MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: July 30, 2006

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August 5, 2006

Hacked E-Passports and More From the RFID Files

Yet again, hackers have proven that they can mess with the Radio Frequency Identification chips that governments, our own included, have been so eager to embed in passports. The concern with such biometric or E-passports is that, among other things, they would allow terrorists to pick Americans and others out of crowds simply by using an RFID reader. According to workpermit.com:

This week a German computer security consultant has demonstrated how to "clone," or duplicate, a specific RFID chip. Lukas Grunwald, a security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert, says the data in the chips is easy to copy, and he demonstrated the technique at the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas on 03 August. [Bet that’s a party.]

The hack was tested on a new European Union German passport, but the method would work on any country's "e-passport," since all of them will be adhering to the same ICAO standard. [International Civil Aviation Authority.] He obtained an RFID reader by ordering it from the maker - Walluf, Germany-based ACG Identification Technologies - but also explained that someone could easily make their own for about $200 just by adding an antenna to a standard RFID reader.

As I reported last year, our own State Department delayed plans to embed passports with RFID tags after privacy advocates publicly demonstrated the poorly encrypted chips could be read from 30 feet away.

On the lighter side of RFID:

Last July, former Wisconsin governor and secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson announced his plan to get an RFID implant.

In 2002, PR firm Fleischman Hillard suggested ways to “neutralize opposition” to RFID technology, including renaming the devices “green tags” and bringing key lawmakers into the “inner circle.”

Oh, and some evangelists consider RFID tags to be the biblical sign of the beast and a portent of the Rapture.

Oregon "Dead Zone" (More Bad News About the Ocean)

For the fifth straight year, a dead zone, now the size of Rhode Island, has appeared off the coast of Oregon. As Julia Whitty reported in Mother Jones' special report on the fate of the ocean,

“Dead zones occur wherever oceanic oxygen is depleted below the level necessary to sustain marine life, a result of eutrophication, or the release of excess nutrients into the sea, usually from agricultural fertilizers….For sea life, it’s as if all the air were suddenly sucked out of the world. Those creatures that can swim or walk away fast enough may survive. Those that can’t, die.”

And dead zones are further exacerbated by global warming. As the New York Times reports on the Oregon dead zone:

Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, said the phenomenon did not appear to be linked to recurring El Niño or La Niña currents or to long-term cycles of ocean movements. That made Dr. Lubchenco wonder if climate change might be a factor, she said, adding, “There is no other cause, as far as we can determine.”

More on the state of dead zones, after the jump:

From Julia Whitty’s Mother Jones feature:

Robert Diaz, a hypoxia expert from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, calculates the global number is doubling every decade. Furthermore, he suggests that at least in some areas hypoxia is rapidly becoming a greater threat to fish stocks than overfishing, since it disperses them off their feeding, spawning, and maturation grounds. And he predicts that hypoxic zones will only increase as the ocean warms further, citing a modeling study predicting that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide will double rainfall across the Mississippi River Basin, increasing runoff by 20 percent and decreasing dissolved oxygen in the northern Gulf by up to 60 percent.

Close to 50 hypoxic zones fester on the coasts of the continental United States, affecting half of all our estuaries. The situation is worse in Europe, with 14 persistent dead zones that never go away, and almost 40 others occurring annually, the biggest and worst being the 27,000-square-mile persistent dead zone in the Baltic Sea, which is nearly the size of South Carolina. Not all of these are caused by riverborne nitrogen. Fossil fuel-burning plants along the Ohio River loft airborne emissions that help create hypoxic conditions in the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound. Excess phosphorus from human sewage, as well as nitrogen emissions from automobile exhaust, impact Tampa Bay. Other dead zones suffer from the nitrogen fixation produced by leguminous crops.

Interestingly, we know how to solve these problems. Rabalais and others have engineered an action plan that calls for the reduction of the Gulf hypoxic zone to just under 2,000 square miles by 2015. “There are modeling studies that show if you reduce nitrogen fertil-izer applications by 12 to 14 percent, you can reach the target without losing crop production. And there are lots of ways to reduce,” she says, listing best management practices such as a reduction in fossil fuel use, cleaner municipal wastewater discharge, restoring wetlands, regulating pen-feed operations, and banning wintertime fertilizer applications.

Another 1.2 Million Fords Recalled (We Warned You)

In a recent issue of Mother Jones, investigative fellow Michael Beckel warned readers of the concerns—shared by Ralph Nader, automotive engineers, and Pentagon analysts—that a Dupont product called Kapton was still being used to coat the wires of the cruise control deactivation switch (made by Texas Instruments) found in millions of Ford cars and SUVs, even though the U.S. and other governments had long been leery of using the product in its military planes and vehicles. These experts theorized that Kapton was to blame for hundreds of mysterious engine fires in Ford’s domestic fleet. As Beckel wrote:

In the 1990s, the Coast Guard eliminated Kapton from its helicopter fleet, NASA grounded the shuttle fleet for five months while inspecting damaged Kapton wire, and the Clinton administration called aging Kapton wiring an issue of “national concern.” The Australian, Israeli, and Canadian governments have all investigated and in many cases prohibited its use in their planes.

So why is Kapton still in millions of Ford cars, trucks, and SUVs?

Since the early 1990s, the company has used this DuPont-manufactured material in the hydraulic pressure switch that shuts off cruise control when drivers hit the brakes. Coated with Teflon, Kapton serves as a barrier between the flammable brake fluid and the electric current just millimeters away. Yet years of use can cause cracking in the Teflon, leaving the Kapton membrane and the switch itself vulnerable to ignition from the current—which, in Ford vehicles, continues even when the engine is off.

In the past seven years, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) has investigated the role of these switches in more than 500 blazes that have ravaged cars, houses, and garages, and reportedly killed at least one person. The agency analyzed 260 cases of fires in Ford sedans—Crown Victorias, Lincoln Town Cars, and Mercury Grand Marquises—with model years between 1992 and 1997. In 1999, the company recalled nearly 300,000 of those vehicles. And by March of last year, the NHTSA had received more than 200 complaints of fires in Ford trucks—F-150 pickups, Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators—with model years from 1995 to 2002. But Ford maintains that the root cause of the fires is too complex to fault a single component.

Although the automaker acknowledges evidence of overheating in the cruise-control components in some models—attributing it to a “systems interaction” of leaking brake fluid, Teflon corrosion, age and mileage, plus the location of the switch—it has recalled less than a third of the vehicles with the Kapton switches. Gail Chandler, a spokeswoman for Texas Instruments, which manufactures the switches, insists they’re safe. “We don’t think there’s anything wrong with the switch itself or with Kapton,” she says. “We’ve thoroughly tested these products and have not found there to be a problem.”

Last week, Ford recalled another 1.2 million vehicles due to safety concerns with same cruise control deactivation switch. That brings the total up to 6.7 million vehicles recalled over this problem. Ford still says that the switches themselves aren’t the problem: "If we felt the switch was unsafe we'd be recalling all of them," said Ford spokeswoman Kristen Kinley. "We're confident we've captured all of them." But as the Detroit News notes,

“if the combined total of 6.7 million vehicles called back -- including 5.8 million in the United States -- were a single recall, it would be the fourth-largest ever. …Some safety advocates and plaintiffs' attorneys have criticized Ford for moving too slowly to recall the vehicles.

"There's no excuse to do these recalls in a piecemeal fashion. There's something in Ford's culture -- look at the Firestone debacle --that prevents them from taking faster action," said Rob Ammons, a Houston attorney representing the family of Darletta Mohlis of Westgate, Iowa, who was killed in a May 2005 fire that the family claims started in her 1996 Ford F-150. "Why not get this product that's catching fire and destroying lives off our roads and off the market?"

The NHTSA says that Ford has been cooperative and that it, too, expects no more problems associated with the switches. We just hope they’re right, though the pressure put on these (as other) regulators by the Bush administration to make things more business friendly gives us pause.

Beckel’s timeline of the Ford switch controversy can be found here. Mark Dowie’s classic Mother Jones article about the atrocious safety problems with the Ford Pinto can be found here.

August 4, 2006

Everything's Coming Up Rummy

Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committe yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld managed to keep a straight face when he tried to correct Senator Hillary Clinton's assertion that he'd been feeding Congress "a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios" about the war in Iraq. Responded Rummy: "I have never painted a rosy picture. I've been very measured in my words. And you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic." No mention if anyone in the room did a spit-take. NPR's Mixed Signals blog has since contacted Clinton's office, which had something less than a dickens of a time coming up with a detailed list of Rummy's "measured" statements on Iraq over the last few years. A few samples:

The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that. —November 2002

We know where [the WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. —March 2003

The residents of Baghdad may not have power 24 hours a day, but they no longer wake up each morning in fear wondering whether this will be the day that a death squad would come to cut out their tongues, chop off their ears or take their children away for "questioning," never to be seen again. —July 2003

The increased demand on the force we are experiencing today is likely a "spike," driven by the deployment of nearly 115,000 troops in Iraq. We hope and anticipate that that spike will be temporary. We do not expect to have 115,000 troops permanently deployed in any one campaign. —February 2004

The level of support from the international community is growing. —June 2005

Q: One clarification on "the long war." Is Iraq going to be a long war?
Secretary Rumsfeld: No, I don't believe it is. — February 2006

Sen. Robert Byrd: Mr. Secretary, how can Congress be assured that the funds in this bill won't be used to put our troops right in the middle of a full-blown Iraqi civil war?
Secretary Rumsfeld: Senator, I can say that certainly it is not the intention of the military commanders to allow that to happen. The—and to repeat, the—at least thus far, the situation has been such that the Iraqi security forces could for the most part deal with the problems that exist. —March 2006

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Sunnis and Shiites and Muslims, oh my!

Former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith says that two months before the U.S. invaded Iraq, George W. Bush did not know that there were two major sects of Islam in Iraq. According to Galbraith, a year after giving his "Axis of Evil" speech, Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, who described to him what they thought the consequences might be if Saddam Hussein were taken out of power.

According to Galbraith, it became clear to them that Bush had no clue that there were Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq. The Iraqi American consultants explained the situation to him, and his response was: "I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!"

No one should be surprised. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush could not identify the Taliban. But as he himself has said--it's hard work, being president.

100 Degrees the New Normal (Thanks to Global Warming)?

Here, via MSNBC, is what most scientists say is certain:

The Earth is warming, by 1.4-degrees Fahrenheit since 1920
The ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising
10 of the last 12 years were the warmest since 1850
The first six months of 2006 were the hottest since they started keeping records in 1890

And here's more of what they say.

"This heat wave and other extreme events we've seen in recent years are completely consistent with what we expect to become more common as a result of global warming, even though we can't be definitive on any single event,” says Jay Gulledge with Pew Climate Change. [...]

"So far, we've had about 80 daily high temperature records broken and in the month of July there were about 50 all-time records for the month of July broken -- that's phenomenal for any air mass, any heat wave that's going on right now," says Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Plan B Approval is Not Assured

The Chicago Tribune puts the FDA's seeming about-turn on Plan B in (cautionary) context:

FDA approval for over-the-counter sales is not assured. One potential hurdle: the FDA wants the company to ensure that pharmacies won't sell the pill over the counter to girls younger than age 18. But isn't that the pharmacies' responsibility? Some advocates worry that such an onerous requirement could be a loophole that would allow the FDA to deny permission for over-the-counter sales.

Dr. Susan Wood, former director of the FDA's Office of Women's Health, resigned in protest last August after the last Plan B delay. She said she was "somewhat encouraged" by Monday's announcement. But she also warned: "I feel they're making it appear they're moving forward. But until we actually see a decision, we can't count on that." Yes, some skepticism is warranted here. Unfortunately, politics may yet trump science again.

The Democrats' Dangerous "Pro-Israel" Stance

Speaking of Iran, Iraq, and Israel, Billmon makes some crucial points here that need to be repeated far and wide. As we know, a lot of purportedly "antiwar" Democrats are against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Fine. But most of those same Democrats are also in favor of letting Israel kill hundreds of civilians and launch quixotic and bloody wars around the Middle East to fight whatever perceived threats may arise, regardless of what those wars mean for the United States. The problem is that those stances are in grave tension with each other, if not outright contradictory.

If the United States withdraws from Iraq, Iran certainly won't sit still. In the event that the ongoing Sunni-Shia civil war continues to expand, Iran will side with the Iraqi Shiites. It might even send troops in to invade. Israel, of course, will fear that Iranian influence in, or worse, control of Iraq will pose a grave threat to its existence. (After all, 100,000 Iraqi Shiites just marched in Baghdad chanting, "Death to Israel!" and supporting Hezbollah.) So Israel might oppose a U.S. withdrawal in the first place—and House and Senate Democrats could agree, so long as it's Israel at stake.

Worse still, Israel could ask the United States to ensure that Iran stay out of Iraq. That could mean war. It's not as if Olmert and Bush have shown much restraint in the past. And Democrats, tethered as they are to Israel—including those self-proclaimed "antiwar" icons such as Howard Dean and Ned Lamont—could well acquiesce. Why not? They've supported the Lebanon adventure so far. Needless to say, war with Iran would be a disaster—for the United States, for Israel, for the world. The point is that various parts of the Middle East are all connected—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, the whole of it—the situation is extremely dangerous, and it's looking very likely that the Democratic Party will prove itself utterly incapable of stopping the worst of it.

Is Iran to Blame for Israel's Woes?

Laura Rozen writes:

From a colleague covering the conflict in Israel: "Almost everyone I talk to here is now saying the Iraq war has presented one of the most significant threats to Israel in its history." Namely because it has so empowered Iran, and reduced US ability to deal with Iran now.

Well, that may be true, in a sense, but it's worth thinking this through. It's a lot harder for the United States to invade Iran now, true—after all, we don't have the troops, and any war against Iran would endanger the 130,000 soldiers currently stationed in Iraq. (Of course, that may not actually deter the Bush administration from bringing out the tactical nuclear weapons and starting World War III, but it's at least convinced some top generals in the Pentagon to oppose war with Iran.) By extension, it's now a lot harder for the United States to threaten to invade Iran. But then again, invading Iran was never a good idea, regardless of what happened in Iraq.

The preferred dovish way of "deal[ing] with Iran" is to talk with the leaders in Tehran, and perhaps eventually striking a deal by promising not to attack (which is a horrible and unfeasible idea anyway) in exchange for better behavior. We still have the ability, even after Iraq, to give that a try at least; it's just that the Bush administration just refuses to do so for various ideological reasons. Maybe Iran is actually less willing to negotiate thanks to the war in Iraq. But it's hard to say, since no one has actually tried.

It's also hard to say in what sense Iran has posed "one of the most significant threats to Israel in its history." Iran has armed Hezbollah, yes. And Hezbollah has been firing missiles into Israel, true. But neither of those things pose existential threats to Israel in the way that, say, various Arab armies, backed by the Soviet Union, did back in the 1960s and 1970s.

In any case, it's worth noting that Israel brought the current crisis on itself by invading Lebanon. Iran had little to do with it. Prior to the outbreak of war on July 12, Hezbollah rocket attacks were somewhat desultory and killed relatively few Israelis—it was bad, yes, but not something Israel couldn't live with if there was no good way of dealing with it. And there wasn't a good way of dealing with it. At present, Israel is talking about occupying a greater portion of Lebanon than it did back during its disastrous occupation in the 1980s. How does that help matters? It doesn't, it's a disaster. Iran is a problem, but it's clearly not the sole problem here.

August 3, 2006

Geneva report highly critical of U.S. commitment to human rights

The Geneva hearings are over and the final report has been released. It is not pretty, insofar as the U.S. and human rights are concerned.

Every four years, nations representing the Conventions against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights meet to review meet to review compliance of ICCPR nations. An official report is issued, along with a "shadow report," what The Raw Story refers to as "a rebuttal from non-government organizations (NGO), advocacy groups, and citizen representatives. The US “shadow report” was prepared by The Coalition for Human Rights at Home, a coalition of 142 not-for-profit groups."

This year's 456-page shadow report describes over a hundred instances of human rights violations, in a response to the official report issued by the United States. Also, the U.S. was a mere seven years late in developing its report, which it is obligated to prepare as an ICCPR signatory nation.

The Raw Story goes on to describe correspondence between the Committee and the U.S. as a "cat and mouse game," in which the Committee addresses questions to the U.S., and the U.S. responds by saying it has already answered those questions. When the Committee then says "please clarify when you answered that and what the answer was," it receives no further communication.

Jamil Dakwar, a staff attorney with the Human Rights Program, National Legal Department of the ACLU, calls the interplay a "dialogue of deaf."

David Horowitz Dodges Charge He Didn't Write Parts of His Own Book (As First Heard on Mother Jones Radio)

Media Matters:

Appearing with University of California, Irvine professor Mark LeVine on the August 1 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, right-wing activist David Horowitz refused to answer LeVine's accusation that Horowitz "admitted on the air" that he "didn't even write or research the parts of" his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery, January 2006), that were about LeVine, and "therefore couldn't comment on how much
of it was true." Instead, Horowitz said, "I'm not going to discuss things that happened on other shows. I have read what Mark LeVine has written."

Horowitz and LeVine appeared on Hannity & Colmes to discuss the Middle East conflict, and during the discussion, Horowitz claimed that LeVine is "an apologist for the terrorists." LeVine responded, "This is absolutely unconscionable for you to say. ... Again, you're lying like you did in your book." LeVine then pointed to a prior debate he had with Horowitz over the research for the chapter on LeVine from The Professors. On the April 9 edition of Mother Jones Radio Broadcast, host Angie Coiro asked Horowitz, "[T]his research [in the LeVine chapter] is credited to Tzvi Kahn. ... How much of your work went into this chapter, per se? Did you clear all the facts, here?" In response to Coiro, Horowitz admitted to never having met Kahn, the researcher credited in the LeVine chapter of The Professors. Horowitz never addressed Coiro's question, which she asked twice, about the extent to which he was involved in the production of that chapter.

Listen to the original Mother Jones Radio interview here.

(Levine bio here, Horowitz bio here.)

Castro to CIA: "Beep! Beep!"

Apparently the exploding cigars were just the beginning. The U.S. has tried to kill Fidel Castro 638 times, or so says one of his former security guys. Many of the plans—which might have been taken from the reject pile of Wile E. Coyote—never got off the drawing board, like this classic:

Knowing his fascination for scuba-diving off the coast of Cuba, the CIA at one time invested in a large volume of Caribbean molluscs. The idea was to find a shell big enough to contain a lethal quantity of explosives, which would then be painted in colours lurid and bright enough to attract Castro's attention when he was underwater.

Now that its bivalve budget has been slashed, I assume the CIA has moved on from trying to off Fidel. But as it goes after our current crop of international enemies, you have to wonder what kind of half-baked, brilliant-in-their-stupidity kind of ideas it's been tossing around. Why do I have a hunch that someone in Langley is desperately trying to find out Osama bin Laden's favorite candy bar?

Lessons from Cuba: Why Sanctions Don't Work

In addition to recognizing that a Cuba-esque policy won't work in Syria, Jacob Weisberg writes that it probably won’t work in Iran either. Weisberg is writing specifically about the futility of imposing sanctions on dictatorial regimes, but his argument begins with the same basic premise—namely, that a policy which has failed to effect change in Cuba for 46 years and counting probably isn’t a great policy.

By applying economic restraints, we label the most oppressive and dangerous governments in the world pariahs. We wash our hands of evil, declining to help despots finance their depredations, even at a cost to ourselves of some economic growth. We wincingly accept the collateral damage that falls on civilian populations in the nations we target. But as the above list of countries suggests, sanctions have one serious drawback. They don't work.

Nothing like an ailing Communist dictator over whom we have no influence whatsoever to remind us what constitutes productive diplomatic strategy.

"Senator Lieberman's campaign bus seems to be stuck in reverse."

Reverse Joe-mentum! AP reports:

Millionaire businessman Ned Lamont opened a double-digit lead over veteran Sen. Joe Lieberman less than a week before Connecticut's Democratic primary, raising the possibility that the three-term senator may have to run as an independent in November, a new poll released Thursday shows. ...

"Senator Lieberman's campaign bus seems to be stuck in reverse," poll director Douglas Schwartz said. "Despite visits from former President Bill Clinton and other big-name Democrats, Lieberman has not been able to stem the tide to Lamont." ...

The poll, however, indicated that Lamont's support is in large part a backlash: 65 percent of Lamont supporters said their vote is mainly against Lieberman. Schwartz said he had never seen a race where an incumbent has stirred up such negativity within his own party.

"Kill all military-age males..."

It was only a week ago that John Podhoretz wondered if the big tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them." As he put it: "Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of sectarian violence now?"

And now the New York Times reports today: "Four American soldiers from an Army combat unit that killed three Iraqis in a raid in May testified Wednesday that they had received orders from superior officers to kill all the military-age men they encountered." Anyone who thinks that excessive bloodhsed is the "solution" to Iraq should read this post by Dan Nexon. Just because the Roman Empire could be maintained through genocide doesn't mean the American empire can. The horrific possibility is that some military officers may be starting to think along the same lines as Podhoretz. Which is another indication, if we needed one, that there's absolutely no reason to stay in Iraq any longer.

EPA: An Unknown Risk is an Acceptable Risk

So there are about 82,000 industrial chemicals in use today. For 2,800 of those, industry has submitted--voluntarily, mind you--data on potential dangers to human health to the EPA. The remaining 79,200 are... a disaster waiting to happen? Something we really ought to look into more? Let's go now to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (chair: James "Global Warming is a Hoax" Imhofe) hearing on the Toxic Substances Control Act, covered by almost no one except the LA Times' invaluable Marla Cone, for a live update:

When asked by Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) if all 82,000 chemicals on the market were safe, [EPA Assistant Administrator James B. Gulliford] said, "Their risks to human health and the environment are acceptable."

Any questions?

August 2, 2006

In Iraq, No Troop Withdrawal in Sight

More troops, not less, are in the offing:

According to U.S. Army officials, the withdrawal of troops from war-rattled Iraq has been delayed for four more months past their scheduled departure. The news came as U.S. President George W. Bush agreed to send more U.S. troops into Baghdad to curb the sectarian violence there….

The Pentagon also identified four other additional Army and Marine Corps units consisting of about 25,000 troops due to deploy to Iraq in the future, enough to maintain the U.S. force at about 130,000 troops for a year.

Blair's Cabinet in Open Revolt

The Guardian reported over the weekend that Blair's cabinet is in "open revolt" over his support for Israel's invasion of Lebanon, revealing for the first time that "at a cabinet meeting before Blair left for last Friday's Washington summit with President George Bush, minister after minister pressed him to break with the Americans and publicly criticise Israel over the scale of death and destruction."

Blair's apparent attempt in a speech yesterday to "change the language as well as the nature" of the war without mitigating his support for Israel's actions, however, does not appear to have done the trick. In a follow-up piece today, The Guardian said that by the time Blair returned to England, three days after the Qana massacre, there was even more anger at his policy: "A former Labour minister, Joan Ruddoch, claimed the party was 'in despair' at the position the prime minister had taken and Ann Clywd, the chair of the parliamentary party, said that the 'vast majority' of his Labour backbenchers wanted a ceasefire." Such strident protests from within Blair's own party are surprising, even given the results of last week's poll showing that over 63 percent of Britons think Blair has tied his country too closely with the U.S. and ought to distance itself (only 54 percent of Labour Party voters agreed).

Our "Cuba" Policy Has Failed... Even in Syria

Now that Fidel Castro's wavering health has brought the issue of America's Cuba policy to the public stage once again, the parallels with other areas of U.S. foreign policy are more obvious than ever. Consider this analysis published today in The Miami Herald, under the heading, "U.S. Isolation Policy Leaves Few Options:"

[Some] Cuba analysts say the U.S. policy of aggressively isolating Castro through economic sanctions means Washington will be forced to play a secondary role in a post-Castro period…. Under the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, the U.S. government cannot lift many of the sanctions against Cuba without congressional approval until Havana declares its intention to hold free elections and release political prisoners, among other conditions.

'"Our strategy is to enter the game in the ninth inning and to tell the Cubans they are on their own until then,'' said Phil Peters, a Cuba expert with the conservative Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., think tank.

Now consider what Thomas Friedman said earlier that morning on NPR. "If you're not going to go to war but you really need [a given country's cooperation], and you're just going to adopt this aggressive verbal stance and some economic sanctions, then you have the worst of all worlds." Sound familiar? But Friedman wasn't talking about Cuba—he was talking about Syria. The result of such a policy, he continued, is that now "you have a hostile Syria but it's not afraid of you and therefore you have no real leverage, and that seems to me to be the penumbra that we're in right now vis-à-vis Syria. And I don't see it serving anyone right now."

Cuba is no Syria, obviously, but it is also no closer to democracy than it was when we first imposed sanctions back in 1960. And there are other important similarities: the U.S. government has castigated and disengaged with both countries largely at the behest of a single, well-organized lobby in Washington, despite no evidence that either policy has produced the desired results.

As Flynt Leverett, a former CIA official and author of Inheriting Syria, told a Brookings Institute audience last year, "I think there is a better way to achieve American policy objectives… It's not rocket science. It's sticks and carrots. In a previous era, we used to call it diplomacy." Of course, he didn't mean "Cuban diplomacy."

Why Can't Congress Telecommute?

Via Ezra Klein, Michelle Cottle reports that, nowadays, members of Congress are expected to maintain homes in their districts and keep their spouses and children there, so as not to appear "out of touch" with the constituents. Naturally, this places a strain on the family life, since it's difficult to constantly shuttle between the Capitol and the home district all the time. The geographic split also forces Congress to shorten its legislative calendar to three days a week, so that representatives can race home to campaign and fundraise and maybe catch up with the kids. Everyone involved is miserable.

Well, here's a radical idea. Technology can do a lot of cool things these days. Among them is teleconferencing. I see no reason why every single member of Congress can't just live in his or her respective district all the time and telecommute to work. They can ask insipid questions at committee hearings and avoid reading lengthy bills just as easily from afar as they can from Washington. This way, they can spend more time with their constituents and their families. And as an added bonus, it would make things much more difficult for lobbyists, who would have to fly to 435 different districts to do their dirty work.

As a triple bonus, if we had publicly-financed elections, representatives could spend even less time fundraising and spending hours on the phone with potential donors, and could spend even more time with their families. Sounds good to me.

UPDATE: Hmm… this could be harder than I thought. Apparently there's a rather insidious anti-teleconferencing bias lurking in Washington: "Nearly two-thirds of U.S. government employees haven't been allowed to telecommute even after the U.S. Congress has established penalties for agencies that don't allow telework options, according to a survey released this week."

Israel, a "Strategic Ally"?

It seems entirely bizarre to me that debates over the shape of U.S. policy towards Israel often hinge on the question of what the best thing for Israel would be. But shouldn't these policy debates hinge on what policy would be best for, you know, the United States? You'd think so, but no.

Anyway, John Judis has a good column in The New Republic today noting that, for the past forty years or so, U.S. policy towards Israel has basically swung between two polar stances: one that seeks to broker peace between Israel and its neighbors, pursued by Carter, Clinton, and Bush the elder; and one that regards Israel as a "strategic ally," as pursued by Ronald Reagan and President Psychopath. The former course appears better for U.S. interests, while Israeli officials often prefer the latter. But Judis points out that the "honest broker" role has actually been better for Israel, as well:

Of course, many Israeli officials prefer an American administration that regards Israel as a strategic ally to one that places a priority on brokering peace between Israel and its adversaries. But the United States and Israel have both fared better when an American administration has tried to broker peace. Carter oversaw the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt—to Israel's enormous benefit. Support from George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton contributed to the Oslo agreements and to a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan in October 1994. This strategy doesn't presume apocalyptical change; instead, it assumes that over decades, Israel could become integrated economically, if not politically, into the Middle East and that former adversaries could co-exist peacefully, if not happily.

In conceiving Israel as a strategic asset, Reagan didn't necessarily hope for a "new Middle East." He was more concerned with winning the cold war with the Soviet Union. But nonetheless, Reagan's embrace of Israel and abandonment of the role of honest broker saw the war in Lebanon (which proved to be an enormous disaster for Israel), the founding of Hezbollah and Hamas, the first terrorist attacks by Islamic groups against the United States and Israel, and the first intifada.

George W. Bush still has two-and-a-half years to go, but so far, his strategy toward Israel has seen the escalation of the second intifada (which began in the last year of the Clinton administration), the eclipse of Arafat's Fatah by the more radical Hamas, and now a two-front war in Gaza and southern Lebanon that is unlikely to achieve the results that the United States and Israel have hoped for.

Indeed, it now appears that we're about to help our "strategic ally" straight into yet another disastrous occupation of southern Lebanon, and there's no end in sight. With friends like these, etc. It's often said that shadowy lobbying groups like AIPAC have convinced the United States to abandon its self-interest in order to make things better for Israel. Perhaps the real scandal, though, is that we're not actually making things better for Israel.

Mel Should Have Gone Straight to Mortification.

AP reports:

Mel Gibson's Tuesday apology for an anti-Semitic rant after his drunken driving arrest came several days too late, celebrity crisis management experts say. ...

"In the first 24 hours, people start forming opinions," said Richard Levick, whose Washington firm represents several celebrity clients. "He has constantly been behind the story and needs to get out front. What he's done through actions is turned perception into reality. People presume he is anti-Semitic."

Mel, come on! This is Image Restoration Strategies 101! Get out in front! You should have gone straight to mortification.

Previous research has provided a list of image restoration strategies that celebrities may employ. They are: denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness of event, corrective action, and mortification (Benoit, 1997). [Mortification, literally "putting the flesh to death," is defined here as full admission of guilt and apology for the event.]

For more on mortification, see here.