Month: July 2010

More evidence of GOP fanaticism from Iowa.

Sometimes in the world (if not so often in the US), foreign policy really isn't about Israel. A reader writes:

The recent screeching coming from the neocon stands with regard to Turkey seem to miss the fact Turkey is emerging as the major energy broker of the region with the help of the UK. Take the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline for instance. As its name implies, this pipeline takes crude oil from the Caspian fields all the way to the Mediterranean Turkish sea port of Ceyhan. The pipeline, which came into full operation in May 2006, has for its largest shareholder a company called BP (30.1%). Then there is the South Caucasus pipeline (December 2006), which takes natural gas along the same route as the previously mentioned pipeline but ends up at Erzurum in Turkey instead, where it is joined by the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline coming from the gas fields of Iran (yes, Iran). BP is also an important shareholder of the South Caucasus pipeline (25.5%). The geo-strategic aims of these two projects were to diversify the energy supplies and lessen Europe's dependence on Russian

oil and gas. 

Interestingly, Türkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortakl??? (TPAO), the national oil and gas company of Turkey, is also a partner of BP in both of these projects (6.53% & 9% respectively). Furthermore, the gas pipeline was also built by Turkish state-owned company BOTA? on behalf of the BP led consortium. BOTA? and Greek gas company DEPA have built an extension of the Turkish pipeline in order to reach continental Europe (November 2007). This last June, BOTA?, DEPA and Italy’s Edison SpA signed a memorandum of understanding for the extension of the pipeline into southern Italy. There is no doubt that these energy deals have reinforced Turkey's position as a strategic ally of the West, contrary to what Mr. Frum or other noecons might think.

More surprisingly, and this is where it gets almost unbelievable, both BP and TPAO have a third business partner not only in the South Caucasus pipeline project but also in the Shah Deniz gas fields of Azerbaijan where the gas is actually pumped out and where BP acts as the operator of the project. This third partner is no other than Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO), registered in the Jersey Channel Islands (UK), and a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company. NICO owns 10% of the pipeline project and 10% of the gas fields project. The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has identified NICO as an entity owned or controlled by the Government of Iran, and as such prohibits most transactions with it.

I'm sorry to say it that way but with regards to the national and financial interests of both the UK and Turkey I don't believe that Israel figures much in the balance. Mr. Frum and his former neocon friends can huff and puff all they want but Israel doesn't factor in here. Prime Minister Cameron's comments in regards to the Flotilla Incident and the Siege of Gaza were obviously not meant to please Israel firsters but rather to demonstrate clearly the strategic significance of the partnership of BP (a British company) and Turkish state-owned companies in the area of energy development. And that's part and parcel of the new Turkey.

Brooklyn, New York, 10.48 am

For a glimpse into why American conservatism really is intellectually dead, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is a pretty good start. Daniel Henninger today pulls a Mark Levin, turning a deeply difficult series of choices about taxes and spending into an abstract debate between two theories. And the description of those two theories would flunk a paper in political theory in a freshman class.

The question is how to tackle the mounting debt and current deficit. Henninger accepts that the debt is "dangerous". But he seems to believe that any tax increases at all to counter it would be more dangerous. This is position worth arguing – and I'd agree that the bulk of the deficit reduction should come from spending cuts (and would support the very harsh cuts in Medicare, Social Security and defense to get there.) But I'm not nuts and understand that sustaining the Bush tax cuts indefinitely and providing no additional revenue source means an austerity that makes David Cameron look like the tooth fairy.

So what would Henninger cut? He doesn't say. He cannot say. He wants to have an abstract debate about big government vs small government or taxes vs spending or liberty vs tyranny – a debate that, as long as it is held in such comic-book forms, he will win.But if that is the debate we are going to have, we will all lose. The entitlement crisis and the war debt began far before Obama's term in office and represent deep structural deficits that were ignored during the spending spree and tax bonanza and off-budget wars of the Bush administration that Henninger slavishly supported.

He also has this fathomlessly cynical thing to say:

Somewhere, George W. Bush must be laughing. Amid 9.5% unemployment, Democrats must deal with the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

Laughing? Laughing that he bequeathed his successor a bankrupt government, two lost, counter-productive wars, an unfunded, budget-busting Medicare entitlement, and a tax structure that simply cannot be sustained without massive cuts in defense, Medicare and social security? Are partisan games and dumb-ass generalities and no specifics on spending cuts really what's left of Republicanism?

If so, and you are a fiscal conservative, your only serious (if horribly tainted) choice is the Democrats. The Republicans are still quite bonkers.

Here's what I don't understand: illegal immigration is down in part because of the economy; and enforcement seems to be much tougher if these stories about the corpses of migrants found in more remote areas are true (and dead bodies are a pretty solid statistic). So why the uptick in anti-illegal hysteria now?

The video above is distressing. The following context might help:

Scores of Bedouin men were standing on a yellow hill, sharing their experiences from the early morning hours, while all around them uprooted olive trees lay on the ground. A whole village comprising between 40 and 45 houses had been completely razed in less than three hours.

I suddenly experienced deja vu: an image of myself walking in the rubbles of a destroyed village somewhere on the outskirts of the Lebanese city of Sidon emerged. It was over 25 years ago, during my service in the Israeli paratroopers. But in Lebanon the residents had all fled long before my platoon came, and we simply walked in the debris. There was something surreal about the experience, which prevented me from fully understanding its significance for several years. At the time, it felt like I was walking on the moon.

This time the impact of the destruction sank in immediately. Perhaps because the 300 people who resided in al-Arakib, including their children, were sitting in the rubble when I arrived, and their anguish was evident; or perhaps because the village is located only 10 minutes from my home in Be’er Sheva and I drive past it every time I go to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem; or perhaps because the Bedouins are Israeli citizens, and I suddenly understood how far the state is ready to go to accomplish its objective of Judaising the Negev region; what I witnessed was, after all, an act of ethnic cleansing.

Haaretz reports on new subsidies for Israeli army officers to move into the Negev. I am unaware of any legitimate reasons for destroying these people’s village and lives. Perhaps I am missing something.

Paul Ryan can only name two things he would cut from the federal budget: repealing the rest of the stimulus and TARP. Seriously? Shadegg falls for the bullshit of an "across the board cut". Steve King repeats the nonsense that the Bush tax cuts paid for themselves. Others are merely flailing.

If you care about debt and deficits, do not, repeat do not, enable the GOP to take us all down that denialist road to bankruptcy again.

To my mind, the coming elections are all about whether 1) the Republicans have a better alternative than returning to Bush-Cheney policies on spending, taxes, war and debt and 2) whether what the Democrats have done in this Congress is worth rewarding. My view is that 1) the GOP has actually gotten worse since Bush-Cheney and their vows of spending cuts are utterly unconvincing (especially since they will have no mandate on any of the specifics necessary to forge a new path). And I remain of the belief that the stimulus worked about as well as one can in an advanced economy, the bank bailout was much more successful than I expected, the decision to bail out GM now looks prescient as it recovers, and the health reform is a decent start but requires careful monitoring on the cost front.

But what do voters think? On health insurance reform, the poll of polls still shows a plurality opposed (the proportions both supporting and opposing the law have sunk). But this nugget from the Kaiser poll stuck out:

Among Republicans, opposition to the law remained steady at 69 percent, but the intensity of that opposition ticked upward. Fifty-three percent of Republicans said they had a “very unfavorable” opinion of the law this month, up from 50 percent in June. Independents, who can tip the balance in elections, split 48 percent to 37 percent in favor, compared with 49 percent to 41 percent a month earlier. The intensity of opinion among this group showed little change; just less than a fifth expressed a very favorable view, and just more than a quarter expressed a very unfavorable view.

This is the great risk of the Palin strategy. By marinating in Fox News propaganda, the Republican base has become extremely angry and polarized. But the sane and not-so-political middle has softer and more favorable views. I wonder whether this pattern is beginning to spread to other areas. As one detects a GOP becoming simply an anti-Muslim party, as the draconian measures against illegal and mainly Hispanic immigrants proliferate, as epistemic closure grows … will we be surprised this fall? Or can anger really change the entire scene?

In a rare congruence, some writers at NRO agree with the Dish on … Doctor Who.

My favorite doctor's assistant? Patrick Troughton's Jamie, on whom I had a massive crush as a little boy. (Given the image above, who wouldn't? And he looked so hot in a kilt facing a Yeti.)

And I have to say I always feared the Cybermen more than the Daleks. Why? I presumed in my bed at night that the Daleks couldn't get up the stairs.

Ryan Avent suggests putting a $5 tax on every barrel of oil.