Tuesday, July 02, 2013

Israel Is Center of US Middle East Policy

A New York Times headline today sums of US Middle Eastern policy for the last 50 years, "Chaos in Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel."  US policy toward Arab states has always been subordinate to our policy toward Israel.  This started when early in its life the United Nations accepted the partition of Palestine, thus allowing the creation of the state of Israel.  One of the first countries to recognize the new state was the US.  (For a slightly different view of how this happened, see "The Myth of the U.N. Creation of Israel.")  In any case, the State Department, led by General George Marshall, strongly opposed President Truman's immediate recognition of Israel, motivated in part by Truman's desire for Jewish votes in the upcoming election.

The US relationship with Israel has evolved over the years, becoming closer and closer, as the US sided with Israel in the various wars that the Arabs waged because of what they saw as the Jewish usurpation of Arab land.  The Arab states joined in various degrees of enthusiasm with the resistance of their Palestinian brethren, placing the US more and more at odds with the overwhelming majority of the states and populace of the Middle East.  But for Israel, there may never have been on OPEC and an oil crisis in the US.  The twin towers of the World Trade Center might still be standing in New York.  The US might not have fought two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.  The US might be many billions of dollars richer for not having supplied Israel with massive aid over the years, about $135 billion by one estimate, and $118 billion by another estimate.

Israel is truly the tail that wags the dog of US foreign policy.  There are many reasons for this, but I do not think that many of them are driven by the national interest of the United States; they are driven by the national interest of Israel, represented by the high number of Jewish politicians in America, the huge influence of Jewish money in national elections (e.g. Sheldon Adelson), and the religious beliefs of a number of conservative, evangelical Christians that Israel is essential to the endtime or rapture.  Clearly there is also the charitable motive of helping an oppressed minority that suffered terribly in World War II.  But it's not clear to me why the Arabs had to pay for Hitler's atrocities, except that it was more convenient for whites of European ancestry.  Part of the original UN settlement also must have been that Britain was exhausted by World War II and did not want to get involved in another war in the Middle East over its Palestine mandate.  It just wanted to get out of Palestine, and giving it to Israel was the easiest alternative at the time.  It was also in accord with Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration.  But these "easy" decisions have a way of coming back to haunt us.

At the current time, I am not sure that I agree with the New York Times article whose title I quoted above.  Israel and Palestine are still the core of the troubles in the Middle East; so, I don't think Kerry should ignore them.  But the article is right that the fires in the Middle East are now in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Iran, Afghanistan, maybe Turkey and other countries.  However, the ember that stays hot and ignites these other conflicts is the Israel-Palestinian conflict and there will be no long-term solution to Arab-spring arc of crisis until there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.  


Monday, July 01, 2013

Bernanke stimulus v Congress sequester

The stock market was upset by Fed Chairman Bernanke's statement that he might let the Fed's quantitative easing bond purchases taper off as the economy improves.  The market's view was apparently that a good economy was worthless; all that mattered was the Fed-supplied QE stimulus.

While the Fed was supplying stimulus through its purchases, the Congress was applying austerity through the sequester, slowing the economy by reducing government spending on many programs. I would not blame Bernanke if he has gotten tired of trying to save the American economy single-handedly, while the idiots in Congress, especially the House, are trying to bring back the Great Depression.  The economy must be somewhat better, or Congress would have killed it, but it was not ready for Congress to start beating on it with a stick.  So, I would guess that Bernanke will be happy to walk away from this mess, but he may want to start to unwind QE so that he does not get blamed if his successor does not do it right.

 This may mean that he will have to start unwinding it a little earlier than he would like to.  If that is the case, then the market may be right that there will be some rough patches ahead, as Bernanke begins to withdraw his first aid while Congress continues to inflict harm on it.

Paula Deen

I think Paula Deen has gotten a bad deal from the press and social media.  Most of the criticism has been about political correctness, not about something terrible that she has physically done. There are currently two other celebrities -- George Zimmerman and Aaron Hernandez -- both of whom appear to have killed black men.  They have gotten more evenhanded treatment from the public than Paula Deen, who truthfully admitted to using the "N-word," but has not been shown to have mistreated blacks physically, much less to have murdered any.  Yet, judging from the public reaction, her crime was worse than Zimmerman's or Hernandez'.  Other football players, including O.J. Simpson and Ray Lewis, probably killed people, but get much less criticism than Deen.  I see a politically correct double standard.  A few people have been less quick to condemn her, including Bill Maher, who of course made his name by making fun of stupid political correctness.  He sees that Paula Deen's accusers are largely narrow minded slaves to political correctness.

People often condemn her for admitting that she has used the N-word.  In essence they condemn her honesty.  But I respect her honesty.  The fact that people don't commend her honesty illustrates the poor character of those who condemn her.  These are people who think it is okay for Wall Street to lie about mortgages and take America to the brink of bankruptcy.

I see the attack on Paula Deen as an attack on the American South.  They hate her Southern cooking, and now they have an excuse to hate her personally.  While what she did is wrong, it was not an unforgivable sin, and her pleas for forgiveness should not fall on deaf ears, as they have in the public media.  The South is not as bad as New York and Los Angeles try to portray it.  One Reconstruction is enough.  

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Money in America

I was saddened by two op-eds in the NYT on Friday.  David Brooks said that the only way to measure success in America is money.  Paul Krugman said that technology will mean that fewer and fewer people will have more and more of that money.

I don't disagree with Brooks that in today's America financial success is the main way to measure success, but I think there are still people, religious or not, who have other values, and who may value some form of personal goodness, loving your neighbor, or doing good for society in general as a higher value than financial success.  It's interesting that although Brooks column talks a lot about religion, it does not mention the "Protestant work ethic" which is probably the most well-known description of the moral system that he says is now dead.

By Brooks' measure, no doctor should aspire to be a family physician, keeping regular people well over time.  All doctors should aspire to be neurosurgeons, cardiac surgeons, or orthopedic surgeons, where the money is.  Everyone should be a specialist.  I suppose you could argue that the best doctors become specialists in high-paying fields, while the worse doctors have to settle for family practices.  But I think at least a few of those actually choose to be general practice doctors because they actually want to make people well and keep them that way, not just make money.

Similarly, no lawyer would ever become a judge.  Judges' salaries are nothing compared to corporate lawyers' or plaintiffs' lawyers.  But somebody has to make decisions that keep society functioning.  Many judges do it, because they feel that it is a higher calling than litigating or finding tax dodges for multi-billion dollar companies.  There are lots of claims that today judges are being bought or influenced by the enormous financial power of big corporations and super-rich individuals, but there are still some honest judges.

But Brooks is right that in today's society a good judge or family doctor no longer has the social status that he would have had a generation or two ago.  The military is another victim.  It's pinnacle was probably after World War II, because almost everybody served, the US won, and the US was relatively unscathed by the war, compared to Europe or Asia.  The nadir was probably post-Vietnam.  9-11 helped restore some luster to the military, but still no one from a "nice" family would serve.  We have developed something of a military caste, with an officer corps drawn from military families or families not connected to the American power structure, and enlisted men drawn from the under-classes of the country, again people who are somewhat alienated from "good" society before they enlist.  They get lots of thanks, but you don't get many people from good universities or wealthy families joining the military.  Because of the relatively small base from which to draw soldiers and the high volume and long duration of the wars they are called to fight, the military is constantly under stress.  In addition, it is now becoming a social experiment by integrating women and gays into the force.  Integration worked pretty well for blacks in the military, but that was a more democratic military with a broader cross-section of soldiers than today's.  We will see whether that makes the social experiment easier or harder.  But Brooks is right that the relatively low pay for the military reduces its stature in American society.  many people who sing the National Anthem or America the Beautiful at sporting events think they are doing just as much to show their love for America as soldiers facing bullets in Afghanistan or some other foreign war.

In the other column, Paul Krugman says that we are going through a change in the economy and the nature of work as great that of the industrial revolution.  It is changing the whole balance of power between labor and capital with capital far outstripping labor in importance.  Manual labor is no longer being outsourced to poorer countries, it is being eliminated by technology.  A CEO can almost run an industrial empire from a computer on his desk.  Thus he reaps almost all of the profit from his factories' production because there are no laborer with whom he has to share it.  For the last generation or so, the technological revolution created jobs in the tech industry, writing code for all the new computers, but Krugman adds that today even those jobs are disappearing.  Education is no longer a guarantee of a decent job.  Furthermore, he says we are duping our young people into going into huge debt to finance their education, which may turn out to be useless in the job market.

If they are both right, we doom the majority of Americans to a life of poverty and low self-esteem.  Neither of them addresses the issue of "celebrity," which is a relatively new American phenomenon.  It often includes people with no special or socially useful skills who make tons of money by playing themselves of some made-up version of themselves on television and the Internet.  If money is really the indicator of social value, we find these people with almost no real value given the highest social value under the new standards.

The histories of the Roman Empire and French Revolution show similar trends, as societies abandoned the values which made them great, in both cases yielding to corruption and income inequality that eventually destroyed them.  The demonstrations yesterday in Brazil, the day before in Turkey, and perhaps last year's Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab spring show that there may be a growing perception among the masses that the super-rich 1% is saying "Let them eat cake," while the masses want jobs and salaries that allow them to buy bread and veggies.




Friday, June 14, 2013

What Next for Syria?

It is odd that the administration has sort of anonymously announced that Syria has crossed the "red line" of using chemical weapons.  Nothing new has happened in the last few days, except that Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been named to new foreign policy positions.  Both of them are activists for using power to right humanitarian wrongs.  I think the new announcement is in some way linked to their joining the administration.

Apparently the finding is that the Assad regime used chemical weapons to kill 100-150 people.  No word on specifically when and where.  Why is it worse to kill 100 people with sarin, than to kill 93,000 (a recent estimate of deaths from the war) by conventional means?  Why would Syria purposefully cross Obama's red line by using sarin to kill 100 people, when the whole idea of WMD and the red line is mass casualties.  There is no "mass destruction" alleged.  It only makes sense if think Assad purposefully wanted to stick his finger in Obama's eye.  That's possible, but unlikely, unless it got Assad some reward from the Iranians or the Russians.

I would not discount the possibility that the rebels got some small quantity of sarin gas and used it to frame Assad.  Until we know more about when, where and how the sarin was used, I think that is a possibility.  I would not put is past the rebels to use sarin gas on a few of their own people if it meant that they would get Patriot missiles from the US.

So now we are going to arm the rebels.  The best justification I have heard was from David Ignatius on "Morning Joe," who said that we are not arming them for the fight against Assad, but for the war after Assad falls.  The rebels purportedly have some good guys interspersed with the al-Qaeda linked terrorists who are fighting Assad.  Presumably we would arm the non-terrorists to fight the terrorists after Assad falls.  However, most of the radical Sunni countries in the Middle East side with the terrorist-linked rebels, or at best don't care who they are as long as they fight the Shias and the Alawites.  The idea that that we can produce a good outcome from the Syrian civil war is preposterous.  You only have to look at the most successful of our recent interventions -- Libya -- to see that a good outcome is very unlikely.  The first thing that happened after we killed Qaddafi was that the Libyans killed our ambassador.  Libya is less of a mess that Iraq or Afghanistan, but it's still a mess.  Meanwhile, the Iraq war ended up strengthening our enemy in Iran, and the war in Afghanistan has failed to stop the Taliban, but has destabilized Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, possibly facilitating the transfer of nuclear weapons to terrorists around the world.

On this issue, as on most foreign policy issues, the two best commentators are Fareed Zakaria and Zbigniew Brzezinski, possibly joined by David Ignatius.  Meanwhile, the Republican lynch mob in Congress, led by John McCain, and now aided by Rice and Power, cries for more blood.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

NSA Spying on Americans

So far the biggest problem with NSA's collection of meta-data from various American phone companies is that it is spying on Americans.  NSA, Obama, and Congress argue that collecting just the phone numbers, locations, times, etc., in not an infringement of Fourth Amendment protection against searches and seizures.  However, it is collecting information about Americans that can be used for intelligence purposes, and the fact that it is stored by NSA means that it is already treated as intelligence data.  This data can be mined for many types of information by NSA, some legitimate and permitted under the Fourth Amendment, and some not.  It's sort of like saying that the government has the right to set up microphones and cameras in your house to record your every move, but it doesn't have the right to look at it, unless it gets a court order.  Maybe NSA is being law abiding, and maybe they are not.  Maybe they are being law abiding now, but won't be in ten years, but they will still have the data to mine for inappropriate information.

If the US faced a clear and present danger to its survival, then this program might be justifiable, but I don't think that it does.  The terrorism threats we face are low-level and usually amateurish.  If you weigh the threat against the loss of civil liberties, I think that loss of civil liberties far outweighs the threat.  The threat does not justify spying on Americans, even if this spying is just recorded and not looked at.  This is exactly the kind of thing that Hitler would have used against the Jews.  In today's world, he probably could have found out where Ann Frank was hiding within hours by collecting and analyzing the meta-data of the electronic footprint of the family hiding her.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Massive Intelligence Collection Threatens Liberty

The collection of metadata about the telephone calling habits of ordinary Americans is ust the sort of thing that an authoritarian government would need to keep its population under control.  By using location and numbers called, you can tell who is white, black, Hispanic, who is Muslim catholic, or Jewish, who is rich or poor, who is politically active as a liberal or conservative.  The information is all there in the big data that NSA is collecting, but NSA promises they won't mine the data for that information.  Maybe it won't today, but what about tomorrow.

Today the system targets Muslims who don't like America.  Tomorrow it could be Jews who belong to the ACLU, or Christians who belong to the NRA, depending on ho is in charge.  The information is all there in NSA's computers; it just depends on who is processing it, and what they do with the results.

Monday, May 27, 2013

Intelligence Leaks

All the talk about the administration's investigation of intelligence leaks reminds me of one of my experiences about 20 years ago while I was in the Foreign Service.  I was the chairman of a committee looking at violations of certain US export control laws. Occasionally we would get intelligence that somebody was trying to violate the laws, and we would debate whether we could take action on the intelligence, and if so, what kind of action.  The intelligence agencies were often resistant to taking action on intelligence, because they worried that it might reveal "sources and methods."  Occasionally I opposed taking action because I did not think the intelligence was good or reliable enough.  In that case, I would usually ask the intelligence agency involved to try and get better or confirming information.  Several times when I did not want to act on questionable intelligence, I got calls at home at 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock at night from Michael Gordon (I think) who had been told the intelligence information and wanted me to confirm it.  I would not confirm it; I fell back on the old saw, "neither confirm nor deny."  I don't even remember if the articles ran.  However, I was amazed that the leaks must have come from the conservative side of the people working on the issue, probably from the CIA or the Pentagon.  And the leaks were of very highly classified information.  Somehow, I expected that if anyone were going to violate the law in order to "do good," it would be some crazy liberal, not some conservative, who claimed to be super patriotic.  I never knew who did it, but I was appalled at the cavalier treatment of classified information.

I didn't have any personal connection to the Iraq war, but I was similarly surprised that Judith Miller wrote a number of New York Times articles on the war, particularly regarding weapons of mass destruction, that were false and planted by conservatives linked to Dick Cheney and company.  It's as if conservatives have no regard for the law or the truth.  I'm sure many do, but the moral standards on the right have in the past seemed to lower than on the left.  I will be interesting if we ever find out where the new set of leaks came from.

Despite my experience, I am not in favor of the way the Obama administration is going about its investigation of the recent leaks regarding Yemen and North Korea.  I don't think Obama should be pursuing journalists; he should limit his investigation to government employees.  If the FBI is too inept to figure out who is doing the leaking without looking a journalists' phone records, then they should give up.  The journalists are not violating the law (in most cases); the leakers are.  Let the journalists do their job, and just go after the government employees.

Friday, May 17, 2013

IRS Scandal Overblown

On its face, the IRS scandal involving the questioning of 501(c)(4) applications by conservative Tea Party groups looks bad, and it is, but it's not terrible.  David Brooks makes a good point in his NYT column on the issue, generally critical, but pointing out that most Tea Party groups hate the IRS, which is reviewing their applications, and would eliminate it or drastically limit it.  Brooks says, "It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most anti-tax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy."

In addition, the 501(c)(4) provision is bad policy, as Steve Rattner wrote in the NYT, and as Stephen Colbert illustrated when he created his bogus, but legal, Super PAC during the last election cycle.  Rattner points out the one of the biggest advantages of 501(c)(4) status is that the group does not have reveal the names of its donors.  Carl Rove has worked out a scheme where he collects money through his 501(c)(4) so that he does not have to reveal donors' names, and then transfers the money to his Super PAC.  In theory the 501(c)(4) group should not be overtly political, but the Super PAC can be.  So, the IRS was given the job of overseeing one of the most controversial  election financing provisions, something that should be overseen by the Federal Elections Commission, but the FEC is toothless and worthless, the IRS is probably a better organization to it, if you are interested in protecting the American people from election fraud.  Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has only strengthened the legal channels for political corruption in America.

So, the IRS made a little stand against political corruption, and it has been viciously attacked for doing so.  It is at fault, particularly if it routinely granted 501(c)(4) status to liberal groups while giving conservative groups a hard time.  However, the real problem is the corrupt politicians who passed section 501(c)(4) in the first place so that their campaigns could rake in millions of dollars in untraceable contributions.

Try Diplomacy with Syria

Here's an op-ed in the NYT by a real FSO in Colorado, Amb. Christopher Hill, arguing the case for diplomacy to solve the Syrian civil war.  I think it is worth a try.  We should be having meetings with the Russians, the Syrians, and anybody else signficantly affected by the war, like the Jordanians and Turks; however, I am not optimistic that anything will stop the bloodshed, including American boots on the ground, much less creating a no-fly zone, or other half-way measures.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the US intervention in Libya, which appeared to be relatively cost-free and successful, was not so successful.  The attack on the American mission in Benghazi, the attack on the Amenas oil facility in Algeria, and the al Qaida unrest in Mail all showed the remaining power of the Libyan rebels who do not like us.  So, the American intervention in the relatively manageable Libyan civil war, was less than completely successful.  Whether it turns out to be 25%, 50% or 75% successful, only history will tell, like the war in Iraq.  Hopefully Libya will turn out better than Iraq.  Unfortunately one of the best American strengths in Libya, the well-liked Ambassador Christopher Stevens, was killed by the anti-American group Ansar al Sharia, weakening America's future role there.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Too Much Benghazi

I have had enough of the Republicans' screaming about Benghazi.  They are overjoyed that Amb. Stevens was killed, and they are dancing on his grave, making political capital with his death.  They, of course, argue that it is the administration and the Democrats who are dishonoring his death by not saying that he was killed by terrorists.  If you compare Benghazi to the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, where the Bush administration actually lied to cover up the fact that he was killed by friendly fire, there is no doubt that the Obama administration was more honest and more concerned about the death of those serving this country.

Only recently has it become clear that Benghazi was neither an embassy nor a consulate; it was some kind of other diplomatic mission, which seems to have been devoted to the CIA.  There were relatively few State Department personnel there; the Ambassador and an IT specialist just happened to be visiting when the attack occurred.  It's not clear what the CIA was doing; they could have been advising local leaders on political and security issues, or they might have been planning drone attacks on the very people who attacked the mission.  If that's the case, they were just too slow.

I also think it's unbalanced to have a man of outstanding moral character arguing with a low-life like Issa.  Wikipedia says Issa was accused of several car thefts, although he apparently was never convicted, and collected on a large fire insurance policy on his company under suspicious circumstances.  He apparently served honorably in the military, although apparently without leaving the US or serving in combat.  Meanwhile, Ambassador Pickering is an honorable man who has served in many senior jobs in the State Department, as ambassador to several countries and as assistant secretary and under secretary in Washington.  While I was an intelligence analyst in the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, I worked with Pickering when he was Assistant Secretary for Oceans, Environment, and Science, and had such a high opinion of him that he is one of the reasons I stayed in the Foreign Service.

Ambassador Pickering's report led to the firing of several State Department employees from their jobs dealing with security.  The Republicans are less interested in security; they are only interested in the talking points prepared for Ambassador Rice the Sunday after the Benghazi attacks, claiming that the talking points were modified for political reasons because of Obama's election campaign.

There seems to be some consensus that the attack was carried out by a group called Ansar al Sharia, although different from the group with the same name in Yemen. This group made a positive name for itself during the rebellion against Qaddafi, but it aroused hostility by its attack on the Benghazi mission, especially since Amb. Stevens was well known and loved by the Libyan people.  It does not appear that it has done anything of significance since 9/11/2012.  It seems to me that in a rational world the Republicans would be mad at Ansal al Sharia for killing the Americans, rather than at President Obama for allowing some watered-down talking points to be used while the US Government was still trying to figure out exactly what happened.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Income Inequality Changes Housing Market

Income inequality is putting more and more houses into the hands of the wealthy 1 or 2 percent, raising prices and making it more difficult for regular people to buy a house.  Stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times document this phenomenon.  The big investors buying the homes are counting on regular people not being able to buy and having to rent the homes the investors are buying.  The New York Times says that the investors are taking a risk, because renting a large number of single family houses is a new undertaking that is difficult to manage.  The investors say that computer technology will allow them to keep up with the numerous records, repairs, etc., that have to be kept for each house.

The Washington Post says that in the formerly depressed Florida market, big investors are buying as much as 70% of the houses sold, perhaps inflating the figures indicating a revival of the housing market.  These are houses that had been owned by individuals until they were foreclosed.  Now they will be rental units being rented by the rich to regular people, who used to own their homes.  The Washington Post says the percentage of Americans owning their home has fallen from 69.2% to  65.4% since 2004.

The attraction for big investors is that very few assets these days pay any significant return.  Bond and stock yields are low and the risk is relatively high for the low return of 1 or 2%.  Buying cheap, foreclosed properties that can yield an 8% return quickly is inviting.

Both articles point out the risks for investors if there is another housing downturn, but the problem with income inequality is that for the rich, an investment that turns sour is not the end of the world, while for a regular person, losing his only home to foreclosure is something like the end of the world.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Foreign Service Losing Ground at State Department

The op-ed in the Washington Post about the State Department's Foreign Service losing ground even within the Department struck a nerve with me.  One of the authors was Susan Johnson, whose parents I knew in Washington; her father was a Foreign Service officer.  Another was Amb. Tom Pickering, whom I worked with as a junior officer and whom I looked up to during my whole career in the Foreign Service.

The issue is an old one, the fact that political appointees are taking over more and more jobs at the State Department.  It also highlights the Foreign Service's loss of prominence to the State Department's Civil Service employees.

When I was the Science Counselor at the American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, the State Department asked me if I would be willing to transfer to the American Embassy in Rome, because the Science Counselor in Rome was leaving, and Italy was taking over the Presidency of the European Union, which meant a big increase in the workload for Rome, since it would have to deal with the usual bilateral issues, plus EU-wide issues that came up to Italy as the EU President.  I agreed to go, since I thought the State Department needed me there.

When I arrived, however, I found that Embassy Rome had been fighting with the State Department personnel system for some time over this position.  The incumbent Science Counselor, who was being forced to leave was a political appointee, one of the problems pointed out in the op-ed.  He had come in with Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, who was then the American Ambassador in Rome.  The political appointee had been in the State Department for eight years, which was the limit for "Schedule C" political appointments.  Bartholomew had tried to get the Science Officer accepted into the career Foreign Service, but for whatever reason, the Foreign Service personnel system had refused; so, he was had to leave.  Apparently Amb. Bartholomew was angry and the system, and was determined to get his own man, apparently someone other than a Foreign Service officer, if only the spite the system.  The odd thing to me was that I knew the Civil Service officer they wanted.  In a previous job, he had worked just across the hall from me.  His office was partly responsible for assigned science officers overseas, and had had a role in my assignment to Warsaw, but apparently not to Rome.  When I had worked with him, I thought he had been a nice enough guy, but under the circumstances I felt that I had been stabbed in the back.  My immediate boss, the Economic Minister in Rome, obviously wanted to replace me to please the Ambassador.  Since I was eligible to retire, I decided to retire rather than try to work for two people who did not want me there.

I was ready to retire anyway.  In Warsaw, the budget for the American-Polish science cooperation that my office supervised had been cut to zero by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, although we had formally agreed to fund it for several more years.  Then, the day I was to transfer from Warsaw to Rome, Gingrich shut down the entire US Government.  My wife and I had moved out of our house in Warsaw, shipped all of our household effects to Rome, and just had a few suitcases in the car, ready to start to drive to Rome that night.  At about 5:00 pm, Rome called and said, "Don't come."  We had nowhere to live.  I finally got Rome to agree that we could leave and go to Rome, but the idea that the US Government would put my wife and me on the street in the winter in Warsaw was abhorrent to me.  It was like sending soldiers into battle and then abandoning them.  It soured forever my opinion of the US Government.

When I got to Rome, one of my jobs was working with the Italians on North Korea.  The US had agreed to supply North Korea with certain things if the North Koreans would give up their nuclear bomb building program.  However, as part of the budget cutting, the Republicans were refusing to appropriate the money necessary to meet America's obligations under the agreement.  Thus, one of my jobs was to go hat in hand to the Italians and ask them as Italians and as the European Union if they could put some money into the pot to pay for what we had to send to North Korea to meet our obligations.  After what had happened in Warsaw and during my transfer to Rome, I was very unhappy to be representing a government that refused to pay its bills.

So, between the Embassy's lobbying to replace me with a Civil Service officer, and the US Government asking me to plead for money from the EU that the US was obligated to pay, I decided that I had had enough and I retired.  It's sad that I left the Foreign Service feeling so bitter.  I suppose I could have stayed and fought the system.  I had tenure and good efficiency reports up to that assignment; I could have stayed for at least a few years, but I didn't really want to work for an Ambassador and immediate boss who wanted me gone.  It was unpleasant while I was there, and if I had fought the system, it would have become still more unpleasant.  I was replaced by the Civil Service officer, but I never heard how his assignment worked out.  I hope for America's sake that it went well.

It's interesting that the op-ed highlights today's problems particularly in "policy bureaus that deal with issues such as ... environment and disarmament."  Both of these fell in my area of responsibility in Warsaw and Rome, as well as in many of the assignments I had during my career.  Had I worked more on bilateral political and economic issues, perhaps my career would have gone better.

When I worked with Amb. Pickering, he was Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Oceans, Environment and Science (OES).  I gather that it would be unusual for a career Foreign Service officer like Amb. Pickering to have this job today.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Fear of North Korea Overblown

Yesterday Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn disclosed a previously classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that North Korea could put a nuclear warhead on a missile, according to the New York Times.  When I worked at the State Department, including in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, people uniformly thought that DIA's intelligence analysis was poor, except in areas such as particular tactical weapons evaluations.  In strategic areas, such as nuclear weapons development, DIA always tended to overplay the threat, presumable because it meant budget money.  The Pentagon needed dire threats to justify spending the huge amounts of money it wanted for its various weapons programs.  Thus, it needed to build up the threatening image of the enemy, whoever it was, the old Soviets, or the new terrorists, or North Korea. 

I think there probably was some collusion between Congressman Lamborn and the Pentagon.  It may not just be accidental that the sentence or paragraph that Lamborn quoted was unclassified, while the rest of the report was.  Somebody at DIA probably wanted to get that analysis out, and worked out a way to do it through Lamborn.  But the rest of the US Government has pretty much disavowed the statement as just the unfounded opinion some crazy DIA analysts. 

I don't think that even next door neighbor South Korea needs to worry about being hit by a nuclear tipped North Korean missile, although it might need to worry about a nuclear weapons delivered by some more conventional means, such as aircraft, truck or ship.  In addition, North Korea probably has few nuclear weapons.  Despite their flouting restrictions on their nuclear program, over the years the international pressure has slowed down their program, meaning that they have relatively little nuclear material, either plutonium or enriched uranium. Just recently they have threatened to restart the plutonium production reactor which has been shut down for years. 

Fear of North Korea Overblown

Yesterday Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn disclosed a previously classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) evaluation that North Korea could put a nuclear warhead on a missile, according to the New York Times.  When I worked at the State Department, including in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, people uniformly thought that DIA's intelligence analysis was poor, except in areas such as particular tactical weapons evaluations.  In strategic areas, such as nuclear weapons development, DIA always tended to overplay the threat, presumable because it meant budget money.  The Pentagon needed dire threats to justify spending the huge amounts of money it wanted for its various weapons programs.  Thus, it needed to build up the threatening image of the enemy, whoever it was, the old Soviets, or the new terrorists, or North Korea. 

I think there probably was some collusion between Congressman Lamborn and the Pentagon.  It may not just be accidental that the sentence or paragraph that Lamborn quoted was unclassified, while the rest of the report was.  Somebody at DIA probably wanted to get that analysis out, and worked out a way to do it through Lamborn.  But the rest of the US Government has pretty much disavowed the statement as just the unfounded opinion some crazy DIA analysts. 

I don't think that even next door neighbor South Korea needs to worry about being hit by a nuclear tipped North Korean missile, although it might need to worry about a nuclear weapons delivered by some more conventional means, such as aircraft, truck or ship.  In addition, North Korea probably has few nuclear weapons.  Despite their flouting restrictions on their nuclear program, over the years the international pressure has slowed down their program, meaning that they have relatively little nuclear material, either plutonium or enriched uranium.  Just recently they have threatened to restart the plutonium production reactor which has been shut down for years. 

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Jury Duty

I had to report for jury duty on Monday for the first time in my life.  When I lived in Virginia, lawyers were automatically exempted, at least for part of the time that I lived there, plus I was overseas for much of my career and thus unavailable for jury duty.

I was one of the jurors initially selected for a misdemeanor trial.  The judge and the lawyers asked the potential jurors a number of questions, and my reply to one surprised me.  They asked how much faith we had in the American legal system on a scale from 1 to 10.  I decided on 6, which made me lower than most. I chose such a relatively low number because I am unhappy with the American legal system.

I think that we are approaching a double standard for justice before the law, one for the rich and famous and one for everybody else.  In particular, I'm unhappy that more people have not been brought to trial (and convicted) for the financial shenanigans that produced the banking crisis that created the "Great Recession."  In addition, insider trading seems to be the rule, rather than the exception, for the rich.  There have been a few trials, but I think it is only the tip of the iceberg.  More and more rich people don't even trade on the public market; they trade in dark pools, where who knows what they do.  They also come up with complex transactions, often through foreign markets, since much of their money is probably already in overseas tax havens.  Hollywood actors may go to trial, but they seldom get convicted, and if they do, they seldom serve any actual jail time.

In theory the jury system, providing a jury of regular people, should counter this favoritism for the rich and famous, but good, expensive lawyers manage to sway jurors, who may already be overawed by the fame of the people they are judging.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Cheney's Military Service

I watched the Showtime movie "The World According to Dick Cheney," but was disappointed at its failure to challenge Cheney's views.  My first objection was that it did not say anything about Cheney's failure to serve in Vietnam.  It talks about how he was expelled from Yale and worked back in Wyoming as an electric lineman before resuming his education in Wyoming and then Wisconsin.  This was in the 1960s, prime time for the Vietnam draft.  His Wikipedia page and this Slate article describe how he weaseled out of the draft.  Normally a student deferment was for only four years; Cheney got more.  For his fifth deferment, he reportedly got a hardship deferment because his wife was pregnant.  Wikipedia says he told that Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

I don't think that everybody who avoided the draft was a coward, but it certainly raised questions about their patriotism.  I think that Cheney thought he was more important than America.  Maybe he thought he was destined to save America from itself.  If so, it didn't work out.  The wars have probably weakened the US militarily and damaged our image abroad.  The huge costs incurred without increasing taxes to pay for the wars damaged the US economy for years to come.

One new, unfavorable fact about Cheney that I learned from the movie was that toward the end of the Bush administration, he became seriously estranged from President Bush.  Bush thought that Cheney had led him astray on foreign policy and defense issues, and in particular had sandbagged him on the issue of illegal wiretapping by the government.

I think it is safe to say that Cheney has no regrets because he has no heart and no conscience.  While he avoided the draft as a young man, he let young men from Wyoming serve in the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it looks like only 14 from Wyoming died in Iraq.

Dick Cheney: unpatriotic coward who undermined American greatness.


Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Government Funding Deja Vu

The sequester episode brings to mind very bad memories of my government service.  I basically quit the Foreign Service because of the government's refusal to fund things I thought it should have funded in the turmoil around the government shutdown in 1995 and 1996.

In the early years of the Clinton administration, before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans came to power in 1994, two years into the Clinton administration, the US had signed a agreement to provide funding for joint science projects between the US and Poland and other former eastern bloc countries for five years.  When I arrived in Warsaw, the US had already provided $2 million funding for one year, and it provided the same amount for the second year, which was the first year of my assignment in Poland.  But Congress refused to provide funding for what would have been the third year of the program.

A fairly senior Polish diplomat repeated called me into the Foreign Ministry to berate me on behalf of the United States for failing to live up to its obligations.  I told him that if wanted results, he should call in the Ambassador rather than me, but at that time Poland was not yet a member of NATO, much less of the EU, and it did not want to do anything that would damage its efforts to join those organizations.  So, he continued to tell me how upset Poland was at the US default.  Having been raised in the South with a heavy dose of lecturing on the importance of honesty, honor, integrity, etc., the fact that I was the representative of a country that failed to live up to those standards hurt me deeply.

About six months or so after the US decision to abrogate the cooperation agreement, the Ambassador decided that the embassy had no need of a science officer, because there was little scientific activity outside of the cooperation agreement.  He said that I could finish my tour, but I would not be replaced when I left.  A little while after that, the State Department in Washington asked if I would be willing to transfer from Warsaw to Rome to take the science job at the embassy there.  I agreed and was scheduled to leave in a few weeks.

It turned out that the day of my departure from Warsaw to Rome was the day the United States Government shut down, November 14, 1995, according to Wikipedia.   My wife and I had moved everything out of our government housing in Warsaw.  Most of our things had been shipped to Rome, but we had a car full  of clothes and two dogs that we planned to drive to Rome.  At about 4:00 pm, while I was saying farewell to some friends in the embassy, Rome called and said not to come because I had been furloughed and there was no funding for travel.  However, we had nowhere to live in Warsaw and everything we owned was either in transit or in the trunk of the car.

Unfortunately, this reminded me of an experience in the Army during the Vietnam War.  My artillery battery was stationed on a mountaintop at a base called Firebase Barbara, west of Quang Tri, near the Laotian border, where we were shelling the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Vietnamization had started; so, we had no American infantry to defend us.  Instead we had two "dusters," old anti-aircraft weapons systems that shot 40 mm rounds like a machine gun.  The duster crews were always stationed in isolated, dangerous places and had a reputation of having gone native and not being very professional.  One night we got an intelligence report that enemy troops were massing at the base of our mountain, apparently planning to attack us.  I got a radio call from our headquarters telling us not to give the dusters any gasoline, because they were famous for not having any, and it was too hard to get it out to us.  However, it looked like if the dusters could not shoot, we were all going to die.  We made sure the dusters had gas; they blew away the area at the base of the mountain where the enemy was supposed to be assembling, and the attack never materialized.

But that's how it struck me -- that the US Government would rather that my wife and I freeze to death in Poland than provide us shelter.  A government that sends troops into the field and then fails to provide them with ammunition and other necessities is a pretty worthless government, and that's what I thought of our government.  We weren't going to die, but for all the government cared, we could have.  Unfortunately, a similar attitude led to the deaths of the American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, a few months ago.

I tended to be just a soldier in the Foreign Service.  I was not an outstanding diplomat.  The assignment in Rome was a plum, but it had fallen into my lap.  Most people who go to nice places lobby hard for the assignment.  I didn't know much of anything about the personnel in Rome.  I was so mad that this time, rather than be the good soldier and camp out in some hotel in Warsaw, I called Rome to complain about being left on the street.  It turned out that the DCM, the deputy ambassador, was someone I knew from a previous assignment in Brazil.  He said to go ahead and travel to Rome and they would figure out the paperwork somehow.  I did, but that basically ended my desire to serve the US government.  I would not serve a government that abandons its troops in the field.

A diplomat is many things: a journalist reporting on the country where you are assigned, a mailman carrying messages from our government to theirs, but also a salesman, both for American products and for the American way of life.  When the government I was representing fell to some mean-spirited, dictatorial, third-world standard, I didn't want to represent it anymore.

I went to Rome.  One reason they wanted me there was that Italy was assuming the presidency of the European Union, which meant that most of the diplomats in the embassy did double duty, they had to deal with the Italian government on the usual bilateral issues, but also on European Union issues.  The presidency lasts for six months.  I stayed for six months to take care of the extra work, but then retired from the Foreign Service and left.

Hegel Confirmed

Chuck Hegel was confirmed today as Defense Secretary according to the Wall Street Journal.  The article cites Hegel's positions on Israel and Iran as obstacles to his nomination.  Iran is really a subset of the Israel issue, since Iran is much more of a military threat to Israel than to the US.  I have been upset that his nomination was being blocked by Jews who were more concerned about Israel than the US.  However, in the final vote, most of the Jews in the Senate are Democrats who vote for Hegel, while the good-old-boy,
Christian, conservative Republicans voted against him.  The one favor that some of them did was to vote against filibustering his nomination.  Many of these conservative, Christian Republicans were responding to urging by the Jewish lobby AIPAC, which represents the conservative wing of Israeli politics.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

Jewish Vendetta

This Politico article reinforces the impression that there is a Jewish vendetta against Hegel for his comments about the Jewish lobby.  It says that right-wing Hegel opponents were seeking a video of a speech he made to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League because they thought it would contain anti-Israel or anti-Semetic comments.  So, the opposition to Hegel seems motivated by those who love Israel more than America and who consider themselves Jews rather than Americans.  But Politico says Hagel said nothing of note to the ADL.  Nevertheless there seems to be a lot of race hatred behind the opposition to Hegel