish from Berlin; Clifford J. Levy from Moscow; Sarah Lyall from Reykjavik, Iceland; Lydia Polgreen from Dakar, Senegal; Simon Romero from Caracas, Venezuela; Somini Sengupta from New Delhi; Michael Slackman from Cairo; Sabrina Tavernise from Istanbul and Kiev, Ukraine; Edward Wong from Beijing; and Robert F. Worth from Sana, Yemen.

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Author: Ethan Bronner
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 5, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05global.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-05