Monthly Archives: February 2011

Gates: no more Afghanistans or Iraqs

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Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said the other day in a speech at West Point that it would be highly unlikely that the United States would again send its soldiers into wars such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Any Secretary of Defense who advises the President to do that “should have his head examined,” said Gates, who will leave his office later this year. There is no word yet on his eventual replacement. Gates said that the “odds of repeating another Afghanistan or Iraq may be low.”  

The speech before the West Point cadets was not a direct criticism of President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq, but it might be important to recall that Gates, a Republican who replaced Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary at the end of 2006, was a close assistant to Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser during the first President Bush’s time in the White House, who later became a leading critic of President George W. Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq.

The United States Army will continue to face challenges around the world but, Gates said. That will require a change in culture within the Army and a necessity for different training and equipment to meet these new challenges.

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1539

Unions under attack in Wisconsin

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That America is not like Europe, although Europeans often think they are one and the same and become disappointed or confused when it does turn out to be the case, has not so clearly been exemplified in a long time than in today’s big battle in Wisconsin between the unions and Governor Scott Walker .
The Republican governor’s clearly stated plan to disarm the unions and reduce their power and influence by abolishing the right to collective bargaining for public employees, is difficult to imagine having its equal anywhere in Europe today, where the trade union movement remains strong as an accepted and integral partner in the community.
Governor Walker argues that his proposal is necessary to overcome the state’s large budget deficit. So far, he has stood its ground, despite a storm of criticism. He has referred to President Reagan, when he simply sacked thousands of air traffic controllers during their strike early in the 1980s, and has become something of a new star among Republicans. Our time has come, says Walker. It is a battle for America’s democracy, according to his opponents, a decisive battle for the future of trade unions in America.
What is sometimes forgotten in this battle is that the unions have already agreed to the Governor’s demands for concessions on pensions and health care in the name of budget savings, but sacrificing the right to collective bargaining is out of the question, they add. The 14 Democratic members of Wisconsin’s Senate support the unions and have fled to neighboring Illinois, making impossible for the governor and the Republicans to push through his proposal – without the 14 Senate Democrats there is no quorum. The governor, they say, must retreat on the collective bargaining issue; otherwise they will not return from their “exile.”
Unions in America have played a crucial role in the years to create a 40-hour work week, rights to vacation, pensions, health care, etc., but they have for decades, maybe especially since President Reagan’s years in the White House, been under attack. The result today is that only seven percent of America’s private sector employees are unionized.
The unions in the public sector have fared better and have been able to better maintain their position and influence. They are precisely the ones now in the Wisconsin governor’s focus, a strategy that has led to a storm of charges against him for “union busting.”
The fact that the public sector trade unions consist of some of the Democratic Party’s strongest supporters has, of course, contributed to the battle’s now clearly partisan overtones in spite of Governor Walker attempts to frame this as solely a budget issue. The mass demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital, clearly show how the budget battle in Washington has now spread well beyond the Beltway. It is, fundamentally, at battle for political power in the 2012 elections.

Shadow boxing on the budget and the deficit

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A broad, intensive debate on the U.S. budget has dominated Washington for a week, ever since President Obama announced his budget proposal for the next fiscal year, which begins on 1 October, and the new Republican majority with 87 Tea Party supporters in the House of Representatives pushed through budget cuts totaling 61 billion dollars in this year’s budget despite unanimous opposition from the Democrats.
In addition, on March 4, the U.S. government reaches its debt ceiling and unless the parties can agree to raise the ceiling so that the state can borrow more money, the entire government machinery can come to a halt.
This happened during President Clinton’s big budget battle in 1995 after the Republicans, like now, won a majority in the House of Representatives and challenged the President. Led by the newly elected Speaker, Newt Gingrich, they forced a government shutdown, which ultimately paved the way for Clinton’s political comeback and re-election 1996. It remains to be seen whether today’s Tea Party Republicans recall that scenario during today’s budget battle, or if they even care.
The battle for this year’s budget, which was never approved by Congress, now goes to the Senate where Democrats have a majority and where the budget proposal from the House Republicans have no chance. Much negotiation remains and much of what can now be called “shadow boxing” remains before a possible budget deal can be reached.
President Obama has so far not wanted to lay his cards on the table. His budget of 3.7 trillion dollars includes a lowering of the budget deficit over the next ten years by 1.1 trillion. But that prognosis has not proved to be particularly credible and has led to the criticism from many, including those whose support he can usually count on.
Somehow, he seems to have fallen back into the role he played for a whole year during the healthcare debate, when he passively followed the debate in Congress, waiting for a deal that never came. It was not until he finally resolutely stepped in and pushed, that a deal came about. The same active engagement from the President was also seen during the lame duck session and resulted in his success on a series of f important issues.
That kind of active leadership is absent today. Everyone is waiting for everyone. No one, whether Obama or the Republicans, seems ready to be out front and tackle the big issues – Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security or defense – that is needed to really bring down the deficit, which today amounts to 1.5 trillion dollars, or 11 percent of the economy, the largest deficit since World War II.
Instead, the deficit debate so far has dealt with only a small portion, or 12 per cent, of the federal budget. That’s not enough to make any serious inroads, but neither party has so far seemed ready to concede this, and no one talks about possible tax increases, which many experts believe will be necessary, eventually. Tax increases have often proven to be the political kiss of death – former President George H.W. Bush and Democratic Presidential candidate Walter Mondale are recent proofs of this.
It is still touch and go for the American economy. Jobs and unemployment are still foremost on the minds of Americans. Many worry about a new dip of the American economy, a new recession, although the Federal Reserve has predicted a nearly 4 per cent growth this year. However, the Fed believes this is still not enough to drastically reduce today’s unemployment 9 percent. In these uncertain economic times, it is not advisable, according to the Fed, either to raise taxes or cut drastically in public expenditure – that could threaten the positive, but fragile, progress that the economy is making right now.

Republicans searching for their candidate

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American politics as a “perpetual election campaign” has been confirmed as of late.
Several of Obama’s staff led by David Axelrod, one of the key men behind Obama’s election victory in 2008, have recently left the West Wing and moved to Chicago to set up the Obama election campaign headquarters for the 2012 presidential election. There is no doubt that Obama will run for re-election but, in addition, there is no democratic challenger in sight, no Ted Kennedy, as in 1980, who challenged and lost against incumbent Jimmy Carter.
The Republicans are looking hard, using strong searchlights, for their candidate in 2012 against Obama, as seen this past week at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s (CPAC) conference in Washington with over 10,000 participants. In many respects, the conference was the start of the battle within the Republican Party about who will be Obama’s opponent in November 2012.
All, or almost all of those who aspire to become the Republican presidential candidate, were there – some of them more or less known, others almost or completely unknown to a wider audience. Their vanity was perhaps their most striking characteristic. Donald Trump, as Republican presidential candidate? Or tea party favorite Michele Bachmann? Or libertarian Ron Paul? Or, or – many of whom are too unknown to even mention here.
The vote at the CPAC conference as to whom the participants wanted to have as the Republican Party’s next presidential candidate was really quite meaningless. Only four thousand of the participants bothered to vote, and libertarian Ron Paul, won like last year. With 30 percent of the vote, the victory only showed how the ultra-conservatives and the tea party members dominated the CPAC conference. Paul has no chance to win the nomination – Trump said so, correctly. In second place was Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate 2010 with 23 percent of the vote while the rest finished far behind, including Sarah Palin with 3 percent, who didn’t even attend, along with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, former speaker Newt Gingrich, Senator John Thune from North Dakota and former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty perhaps wished that they had not been there, for they all ended up well behind Paul and Romney.
But the race has just begun. No one is yet an official candidate and it’s too early to draw any major conclusions right now other than that the Republicans’ feverish hunt for their presidential candidate will intensify as the Iowa and New Hampshire contests early next year quickly approach. Now is the time to organize and to raise money, a lot of money, which Mitt Romney has done much better than the others, so far. So, I guess, he is the front runner for now, which might not mean a thing down the line.
The Republicans have no doubt been encouraged by their election victory in 2010 and its new majority in the House of Representatives, but new victories in 2012 are far from guaranteed. The Republicans should probably not even take it for granted that they will retain their majority in the House of Representatives. President Obama is still a formidable opponent, perhaps even more so today than ever before during his two years in the White House. He seems to have a new spring in his step, and with each week of new signs of a strengthening U.S. economy, and if the unemployment figures can come down further, he looks to be increasingly formidable in November 2012.

The legal battle over healthcare reform is heating up

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When Americans have problems, they get a lawyer and go to court. Everyone is sued, or, at least, everyone threatens to sue everyone, and often about the smallest of things.
The American system of separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial powers makes it unique in comparison to Europe. The result is that many of the country’s crucial issues, such as racial segregation in schools, the right for a woman to have an abortion or how election campaigns should be financed, are not finally determined by the president or Congress, but through the judicial process, from the lower bodies up to the nine members the Supreme Court.
Now, a momentous legal and constitutional battle looms. It is about President Obama’s healthcare reform that was approved by Congress in March last year. It’s a battle not easily understood by Europeans where every citizen is guaranteed healthcare. They say: of course, every American should be entitled to health care and health insurance, without exceptions. They also wonder about the role of the judiciary and the Supreme Court and the central position of the U.S. Constitution in the American political system.
“Obamacare,” as Republicans and reform opponents condescendingly call the new law, has certainly divided America. About as many Americans support the reform as oppose it, at least if you talk about the new law in its entirety. However, some of it went into force at the start of this year and many of these measures have proved popular – lower drug costs for retirees, tax breaks for small businesses seeking health insurance for their employees, children up to age 26 can now remain insured under their parents’ health insurance, no child can no longer be denied health insurance because they already sick – so called pre-existing condition, and no person can get his/her insurance revoked if falling ill.
The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives has already voted to scrap the entire healthcare law. The Republicans in the Senate tried the same thing, but the Democratic majority prevented that from happening. Obama and the Democrats have said they are willing to take a look at individual sections of the new health care law to see if these can be improved, but they will not touch the whole law as such. For the moment, at least, it seems that the fight over the healthcare law in Congress has reached a stalemate
It is here, where the legislative process seemed to have reached an impasse, that that the focus has turned to the courts. In a series of legal maneuvers opponents of the healthcare law now seek to have it declared unconstitutional.
Twenty six attorney generals – all of them Republicans — are suing the Obama administration. Their goal is for the U.S. Supreme Court to find the new law unconstitutional. In addition, four federal judges in the states of Virginia, Michigan and Florida have expressed their opinion on the healthcare law. Two of them, both Democrats, have said that the law is consistent with the Constitution. The other two, both Republicans, had objections and one said that the entire law is unconstitutional.
For the opponents, the central argument has focused on the fact that, starting in 2014, everyone must buy health insurance. Congress does not have the power to order such a thing. No one can be forced to do this, they argue. But proponents of the new law say that it is no different from the fact that people have to buy car insurance or home insurance. Congress has this power. Choosing not to participate will make the system unfair and eventually so expensive that nobody will be able to afford insurance.
Much of the present debate is now focused on the date when the healthcare law will reach the Supreme Court. That it will reach the highest court seems a foregone conclusion, although no one knows when that will happen . One year? Two years?
Meanwhile, legal experts on all sides are lining up, pro and con. In recent articles in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, Harvard law professor, Laurence Tribe, and Georgetown University law professor, David Cole, both regarded as liberals, are surprisingly optimistic about the Supreme Court’s future decision on the healthcare law. Both argue that the law is based on well-established praxis and that there are enough precedents for the Nine on the Court, in spite of their ideological differences, to uphold the healthcare law and thereby declare it consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
We’ll see if they are right when the time comes. If so, it will be a decisive step for America in its gradual transition to a country where everyone has the right to health insurance. If not, it’s back to square one.

America and Egypt

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The big snow storm that poured in over Oklahoma and continued over the plains northward to Kansas and Missouri, and up to Chicago, Detroit and finally to New York and Boston and New England, is over. Here in Washington we escaped the storm – thankfully. Everyone who has lived in the U.S. capital knows that even only an inch or so of fresh snow can paralyze the city – close schools, block roads, lose power for hundreds of thousands of customers, often for days at a stretch.
This happened after a storm just a little over a week ago, but this week’s massive storm never reached Washington, and today the sun shines, and with a thin blanket of snow on the ground, it is both warm and beautiful.
While much of the country was struggling against the elements, the political Washington’s attention was focused on Egypt and events there. Crisis in Egypt has put the Obama Administration’s and the traditional American foreign policy in the Middle East under severe pressure. The Administration is currently balancing cautiously between the searches for stability while at the same time supporting the young democracy movement in the Middle East. President Obama’s stated support for the protesters and his call for that now, underline “now”, is the time for President Hosni Mubarak to reform and democratize Egypt’s politics, did not sit well with the Egyptians, according to American newspaper reports. On the contrary. But so far the White House stood its ground.
The question now is how the U.S. stance could be impacted by the fact that peaceful the demonstrations have turned into violent street battles with hundreds of deaths as a result. Reports like the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s eyewitness report from Tahrir Square in Cairo on Thursday about armed pro-Mubarek thugs assaulting peaceful pro-democracy protesters have certainly contributed to further weakening support in this country for Mubarek.
Whenever this country finds itself in a foreign policy crisis, the political opposition has traditionally backed the president’s policies. That is also the case now, as witnessed by the Republican presidential candidate in 2010, John McCain, who on Wednesday called for Mubarek to resign and immediately start the preparations for free and democratic elections later this year. McCain’s statement must have been welcomed by the White House, for it is obvious that America is facing a foreign policy crossroads where its traditional Middle East policy is at stake. At such a time, bipartisan consensus is of great importance.
Democracy is at best extremely fragile in the Middle East. U.S. allies make up almost all of the various forms of dictatorships. What is their future and what is the future of their relations with the United States? And what does all this do to the American-Israeli relationship? Can the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 be threatened?
These are important questions. Crucial questions. But there are no definitive answers to them today. However, nothing seems impossible when Egypt, both the U.S. and Israel’s most important ally in the Arab world, faces such an uncertain future.