Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘United States’ Category

Muslim integration falling victim to media drive for conflict

Posted in Middle East, United States on September 15, 2010|

[Originally published in Nieman Watchdog.]

Seven years ago, it was neonconservatism that led to a major clash between the U.S. and Islam. Will the 24-hour news cycle cause the next one?

What has most set the United States apart from its fellow liberal democracies in Western Europe over the nine years since 9/11 has been our acceptance and integration of Muslims into American life.

That essentially benign and welcoming attitude, fortified by our history of encouraging immigration and our principled Constitution, has been the main reason we have not suffered the kinds of terrorist attacks that have plagued countries like Britain and Spain, where attitudes have been less than welcoming.

All that now seems to be changing. Virulently anti-Muslim groups are trading on the fears of the largely uninformed American population by aiding and abetting anyone who wants to join or ramp up the hue and cry against Islam. Recent national focus on the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan and new mosques in Tennessee and the Midwest, as well as attacks on mosques around the country, all seem to be stirring up the pot.

The situation has gotten so out of hand that we are now being warned by the president, the secretary of state and even our favorite General Petraeus that a continuation of this anti-Islamic rhetoric and activity will gravely damage the United States throughout the Islamic world, particularly in those regions where we have committed our military power – Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc.

Of course, these warnings of calamity to come are precisely the same warnings given to the Bush administration by the State Department, by our favorite general of that moment (Eric Shinsheki), by the CIA and by countless Middle East experts and observers during their ramp-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite those warnings, President Bush, inspired by an extremist neocon vision of democratization through unilateral preemptive war, invaded Iraq. The Muslim world was inflamed.

Just as those warnings seven years ago proved to be prophetic, today’s warnings are likely to come true as well. But the media doesn’t have to make things worse.

Last week’s threatened burning of Korans by an obscure group of 50-odd, fundamentalist Christian radicals in Florida would never have gotten any attention anywhere were it not for the eager complicity of today’s American media which, in its endless, ongoing quest to fill the news for 24 hours of every day, took an otherwise insignificant story and ballooned it into a crisis.

In this case the media’s drive to manufacture stories could have resulted in additional American deaths abroad or, if Muslim integration in this country suffers, even at home.

No one questions the media’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech, but that right brings with it some responsibilities, which were in no way met by the coverage of this woeful Florida preacher’s antics.

Could it be that the media’s need to manufacture conflict will be the source of America’s next great clash with the Muslim world – this time, perhaps, within our own borders?

Read Full Post »

Are Americans Giving Up on Their Freedoms?

Posted in terrorism, United States on January 28, 2010|

[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]

Compared with much of the rest of the world, America enjoys unparalleled, constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Unfortunately, in bad or difficult times, our national leadership, irrespective of political party, is prone to make those guarantees secondary to their own notions of “security.”

Suddenly, the “safety of the American people” becomes more important than the Constitution. Practices and procedures are adopted that fundamentally conflict with that document. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush have all gone that route.

At least Lincoln and Roosevelt had real wars on their hands. Bush had only his contrived “War on Terror,” a self-defeating reaction to the horrors of 9/11 which apparently was designed by the Neoconservatives, as were many of his other policies, to keep Americans in an endless state of fear and turmoil. This would, in turn, enmesh us in their “long war” which would commit us to equally endless years fighting their contrived enemies. Maybe they thought that fomenting this struggle would keep them in power. Clearly, it has not.

Over the six-plus years since 9/11, we have seen an end to certain habeus corpus rights, unconstitutional wireless wiretapping, torture, the CIA Gulag of prison camps, over 700 presidential “signing statements” abrogating legal legislation, and on and on.

We even got to the point where when President Bush found a law he didn’t like, he said he would interpret the law his own way. With a court system that was increasingly permissive in dealing with his activities, you had the perfect constitutional storm.

After 9/11, having not experienced a serious foreign attack on the continental US since the War of 1812, Americans panicked. We were being asked to actually give up constitutional rights for some amorphous sense of safety. We were bombarded with color-coded threat assessments, constant reminders of America’s vulnerability, stories of plots against America, and heavy coverage of attacks abroad.

Then we got Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, waterboarding, the CIA Gulag and we were told America had to do that to be safe. In a direct abrogation of our responsibilities as citizens, we accepted it! We simply packed up all our constitutional convictions and gave in, forgetting Benjamin Franklin’s admonition of 300 years ago that if you give up your rights for safety, you will get neither. That does not seem to have changed under President Obama.

The fact is that free societies are not safe. That’s the price you pay for your freedom. There is no middle ground. Either you are “free” or you are “safe”.

Let us accept as true the Bush administration’s claim that the techniques and tools that diminished our civil liberties at home and our reputation abroad were worth it because they stopped terrorist attacks. Even then the argument fails, for such things represent a tactical response to a strategic threat. They may stop the occasional attack, but they won’t address the fundamental issue. Even with a new administration, we need to change our counterterrorism policies.

Don’t believe the constant drumbeat that Muslims “hate us for what we are.” They actually like what we are. What they don’t like is what we do. They do not like our policies. As long as those policies persist, that tiny percentage of Islam that is composed of radical Muslims will wish and do us evil.

What Muslims want is pretty straightforward. They want foreign troops out of Arab countries, particularly out of the holiest countries like Saudi Arabia. They want an end to foreign support for the repressive, unelected governments in the Muslim world, an end to the American military occupation of Iraq, an end to killing Muslims and an equitable solution for Palestine.

It is possible to reach the goals outlined above if America and Europe get together and work for them. As of this moment, our active involvement is the only way we will solve the problems that face us in that part of the world. Only through such solutions will we realize our national interests in the Middle East, rid ourselves of our fears here at home and reconnect with our constitutional guarantees.

The election of Barack Obama initially provided real hope that appropriate solutions would be undertaken. Since then, he appears to have adopted the Bush Administration’s foreign policy philosophy and tactics, leaving little hope either for peace or for our military departure from the Middle East.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA Station Chief who served in East and West Europe and the Middle East and as Chief of the Counter-terrorism Staff. He lives in Williston.

Read Full Post »

America Must Grasp Climate Change Opportunity

Posted in United States on December 24, 2009|

[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]

Most of the world has just met in Copenhagen, intent on arguing about climate change. On the one hand, it seems that a majority of the worldwide scientific community believes that climate change is caused by human behavior. On the other, the nay-sayers say that is simply untrue. Emotions are high. Demonstrators on both sides are über-passionate.

Either way, it means that opportunity knocks for America and that we can use this situation to our advantage. It presents an opportunity for us to solve our own pressing economic problems, while at the same time allowing us to look uncharacteristically benevolent in the eyes of the rest of the world.

America is in the midst of a major recession. We are extraordinarily deep in personal and national debt, have largely lost our manufacturing base and are mired in two ongoing overseas conflicts that exacerbate our debt problems. We have little reason to anticipate a rosy future.

In addition, the world is running out of its traditional sources of energy. Fossil fuels are finite and quite frankly, it’s irrelevant precisely when we run out.  It will happen.

And while we are running out of energy, mankind continues at breakneck speed to produce the only commodity that is capable of exacerbating our problems – an endless supply of additional people to feed, clothe and energize.

Overall, a glorious opportunity for America.

What America seriously needs are jobs that produce products that will be sought after here and in the rest of the world. Someone in the world is going to do just that.  In fact, since the 1990s, Japan, through a conscious, targeted, investment policy, has concentrated strongly on “green” industry and Japanese citizens now own 40% of world patents in that sector.

It is not sufficient that we simply go back to the old ways that didn’t work for us.  While some foreign cars are getting over 50 miles per gallon, American producers, smarting from their pursuit of the perfect Hummer, now brag that their cars get 30.

Although it may seem creative, typical of those old ways is General Motors’ approach to its Volt electric car.  GM scotched the Volt decades ago as economically unadvantageous to the company.  Now, in the face of criticism of their decades-long disinclination to change with market demands and reality, they have reinvented the Volt.  The problem is that it is going to go on the market at near  $50,000.

Most american cars travel under 100 miles a day.  Driving takes place within a chip shot of owners’ residences.  What is needed for that kind of driving is an electric car that sells for one quarter of the Volt, without the typical Detroit bells and whistles designed to jack up the price, and with a battery-powered driving range of around 100 miles.  That should be within our technological reach, but America does not appear to be pursuing that at this time.

Cars aside, the real opportunity for us lies in renewable energy.  In America’s short history, we have distinguished ourselves as a people by our creativity and inventiveness.  We have invented half the things that have made life better for mankind over the past two hundred years and there is absolutely no reason why we can’t do that again.

Whether fossil fuels warm the planet or not, they are getting daily more expensive and will run out.  At this moment, electricity generated by renewable sources is the logical replacement for fossil fuels.  We know that wind, rain, tides, water, geothermal, sunlight, biomass and probably many other things are viable sources for the production of electricity.  If Americans were not so guilt-ridden over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power would be a natural for us, as it is in much of Europe.

Worldwide production of wind power is growing at 30% per year.  In 2007, Africa bought 30,000 small solar power systems.  America has the world’s largest geothermal and photovoltaic power installations.  Renewable power generation is growing at an amazing rate around the world and there is absolutely no reason why American industry should not be in the vanguard of that industry.

So, who cares who is right about global warming?  The world and most importantly the US clearly will benefit from a galvanized American-led effort to exploit viable renewable energy sources.  If we don’t do it, someone else will and there will be little economic benefit to the US.

There are countries and companies abroad that are active in this renewable arena.  They plug along while we argue endlessly and pointlessly about climate change.  It seems absolutely incredible that American capital is not pouring into this field, whether to save mankind from climate change or to create new jobs and line our pockets.

It does seem like a no-brainer.

Read Full Post »

The long term: Unintended consequences could help or hinder Obama

Posted in foreign policy, United States on November 8, 2009|

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and Barre Times-Argus.]

What’s going on today in the White House is the perfect argument for a non-renewable six-year presidential term. There are so many incredibly difficult and intractable issues on this president’s plate right now, that any preoccupation with the possibility of a second term is only going to inject domestic politics into the decision-making process, lead to bad decisions and, in effect, preclude Obama’s re-election in 2012.

George W. Bush’s November 2008 legacy to whichever presidential candidate was elected to follow him in office was, quite simply, a kiss of death. It wouldn’t have mattered whether it was McCain or Obama, for what Bush willed to his successor was extremely toxic and under the best of circumstances probably would have limited anyone to four years in office. Just consider Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.

The Middle East is a different world. Americans, with their notion of American Exceptionalism, would notice little but strange behaviors, strange beliefs and strange activities. Unfortunately, this American ethnocentricity, among the most pervasive in the world, makes our dealings with different cultures abroad extremely problematical.

The key to all of this is the unfortunate fact that many of the most important foreign policy decision made by any U.S. president are made, not on the basis of the objective facts that exist in the country or region in question, but rather on the basis of the domestic political needs of the president in power and his party.

Faced with the intractability of the situations that face him in the Middle East, President Obama has little wiggle room. He is disadvantaged by his own lack of military experience. His campaign pronouncements that Iraq was a bad place to be, but that Afghanistan is a good one, do not help. When he got rid of General McKiernan and replaced him with General McChrystal, he put himself at the mercy of the military and its vocal supporters in the congress and around the country.

As an inexperienced president with no military expertise, how could he possible go against McChrystal’s recommendations? Was the president so naïve that he thought a hard-charging, ambitious, three-star would admit that virtually any counterinsurgency program would entail decades of future effort and trillions of dollars or even, perhaps, that it might not be doable? Would he think that for the first time since MacArthur, a general would go public, eschewing the chain of command?

This is not to say that the decision of what to do in Afghanistan is clear-cut. What is clear is the fact that there is no present connection between Afghanistan and terrorism. The issue in Afghanistan is the Taliban insurgency and has nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaida. Additionally, history provides little evidence of successful, traditional counterinsurgencies. Why should we succeed here?

Given that and the fact that Afghanistan has never been successfully conquered by anyone, the policy decision should only be whether we really want or need to fight an expensive, long-lasting and problematic counterinsurgency against the Taliban, when the president has told us repeatedly that our real fight is against terrorism.

In this context, the re-establishment of Afghanistan as an Al Qaida safe haven is highly unlikely. Al Qaida was directly responsible for the defeat of the Taliban in 2002, a course of action the Taliban is hardly likely to repeat. Besides that, Al Qaida has proven it can act in America, Spain, England and France without Afghanistan.

And what of Iraq? Will the fragile respite of the past months continue or will it, as many experts fear, devolve into sectarian and ethnic struggles? If it does, what will Obama do? Will he succumb to pressure from those who feel that military response is the only and best response, like the pressure he feels today on Afghanistan, or will he find a better way to get us out of a mess with which we never ever should have become involved in the first place?

With politics what they are, the president likely will be tempted to take the middle of the road on these military issues. That will be a mistake that will almost certainly limit him to one term.

Conversely, imagine the president undertaking the unusual, groundbreaking policy of letting the realities of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran dictate his policies. Not only would such a policy be in tune with such realities, it would almost certainly have the best chance for “success”, however he may choose to define it. He certainly won’t get there with compromise policies based on domestic politics.

The unintended consequences of implementing a rational foreign policy built on facts as opposed to one preoccupied with domestic politics, could be a startling amount of “success,” which very possibly might even lead to a second term.

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle East and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. He lives in Williston.

Read Full Post »

To Consolidate Your Power: Find an External Enemy

Posted in foreign policy, United States on September 24, 2009|

[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]

If you look around the world, just about every country that needs one has an external “enemy”. It’s hard to say when this phenomenon started, but it certainly is true. For a lot of obvious reasons, certain countries really feel that they can’t survive without one.

It probably started with the tribal societies of the first homo sapiens. Certainly, the ingrained fears, hatreds, jealousies and violence that accompanied those societies have continued in today’s world and from the widespread nature of the phenomenon, it’s probably fair to say that it’s part of what mankind is and will remain as long as it exists.

The worst applications of the “enemy syndrome” are found in the most repressive countries, giving reason to conclude that the syndrome is an integral part of maintaining internal national control. In non-democratic countries, particularly those which incorporate multiple religious, tribal and or ethnic groups, fostering the existence of national enemies is critical to keeping divergent populations in line.

The Soviet Union was a perfect example. Stretching from Europe to Asia and incorporating, Slavic, Turkic, Caucasian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Paleo-Siberian peoples, speaking over 200 languages and dialects, the USSR had little reason to think that all those people had much in common, or that they would cooperate without considerable pressure to do so.

The question was, how could a central (Soviet) government keep the USSR together? The answer was to find an enemy acceptable to its diverse population. Thus was born the Glavnyi nepriyatel’ or “Main Enemy” as embodied in the United States. With America as its most dangerous adversary, the Soviets kept pretty good control over an extraordinarily disparate population for decades.

The Soviets took it one step further when they created the concept of “capitalist encirclement”. Listen to Joseph Stalin in 1937:

“Capitalist encirclement—that is no empty phrase; that is a very real and unpleasant feature. Capitalist encirclement means that here is one country, the Soviet Union, which has established the socialist order on its own territory and besides this there are many countries, bourgeois countries, which continue to carry on a capitalist mode of life and which surround the Soviet Union, waiting for an opportunity to attack it, break it, or at any rate to undermine its power and weaken it.”

Thus, the Soviets set up the straw men of capitalism and America as the great enemies and threats to all the goals of the Soviet Union. Of course this was not designed to do anything other than increase Soviet hold over its people by uniting them against a spurious, external, American enemy.

There are literally dozens of historical and actual permutations of this theme. Pakistan with India, the Nazis with Jews, gypsies and other “undesireables”, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe with Britain, Saddam’s Iraq with Iran, the Shia and the Sunnis, many Arab states with Israel. On examination, two phenomena stick out. The enemy syndrome is prevalent in countries where the regime does not have full support of its people, or where there is major ethnic, tribal or religious diversity within the population, or both.

Curiously, during the last eight years, America has fallen victim to the enemy syndrome. We cut our teeth in the Cold War when the USSR was our enemy for decades, giving a sense of national unity to a country where our ethnic, religious and political differences were legion. On the negative side, and there always is a negative side, it enabled the McCarthy era and all the wars we took on in the name of “saving the world from Communism”.

The creation of a dangerous enemy gives any regime the excuse to limit freedoms which can perpetuate a regime in power. Today we have radical Muslim terrorism as our new national enemy. This all began under George W. Bush after 9/11 and got us directly into our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These struggles, purportedly against “terrorism”, were referred to by Bush and the Neoconservatives as the “long war” and it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude from what Karl Rove has said that the real goal was to create an enemy, the battle against which would keep the Republicans in charge for years. The negatives of this “long war” included all the loss of basic civil rights that we suffered during that administration.

As long as American administrations feel the political need for enemies, we will continue to find them. And with the enemy syndrome we will inevitably inherit a new set of national negatives in our pursuit of those enemies. Are we caught in this syndrome?

Haviland Smith is a retired CIA station chief who served in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and as chief of the counterterrorism staff. A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.

Read Full Post »

An Impending Disaster of Partisanship?

Posted in United States on May 28, 2009|

[Originally published in The Herald of Randolph.]

America is all about checks and balances. We began it all by setting up our national government in a way that would spread power between the Judiciary, Executive and Legislative branches of Government. Each would provide checks and balances on the others.

This arrangement has forced us to compromise. Compromise, in the main, has brought us to the center, politically, economically and philosophically, helping us avoid the extremist pitfalls that have in the past characterized other, more authoritarian systems around the World.

In our national political arena, the spirit of compromise, as forced on us by the diffusion of power between the parties, has helped us achieve centrist moderation.  That has occasionally been painful, simply because on the political side, there have been times when one of the parties in our two party system, flush with long-term electoral success, has felt it had no reason to compromise with the other.  We have seen that recently and may see it soon again.

The arrogance of presumed power and the inclination to uncompromisingly stick it to the other party has often led to the ouster of the offending party and the restoration of power through the electoral re-installation of the opposition.  This situation has become more pronounced in recent decades as the Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly at philosophical odds.

We are in the middle of one of these changes right now.  We have gone from an essentially autocratic and politically partisan Bush Administration, which did pretty much as it wished, through national disenchantment with those policies, to their ouster and the re-installation of the Democrats.

Despite Obama’s inclination to reach out to the Republicans, which he appears to have sincerely wished to do, two unproductive issues have surfaced. On the left, there are indications that some Democrats would like to get even for the past eight years, where in contrast, the Republicans have lined up and voted in a bloc against all the important Obama initiatives designed to address our critical economic problems.

We have no experience with the economic problems that might teach us what to do today. Further, it would appear that the policies that helped get us here and which in many cases are now supported by congressional Republicans as viable solutions, are not going to get us out of the mess we are in.  It may be that Democratic policies also may not do the job either, but at least they have not been tried and already failed.

Yet, these attempts have passed despite 100% Republican Congressional disapproval.  Any non-partisan bystander who looks at this situation has to think that the Republicans are taking an incredible, all-or-nothing risk.  If the Democrats’ policies don’t work, they, the Republicans, win it all, BUT, and it’s a big but, if the Democrats are even only sufficiently correct, the Republicans will lose.

This may be a gamble that the Republican leadership, if there really is such a thing today outside the talk show circuit, is prepared to take.  It may be a risk that the Democrats, believing that their policies will succeed, are also prepared to take.  Those real gamblers are, in the main, the most radical and partisan members of both political parties, those who see political annihilation of the other party as a good thing.

However, if you are an Independent, Democrat or Republican and from the political center, this has all the earmarks of an impending disaster. The existence of either a too weak or a too strong party is dangerous.  What you don’t want if you are a centrist, is for either party to lose big-time.  All that does is put the radicals in charge – the ones who more than anything else, want to use their new power to get even with the party that put them through hell for their preceding years in the political wilderness – and permits them to promote their most radical policies.

The only hopeful sign for moderate, non-partisan centrists at this moment is the indication that some Republicans have been increasingly supporting Obama-sponsored legislation against the wishes of their party leadership.  This can be seen in the recent bills addressing credit card fraud, financial fraud and predatory housing lending, all of which have drawn Republican support.

The divisiveness we have seen over the past few decades has been of little service to this country.  We were far better off when major differences between the two parties were few and far between and when changes from administration by one party to the other did not presage traumatic political, social and economic change. We need the checks and balances provided by two viable parties with minor, not major differences.

A little more bipartisanship today could help us a lot tomorrow.

Haviland Smith was a long-term resident of Brookfield.  He now lives in Williston.

Read Full Post »

Economy could test America’s world role

Posted in foreign policy, United States on March 8, 2009|

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and Rutland Herald.]

Americans are currently looking at their disastrous economy with a mixture of fear and concern. Given what’s happening in Washington, Wall Street and Main Street, those are understandable concerns. After all, what is our country going to look like in one year? Five years? Ten years?

But then, how many of us think about the impact on the rest of the world of identical problems to those that are now vexing us here at home? In this interconnected world, those foreign impacts could be even greater on us than those that seem to apply only to our economy.

The issue here is a loss of international political stability and its effect on American national interests around the world.

Perhaps the greatest single impact of the global downturn lies in the plummeting price of crude oil.

Most oil producing countries have economies that are wholly or largely dependent on oil and about half of the 15 largest oil producers are heavily dependent on the actual price being paid for it. Many of the countries that are heavily dependent on oil for their well-being have marginal economies. When they are in any way threatened, those marginal economies can become a source of real national unrest. Iran is such a country. During the past few years, there have been increasing internal complaints about the Iranian economy. A drop in the price of oil will simply increase pressure on the government, as the economy is not sufficiently diverse to permit some other sector to take up the slack. Unchecked, this will lead to instability in Iran

The potential for instability lies not just in Iran, it is there all over the oil-producing world in countries we have long supported and thought of as our friends. Think about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Nigeria and Algeria. This has been true in just about all those countries simply because none of them are democratic, all of them have significant domestic dissent and all are vulnerable to radicalism. Toss in Russia, Mexico, and Brazil and ask whether or not it is in our interest for there to be unrest in those countries.

In the days of $140 per barrel crude, such countries set their priorities on the basis of that price. In some cases, the budgets that evolved to meet the demands of the populations of those countries were understood to be unworkable if the price of crude slipped below a specific price per barrel.

With the price of crude now substantially below the minimum required by many oil exporters to meet their internal budgetary requirements and thus the basic requirements for national stability, the potential for trouble is very real.

China’s situation is very complicated. The one thing that motivates the regime in China is maintaining stability. In order to maintain stability, they feel they must have an annual GDP growth rate of around 10 percent. That means that China requires that 8 million to 9 million new jobs be created a year, all in the name of maintaining stability.

Yet, in 2009’s economic downturn, China will see between 15 million to 20 million new, jobless, migrant workers. Even in a rising economy, it would take over two years to create jobs for them. Take no pleasure in Chinese instability. An unstable nation of 1.3 billion souls is the last thing in the world we want.

Russia is no better off. The recent resurgence of a Russia looking to reestablish the old Soviet position of eminence and influence on the world scene was enabled by the riches brought by their recently established oil wealth. Russia’s ability to fulfill those international aspirations, as well as their ability to satisfy the needs of their own population, will be directly and negatively impacted by the recent drop in crude prices. Today’s bothersome and pushy Russia is far preferable to an unstable Russia.

The international economic downturn is a threat to the United States because it creates political instability. Instability is dangerous to us regardless of whether the country involved is a friend or foe. It is dangerous because there is no way to predict the ultimate outcome of political instability.

In the Muslim world with oil producers and non-producers, it could easily consist of the radicalization of the countries involved. Our old, undemocratic allies, faced with major economic shortfalls and lacking any real internal political support, could see Muslim fundamentalism emerge as a major threat to their stability. The same could easily become true in any country that does not enjoy the support of its people. That could involve our Allies as well as our enemies.

Thanks largely to the excesses of Western greed that lead to the global economic collapse, the world is about to enter a period of what could easily turn into economic chaos. At the very least, we are heading for international economic instability and a time when political instability already grips the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia.

Instability has always fostered revolution. We could be heading now toward the onset of a world-wide revolutionary period that will test American leadership.

Haviland Smith writes about foreign policy.

Read Full Post »

House Democrats Endanger Obama’s Ideals

Posted in United States on February 26, 2009|

[Originally published in The Randolph Herald.]

Quite apart from whether the passage of the new economic stimulus package will do much for the job creation, just think what it has done to President Obama’s long-held hope for a new sense of bipartisanship in Washington.

Many Americans voted for Barak Obama for President because he promised he would change the way Washington does business. There would no longer be the bitter disputes that characterized the old battles between the Democrats and Republicans.  The newly elected Democrats would not run roughshod over the Republicans, as the Republicans had done to them during the Democrats’ long years out of power. “Bipartisanship” would be the new Obama mantra.

Now, in the first test of this new bipartisan approach to governance, we have the first old style partisan battle of Obama’s presidency.  And it took less than two weeks to get it started!  However, there is a slightly new twist here.

We appear to have both a traditional ideological battle between Republicans and Democrats, as well as a practical tiff between the White House and the House Democrats.

The long suffering and clearly angry Democratic majority in the House initiated the bill that kicked off the present dispute. It contained a number of items on the Democratic wish list, items that the Democrats had been unable to pass in the face of a Republican majority or a presidential veto.  Many of those items bring little promise of job creation.

Unless you consider the Democratic House leadership to be inordinately stupid, you would have to conclude that they knew exactly what they were doing and that they did it because they saw in the urgency surrounding the economic stimulus package the opportunity to turn their previously thwarted dreams into reality.

If you match that up against President Obama’s clearly articulated goal of restoring bipartisanship to Washington, then it is clear that the Democrats who supported the bill as written saw that support as more important than supporting their new president – the one, incidentally, who brought so many of them to Washington on his coattails.

Nevertheless, House Democrats, smarting from years of suffering in the political wilderness, put together a bill that pretty much used up their wish list of legislation designed to benefit their base. The opportunity presented by the financial and economic crises was far too tempting to let pass.  Perhaps they thought that in the spirit of bipartisanship, the bill would have to be passed and that in order to not look partisan and mean spirited, the Republicans would have to go along, thus ensuring the passage of all those Democratic wish list items.

Of course, the problem is that the Republicans refused to play along and called the bill what they saw it to be, a new pork barrel.  They really played their hand well and many Americans, Democrats included, became concerned that the bill was pure pork politics and not the stimulus package everyone was looking for.

For the sake of a few billion dollars of legislation favoring their base, the House Democrats tried to slip this one past the Republicans and failed.  In the process, they have seriously jeopardized President Obama’s hopes for more Congressional cooperation on upcoming legislation designed to cope with the critically important economic problems that face us.

The sad part of the situation is that thanks to an overly partisan Democratic approach in the writing of the bill in the House, President Obama’s hopes for real bipartisan approach to governance has taken a heavy hit.  Given the recent comments of virtually all the Republicans on the Hill, it would appear that hopes for future bipartisan cooperation are increasingly dim.

Will the three “liberal” Republican Senators who signed onto the stimulus package be eager to support the Democrats again? That’s unlikely, unless, of course, the package as passed solves all our problems.  Given the probability that no one in either party really knows for sure how to deal with our economic problems, this seems highly unlikely.

No, the Democrats have clearly forgotten how to wield power to their own advantage.  In forgetting those old, immutable lessons, their impatience has seriously threatened their own legislative hopes for the future.

Haviland Smith is a former long-time resident of Brookfield.  He lives now in Williston.

Read Full Post »

Bipartisan Washington?

Posted in United States on February 1, 2009|

One of the problems with our democratic system of government lies in the fact that it encourages an endless cycle of legislative retribution.  First, one party exercises eight years of Congressional power bolstered by presidential veto. Then the other party wins and the first thing they do is try to overturn everything their predecessors did and enact all the measures on which they could not succeed when the system was against them.

Against that backdrop, we have a new President Obama who says, to the delight of a very healthy majority of the electorate, that he wants to do away with that old partisan approach and cooperate with the opposition Republicans in a critical bipartisan attempt to stimulate our flagging economy.

So, the first time the chance for such cooperation arises, the House Democrats, whether ignored, supported or goaded on by the White House, come up with an economic stimulus bill that essentially pokes its thumb in the Republicans’ eye.   So much for the bipartisan approach!

What seems clear about the current Washington wrestling match over the economic stimulus package, is that no one really can pinpoint a solution to our problems.  Neither party has faced this kind of issue before, so all we see offered are theoretical solutions.

Let’s grant that there are legitimate philosophical differences between the Republicans and Democrats on the economic stimulus issue.  Everyone knows that. Yet, when it comes time to act out on this presidential promise of bipartisanship, the Democrats submit a bill that contains a large number of programs that they have not been able to get past a Republican Congress and the Bush veto.

At the same time, in 100% doctrinaire fashion, the Republicans see tax cuts as the only answer to our economic woes.

This is not to say that either tax cuts or those pet Democratic projects are bad.  Clearly, new infrastructure is badly needed in this country and tax refunds, particularly if directed toward the middle class, would be helpful stimuli.

However, the issue is one of timing.  Was it absolutely necessary for the Democrats to include these pet unpassed projects on an economic stimulus bill, particularly if doing so would predictably be offensive to the Republicans?

Isn’t the purpose of the exercise, quite apart from stimulating the economy, to change the country over to a less partisan approach?  Apparently that is not so in the eyes of those congressional Democrats who have been chafing under Republican dominance for years.

It’s funny how crises provide the loopholes through which politicians shove their pet projects.  President Bush quite unashamedly shoved the Iraq invasion and a major diminution of our constitutional rights through a supine congress (Democrats included) only when basking in the ugly results of 9/11.

And so it is true today that our financial/economic crisis has given the long-suffering Democrats an opportunity for retribution.  They have taken it by turning what could have been a bipartisan economic stimulus bill into a mean spirited move to redress years of having their favorite programs slighted.  Strike while the crisis is hot!

All of this adds up to precisely the situation that President Obama says he  wants to avoid.  We are mired in the old politics of partisanship first and problem solving last.  President Obama inherited a Democratic majority Congress that had favorability ratings even lower than those of President Bush.  It is clear from the bill that has come out of the House that Speaker Pelosi is at best disinterested in the program of political cooperation on which President Obama won the election.  President Obama can hardly be pleased and there lurks at the package’s second stage the equally partisan Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.  Only time will tell what mischief he can work.

The sad part of all of this is that the House Democrats could easily have limited this bill to what it was designed to be – and economic stimulus package.  If they had done that, it is highly likely that the Republicans would have signed on and that might well have changed the tone in Washington for the better.

At that point, with majorities in the Congress and a Democrat in the White House, they could have moved on to their pet projects without starting Obama’s presidency with an old-time, partisan battle. One wonders if this “new tone” in Washington is all a charade, or if the new president plans to have some frank conversations with his so-called allies on Capitol Hill.

We shall see, but it’s hardly an auspicious start.

Haviland Smith worked in and out of Washington for 25 years.

Read Full Post »

The New Socialism, Thanks to the Republicans

Posted in United States on January 1, 2009|

[Originally published in The Randolph Herald.]

In the simplest of terms, capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned. Socialism is a system in which the means of production are owned collectively or entirely by the state. Communism is a system in which there is collective ownership of the means of production.

From the Marxist perception, capitalism will move to socialism and socialism ultimately will evolve into true communism where the advanced level of awareness (and selflessness) of the people will permit the common ownership of the means of production and property in a classless, egalitarian society for the equal benefit of all members of that society.

The simple fact is that for a number of valid reasons far too complicated to explore here, such a classless society has never evolved on this planet and, given human nature, probably never will. It’s hard to think of man as perfectible.

Whether you like the theory and/or practice of capitalism or not, it has brought the vast majority of our people a standard of living unparalleled in the history of man.

At the same time, there has long been a massive ad hoc program in this country designed to label anything its authors did not like as “socialism”. Most of those who use the word haven’t the foggiest idea what socialism really is. They use it to condemn out of hand such programs as single payer health systems, when many of them benefit directly from such programs themselves. Our military medical program is a single payer system – thus a “socialist” system. With a short stretch, the system which supports the US Congress is a single payer system. If we all had that system (for which we all pay) there would be no philosophical problems with such a reviled “socialist” program.

Most poignant of all is what has been going on in the United States since the subprime crisis, the financial meltdown and a crashing economy hit us. A Republican administration, champions of unfettered capitalism and undying foes of anything they can label “socialist” is in the process of taking over banks, major insurance companies, Investment houses, mortgage companies and capitalist institutions like the automobile industry.

That said, the subprime crisis was not created by the Republicans alone. The Democrats played a large role in creating a system which made unbelievably risky loans to people who never should have been considered worthy. What the Republicans did do was lead the way on deregulation of just about every institution that might have helped us avoid such a crisis.

More than that, before the party was hijacked by Southern Democrats after 1964, the Republicans had represented fiscal responsibility. Yet, over the last eight years they have turned us from a healthy surplus to the greatest deficit this country has ever known. That fact, added to the constant “spend, spend, spend” message of the past eight years, has had a truly negative effect on our balance of payments, our national debt, the weakening of our dollar and our miniscule level of personal saving. These realities, along with the issues in our financial markets, are what is causing our current pain.

Now, we are going to bail out an automobile industry that has been out of step with the needs of this country for years. They have muscled their way out of café standards, preferring to build monster trucks and SUVs that netted them $10,000 per vehicle, to the design and production of fuel-efficient vehicles that might help us survive the inevitable rise we will once again see in the price of oil.

What are we to think? If everything goes according to what appears to be Federal government’s plans, the government, funded by us taxpayers, will soon own most of the banking, mortgage, insurance, securities, and automobile industries. Having done all of that, the government will probably be expected to bail out any other industry hit hard by our recession. Commercial real estate companies are mumbling and could be next, or any other industry that produces items that we do not want or need, or cannot afford.

So, our cherished capitalism, built from the onset on a system of risk and reward, is in the process of dropping the risk component. Instead, those industries are being bailed out by the government, an act which ultimately will serve only to destroy the system as we know it. Capitalism isn’t capitalism when risk is removed. Carefully regulated risk is what constantly forces it to improve. When you remove the risk, you destroy all the potential good in the system. We are likely heading mindlessly toward Socialism, a system whose productivity pales historically in comparison to capitalism.

Haviland Smith is a former long-term resident of Brookfield. He now lives in Williston.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »