Sunday Morning

I'm making my Sunday morning routine to read some of the world's newspapers to educate myself on the rest of the worlds opinions on things. I've found 3 that are particularly poignant, so I'll post them on here for everyone to read. One is from the New York Times, one from the Japan Times, and the other from The Times Britain.

I went out with Brennan (my roomate) and his brother last night. We bounced around different places, had a few drinks, played some pool, ate dinner, then ate a latenight snack. I had a pretty good time. It felt good to finally get out and do something with someone other than going out by myself! Other than that, not too much else is going on. I just finished reading through the papers, so I'll post the info. Maybe I'll do some more surfing through world papers and will post some more later. I do have to go in and study today, our test is Wednesday! Wish me luck. Here are the articles:

The New York Times
November 21, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Doctrine Left Behind
By MARK DANNER

It seemed somehow fitting, and fittingly sad, that Colin Powell saw his resignation accepted as secretary of state on the day marines completed their conquest of Falluja, ensuring that the televised snapshots of glory drawn from his long public career would be interspersed with videotape of American troops presiding over scenes of urban devastation in a far-off and intractable war.
As I watched images from Mr. Powell's life flicker past, and as the fruits of the American victory became clear - a ravaged city; an elusive enemy, most of whom had escaped; a countrywide counterattack in which insurgents seized parts of Mosul - I felt a ghostly echo of words I could not quite grasp. Two days later, watching an American general declare that in Falluja our forces had "broken the back of the insurgency," I felt the sentences I'd struggled to recall suddenly take shape; I reached for Mr. Powell's memoir and found these bitter lines:
"Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses. ...Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."
Those plain words about Vietnam stand out with refreshing immediacy today, in this age of the destruction of the fact, when incontrovertible but unwelcome information is dismissed as partisan argument. What might the Colin Powell who wrote those words, or the younger officer in Vietnam who envisaged his future as a man who could never "quietly acquiesce," have said about our present war? What might "many of his generation" - who are indeed the men now commanding in Iraq - have said, had they not themselves quietly acquiesced?
They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the United States has from the beginning had too few troops in Iraq: too few to secure the capital or effectively monitor the borders or even police the handful of miles of the Baghdad airport road; too few to secure the arms dumps that litter the country; and too few to mount an offensive in one city without leaving others vulnerable.
They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the insurgency is spreading: when I arrived in Iraq 13 months ago, the insurgents were mounting 17 attacks a day; last week there were 150 a day. If the old rule of thumb about counterinsurgency warfare holds true - that the guerrilla wins by not losing and the government loses by not winning - then America is losing the Iraq war. The Iraqi insurgents have shown "outstanding resilience," as a Marine intelligence report compiled after Falluja put it, and "will continue to find refuge among sympathetic tribes and former regime members."
Finally, these imaginary officers who refused to "quietly acquiesce" might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that if indeed the war is going very badly, the fault belongs not with commanders in the field but with policymakers in Washington, who in conceiving and executing the war made a series of flagrant mistakes and then doggedly refused to acknowledge or correct them: the failure over many weeks to establish law and order in Baghdad and other cities; the failure to begin an effective reconstruction program, leaving many Iraqis without electricity, water and other basic supplies for months; and finally - according to James R. Schlesinger, a Republican and former secretary of defense, in his report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison - the failure not only "to plan for a major insurgency, but also to quickly and adequately adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations."
It is a sad and familiar litany. But however widely these disasters are acknowledged, many Americans seem willing to treat them as if they were acts of God rather than the results of decisions that were made, and not made, by our officials - decisions that stem ultimately from a failure to coordinate the agencies and departments of American power.
This job falls, by statute and custom, to the national security adviser. And it is directly to that office that "the major interagency coordination problems between State and Defense and the striking ineffectiveness of the National Security Council" can be traced, in the words of Anthony Cordesman. Mr. Cordesman, a nonpartisan military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is one of many professionals who trace the disasters in Iraq back to failure to resolve conflicts between major government departments, as well as to debilitating "ideological efforts to shape the nation-building effort and personnel deployed to Iraq."
After Condoleezza Rice's elevation as Mr. Powell's successor, so much of the commentary seemed focused on her "closeness" to the president that it might have seemed the height of indiscretion to point out that she has been something of a disaster in her present job - a fact widely acknowledged among foreign policy professionals.
No one can say how many lives could have been saved had the responsible officials asked the right questions. As it happens, those questions had been laid out with courage and clarity back in 1992, by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Colin Powell. While the Powell Doctrine is generally thought simply to prescribe the setting of clear objectives and the use of overwhelming force to achieve them, it also sets out a series of questions that policymakers must ask and answer before committing American lives to war. They make sobering reading today:
"Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?"
Faced with the war in Iraq, how might Mr. Powell have answered these questions? The main "political objective" the United States sought in Iraq, insofar as the president identified it, was to deprive Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. These always ghostly objects have long since evaporated; and no matter how often administration officials repeat that the French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations also judged that Mr. Hussein had weapons, this will not change the recalcitrant fact that these parties did not accept that they posed enough of a threat to support an immediate war.
Second, had "all other nonviolent means failed" to disarm Mr. Hussein? Though the president is still fond of declaring, as he did in the first presidential debate, that "Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming," the rest of us have perhaps not entered too deeply into the post-factual age not to acknowledge what we now know: that in fact Saddam Hussein did disarm - and that the international inspectors on the scene, given time and sufficient diplomatic support, would eventually have confirmed this - just as David Kay, the administration's arms inspector, was able to do in the war's aftermath. As he allowed himself to say in a moment of near-suicidal honesty, in the matter of the weapons the Iraqis "were telling the truth."
But it is in posing his last several questions that the younger Mr. Powell becomes a truly heartbreaking figure - the questions about "gains and risks" and about consequences. How do we evaluate these? We can speak of the 1,200 Americans dead and 9,000 wounded, or even of the thousands of Iraqis who have died. But what objective do we weigh them against?
And finally: "How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?" The question is unflinching, but there is little evidence that the administration Secretary Powell served ever made a serious attempt to answer it. What would such an attempt have looked like? We know the answer; for in 1992 the general himself offered us an example of the "logical process" he had in mind, analyzing why President George H. W. Bush did not order our forces to take Baghdad in 1991:
"We must assume that the political objective of such an order would have been capturing Saddam Hussein," he wrote. "What purpose would it have served? And would serving that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not."
These lines carry with them the whiff of far-off times, a lost world of pragmatism that pre-dated the religious trappings of the war on terrorism. Today, "the major occupation forces" Mr. Powell warned against are fighting a guerrilla war in a country on the Persian Gulf, through which half the industrial world's oil passes - a country far more strategically important than Vietnam.
Begun as an ideological crusade, the war has now settled into something bloody, murderous and crude, with no "exit strategy" in sight. The war's beginning, built on the threat of weapons that did not exist, and its ending, which flickered to life so temptingly on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln 18 months ago, have disappeared, leaving American troops fighting and dying in a kind of lost, existential desert of the present. We may not have yet reached Colin Powell's vision of "half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand." But we are well on the way.
Mark Danner is the author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror."


Japan Times
Last gasp of U.S. hegemony
By KEVIN RAFFERTY Special to The Japan Times HONG KONG --
Sometimes it is difficult to fathom the mind of Mr. Market. After the Congress Party won the Indian election, the stock market plunged. After U.S. President George W. Bush's re-election was confirmed, markets everywhere were almost dancing with joy, seemingly oblivious to $50-a-barrel oil prices, the bloody mess in Iraq, the threats from al-Qaeda, America's jobless recovery and its yawning deficits.
TV's talking heads were jubilant, declaring that a victory for tax cuts that would boost economic growth and send Wall Street and other markets soaring. Perhaps it was the hallucinatory effect of the election slogans that had many voters believing that God and American guns could keep gays and terrorists at bay while restoring peace, harmony and prosperity to the world.
The reality is that Bush will be forced to make hard choices, and the American people will have to face pain for their profligacy. For the rest of the world, U.S. difficulties will bring hardships.
But while the rest of the world has the potential to recover, this is the beginning of the end of U.S. hegemony. It will be a tougher new world that emerges, but as with the British Empire or Ancient Rome, there is nothing God-given or eternal that says Washington must rule the world forever.
Perhaps the only good thing about the U.S. election was that it was over quickly and cleanly. However, the whole pantomime performance of the poll should raise doubts about the efficiency and validity of its contribution to democracy.
Bill Bonner of the Daily Reckoning said he had been hoping that both candidates would lose. He cynically noted that Americans are proud of their democracy: It gives them an opportunity to change leadership "by fraud, rather than by force. The candidates stir up the mob of lumpen voters however they can, dredging from the bottom of the pot the most sordid and titillating sentiments. One offers visions of apocalypse, and stands tall as the man who can protect them. The other says he will give voters more pills, at someone else's expense of course, and a whole new range of bribes while also cutting the federal deficit in half!
"No matter that the promises are implausible, impossible, oxymoronic or merely stunningly counterproductive, the crowd takes to it like a shot of Jack Daniels after escaping from a dry-out center."
Bonner does exaggerate, but the problem with this U.S. version of democracy is that the demos gets a single chance every four years -- or two years if you count the congressional elections -- to make their voices heard.
Since both houses of Congress now have stronger Republican majorities, there is little to stop Bush doing whatever he wants, especially now that he has the moral advantage of a 51 percent majority of the popular vote. In 2000 Bush lost the popular vote and won in the electoral college only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. But that did not stop him from opening a perilous second front in the war against terror on the basis of badly flawed intelligence.
As a European, I find it hard to understand how the American people can swallow Bush's contradictory claim that the war against terror is going jolly well but that, since the danger is greater than ever before, he is the leader to keep America safe. I pray that in the wake of his triumph, he listens to British Prime Minister Tony Blair's pleas that renewed efforts must be made in the quest for a Middle East peace as the key to defeating the terrorists.
The war in Iraq is more than a sideshow. Indeed, it is an expensive drain in both manpower and money on an already overstretched American economy. This is the real problem that Bush faces, and it will not go away even if he zaps all the terrorists from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's perceptive economist, drew attention to the fact that some of the numbers are nothing short of frightening. The U.S. currently has $38 trillion in debts, and there is a $54 trillion federal funding gap -- the difference between what the government is committed to pay out and what it will receive in tax revenues.
Not to worry, say cheerful economists who point to the fact that, although the 3.7 percent growth in the third quarter was a bit below expectations, consumers are still spending. In fact, consumer spending accounts for about 70 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
By many measures, Americans are far better off than they have ever been, with more electric devices and gadgetry crammed into even bigger homes. The average American house was 135 square meters in 1970 -- today it is 201 square meters. And of course those homes are worth more and more when measured in dollars -- the world's monopoly money.
But, Roach noted, America's net national savings rate fell to a record low of 0.4 percent early last year. It has risen slightly to just 1.9 percent. Roach warned that, with such low domestic savings, America imports foreign savings to fund economic growth. "The external deficit [has] risen to 5.7 percent of GDP." The U.S. is now absorbing more than 80 percent of the world's surplus savings, "requiring $2.6 billion of capital inflows each business day to fund its domestic saving shortfall."
The U.S. is spending at all levels like there is no tomorrow. The trade deficit is hitting new records. The budget deficit is growing and will grow faster while Iraq bleeds American money. Meanwhile, a demographic time bomb is ticking as aging baby boomers reach retirement age. The number of Americans aged 65 and above will rise from 12.4 percent of the total population to 18.2 percent over the next 25 years, though that's well after Bush leaves the White House.
When will the economic nuclear explosion occur? Like riding a bicycle, continuous momentum is important. The situation may continue as long as the rest of the world is prepared to accept dollar assets.
Roach concluded that savings is the sustenance of long-term growth for any economy. And yet America is lacking in savings as never before. It has finessed that shortfall by consuming the wealth generated by asset appreciation and by drawing heavily on the world's pool of surplus savings.
In my view there is nothing stable about this arrangement. In fact, there is a growing risk that America's savings shortfall will only intensify in the years ahead -- especially given Washington's total lack of fiscal integrity. As always, the flows will give the impression that this outcome is sustainable. In the end, nothing could be further from the truth.
Kevin Rafferty, a former managing editor for the World Bank, is author of "City on the Rocks, Hong Kong's Uncertain Future" (Viking Press, 1990).
The Japan Times: Nov. 15, 2004



The Sunday Times – Britain
November 21, 2004
Britain joins EU Army
BRITAIN is to commit more than 2,000 troops to a new 18,000-strong European Union army that will be deployed as a peacekeeper to the world’s trouble spots, write Adam Nathan and Nicola Smith.
Despite concerns within the military about overstretch, ministers will announce this week that at least one battle group will be ready by January.
They will also say the force will expand by 2007 to comprise a multinational force of up to 12 elite rapid-reaction battle groups — each with 1,500 soldiers. At least two of these groups will be ready to deploy at 15 days’ notice to humanitarian or peacekeeping emergencies, primarily in Africa.
Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines have been earmarked for the new force.
A British official said: “A commander could immediately draw on 1,500 troops who will be sitting in the barracks with their boots on, ready to go.”
The creation of the force was signalled earlier this year by Tony Blair following the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, and comes only a week after Britons had to be evacuated from fighting in the Ivory Coast.
Although it is not envisaged that the battle groups would be deployed to the Middle East, they could have a role in supporting policing and the rule of law. An EU team is to visit Iraq within the next fortnight.
The force — which would comprise the rapid-reaction units in an EU army that supporters want to expand to 60,000 — is already prompting some concerns that it could duplicate the role of Nato.
Nicholas Soames, the Conservatives’ defence spokesman, said: “We believe the EU defence contribution should be under the Nato umbrella. Anything that undermines Nato is damaging. We will be studying the details but this sort of duplication is an expensive waste of time.”
Some Nato planners are concerned that the new force should not be used as a cheaper substitute for the alliance and insist that EU military units must be trained to Nato standards. “It is right to pose the political questions, but at the moment we do not need to sound the alarm bell,” said a diplomat at Nato HQ in Brussels.
Any deployment would require an emergency meeting of the EU’s council of ministers. Membership of a battle group would not be compulsory and individual nations would retain a veto over deployment.
Military command in the field would lie with the country with the biggest contingent. Britain, France, Italy and Spain will each provide one battle group made up solely of its troops, while Britain will share a second battle group with the Dutch. Seventeen EU countries have committed soldiers.
General Jean-Paul Perruche, French head of the EU’s military staff, said the creation of the battle groups was a “significant” development.
“It is the adaptation of the capabilities of Europe to the new context of crisis in the world. To be able to commit at short notice a significant trained force, to intervene in an emerging crisis ,” he said.
It has also been mooted as an attempt to encourage European countries to investment more in military capabilities. There is growing concern within Britain’s armed forces about their ability to meet their commitments after it emerged that more than £1 billion is to be cut from “frontline” forces.
Senior officers — including, it is believed, General Sir Michael Jackson, chief of the general staff — are concerned that it will leave the army without the funding needed for 1,000 soldiers, about 1% of its force.
· Commonwealth troops working in sensitive positions in the British armed forces have been told to adopt British nationality or lose their jobs. Some 8,000 Commonwealth troops work for the services and the ultimatum will affect those with access to sophisticated equipment and sensitive information, particularly in the special forces.
The Ministry of Defence said: “There are various criteria that must be satisfied for personnel with access to sensitive material, one of which is nationality. The Home Office will fast-track dual nationality, but if they do not wish to take it we will endeavour to move them to another part of the service. We are not asking them to turn their backs on their countries.”