Month: January 2009

Tyler Cowen is pleased that tax cuts are making up such a large part of Obama’s stimulus:

It’s already a talking point that "the Democrats have lost their nerve" but the reality is not so devious.  Obama wishes to deliver on his pledge to cut taxes (always electorally popular) and upon close inspection the economic team probably hasn’t found a lot of first-year stimulus spending it likes.  That leads to this obvious policy conclusion and of course it is very good news.  No, I do not think these tax cuts will drive recovery but a) less money will be wasted, and b) it shows that the Obama team is willing to flinch and be realistic, not just as a final compromise but indeed as an opening gambit.

I don’t want to jinx it, but so far, the Obama transition has been two things – focused fundamentally on what works, and finding a way to bring as many people into the coalition as possible. It’s immensely impressive.

Stephen Walt and Matt Yglesias explain.

A reader writes:

Thanks to you, I’ve been reading up on Bagram all day long.  And I’ve gotten more and more depressed. The torture and abuse that went on there is chilling. But one thing really stands out:

"The torture and homicides took place at the military detention center known as the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which had been built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1980-1989). A concrete-and-sheet metal facility that was retrofitted with wire pens and wooden isolation cells, the center is part of Bagram Air Base in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan."

We took a facility built by the Soviets, and we turned it into a Gulag. Despite Obama’s promise and pledges of reform, this is a stain that will not wash away.  Ever.

Bush and Cheney took Saddam’s Abu Ghraib and made it a torture zone under American control. They took Soviet sites in Eastern Europe and revived their record of torture, under the American flag. Bagram was part of a pattern. And people wonder why a person untainted by the past should be CIA director.

Arnold Kling wants a smaller stimulus.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes an important point:

One story the media isn’t telling, because it’s impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won’t allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians. Early reports indicate that Hamas mortar teams were firing from the UN School. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.

One more thing, speaking of pornography — we’ve all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It’s a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn’t matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? 

I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.

I cite Jeffrey with the photograph above because a) the abuse of dead bodies by Hamas is another variant of their disgusting radicalism, b) Hamas does stage photographs, c) given their military inferiority, these photographs are also in some ways a weapon. The photograph was taken by Thair Hasani. Hasani is a Getty photographer and it is part of a series that certainly looks legit. But I cannot vouch for its authenticity, and I doubt that’s possible given the restrictions on reporting from Gaza. Nonetheless, this girl is dead and buried. She is a human being.

(Photo: Palestinians evacuate the dead body of a child from in the rubble of a four story house that collapsed when struck by an Israeli air strike on January. 6, 2009 in Gaza City, Gaza Strip. By Thair Hasani/Getty.)

Today Marc Lynch attended a lecture by Sallai Meridor, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States:

Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals. Indeed, he at times seemed to offer this absence of strategy as a virtue, as evidence that the war had been forced upon Israel rather than chosen: "we have no grand political scheme… we were forced to defend ourselves to provide better security, period." With current estimates of 550 Palestinians dead and 2500 wounded, and the region in turmoil, the absence of strategy is not a virtue.

From the AP:

More than 70,000 Iranian students have volunteered to carry out suicide bombings against Israel, Iran’s state news agency reported Monday, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not responded to their request for permission.

Volunteer suicide groups have made similar requests in the past and the government never responded, giving the campaigns more of the feel of propaganda.

A useful reading of the tea-leaves from Fred Kaplan. Then this from Les Gelb:

The CIA veterans may never give up their fight against Panetta, but at least the Congress and the press should not let themselves be hoodwinked into believing that Panetta isn’t as good as a pro, and for purposes of doing what needs to be done at the CIA, better than a pro.

A reader writes:

You overlooked an important element in Bush’s plan for funding AIDS services organizations. I think your statement that Bush made a "genuine attempt to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it," is misleading. Bush’s AIDS policy was in many cases ruled by a commitment to something called the Anti-Prostitution Pledge, which denied services to all AIDS organizations that worked with or on behalf of sex workers in Africa and the rest of the world.

This moralistic approach is impractical when it comes to AIDS treatment and prevention.

Since 2003, it has caused hundreds of invaluable HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention organizations the world over to cut services or shut down completely. Brazil alone lost $40 million dollars in funding because it refused to sign the Pledge.

Bush put conservative politics first and poor people at risk of or living with HIV/AIDS second. He left those who work in the sex industry out of the mix completely, thereby giving the HIV infection opportunity to spread because of lack of education and services for those who need it most.

To quote Penny Saunders of the Network of Sex Work Projects, "The ‘anti-prostitution pledge’ makes it difficult or impossible to provide services or assistance to the people who are most at risk of HIV/AIDS." This is not a genuine approach but rather one that is blind-sighted by a far-from-admirable political agenda.

Daniel Levy weighs in:

There is also some appalling misinformation being spread – one frequently hears the claim that Israel left Gaza in 2005 in order to build peace but all it received was terror.  I appreciate the Gaza evacuation of 2005 and how difficult it was  and I in no way condone the launching of rockets against civilian targets from Gaza but the unilateral nature of the Gaza withdrawal was a mistake (and I said it at the time) and I don’t appreciate this rewriting of history.  Israel at the time did not evacuate Gaza as part of the peace process.

Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explicitly said that Israel "will stay in the territories that will remain."  His most senior adviser who was in charge of the disengagement, Dov Weisglass, was even more explicit stating that the plan would freeze the peace process and "prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state…it supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." This was brought out by the fact that, as mentioned, Gaza was immediately placed under closure – and those who blame the Gazans for not developing their economy post-occupation should be reminded of that.

We also frequently hear the claim – what would America do if it came under rocket fire from Canada or Mexico? Again, there can be no justification for rockets targeting Israel’s south, and of course America would respond if it were under fire from Canada or Mexico. But let’s at least complete the analogy and here is that bigger picture. Gaza constitutes under 6 percent of the ’67 territory in which a Palestinian state is supposed to be created (Gaza, West Bank, Palestinian East Jerusalem), about 94 percent remains under occupation so under our scenario 94 percent of Canada or Mexico would have remained under a 40 plus year American occupation with settlements and roadblocks, and with the "liberated" 6 percent still under siege.  Now I like the Mexicans and Canadians as much as the next person but is it totally inconceivable that under such circumstances some of them would have formed hardline armed groups that would even become very popular and use that 6 percent of territory to launch attacks against America? I will leave it to your imagination.