Earlier this month,the conservative organization Keep America Safe launched a p.r. fusillade against Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys who represented Guantánamo detainees. “The crux of the matter,” says Liz Cheney, chair of the organization, “is the American people have a right to know whether lawyers who used to represent and advocate on behalf of terrorists” are working at DOJ. They just want to know who the terrorist lawyers are. An innocent question, to be sure.
In the Financial Times today, S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in George W. Bush’s sterling administration, and pollster John Zogby have an op-ed calling for Congress to start over and draft a bipartisan health care bill. “It is possible a Republican leader could yet emerge and resolve the healthcare impasse,” they intone. And oh yes, it is possible, too, that aliens could land is Oshkosh and take over city hall.
On February 2, at the first Senate hearings on gays in the military since 1993, Admiral Mike Mullen became the only sitting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to support allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. He said the “institutional integrity” of the armed forces demands that they stop forcing gay service members to lie in order to serve their country. The current policy of “don't ask, don't tell” (DADT), Mullen argued, ends up needlessly “devaluing” a critical segment of the military population.
As President Obama begins a push to impose harsher economic sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, his success will be determined largely by the answer to a single question: Will China and Russia get on board? In order to bite, sanctions must be enforced by the rest of the international community, but, so far, Beijing and Moscow have been reluctant to endorse the toughest penalties advocated by Washington.
Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.
There must be 100 smart analyses of last week's State of the Union speech. Many of my blogosphere friends were happy with it. I was pretty dismayed. I thought the President needed to push much harder and with greater specificity for a comprehensive bill. A week later, I feel even worse.
The origin of my disquiet was ably expressed by Brown University professor James Morone in Wednesday morning's Los Angeles Times. Morone provided the best analysis of that address, even though his essay went to print before word one was spoken. Morone is a gifted scholar who works at the interface between history and political science. If you haven't read him, stop reading this column and do so.
His op-ed "Seeking their inner Trumans" identifies a crucial political problem.
The Democratic leaders have not gotten credit for running this difficult reform through the daunting congressional gantlet. It hasn't been pretty -- Democratic leaders are talking ruefully about sausage-making -- but they played the inside game brilliantly.
But they forgot to tell their story to the people…. The Republicans told their story with exquisite skill. "Death panels," socialism and "government takeover" were all colorful ways to opt for private markets over government policy.
What is remarkable -- given the eloquent man in the White House -- is that Democrats were too busy dealing to come up with a counter story…. Not just once, in a complicated speech, but every day and in ways that connect….
Part of the President's task was to place that inside game in broader perspective, to remind voters that there was an honorable purpose to all that sausage-making. Clawing for 60 votes is sordid when the goal is to pass another bloated agriculture or a fighter jet the Pentagon doesn't want. It's quite another thing when the goal is providing health insurance coverage for 30 million people.
On August 26, 2008, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touched down for a secret meeting on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Indian Ocean. The topic: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The country that arguably poses Barack Obama's biggest foreign policy challenge just got a little harder to deal with. I missed it at the time, but during his visit to Pakistan last week the normally circumspect Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke carelessly in a way that has even further inflamed that country's intense, paranoid anti-Americanism.
In the shadow of the intelligence failure that culminated with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lighting an explosive aboard a Detroit-bound flight, the titular head of the U.S. intelligence community was busy fighting another war. For months, in fact, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence (DNI), had been waging an epic bureaucratic offensive. His job had been created in the wake of September 11 to foster cooperation and accountability among the 16 agencies sifting through the mounds of inbound data about threats to U.S. interests.
I’ve already written of the new liberal complacency about terrorism: “Clutching at Straws: The So-Called ‘Weakness’ of Al Qeada.”
My favorite moment from last month’s White House jobs summit came when the president asked if Washington had been doing something to discourage hiring. At this point, a man named Fred Lampropoulos, the CEO of a Utah-based medical device manufacturer, chimed in that yes, in fact, it had. “[T]here’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do,” Mr. Lampropoulos told the president, according to The New York Times. Political uncertainty, he said, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
On the night of December 1, shortly after Barack Obama announced plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, retired Lt. Colonel John Nagl appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Maddow was dismayed by Obama’s new plan, which she called “massive escalation,” but, when she introduced Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert who has long called for a greater U.S. commitment to Afghanistan--even if it means raising taxes and expanding the military--she was surprisingly friendly. And, after Nagl spent the segment praising Obama’s plan, which he said would throw back the Taliban and enable more civil and economic development, Maddow may have remained skeptical--but she was also admiring. “It’s a real pleasure to have you on the show, John,” she said.
Four days before the fall of Kabul in November 2001, Osama bin Laden was still in town. The Al Qaeda leader’s movements before and after September 11 are difficult to trace precisely, but, just prior to the attacks, we know that he appeared in Kandahar and urged his followers to evacuate to safer locations in anticipation of U.S. retaliation. Then, on November 8, he was in Kabul, despite the fact that U.S. forces and their Afghan allies were closing in on the city.
Before I answer that question, let me recommend Mike Grunwald's excellent cover story for the Person of the Year issue. It's a great introduction to Bernanke for readers who aren't economics or finance nerds, but you'll find it compelling even if you are such a person. I especially agree with Grunwald's verdict on Bernanke as crisis-manager:
None of this was pretty, and reasonable people can disagree about the judgment calls. The Fed is supposed to lend only against safe collateral; the Bear and AIG deals clearly crossed the Rubicon into risk. Letting Lehman fail nearly croaked the global economy. Saving AIG — an insurance company! — the next day seemed strangely inconsistent. Maybe the Fed could have devised a way to restrict bonuses at rescued firms while giving creditors haircuts. Maybe TARP could have required bailed-out banks to lend more. Certainly, all the interventions created moral hazard, sending a perverse message that "too big to fail" financial firms will be rescued no matter how badly they screw up, encouraging Wall Street traders to start gorging on risk again.
But that's what happens in panics when leaders actually try to preserve the financial system. The central bankers of the 1930s avoided moral hazard but betrayed the world. ... Now that the fire is out, it's easy to attack the firefighters for getting the furniture wet or holding their hoses improperly. [emphasis added.]
There was one sure way to not be overly-generous to fat-cat bankers, and that was to let them fail. Unfortunately, that would have also collapsed the supply of money and credit, which happens to be a sure-fire way to create a Depression. Conversely, if you're determined to prevent a Depression, then there's no way to do it without being overly-generous to the fat-cats, at least when you have the collection of too-big-to-fail institutions we had last fall. Now that doesn't mean you don't reform the system to avoid ending up there again. But those were the choices we actually faced. Given that, it's hard to believe anyone would have preferred that Bernanke make a different call.
Having said all that, should Bernanke have been person of the year in 2009?
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
By Neil Sheehan
(Random House, 534 pp., $35)
In late March 1953, a colonel named Bernard Schriever sat in a briefing room at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, listening as John von Neumann, the brilliant mathematician, and Edward Teller, the physicist, discussed the future of the hydrogen bomb, the far more powerful follow-on to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki eight years earlier. The United States had detonated its first hydrogen device the previous year in the Pacific, vaporizing a tiny atoll with a force of greater than ten megatons, or ten million tons of TNT. (In contrast, the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima yielded a mere twelve kilotons, or twelve thousand tons of TNT.) Whereas the A-bombs used against Japan had relied on the process known as fission, splitting atoms of uranium and plutonium, the new H-bomb used the power of a fission explosion to fuse isotopes of hydrogen, releasing even more energy in weapons of theoretically unlimited yield. The only problem, from the Air Force’s point of view, was that the first fusion device was an impractical behemoth. It weighed eighty-two tons--hardly something one could load into the bay of a bomber.
An absolutely priceless moment from yesterday's jobs summit, courtesy of The New York Times:
Mr. Obama told the chief executives that he wanted to know: “What’s holding back business investment and how we can increase confidence and spur hiring? And if there are things that we’re doing here in Washington that are inhibiting you, then we want to know about it.”
Listening to Barack Obama explain his new strategy for Afghanistan tonight, you may have been struck by a sense of deja vu. Before a sea of somber West Point cadets, Obama invoked the grim memory of the September 11 attacks. He vowed that the days of “blank check" policymaking are over. He called al Qaeda a “cancer” that threatens the region and said he would not allow the group a safe haven there. He insisted that the U.S. would get tougher about corruption within the Karzai government and would extend a hand to low-level Taliban fighters willing to switch sides. He pledged to accelerate training of Afghan security forces and explained that doing so will allow our troops to return home.
If these points sounded familiar, it’s because Obama has made them all before. Go back and read the president’s March 27 speech explaining his first troop increase for Afghanistan; tonight’s speech often reads like a lightly rewritten version of that one, this time with 30,000 new troops substituted for 17,000, and new specifics about a date for beginning a U.S. withdrawal (namely, June of 2011).
This is not a complaint about self-plagiarism. It’s a compliment for Obama’s consistency and intellectual honesty. Back in March, Obama described his vision as “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” That vision implied a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan—one which the Pentagon properly understood to require tens of thousands of more troops to implement. For a time this fall, White House officials fretted that General Stanley McChrystal’s troop request had given them a “sticker shock” which required a re-review of their strategy. But no one who understood the war, no one as smart as Obama, should have been surprised by McChrystal’s troop request.
Which is why it made sense for Obama’s speech tonight to reiterate his March vision. Sure, he could have cited declining political support for the war, and the fraud-tainted election of Hamid Karzai, and the still-precarious U.S. economy as reasons for changing his mind. It would have been hard to blame him. But Obama’s reiteration of his main talking points from March indicates that he believed what he was saying at the time and simply hasn’t seen anything dramatic enough in the past six months to change his mind.
After ten months of waiting, USAID finally has a new chief: Rajiv Shah, currently the agriculture department’s top scientist. Directing the country’s principal agency for administering foreign aid is a heady position for someone who is all of 36. And it’s going to be a difficult one. Shah is stepping into the middle of a struggle that has been quietly simmering for years in Washington.
For years, advocates of climate-change legislation have struggled to find a sales pitch that will sway even the most hardened of skeptics. Polar bears, green jobs, urgent pleas to think of the grandkids … none of them have quite done the trick. But recently, a new argument has come to the fore: the national security case for cutting carbon emissions.
One afternoon in October, a blue and white jumbo jet flew high above the Pacific Ocean, approaching the international dateline. On board was the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who was on an around-the-world trip that would end with a summit of NATO defense ministers, where the topic of the day would be Afghanistan. Gates was flying on what is often called “the Doomsday Plane,” a specially outfitted 747 that looks like a bulkier Air Force One and was built to wage retaliatory nuclear war from the skies.
It's too bad Slate retired that rubric, because if one of their stories ever deserved it, it's this one from Fred Kaplan about how the Army fudged its numbers to exceed its 2009 recruiting goal of 65,000 new troops:
The Dept. of Defense is crowing about its recruiting success in fiscal year '09, and chalking it up -- at least in part -- to the weak economy. From the Washington Post:
The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as bonuses and other factors, had led more qualified youths to enlist.
The military has not seen such across-the-board successes since the all-volunteer force was established in 1973, after Congress ended the draft following the Vietnam War. In recent years, the military has often fallen short of some of its recruiting targets. The Army, in particular, has struggled to fill its ranks, admitting more high school dropouts, overweight youths and even felons.
Yet during the current budget year, which ended Sept. 30, recruiters met their targets in both numbers and quality for all components of active-duty and reserve forces.
The following chart (using data from here) shows the percentage of recruits over the past two decades that have at least a high school diploma. Indeed, during recessions this ratio tends to rise while in expansions the reverse is true.
The big drop in diploma holders in the Army for the earlier part this decade is no doubt the result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as a cutback in the number of recruiters. The effect is less pronounced in the Marines and Navy, where the probability of being wounded or killed in combat is likely lower (at least in the latter).
How can we snatch victory from the jaws of defeat in
The Boston Globe's Bryan Bender notices something interesting:
An article in the Pentagon’s top scholarly journal calls in unambiguous terms for lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces, arguing that the military is essentially forcing thousands of gay men and women to lead dishonest lives in an organization that emphasizes integrity as a fundamental tenet.
Okay, I'll admit that I have some issues with the Olympics, but I think that even Mary Lou Retton should be outraged over Barack Obama's decision to fly to Copenhagen later this week to lobby for Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Sum
