Indict Snowden Now

Edward Jay Epstein gets it right in the Wall Street Journal this am.  Anyone who understands intelligence knows Snowden launched a deliberate operation that had nothing to do with unveiling a domestic spying program.  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932
The media has hardly questioned Snowden's own version of his motivation and actions--even though he publicly admitted his mission was carefully planned.  Instead of the Pulitzer prize, the Washington Post should have received the Razzie Award. 
Perhaps the Russians were involved from the beginning.  Snowden met with Russian operatives at their consulate in Hong Kong. 

Epstein notes that to begin turning around public perception, there needs to be a federal indictment against Snowden.  Hasn't happened yet. 

Venezuela's Tiananmen Square?

Hyperbole?  Okay, just a little bit.  But the Maduro regime's crackdown on student protest camps has familiar echoes. See this news account: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-08/venezuela-national-guard-raids-student-protest-camps.html 

By the way, these camps are in middle-class eastern Caracas, the heart of opposition country.  Chavez used to leave protests alone that limited themselves to that part of the city.  Now Maduro is going after them everywhere.  The Venezuelan students--who see their future vastly limited by the cronyism and economic stagnation of Bolivarian revolution--are the fighting element of the opposition.  They haven't given up. 

Maduro has a much more limted toolkit than Chavez, so he has to resort to overt suppression.  Notice that the body count has been a lot higher than under Chavez.

By the way, for a good blog on Venezuela, see http://devilsexcrement.com/

Keystone: A Stone Rejected

One expert on energy and on how Washington works predicted to me some months ago that the Obama Administration would approve Keystone XL, the long pipeline TransCanada wants to build to connect the Alberta oil fields to our big hub in Cushing, OK.  His reasoning was essentially political: the administration knows that approval would help several Democratic senators vulnerable to losing their seats in November. The administration wants to approve Keystone anyway, he reasoned, and eventually political reality will win out over the desires of the environmentalists.

Where are we now?   The project has delayed anyway by the Nebraska legislature, and the State Department (because this comes from Canada) has put off approval indefinitely.  My friend the expert now despairs of approval ever happening during this administration.

Very predictable, I think.  Ideology in this case has consistently trumped politics.  The energy industry argues that Keystone would in fact be good for the environment--less truck emissions, less spills--but US-based environmentalists are way beyond that now.  Their concerns are planetary.  Keystone represents for them our continued global addiction to fossil fuel.  It is a giant heroin needle symbolizing our dependency.  Stop this now, and get on the road to recovery.  

It looks like the greens have won their fight, at least for now.  A fight to stop part of Keystone being built.  Another pipe, in a country with thousands of these things.  See map:  http://www.theodora.com/pipelines/united_states_pipelines_map.jpg

Postscript:  The White House touted their report on global warming--the third National Climate Assessment--and how it impacts everything in the country.  The administration pledges to dedicate the rest of its term in office to tackling this.  Is this part of the winning electoral strategy too?

Benghazi and the Infamous "Talking Points"

Congressional hearing about what happened in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 grind on.  Most of the focus lately has been on whether the White House manipulated the messaging after the tragic event.  Don't expect any "smoking gun" emails on this.  This is fundamentally a story about how bureaucratic bungling led to a US ambassador being killed in a bad place.  The messaging after the fact doesn't change that reality.  To recap briefly:

• The intelligence community knew Benghazi was "terrorist central" and getting worse.  Numerous attacks, even on the Embassy "temporary mission facility," were well documented.
• The decision was made at Main State NOT to fund security improvements to the mission facility. (Because, well, it was temporary, and they expected to shut it down later in the year.)
• The Pentagon-provided Site Security Team, which was beefing up the ambassador's personal protection, was not renewed. 
• State decided to use the local 17 February Brigade militia to provide security for the facility.

The rest is history.  Read the sad details in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report here: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/benghazi2014/benghazi.pdf  Another good report is the State Department's Accountabilty Review Board's piece, which you can find on the internet easily.

I keep hearing talking heads say, that while the attack was going on, "we needed to do something."  But what?  Read the report yourself.  Note a small but telling detail: the Ambassador's security team fired no shots during the attack. (That gives you some idea on the restricted rules of engagement in an ostensibly friendly country.)  Like I said, the real scandal was all on the front end. 

Now about those talking points.  Written by CIA and used apparently by UN Ambassador Susan Rice on the talk shows days later, they called the attacks (there were three in all) "demonstrations."  As the SSCI report shows in the appendix, the CIA's first draft called them attacks.  Then by the time the talking points were chopped on by CIA's Office of Public Affairs, they became "demonstrations."  Big difference in wording.  Why CIA's OPA would have anything to do with making such a spurious and clueless analytic judgment is beyond me.  When I read through all this (yesterday, SSCI's report came out in January) I almost started buying into Congressman Issa's belief that this process was politicized. 

Almost.  Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence.

Can a Libertarian Foreign Policy Exist?

At a conference last week, I heard a speaker say that all Americans are a little bit libertarian; left or right, they just want to be "left alone."  

These days, the Republican party seems most enthralled to the libertarian ideology.  The former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul was the most salient example, but many other GOPers fall along the libertarian spectrum.  The pendulum with many of them has swung away from support of Bush's exercise of American power abroad.

In the link below, Philip Giraldi of the American Conservative, no defender of Bush, says a libertarian foreign policy would essentially be a contradiction in terms because, for one thing, libertarians hold the state in such low regard.  http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/recovering-the-founders-foreign-policy/

This was clear when I used to hear Paul discuss foreign affairs.   He assumed that if we left the rest of the world alone, the world would leave us alone.   His views seemed indistinguishable from those of George McGovern or, if you remember him, Henry Wallace. 

Not sure Giraldi is right about the founders' views on foreign policy.  I seem them as wanting to assertively defend American rights abroad. (See Jefferson's stance against the Barbary pirates.)  But his article is worth reading as it lays out how we are often trapped in the "tyranny of labels."

"Human Capital" Theorist Dies

Nobel prize winner Gary Becker passed away.  See his obit here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/05/business/economy/gary-s-becker-83-nobel-winner-who-applied-economics-to-everyday-life-dies.html?_r=0#

Becker's idea on the power of human capital is a big motivator for this website. 

Global Democracy in Decline? 

Lately the news has been discouraging: the "third wave" of democratization has stalled, and even receding in some places.  In several big countries--Turkey stands out in this group--democratic freedoms are being curtailed. Thailand and Venezuela have really taken a step back in the last decade.  Egypt just took a "mulligan" on democratic reforms.  Don't even mention China.

Part of our problem is we talk about democracy as if its definition is universally acknowledged.  There have been many attempts to establish democratic norms worldwide; see for example the Copenhagen Criteria on EU membership. 

In fact, there are different "theorems" about democracy; the liberal democracy that we hold to be the gold standard is just one of them.  Jacques Barzun wrote an insightful article about this in the Journal of Democracy years ago.  No reason to think his basic point has been refuted.

Consider:  Chavez and his people always argued that the revolution was "democratizing" Venezuela by eliminating bourgeois trappings like the Senate and introducing referenda on important topics.  Chavez hated liberalism but loved democracy.   There is no question that he had a majority of Venezuelans behind him through most of his "reforms."  We can say the same about Putin and Erdogan today. 

Liberal democracy might be a historical accident particular to the West. 

See Larry Diamond's article below.  Diamond knows as much about democratization as anyone. 
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-deepening-recession-of-democracy/361591/   Yet I found his book on democratizing Iraq frustrating.   He missed what I think was a big factor for making democracy work in Iraq: the constitution and electoral system needed to be designed, like ours is, to orient the people toward the center and away from the extremes.  Instead, the experts recommended a proportional representation system that gave more power to small sectarian parties led by unelected clerics.