Monday, December 22, 2008

On Bernard-Henri Levy’s Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism

Excerpts of The European Left And Ours. By Peter Berkowitz
Bernard-Henri Lévy, on point and off

Policy Review. December 2008 & January 2009

The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States marks a dramatic victory for the progressive left in America and a resounding repudiation of George W. Bush’s presidency and the Republican-controlled Congress with which he governed for six years. Obama’s election also represents an historic moment for the United States.

Many have been celebrating throughout the nation, and for good reason, because America, by electing a black man to the highest office in the land, has taken another impressive stride to overcome the last, lingering legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. To be sure, it would have been better if more progressives had bothered to notice, let alone take pride in, how far their country had come when George W. Bush — white, southern, and conservative — named in his first term Colin Powell secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice national security advisor, and in his second term elevated Rice to secretary of state. But the stirring fact remains that Obama’s triumph crowns a half century of steady progress in fulfilling the Declaration of Independence’s grand promise of freedom and equality for all, and in realizing the Constitution’s aspiration to build a more perfect union through representative government. At the same time, Obama’s election reaffirms the reality, frequently denied or derided by progressive anti-American sentiment at home and abroad, that the United States is a land of golden opportunity.

[...]

In Chapter III of The Prince, Machiavelli observes that in politics as in physical health, in the beginning illness is easy to cure but hard to recognize; if untreated, it becomes, in the fullness of time, easy to recognize but hard to cure. The left’s electoral success in Campaign 2008 is bound to increase the difficulty in recognizing — particularly for the left — the dangerous impulses, sentiments, and opinions it harbors, permitting them to fester and grow.

One way to get a better grasp of the malady now, when it is harder to see but easier to cure, is to turn to the European left, particularly in France, where the impulses, sentiments, and opinions roiling the progressive spirit in America can be seen in their advanced form. And to understand why those impulses, sentiments, and opinions are dangerous to freedom and democracy, one can make a good beginning by turning to Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism (Random House, 2008), Bernard-Henri Lévy’s intelligent, personal, and engrossing polemic about the decline of the European left. A more literal translation of the book’s title is The Backward Falling Corpse.

Lévy, or bhl as he is often called in France, is himself a man of the left, indeed one of the European left’s most famous men. Rich, dashing, and flamboyant; journalist, philosopher, and activist; editor, prolific author of newspaper columns and books, tv star, and filmmaker; tireless self-promoter and determined advocate of the helpless and brutalized in Bangladesh, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Darfur, and elsewhere — Lévy, who turned 60 this year, has made a career of taking the European left to task and calling it back to its best instincts and worthiest purposes. In 1976, two years shy of his thirtieth birthday, in an issue of Nouvelles Littéraires, a Parisian review of literary and political ideas, he coined the term “New Philosophers” to describe a group of French thinkers, of which he was one, who had broken with Marxism, communism, and the pronounced anti-Enlightenment doctrines driving French intellectual life and, in the process, had rediscovered the liberal tradition. Much of his work over the past 30 years has been devoted to clarifying the imperatives of a left that, purged of visionary delusions and reconciled to market realities and human limitations, retains its progressive conscience and convictions and summons the courage to act on them.

Despite his labors and those of his fellow New Philosophers — including Pascal Bruckner, Maurice Clavel, Luc Ferry, Alain Finkelkraut, André Glucksman, and Alain Reanaut — “European progressivism has for the last ten or twenty years,” Lévy laments, “developed the worst possible reflexes.” Almost a parody of itself, the European left has become intolerant, parochial, selectively stirred by suffering, and contemptuous of the idea of a universal human nature.

In stark contrast, a healthy European left, according to Lévy, would stand for liberalism, or the belief that the overarching purpose of the state is to protect the rights of all individuals equally. It would also uphold the idea of Europe, proclaiming that citizens of the countries from Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria in the east to the United Kingdom in the west, and from Norway, Sweden, and Finland in the north to Spain, Italy, and Greece in the south share a common history and political destiny that at the same time connects them to peoples around the globe. It would practice the politics of human rights, according to which citizens have a responsibility to protect the freedoms not only of fellow citizens but of those who live beyond their borders. And it would embrace the concept of a universal humanity, which undergirds the liberal tradition, provides a common ground for European unity, and is the basis for the belief in human rights. In fact, contends Lévy, these pillars of European progressivism are under assault from a left that has been hijacked by radicals, estranged from its original moral impulses, and propelled far afield of its proper political goals.

To determine how the left has gone so calamitously astray, Lévy seeks “to retrace the ideological and political history” of his generation. Because of his multi-faceted engagement in French cultural, intellectual, and political life, the history he tells also functions, in part, as an intellectual autobiography. And although it is very much a French book about France and Europe, Left in Dark Times aims to shed light on the plight of progressivism on both sides of the Atlantic, because American progressives too, maintains Lévy, “inspired by the desire to create a heaven on earth, were — and are, more than ever — led to a flirtation with darkness, barbarism, and hell.” By slaying the “monsters” bred by such flirtation, Lévy hopes to return the European left — as well as the American left he sees as headed in the same disastrous direction — to the high and noble aspects of its heritage.

Ultimately, however, Lévy misconceives that heritage, or at least misconceives the context in which it must be recovered and reconstructed. Emblematic of the misconception is his decision to begin and end his book by invoking Nietzsche. In the preface, he hopes that “these pages can contribute, modestly but solidly, to the creation of a universal movement of free spirits worthy of the name.” This alludes to the preface of Beyond Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche declares himself a free spirit who writes in anticipation of philosophers of the future, a new kind of philosopher who does not merely understand the world but masters it by subjecting it to his will. And in the epilogue, Lévy explains that “in order to light the lantern of a Left that is still in search of itself” — much like Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science, section 125, “who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: ‘I seek God. I seek God’” — it is necessary to “draw this cartography of darkness” that is engulfing European leftism and “describe the laboratories” in which “the concepts of liberalism, the idea of Europe, the politics of human rights, or the dream of an all-embracing concept of humanity are being methodically crushed.” This echoes the language and teaching of On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche argues that to overcome bad ideas one must first trace them back to their hidden, ignoble origins. Once the work of debunking has been accomplished, Lévy asserts, the left will be able to act on its “best reflexes” by embracing “a methodical atheism” whose preeminent article of faith is, “No more uncreated truths, of any kind.” Thus, like Nietzsche’s madman in The Gay Science and his Zarathustra, Lévy proclaims to a public that is implicated in the crime but does not yet comprehend the deed that God is dead and that mankind’s redemption from the enormous loss consists in taking full responsibility for the creation of values.

But Lévy’s invocations of him notwithstanding, Nietzsche, for all his philosophical merits, does not guide one to the heart of what ails the left, much less provide the antidote that will restore it to health — at least not in the sense that Lévy intends. Indeed, to understand what ails it, one would have to grasp the spell that Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism,” as Bruce Detwiler aptly named it, continues to exercise over the left.

The immediate impetus for Lévy’s new book, the author explains in the introduction, was a telephone call he received in January 2007 from Nicolas Sarkozy, during which the conservative candidate for the French presidency asked for his public support. Lévy replied that while they were friends and he wished Sarkozy well, he couldn’t vote for him because the left was his family, he had always voted with the left, and would continue to do so. But the conversation caused Lévy disquiet and perplexity. It’s not that he doubted the depth of his own loyalty to the left. Rather, he realized that that loyalty required an explanation, since he could not deny that Sarkozy “was right when he said that, on the questions of Darfur and Chechnya, as well as several other matters that have always been close to my heart, the Left to which I had stayed faithful was behaving strangely.”

Setting out in search of clarity, Lévy recognizes that his appeal to family to explain his loyalty to the left is, in a sense, “pathetic,” as it contradicts his commitment to expose his moral and political beliefs to the stern test of reason. So he pursues the essential factors. He has to admit that the traditional split between left and right has become harder and harder to believe in. In France at least, the right used to prefer the old and traditional while the left preferred the new and modern. Later, the split was between conflicting ideas toward the reality of progress and the duty to promote it. And in the France in which he came of age, to be on the left was to believe in the possibility and desirability of revolutionary change that would wipe the slate clean and reconstitute a truly moral humanity and society. Yet today, Lévy observes, things are in flux. Even as most precincts of the right have made peace with progress, the left has begun to show reactionary signs.

In pursuit of what truly animates the left, Lévy officially refuses the easy definition of itself that the left is always eager to proffer — that, in contrast to the right, it defends the oppressed, fights injustice, and is scandalized by extreme poverty. Nevertheless, his animated reflections — an illuminating and sometimes undisciplined blend of journalism, history, memoir, and philosophy — suggest, consistent with the easy explanation, that a superior orientation of the heart, call it compassion for all who suffer, really is the left’s defining feature.

Certainly his initial efforts to capture the essence of the progressive spirit suggest the centrality of compassion. To be a man of the European left, Lévy argues, is, to begin with, to hold certain images dear, to cherish a set of great events, and to possess specific reflexes. The images that Lévy vividly describes — aristocrats Léon Blum and André Malraux in the 1930s addressing rallies for workers, his own soldier-father fighting in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, himself in Portugal in 1974 joining the crowd in Marques de Pômbal Square “burying the evil spirits of Salazarism” — are not meant to be exclusive or exhaustive but exemplary: To belong to the left is to have inscribed in one’s mind indelible images of brave men and women standing firm against the varieties of injustice.

The events — the French capitulation to the Nazis that goes under the name Vichy, the Algerian War, May 1968, the Dreyfus Affair — serve as a litmus test. A man of the European left, particularly of the French left, Lévy maintains, cannot be other than appalled by France’s World War II collaboration with fascism; ashamed of France’s brutal efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to maintain control of Algeria; exhilarated by France’s young men and women’s repudiation in May 1968 of authoritarianism in politics and culture; and, looming over all, still scandalized by the turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair, in which the wrongly accused Jew was sacrificed to the interests of the state, tradition, and religious prejudice.

And then there are the reflexes, determining the images and events that get enshrined in the memory of men and women of the left: acting to spread greater freedom and greater equality in such a way that the advance of one does not involve a diminution of the other; seeing not providence but politics as the means for dealing with society’s inevitable injustices; defending the solitary person facing the threatening crowd; perceiving the fascist and totalitarian threats in their many guises and energetically opposing them; and owning up to the historical injustices that have been perpetrated in the name of one’s culture, one’s nation, and even one’s universal principles.

What prevents those who consider themselves, and are considered by others, as on the left today from honoring these images, events, and reflexes? The totalitarian temptation, argues Lévy, is no longer the problem. But it was for a long time. Thirty years ago, the European left was still inclined to justify Stalin and other communist dictators on the theory that it is necessary to break a few eggs to make an omelet, or to criticize communist leaders for breaking too few eggs and not taking their revolutionary principle far enough. But today hardly anyone on the left denies communism’s crimes or believes that justice requires total revolution. The left’s moral and political delusions could not withstand Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s courageous chronicling of Soviet communism’s crimes in The Gulag Archipelago, the publication of which in 1973 in the West, was “an event,” reports Lévy, “that shook our generation to the core.” In 1975, the Cambodian Revolution delivered a devastating blow not merely to Marxism or communism “but to the very idea of Revolution.” By demonstrating the horrifying lengths to which it was necessary to go to radically remake man and society — regulating the family and love, rewriting language, and uprooting millions to rearrange the relation between cities and the countryside — Pol Pot and his minions exposed for all who had eyes to see the cruelty and contempt for ordinary human beings contained in the revolutionary idea.

The New Philosophers contributed in the 1970s and 1980s by reclaiming liberal and Enlightenment ideas, and, with refurbished intellectual equipment, criticizing the totalitarian temptation embedded in the left’s philosophical inheritance from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre. Against the idea that the aim of politics is to actualize the Absolute or the Good, the New Philosophers taught that misery, disorder, and tragedy were inseparable from the human condition and that the dramatically more modest quest to “make the world a bit more livable for the greatest number of people” represented a plenty ambitious political agenda. In opposition to the belief that history had an inexorable logic and that those on the wrong side of it must be mowed down or swept away, the New Philosophers denied that history had a necessary or knowable direction and contended that individual rights could not be set aside for the sake of progress but rather that progress consisted in respecting individual rights in the here and now. Contrary to the hallucinatory claims made on behalf of the dialectic, which the left invoked to justify all manner of death and destruction as part of the necessary clash of contraries that would ultimately yield peace and mutual understanding, the New Philosophers taught respect for the testimony of the senses, stuck close to the lived reality of flesh and blood people, and refused to invest war and revolution with metaphysical meaning and redemptive power. And, finally, rejecting the left’s conviction that only sickness — and not evil — exists, the New Philosophers recognized that to see only sickness in men and never weakness and wickedness in human nature was to provide totalitarian license to wield the power of the state to purge the contagious and cure the rest.

Despite the lessons learned by the left over the past 30 years about the history of communism and the philosophy that underwrites the quest for revolutionary transformation, Lévy finds himself compelled to concede that Sarkozy was correct on the large point: The European left is decrepit. And its decrepitude accounts for its infidelity to the images, events, and reflexes that have long defined it.

But this decrepitude is of a novel sort: The left, argues Lévy, not only shows signs of reaction, it has in many quarters become right wing. By this he means something more than that the left has embraced its opponent’s principles, since he does not regard conservatives as co-equal partners in sustaining and extending freedom and democracy, or even as worthy rivals. Rather, the right, for Lévy, represents an inherently defective sensibility. After all the historical and philosophical work is said and done, when all the fancy words and fine formulations have been put before the public, when all the gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts about how the left must rid itself of toxic ideas and judgments has been performed, Lévy still adheres to the left’s official and invidious distinction between itself and the right. For he makes clear that the left’s decrepitude, its having adopted the orientation of the right, means above all that the left has lost its compassion. Alas, in holding that to be of the left is to have a good heart and to be of the right is to have a heart of stone, Lévy gives expression to that atrophy of the progressive imagination that he seeks to overcome.

His failure to break free of the left’s cherished self-image, however, does not prevent Lévy from performing an instructive “critique of neoprogressive reason” that brings to light the morally and intellectually corrupt opinions harbored by the European left today and the spirit of resentment that nourishes them. First, according to Lévy, the European left is reflexively anti-liberal, reducing the liberal tradition to the unfettered free market while overlooking the tradition’s core teaching about individual rights, consent as the ground of legitimate government, and the enforcement of contracts as an indispensable precondition to peace, prosperity, and justice.

Second, the European left nourishes an anti-European sentiment, doubting or openly rejecting the project of unifying Europe politically. It does this under the spell of identity politics, a politics that does not simply observe and respect the distinctions among peoples — national, cultural, and ethnic — but which amplifies them until they drown out the shared interests and transnational, transcultural, and transethnic moral and political principles that should unify the diverse peoples of Europe.

Third, it exudes anti-Americanism. Its “principled detestation of America” is born out of envy of America’s global leadership and dictates condemnation of any action or undertaking that serves American national interests regardless of the extent to which liberty and democracy are also served.

Fourth, it is anti-empire and anti-colonial with a vengeance. Whereas these ideas once stood for opposition to the developed world’s exploitation of the developing world, for today’s European left, they amount to little more than another way to express anti-Americanism, or always seeing in foreign interventions, from Darfur to Iraq, America’s implacable ambition to enlarge and tighten its stranglehold on world politics.

Fifth, it pioneers a new form of anti-Semitism. To be sure, the new form cannot be entirely severed from the old forms: Christian (the Jews killed Jesus), enlightened (the Jews are responsible for the sins of Christianity), nationalist (the cosmopolitan Jews don’t fit in and can’t be trusted), social and economic (the Jews are bankers and merchants who exploit workers and suck the blood of the poor), and racist (the Jews are a degenerate breed who corrupt the purity of other races). In contrast, argues Lévy, the European left vilifies Jews for monopolizing the limited stores of human compassion by constantly invoking the Holocaust; for exaggerating the suffering and death Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis; and for using Jewish compassion-mongering to justify Israel, which, according to the neoprogressive anti-Semites, is a fascist and racist state. Indeed, if the testimony of the those progressives gathered at the World Conference against Racism held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations is to be credited, Israel is the worst state on the face of the earth.

And, sixth, even as the European left routinely attacks liberalism, disavows the idea of Europe, denounces America, morbidly fixates on empire and colonialism in part to further the repudiation of America, and breeds a new kind of anti-Semitism, it is open to and accommodating of Islamic extremism. It treats what Lévy prefers to call “Fascislamism” — which scorns individual freedom; declared religious war on the West; and has conducted murderous attacks on civilians in, among other places, the United States in 2001, in waves in Israel throughout 2001 and 2002, in Bali in 2002, in Iraq at high levels of intensity from 2004 to 2006, in Madrid in 2004, and in London 2005 — “with the indulgence that the [progressive] tradition demands for the humble and the ill-fated.”

Ultimately, argues Lévy, the European left lost its way because of “the unprecedented crisis” of “the Universal.” This is another aspect of the moral, political, and philosophical loss of bearings, aspects of which Leo Strauss diagnosed almost 60 years ago in Natural Right and History, Alasdair MacIntyre analyzed almost 30 years ago in After Virtue, and Charles Taylor explored almost 20 years ago in Sources of the Self. Although Lévy appears unaware of it — without evidence he puts Strauss in the camp of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt and says nothing of MacIntyre or Taylor — all three argued that the breakdown of the belief that reason could identify universal features of human nature had destabilized morals and politics. In response, all three sought resources in the history of philosophy and religion to rebuild our capacity to make universal claims.

Meanwhile, at least on the left, according to Lévy, the disintegration of belief in a shared human nature and in universal moral and political principles tends to be celebrated as liberation. Indeed, among intellectuals in Paris, Berlin, and London — and among not a few in Cambridge, Mass., New Haven, and Princeton — it remains popular to decry the history of European colonization as “a product of the Enlightenment and the colonizers’ desire to spread their universalist, humanist message overseas.” To be sure, acknowledges Lévy, “Europe committed violence against non-European societies.” But universalism, he argues, certainly the universalism of the liberal tradition, of the Enlightenment, and even, he suggests, of Christianity, is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist in spirit and in practice:


A failure of the Universal, of the impossibility or the refusal to envisage the profound unity of the human race, leads to imperialist or colonial massacres; a reinforcement of the Universal, a reinforcement of the idea that all people issue from the same source, are children of the same father, and therefore belong to the same brotherhood, makes us resist them.

Moreover, contrary to arguments favored by the left, Lévy adamantly insists that neither the origin of individual rights in the West nor their absence or less developed condition in non-Western nations and civilizations undermines their universal claims. And he’s right: The laws of physics don’t hold true only in Europe and America. Of course morals and politics present difficulties that physics does not. Determining the requirements of individual rights across nations and cultures requires skillful translation and refined judgment. But taking the easy way out — and oblivious to the damage done to the ideas that sustain solidarity with those who suffer — many on the left prefer to reject the very validity of universal claims.

One would have thought that Lévy would therefore conclude with an exhortation to the left to undertake fresh studies of the liberal, Enlightenment, and even religious foundations of universal claims about our human rights and human responsibilities. Instead, siding with Nietzsche and Heidegger, he declares in the epilogue that only a thoroughgoing atheism can save the left now. Only such atheism, he asserts, can furnish a viable foundation for the reestablishment of the Universal. Yet, in a book overflowing with arguments of all shapes and sizes, Lévy provides only a profession of faith in atheism’s truth and progressive potential. Like Nietzsche, he affirms that because God is dead, all values can at last be seen as created values, but whereas Nietzsche believed that the practical and profound meaning of God’s death could be understood by at best a few, Lévy hopes that God’s death rigorously understood can galvanize the progressive spirit. To overcome the “disorder of the world, its injustices, its misery,” he preaches, “we have to make an antiwager that we can win not by betting on the existence but on the nonexistence of God” because “that’s the price of democracy.” The alternative “is the devil and his legions of murderous angels.”

Put differently, Lévy envisages a choice between a “melancholy Left” and a “lyrical Left.” The lyrical left — the left against which he directs his polemic — has for a generation played it safe, grown slack, and become too enthralled with its visions of perfection to undertake constructive action on behalf of the afflicted and oppressed. In contrast, the melancholy left — the left which barely exists today but toward which his polemic points — will be humble, truthful, capable of resisting the worst seductions, and, in its devotion to correcting injustice and alleviating misery, disposed to see power as a necessary burden.

A left that was melancholy in Levy’s sense would indeed represent a huge political gain. More is the wonder and more is the pity that at the end of the day he seeks to anchor this new, pragmatic, and melancholy left in an old, metaphysical, and highly lyrical appeal to the limitless freedom that is man’s reward and responsibility for courageously facing up to the death of God. After all, what could be more radically aristocratic or less hospitable to progressive hopes than a vision of politics in which each was encouraged to view himself as completely and absolutely sovereign?

Three misunderstandings, typical of the progressive spirit, prevent Lévy from moving beyond his searing description of the left’s maladies to the elaboration of effective correctives. The first of these concerns conservatism. For Lévy, conservatism means altar and throne, reaction and bigotry, heartlessness and vulgarity. True, conservative thinking in France has not undergone a renaissance of the sort initiated in the 1950s in the United States by, among others, William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich Hayek. But Lévy, whose earlier book American Vertigo is an account of democracy in America based on his 2005 tour of the U.S., should appreciate that conservatism in America today means — not everywhere and always but significantly and for many thoughtful spokesmen — preserving the institutional, material, and moral preconditions of a free society. And a student of philosophy and of politics should not, as Lévy is quick to do, consign Edmund Burke, crucial strands of whose Reflections on the Revolution in France defend liberty against excesses still characteristic of the left’s ambitions for moral and political transformation, to the antiliberal and anti-Enlightenment tradition. Lévy’s failure to enter sympathetically into the conservative spirit is a failure of observation, imagination, and education. It reflects a larger failure of the progressive spirit, which often appears bent on seeing in conservatives only enemies to defeat, fools to patronize, or victims to rescue.

Lévy’s second misunderstanding is of atheism. Like Christopher Hitchens, Lévy believes science and reason vouch for God’s death and that atheism has essentially progressive moral and political implications. Both views are mistaken. Science and reason can show that what believers claim to know is actually based on faith, but, at least in the case of biblical religion, science and reason are powerless to prove that what believers hold on faith — that a mysterious God created the world and fashioned humanity in His image — is false, inconsistent with the truths of science. Moreover, a truly methodical atheism, as Nietzsche vividly showed, far from nourishing progressive hopes, implies that nothing is true, permits everything, and authorizes a ruthless quest to enlarge one’s freedom by extending one’s mastery over all things. In fact, the promulgation of the dogmatic atheism that Lévy champions is likely to exacerbate the maladies on the left that he has thrown into sharp relief.

Lévy’s misunderstandings of conservatism and atheism are rooted in a third, a misunderstanding of the modern liberal tradition. While he rightly repudiates the reduction of liberalism to the untrammeled free market, he wrongly identifies unlimited individual freedom as the tradition’s bedrock teaching. That’s why, like Foucault and lesser postmodernists, he thinks that Nietzsche captures the essence of the liberal spirit. But, as Nietzsche well knew, the compassion to which Lévy is devoted and the freedom to create all values that he cherishes do not hang together. One does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s harsh judgment that concern for those who suffer is slave morality, the revenge of the weak and sick against the strong and bold. But one ought to appreciate that proclaiming that morality is the product of human will and artifice, and encouraging individuals to break free of its shackles and fashion their own values is at least as likely to generate decadence and brutality, or pride and presumption, as it is compassion and mercy. Such an appreciation would lead progressive thinkers away from Nietzsche and back to the liberal tradition, which limits freedom by equality and equality by freedom, and, at its wisest moments, grounds both in human dignity.

[...]

Obama’s leadership, specifically his promise to govern as president of all the people and not just of his progressive constituency, will be sorely tested. To meet the challenge, he will have to grasp the respectable moral intentions out of which conservatism arises; the perils of secularism and the promises of faith; and the real heart of the liberal tradition. Or, a tad less abstractly, he will have to recognize, and govern based on the recognition, that securing liberty and equality in America is the joint work of those who, by virtue of temperament and training, focus on preserving our precious heritage and those who, by virtue of temperament and training, focus on improving it.

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His writings are posted at http://www.peterberkowitz.com/

Deputizing EPA?

EPA Goes Man-Hunting. By Steven Milloy

Fox News. Thursday, December 18, 2008

It’s little wonder why the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list doesn’t include anyone accused of breaking federal environmental laws. It’s hard to argue that a father-son team accused of illegally importing Alfa Romeo sports cars that don’t meet U.S. tailpipe emissions standards is the criminal equivalent of the likes of Usama bin Laden or the other hardened sociopaths for whom the FBI warns the public to remain on the lookout.

But the Environmental Protection Agency has now cured its apparent case of outlaw-envy with the launch of its own “Wanted” list last week. Hoping to “track down environmental fugitives,” the agency wants to “increase the number of ‘eyes’ looking for environmental fugitives.”

In addition to the Alfa Romeo Gang believed to be hiding out in Italy (so remain alert on your next visit to Tuscany), the EPA wants us to keep an eye out for Mauro Valenzuela, an airplane mechanic criminally charged for improperly loading oxygen canisters thought to have caused the tragic 1996 crash of ValuJet flight 592.

But converting the crash into an environmental crime seems a stretch. The EPA apparently views the canister loading as “illegal transportation of hazardous material.” In any event, Valenzuela’s boss and co-worker were eventually acquitted of the same criminal counts. The only reason Valenzuela also wasn’t acquitted was because he panicked and fled to parts unknown before trial. He is, in effect, a fugitive from his own innocence -- but he is wanted by the EPA nonetheless.

The rest of the EPA’s fugitives appear to be mostly hapless immigrants now believed to be “hiding” oversees in places like Syria, Mexico, India, Greece, Poland and China. They’re wanted for a variety of alleged infractions, including smuggling banned refrigerants, discharging waste into sewers, lying to the Coast Guard about a ship’s waste oil management system, transporting hazardous waste without a manifest, and creating false official documents.

While the EPA’s fugitives certainly appear to be a motley lot who may have broken a variety of environmental regulations, often unwittingly, one can’t help but wonder whether the EPA’s Wanted list is not only over-the-top, but where the agency is headed.

We, of course, don’t want people breaking environmental laws, however technical or trivial, but there’s hardly a moral equivalence between a food delivery man who, in a panic, drained 32 gallons of gasoline into a storm sewer and Islamic terrorists who have declared war on America.

The list’s creation seems a furtherance of the Greens’ larger campaign to plant the idea within the public’s mind that all environmental “transgressions” fall along a criminal continuum.

Unlike the FBI’s Wanted list, which spotlights a number of truly dangerous characters accused of causing actual harm to real people -- murder, kidnapping, rape, child molestation, armed robbery and the like -- the EPA’s fugitives are wanted for violations that seem to have caused little, if any, harm to anyone or the environment.

It’s too bad, however, that you can’t say the same thing about the EPA’s Enforcement Division.


In September 1988, the EPA had John Pozsgai indicted for removing more than 5,000 old tires from his property and spreading dirt where the tires had been. Although Pozsgai’s land was bordered by two major highways, a tire dealership and an automobile salvage yard, the EPA considered his land a federally protected “wetland” because of a drainage ditch running along the edge of his property. Though the ditch was mostly dry, it flooded during heavy rain, and the EPA considered it a stream. When Pozsgai filled the ditch without a permit, EPA undercover agents secretly filmed the dump trucks that delivered the topsoil. Though his actions didn’t create any pollution, endanger any species or water quality, Pozsgai was sentenced to three years in prison and fined more than $200,000.

In 1997, nearly two dozen federal agents, armed with semiautomatic pistols, showed up at James Knott’s wire-mesh manufacturing plant in Massachusetts. Knott was indicted on two counts of violating the Clean Water Act for allegedly pumping acidic water into the town sewer system. The EPA publicly condemned Knott and warned that his conviction could result in up to six years in prison and a $1.5 million fine. The case was subsequently dropped when it was discovered that the EPA had omitted vital information from the search warrant information indicating that Knott wasn’t violating the law.

What is the future of eco-crime? A man in the U.K. was fined $215 for leaving the lid of his trash can ajar by more than three inches. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proposed last July to deputize garbage men to fine people as much as $1,000 for mixing trash with recyclables.

Garbage cops, however, pale in comparison to the call earlier this year by NASA’s global warming alarmist, James Hansen, to put the CEOs of oil and coal companies on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature” -- a sentiment first broached in 2006 by a blogger for Grist magazine who called for a “climate Nuremburg” for those who have questioned the need for global warming regulation. Is this really the direction in which we want to go?

It could just be that the real threat to society comes not from a couple of guys selling a few European sports cars that don’t meet stringent U.S. tailpipe standards, but those who use the environment as an excuse to commit crime like, say, the elusive Earth Liberation Front (ELF) terrorists whose arson and vandalism targets have included homes, university buildings, a ski lodge, SUVs, SUV dealerships and more. What’s the EPA doing about ELF?


If the EPA needs a Wanted list, how about making it a “Help Wanted” list in search of Enforcement Division employees with some perspective?

Sunday, December 21, 2008

WSJ article by J Sinton, founding president of Air America Radio

Limbaugh Is Right on the Fairness Doctrine, by Jon Sinton
Liberals don't need equal-time rules to compete

Dec 22, 2008

Conservative talk radio has worked itself into a tizzy lately over the rumored revival of the Fairness Doctrine -- the FCC policy that sought to enforce balanced discussion on the nation's airwaves.

As the founding president of Air America Radio, I believe that for the last eight years Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been cheerleaders for everything wrong with our economic, foreign and domestic policies. But when it comes to the Fairness Doctrine, I couldn't agree with them more. The Fairness Doctrine is an anachronistic policy that, with the abundance of choices on radio today, is entirely unnecessary.

Instituted in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine obligated stations to "afford reasonable opportunity" for opposing views on topics of "public importance." At the time, most cities outside of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles had only a few stations. AM radio was in everyone's car and home, but there were just three or four stations per market. FM radio was still a quarter of a century away from commercial success.

Policy makers who introduced the Fairness Doctrine were worried that crafty special interests could overwhelm the airwaves with one-sided propaganda and tilt elections, sway public sentiment or foment civil unrest. Their fears were understandable. Joseph Goebbels effectively used radio in service of the Third Reich.

Contrary to what some people would have us believe today, the Fairness Doctrine was primarily an issue on TV, since radio didn't have much talk. Until the 1970s, AM stations had a steady diet of music with a couple of minutes of news at the top of the hour. But by 1978, music had migrated to FM, leaving AM in a programming lurch. The history of media is replete with new technologies stealing the content of the ones they supplant. Motion pictures killed vaudeville; radio was full of dramas and comedies before Jack Webb and Jack Benny switched to TV. As for AM radio, it was not until Rush found an audience on WABC in New York City in 1988 that the AM operators knew what to do with their once mighty stations.

The conventional wisdom is that Rush's success depended on the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Some say that if he had to make time for opposing opinions, Rush would have flopped. Personally, I think he is most entertaining when he is dismantling opposing arguments. He's successful because he is a superior entertainer.

Rush created the new AM template, and it spread like wildfire. When programmers and sales managers get a whiff of success, it is cloned in every conceivable way until the audience, once grateful for innovation, tunes out.

So why didn't liberal talk radio flourish as well? There are several reasons, none of which has to do with a lack of talent. Bill Maher, Al Franken, Stephanie Miller, David Bender, Janeane Garofalo, Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow all have the chops.

First, boring hosts made the occasional, unsuccessful foray (sorry, Mario Cuomo). Second, some talented lefties like Mike Malloy were cast into the abyss of right-wing talk radio where they were completely out of place. (Radio is a mood servicing drug; format purity rules.)

Finally, most broadcast owners are conservative. Programs like Rush's have made them rich, so the last thing they want is to mess with success, particularly if it entails airing opinions they don't share. Trust me, it took us years to get them to play rock 'n' roll.

No one tried a national, 24-hour liberal station before Air America Radio. When we founded Air America, we aimed to establish a talk network that lived at the intersection of politics and entertainment. Of course, we were motivated by our political leanings. But as a lifelong broadcaster, I was certain that at least half the American audience was underserved by conservative talk radio. Here was an opportunity to capture listeners turned off by the likes of, say, Sean Hannity. The business opportunity was enticing.

It never occurred to me to argue for reimposing the Fairness Doctrine. Instead, I sought to capitalize on the other side of a market the right already had built.

When conservative talking heads wave a red flag about the possible revival of the Fairness Doctrine, they know it's a great way to play the victim and rally supporters. But I'll let Rush continue with his self-righteous indignation -- and if I want, I'll tune into Rachel Maddow, or one of the thousands of other voices that populate radio today.

Mr. Sinton is the founding president of Air America Radio.

WSJ editorial: A Middle East Arms Race

A Middle East Arms Race
The Arabs respond to the likelihood of the Iranian bomb

Dec 20, 2008

Hosni Mubarak is no one's idea of a visionary, but in sensing the Middle East's political winds he has few equals. So when Egypt's president-for-life warned his ruling party last week that "the Persians are trying to devour the Arab states," it's worth paying attention.The immediate cause of the remarks is a war of words by Iran that led Mr. Mubarak to recall an envoy from Tehran last week. Among other provocations was the recent release of an Iranian film celebrating the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, Mr. Mubarak's predecessor. A Tehran demonstration late last month also called for Mr. Mubarak's execution, on the grounds of his alleged "subservience to the Zionists."

But the broader context of the friction is its steady progress toward a nuclear weapon and the encroachment by Iran into the Arab world -- principally through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Mahdists in Iraq. States like Egypt and Saudi Arabia watched with dismay in the summer of 2006 as Israel failed to deliver a knockout blow against Hezbollah. Now they calculate that the U.S. lacks the will to prevent a nuclear Iran. As for Barack Obama's promise of "tough diplomacy," we suspect the Arab states take him about as seriously as they would a tourist who thinks he knows how to bargain at an oriental bazaar.

Little wonder, then, that the Arab states are taking a keen interest in acquiring nuclear capabilities of their own. The latest is the United Arab Emirates, which hopes to sign a nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S. before the Bush Administration leaves office. Saudi Arabia is seeking a similar deal, while Egypt, Algeria, Turkey and even Yemen are also in the market for reactors.

The ostensible rationale for these reactors varies from place to place, from energy-intensive water desalination schemes to reliable electricity supply. Under the terms of the agreement being proposed for the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, neither country would enrich its own uranium and both would put their facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Still, it's difficult to see what use oil giants like the Saudis or Algerians would have for nuclear power except as a hedge against an Iranian bomb. IAEA safeguards or not, possession of "civilian" nuclear technology served India and Israel as the crucial first step to getting a bomb. It gave local scientists first-hand experience with the technologies and allowed opportunities for the covert diversion of key nuclear materials. Reports have circulated for years that the Saudis have pursued a secret nuclear program with help from Pakistan, though the Saudis deny this. Egypt has also been cited by the IAEA for undeclared nuclear work.

All this is a useful reminder that the threat of Iran's nuclear programs lies not only in whether it will acquire a bomb. It's also a question of how Iran's neighbors will react. The Israelis have said publicly that a nuclear Iran is an intolerable threat, a view many Arab states share privately. If neither Israel nor the U.S. act, they will be tempted to seek their security by acquiring their own nuclear deterrents. A Middle East in which Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt have the bomb -- in addition to Israel and Pakistan -- is possible within a decade.

Maybe there's someone at the Council on Foreign Relations who can explain why this isn't such a terrible scenario, what with everyone pointing a gun at everyone else's head. Our view is that this is a recipe for global instability, if not catastrophe, and a reminder of why no one should be complacent at the looming prospect of an Iranian bomb.

Wesley K. Clark: Actually, Democrats and the military can get along. Here's how.

Taking Command. By Wesley K. Clark
Actually, Democrats and the military can get along. Here's how.

Washington Post. Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page B01

The last time the United States elected a Democrat as its president to govern with a majority-Democratic Congress, an immediate fracas arose over gays in the military, reinforcing a partisan story line that Democrats can't be trusted with the nation's security. Sixteen years later, some will certainly be watching how deftly President-elect Barack Obama salutes, or how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid say the Pledge of Allegiance.

These are symbols, of course, but the national security challenges the nation faces now are anything but symbolic: two wars, an ongoing terrorist menace, a growing list of unmet military needs and a long roster of other threats arising from new quarters. So it's natural to ask: What do the Democrats need to understand about the military? And what does the military need to understand about the Democrats? As someone who has labored in both camps, I offer some thoughts.

Let's start by facing the truth: Democrats have long had an ambivalent relationship with the military, and vice versa. While Democrats profess to like and support the military, Republicans usually win more military and veterans' votes than Democrats, and no wonder: Democrats have been pilloried for supposedly wanting to cut defense spending, for being soft on America's enemies and for wanting to use the armed forces for "social engineering" -- code for letting openly gay soldiers serve. As one senior Army leader told me a few years ago, "The Democrats may be all in favor of using force in a crisis, but can you trust them to stick with us when the going gets tough?" Exit polls last month showed that voters who've served in the military went for the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, over Obama by 54 percent to 44 percent.

And the mistrust runs both ways. To some Democrats, the armed forces appear, in the words of one New Hampshire activist who chided me in 2003, to be an "authoritarian, hierarchical, male-dominated" institution that's out of touch with liberal values. A small number of Democrats can usually be counted on to oppose any use of force and occasionally go after the institution that makes the use of force possible. (I sometimes hear concerns on college campuses that the make-up of our all-volunteer force is not "representative" of America, but I don't see the students rushing to volunteer themselves to redress the balance.)

So it's easy to assume that the military and the Democrats don't and won't get along. It's also wrong. As the 2000 election approached, a member of the Joint Chiefs confided to me: "You know, people wouldn't believe it, but probably no one else will ever treat us as well as the Clinton administration has." From a shaky beginning, including the confidence-battering 1993 "Black Hawk Down" shootout in Somalia, the top civilians on Clinton's team and the president himself took pains to build respect and trust with the military's top brass -- above all by engaging in forthright dialogue.

Building on that, Obama is off to a promising start with the Pentagon, steering clear of a reprise of the fight over "don't ask, don't tell" and picking pragmatic, non-ideological leaders whom top military officers will find highly reassuring -- especially since so many may have discovered from personal experience that a particular partisan label is no guarantee of good leadership. Retaining Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, designating Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (with her six years of experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee) as secretary of state and appointing James L. Jones (a retired four-star Marine general) as national security adviser should go a long way toward assuring members of the armed forces that their concerns will be given a fair hearing at the very highest levels.

But the incoming team and the Democrat-dominated Congress still need to work hard to understand the lower ranks and the culture of today's military. Perhaps as many as 75 million Americans have either served in uniform or have family members who have done so. At any given time, the armed forces total some 2 million Americans on active duty, in the National Guard or in the reserves -- all volunteers. Most read military-focused newspapers, such as the Army Times, and many live on bases, relatively isolated from nearby communities. The majority are married, and almost half have children, creating a subculture of families that endure frequent moves and frightening absences. Most Americans just can't fathom the stress and pain this lifestyle imposes (although Michelle Obama can -- as the future first lady showed by reaching out to military family members during the campaign).

Our military is a values-based institution. Don't think of it as Republican or Democratic. Sure, occasionally someone will pop up, like the radio talk-show host I met while traveling in Arizona, who assured me that he had become a dues-paying Republican while serving as a Marine officer and thought that everyone else should, too. But most of us are uncomfortable with partisanship. True, many in the military, especially those who have served longer, lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum. (What would you expect? The military must obey the orders of the commander in chief and follow the chain of command, which means giving up one's own liberties and spending time in difficult and often very dangerous circumstances.) But the real military values aren't partisan values; they're service, loyalty, honesty, patriotism, respect, achievement and personal responsibility.

Which brings us to one more core military value, one that Democrats can easily embrace: fairness. Military leaders take care of their troops -- and their unit's families. They don't take advantage of their authority. Captains eat after their troops do, not before. Good officers get to work earlier than their subordinates and leave later. I used to joke on the campaign trail that the Army was a socialist organization: The government owned the housing and all the equipment I worked with, everyone's children went to the same schools and used the same hospitals, and the highest-ranking person (after more than 30 years in uniform) earned only about 10 or 12 times the salary of a raw recruit. In the military, we don't like favoritism, show-boating or elitism.

That's a good base upon which to build. But Democrats must also realize that the military's respect has to be earned. We don't consider ourselves an "interest group." Sure, we will always appreciate more pay, better housing and stronger veterans' benefits. But that isn't how the Democrats will win over the military. They'll win by being straight-up, clear-eyed and professional about national security. And if they are, the military will trust them, even with a painful withdrawal from Iraq and the inevitable defense cutbacks.

Above all, don't think that we are anxious to "use our toys." Forget about the Hollywood dramatics: Soldiers are the last to seek war. We know its personal and professional consequences painfully well. Those in uniform would prefer that President Obama use every other tool and method -- diplomacy, sanctions, calling in the allies -- before sending troops into combat. You're better off leaving political and economic development to others, too. As for crisis response? Please, let the diplomats work their magic first.

But the military will have to show some understanding as well. We don't have a monopoly on knowing what the nation's best interests are. National security now involves such spheres as law enforcement, the economy, the nation's industrial and scientific base and even such matters as health care and civil liberties. The military is just one voice among many.

Nor are our military plans and proposals beyond questioning. There's a lot of judgment involved in strategy and operations, and not a lot of certainty. The military is a cautious institution, and plans and options sometimes reflect just the opinion of the most senior person in the room. Even hard military "requirements" should stand up to public scrutiny. So when new members of Congress, Hill staffers and political appointees question tactics, techniques, troop levels and programs, we have to continue to treat these questions seriously and answer them with respect and diligence.

Recognize, too, that the Democrats have generally been pulling for the human side of the military. Worried about veterans' benefits, on-base child care facilities, health care and troop retention? Since at least the early 1990s, Democrats have been putting the "juice" into the all-important people programs that have made the armed forces such a successful institution today.

Finally, let's put aside the partisan legacy of Vietnam once and for all. We all grieve for the losses there and for the needy, homeless vets today. But almost no one now in uniform served in that conflict, and most of the Democrats who will be moving into offices at the National Security Council, the Pentagon and in Congress are too young to have been part of the bitter national debates over the war. Iraq just isn't Vietnam, and the debates over a U.S. withdrawal need not tear the country apart -- especially if we in the military recognize that the Democratic Party that I have been associated with is every bit as patriotic and service-oriented as any other group in the United States.

We have a president-elect who has set out a pragmatic, nonpartisan, visionary course. It's time to lay to rest the old stereotypes about feckless, pacifist Democrats and authoritarian, war-mongering soldiers. If there were ever a time to get the relationship between Democrats and the military right, this is it.

Wesley K. Clark, a retired four-star general, commanded the 1999 war in Kosovo as NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe. He is a senior fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations.

Christopher Willcox's review of Barton Gellman's Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Anyone still interested in the sorry state of mainstream journalism should have a good, long look at Barton Gellman's blistering portrait of Dick Cheney. Despite some labored huffing and puffing over Cheney's behind-the-scenes role on everything from surveillance techniques to global warming, Gellman adds very little that is new to the historic record. What Angler is most notable for is its obvious animus and its disregard for the traditional newsman's separation of church (editorial opinion) and state (fact-based reporting).

Gellman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories in the Washington Post on which this book is based, is a prime exemplar of the new kind of journalism that conflates reportage and opinion in ways that, not long ago, would have outraged news editors. But not only are some of today's senior editors tolerant of such front-page editorializing, they are critical of reporters who don't provide it.

[...]

Angler is neither well written nor particularly instructive on the motives and methods of a vice president who has exercised enormous influence over the last eight years. Much of the material on Cheney's reticence with the press-surprise!-and his conviction that the presidency had been weakened by an overzealous Congress, is deeply familiar. But the volume is a treasure trove of journalistic techniques deployed to bag the quarry.

There is the bogus use of comparative statistics.

[Quote of Gellman's attempt to place 9/11 in context:

For Sept. 11, the National Center for Health Statistics recorded a 44 percent spike over the expected daily death rate, followed by a return to normal on Sept. 12. The year-end tally showed 2,922 lives lost to "terrorism involving the destruction of aircraft (homicide)," a figure that was comparable to the 3,209 pedestrians killed by cars, pick-up trucks or vans. (Non-terrorist homicides exceeded 17,000.) The economic damage was extensive, but no match for the losses of Hurricane Katrina or the subprime mortgage meltdown in Bush's second term.]


Whatever one might think of this dismissal of the September 11 horrors, it is entirely in keeping with the author's apparent conviction that terrorism is essentially a matter for the police and that the Bush administration's response is a greater threat than terrorism itself. "The vice-president shifted America's course," writes Gellman, "more than any terrorist could have done....Decisions made in the White House, in response [to terrorism] had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society."

[Full quote of Gellman's last line above: "These measurements obviously did not capture the full meaning of September 11. A familiar terrorist threat announced itself that day with frightening new proximity and ambition. But decisions made in the White House in response, had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society."]

See the full comments at "Angling for Cheney," PowerLine blog, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/12/022350.php

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Real Climate: 2008 temperature summaries and spin

Excerpts of article 2008 temperature summaries and spin in Real Climate, http://www.realclimate.org/:

The great thing about complex data is that one can basically come up with any number of headlines describing it - all of which can be literally true - but that give very different impressions. Thus we are sure that you will soon read that 2008 was warmer than any year in the 20th Century (with the exception of 1998), that is was the coolest year this century (starting from 2001), and that 7 or 8 of the 9 warmest years have occurred since 2000. There will undoubtedly also be a number of claims made that aren't true; 2008 is not the coolest year this decade (that was 2000), global warming hasn't 'stopped', CO2 continues to be a greenhouse gas, and such variability is indeed predicted by climate models. Today's post is therefore dedicated to cutting through the hype and looking at the bigger picture.

As is usual, today marks the release of the 'meteorological year' averages for the surface temperature records (GISTEMP, HadCRU, NCDC). This time period runs from December last year through to the end of November this year and is so-called because of the fact that it is easier to dice into seasons than the calendar year. That is, the met year consists of the average of the DJF (winter), MAM (spring), JJA (summer) and SON (autumn) periods (using the standard shorthand for the month names). This makes a little more sense than including the JF from one winter and the D from another as you do in the calendar year calculation. But since the correlation between the D-N and J-D averages is very high (r=0.997), it makes little practical difference. Annual numbers are a little more useful than monthly anomalies for determining long term trends, but are still quite noisy.

The bottom line: In the GISTEMP, HadCRU and NCDC analyses D-N 2008 were at 0.43, 0.42 and 0.47ºC above the 1951-1980 baseline (respectively). In GISTEMP both October and November came in quite warm (0.58ºC), the former edging up slightly on last month's estimate as more data came in. This puts 2008 at #9 (or #8) in the yearly rankings, but given the uncertainty in the estimates, the real ranking could be anywhere between #6 or #15. More robustly, the most recent 5-year averages are all significantly higher than any in the last century. The last decade is by far the warmest decade globally in the record. These big picture conclusions are the same if you look at any of the data sets, though the actual numbers are slightly different (relating principally to the data extrapolation - particularly in the Arctic).

So what to make of the latest year's data? First off, we expect that there will be oscillations in the global mean temperature. No climate model has ever shown a year-on-year increase in temperatures because of the currently expected amount of global warming. A big factor in those oscillations is ENSO - whether there is a a warm El Niño event, or a cool La Niña event makes an appreciable difference in the global mean anomalies - about 0.1 to 0.2ºC for significant events. There was a significant La Niña at the beginning of this year (and that is fully included in the D-N annual mean), and that undoubtedly played a role in this year's relative coolness. It's worth pointing out that 2000 also had a similarly sized La Niña but was notably cooler than this last year.

While ENSO is one factor in the annual variability, it is not the only one. There are both other sources of internal variability and external forcings. The other internal variations can be a little difficult to characterise (it isn't as simple as just a super-position of all the climate acronyms you ever heard of NAO+SAM+PDO+AMO+MJO etc.), but the external (natural) forcings are a little easier. The two main ones are volcanic variability and solar forcing. There have been no climatically significant volcanoes since 1991, and so that is not a factor. However, we are at a solar minimum. The impacts of the solar cycle on the surface temperature record are somewhat disputed, but it might be as large as 0.1ºC from solar min to solar max, with a lag of a year or two. Thus for 2008, one might expect a deviation below trend (the difference between mean solar and solar min, and expecting the impact to not yet be fully felt) of up to 0.05ºC. Not a very big signal, and not one that would shift the rankings significantly.

There were a number of rather overheated claims earlier this year that 'all the global warming had been erased' by the La Niña-related anomaly. This was always ridiculous, and now that most of that anomaly has passed, we aren't holding our breath waiting for the 'global warming is now back' headlines from the same sources.

Taking a longer perspective, the 30 year mean trends aren't greatly affected by a single year (GISTEMP: 1978-2007 0.17+/-0.04ºC/dec; 1979-2008 0.16+/-0.04 - OLS trends, annual data, 95% CI, no correction for auto-correlation; identical for HadCRU); they are still solidly upwards. The match of the Hansen et al 1988 scenario B projections are similarly little affected (GISTEMP 1984-2008 0.19+/-0.05 (LO-index) 0.22+/-0.07 (Met-station index); HansenB 1984-2008 0.25+/-0.05 ºC/dec) - the projections run slightly warmer as one would expect given the slightly greater (~10%) forcing in the projection then occurred in reality. This year's data then don't really change our expectations much.

[...]

A Chance for Consensus on Iraq. By John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham

A Chance for Consensus on Iraq. By John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham
Washington Post, Dec 19, 2008.

After our visit to Iraq this month, it is clear that what was once unthinkable there is now taking place: A stable, safe and free Iraq is emerging. Violence has fallen to the lowest level since the first months of the war. The Sunni Arabs who once formed the core of the insurgency are today among our most steadfast allies in the fight against al-Qaeda. A status-of-forces agreement between Iraq and America will take effect next month, providing for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a commensurate increase in Iraqi self-defense. And Iraqi politics is increasingly taking on the messy but exhilarating quality of a functioning democracy. While uncertainty and risk remain high, and the gains made are not irreversible, the situation in Iraq has improved dramatically since the dark days before the surge.

Now it's time for the unthinkable to take place in Washington. For the past several years, Iraq has divided and polarized our parties, our policymakers and our people. The debate over the war has often been disfigured by politics and partisanship, precluding the national consensus so important to American security in a dangerous world. President-elect Barack Obama has the opportunity to end this destructive dynamic and rebuild a bipartisan consensus on American foreign policy, including the way forward in Iraq. In naming talented, principled and pragmatic leaders to his national security cabinet, the president-elect has already demonstrated that he wants to set aside foreign policy politics as usual. Now the very capable leadership team of Defense Secretary Bob Gates, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton and Gen. Jim Jones, the incoming national security adviser, can apply their bipartisan credentials to help the president-elect forge an Iraq policy that will garner the support of Democrats and Republicans alike.

No longer does Congress need to be locked in partisan trench warfare over withdrawal dates and funding cutoffs. Our shared, central task now is to work together to support a responsible redeployment from Iraq, based on the new and improved realities on the ground.

To achieve this, the president-elect, his national security team and all of us in Congress should seek the counsel of Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, and Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of coalition forces in Iraq. Gen. Odierno was the operational architect of the surge in 2007, when he served as deputy to Gen. Petraeus, as well as of the tribal engagement strategy that persuaded Sunnis to abandon the insurgency and join our side. Gen. Odierno -- as the current commander on the ground -- is the person whose judgment should matter most in determining how fast and how deep a drawdown can be ordered responsibly.

John McCain (R-Ariz.), Joe Lieberman (Independent Democrat-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are members of the U.S. Senate.

WaPo Editorial On W. Mark Felt

W. Mark Felt
In an ambiguous career, an anonymous source did his country a great service.

OLD MEN forget," says the Shakespearean warrior-king on the day of battle, yet there are those who will "remember with advantages" what feats they did in times of strife, when great issues were decided. W. Mark Felt Sr., who died Thursday at the age of 95, never really availed himself of that old man's privilege. He played a key role in bringing down an administration that badly abused its powers, but he did it in secret, and he kept that secret almost to the grave. By the time he revealed his identity -- just 3 1/2 years ago -- the anonymous source known as "Deep Throat" had been struck down by common calamities of age -- stroke and dementia. So much for remembering with advantage.

But, then, Mr. Felt was never all that certain whether he would be regarded as a hero or a turncoat. As a high FBI official with intimate knowledge of what was going on in the Nixon administration during its frantic efforts to cover up Watergate and other misdeeds, he helped Bob Woodward of The Post immeasurably. He served as a valuable anonymous source while the team of Woodward and Carl Bernstein worked the biggest scandal story in ages. Mr. Felt could tell himself -- and certainly many would have told him -- that he was doing the country an invaluable service, that he had no choice but to reveal the secret information entrusted to him.

But Mark Felt was also a creature of the FBI -- J. Edgar Hoover's FBI -- and he knew that what he was doing would be seen by many of his colleagues as a betrayal. Given what we know, and continue to learn, about Mr.

Hoover's abuses of power, the loyalty that Mr. Felt displayed to him and to his legacy only adds to the ambiguity of his career. In fact, it led to his conviction on charges of authorizing illegal break-ins at the premises of antiwar radicals and their families -- for which Mr. Felt received a pardon from Ronald Reagan.

Mark Felt inhabited a world in which good and talented and diligent people such as himself could feel it was a justifiable act to spy on someone of the stature of Martin Luther King Jr. It is a world in which many things, good and bad, come under the broad rubric of "security." Few who operate in it emerge as pristine heroes, as we continue to be reminded. But Shakespeare notwithstanding, there's not much likelihood by this time that the good Mark Felt did will be interred with his bones.

Friday, December 19, 2008

"Bush Has Made Us Vulnerable: Two incompetently prosecuted wars have undermined our deterrent"

Bush Has Made Us Vulnerable, by Mark Helprin
Two incompetently prosecuted wars have undermined our deterrent

In his great Civil War history, "Decision in the West," Albert Castel describes the last Confederate hope of victory. If in 1864 the Confederate armies continue to exact a steep cost from the North, "the majority of Northerners will decide that going on with the war is not worth the financial and human cost and so will replace Lincoln and the Republicans with a Democratic president and Congress committed to stopping hostilities and instituting peace negotiations." He cites the resolution of the Confederate Congress that: "Brave and learned men in the North have spoken out against the usurpations and cruelties daily practiced. The success of these men over the radical and despotic faction which now rules the North may open the way to . . . a cessation of this bloody and unnecessary war." Plus ça change . . . .

The administrations of George W. Bush have virtually assured such a displacement by catastrophically throwing the country off balance, both politically and financially, while breaking the nation's sword in an inconclusive seven-year struggle against a ragtag enemy in two small bankrupt states. Their one great accomplishment -- no subsequent attacks on American soil thus far -- has been offset by the stunningly incompetent prosecution of the war. It could be no other way, with war aims that inexplicably danced up and down the scale, from "ending tyranny in the world," to reforging in a matter of months (with 130,000 troops) the political culture of the Arabs, to establishing a democracy in Iraq, to only reducing violence, to merely holding on in our cantonments until we withdraw.

This confusion has come at the price of transforming the military into a light and hollow semi-gendarmerie focused on irregular warfare and ill-equipped to deter the development and resurgence of the conventional and strategic forces of China and Russia, while begging challenges from rivals or enemies no longer constrained by our former reserves of strength. For seven years we failed to devise effective policy or make intelligent arguments for policies that were worth pursuing. Thus we capriciously forfeited the domestic and international political equilibrium without which alliances break apart and wars are seldom won.

The pity is that the war could have been successful and this equilibrium sustained had we struck immediately, preserving the link with September 11th; had we disciplined our objective to forcing upon regimes that nurture terrorism the choice of routing it out with their ruthless secret services or suffering the destruction of the means to power for which they live; had we husbanded our forces in the highly developed military areas of northern Saudi Arabia after deposing Saddam Hussein, where as a fleet in being they would suffer no casualties and remain at the ready to reach Baghdad, Damascus, or Riyadh in three days; and had we taken strong and effective measures for our domestic protection while striving to stay within constitutional limits and eloquently explaining the necessity -- as has always been the case in war -- for sometimes exceeding them. Today's progressives apologize to the world for America's treatment of terrorists (not a single one of whom has been executed). Franklin Roosevelt, when faced with German saboteurs (who had caused not a single casualty), had them electrocuted and buried in numbered graves next to a sewage plant.

The counterpart to Republican incompetence has been a Democratic opposition warped by sentiment. The deaths of thousands of Americans in attacks upon our embassies, warships, military barracks, civil aviation, capital, and largest city were not a criminal matter but an act of war made possible by governments and legions of enablers in the Arab world. Nothing short of war -- although not the war we have waged -- could have been sufficient in response. The opposition is embarrassed by patriotism and American self-interest, but above all it is blind to the gravity of the matter. Though scattered terrorists allied with militarily insignificant states are not, as some conservatives assert, closely analogous to Nazi Germany, the accessibility of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons makes the destructive capacity of these antagonists unfortunately similar -- a fact, especially in regard to Iran, that is persistently whistled away by the Left.

An existential threat of such magnitude cannot be averted by imagining that it is the work of one man and will disappear with his death; by mousefully pleasing the rest of the world; by hopefully excluding the tools of war; or by diplomacy without the potential of force, which is like a policeman without a gun, something that doesn't work anymore even in Britain. The Right should have labored to exhaustion to forge a coalition, and the Left should have been willing to proceed without one. The Right should have been more respectful of constitutional protections, and the Left should have joined in making temporary and clearly defined exceptions. In short, the Right should have had the wit to fight, and the Left should have had the will to fight.

Both failed. The country is exhausted, divided, and improperly protected, and will remain so if the new president and administration are merely another face of the same sterile duality. To avoid the costs of a stalled financial system, the two parties -- after an entire day of reflection -- committed to the expenditure of what with its trailing ends will probably be $1.5 trillion in this fiscal year alone.

But the costs of not reacting to China's military expansion, which could lead to its hegemony in the Pacific; or of ignoring a Russian resurgence, which could result in a new Cold War and Russian domination of Europe; or of suffering a nuclear detonation in New York, Washington, or any other major American city, would be so great as to be, apparently, unimaginable to us now. Which is why, perhaps, we have not even begun to think about marshaling the resources, concentration, deliberation, risk, sacrifice, and compromise necessary to avert them. This is the great decision to which the West is completely blind, and for neglect of which it will in the future grieve exceedingly.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt) and "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt).

Bret Stephens: Let's Buy Pakistan's Nukes

Let's Buy Pakistan's Nukes, by Bret Stephens

Every visitor to Pakistan has seen them: 20-foot tall roadside replicas of a remote mountain where, a decade ago, Pakistan conducted its first overt nuclear tests. This is what the country's leaders -- military, secular, Islamist -- consider their greatest achievement.

So here's a modest proposal: Let's buy their arsenal.

A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear program (and midwife to a few others), likes to point out what a feat it was that a country "where we can't even make a bicycle chain" could succeed at such an immense technological task. He exaggerates somewhat: Pakistan got its bomb largely through a combination of industrial theft, systematic violation of Western export controls, and a blueprint of a weapon courtesy of Beijing.

Still, give Mr. Khan this: Thanks partly to his efforts, a country that has impoverished the great mass of its own people, corruptly enriched a tiny handful of elites, served as a base of terrorism against its neighbors, lost control of its intelligence services, radicalized untold numbers of Muslims in its madrassas, handed the presidency to a man known as Mr. 10%, and proliferated nuclear technology to Libya and Iran (among others) has, nevertheless, made itself a power to be reckoned with. Congratulations.

But if Pakistanis thought a bomb would be a net national asset, they miscalculated. Yes, Islamabad gained parity with its adversaries in New Delhi, gained prestige in the Muslim world, and gained a day of national pride, celebrated every May 28.

What Pakistan didn't gain was greater security. "The most significant reality was that the bomb promoted a culture of violence which . . . acquired the form of a monster with innumerable heads of terror," wrote Pakistani nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy earlier this year. "Because of this bomb, we can definitely destroy India and be destroyed in its response. But its function is limited to this."

In 2007, some 1,500 Pakistani civilians were killed in terrorist attacks. None of those attacks were perpetrated by India or any other country against which Pakistan's warheads could be targeted, unless it aimed at itself. But Pakistan's nuclear arsenal has made it an inviting target for the jihadists who blew up Islamabad's Marriott hotel in September and would gladly blow up the rest of the capital as a prelude to taking it over.

The day that happens may not be so very far off. President Asif Ali Zardari was recently in the U.S. asking for $100 billion to stave off economic collapse. So far, the international community has ponied up about $15 billion. That puts Mr. Zardari $85 billion shy of his fund-raising target. Meantime, the average Taliban foot soldier brings home monthly wages that are 30% higher than uniformed Pakistani security personnel.

Preventing the disintegration of Pakistan, perhaps in the wake of a war with India (how much restraint will New Delhi show after the next Mumbai-style atrocity?), will be the Obama administration's most urgent foreign-policy challenge. Since Mr. Obama has already committed a trillion or so in new domestic spending, what's $100 billion in the cause of saving the world?

This is the deal I have in mind. The government of Pakistan would verifiably eliminate its entire nuclear stockpile and the industrial base that sustains it. In exchange, the U.S. and other Western donors would agree to a $100 billion economic package, administered by an independent authority and disbursed over 10 years, on condition that Pakistan remain a democratic and secular state (no military rulers; no Sharia law). It would supplement that package with military aid similar to what the U.S. provides Israel: F-35 fighters, M-1 tanks, Apache helicopters. The U.S. would also extend its nuclear umbrella to Pakistan, just as Hillary Clinton now proposes to do for Israel.

A pipe dream? Not necessarily. People forget that the world has subtracted more nuclear powers over the past two decades than it has added: Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine and South Africa all voluntarily relinquished their stockpiles in the 1990s. Libya did away with its program in 2003 when Moammar Gadhafi concluded that a bomb would be a net liability, and that he had more to gain by coming to terms with the West.

There's no compelling reason Mr. Zardari and his military brass shouldn't reach the same conclusion, assuming excellent terms and desperate circumstances. Sure, a large segment of Pakistanis will never agree. Others, who have subsisted on a diet of leaves and grass so Pakistan could have its bomb, might take a more pragmatic view.

The tragedy of Pakistan is that it remains a country that can't do the basics, like make a bicycle chain. If what its leaders want is prestige, prosperity and lasting security, they could start by creating an economy that can make one -- while unlearning how to make the bomb.

Science Mag: John Holdren to be Nominated as Obama's Science Adviser

Science reports:

Strong indications are that President-elect Barack Obama has picked physicist John Holdren to be the president's science adviser.

A top adviser to the Obama campaign and international expert on energy and climate, Holdren would bolster Obama's team in those areas. Both are crowded portfolios. Obama has already created a new position to coordinate energy issues in the White House staffed by well-connected Carol Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and nominated a Nobel-prize winning physicist, Steve Chu, to head the Department of Energy. That could complicate how the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Holdren will run, will manage energy and environmental policy. "OSTP will have to be redefined in relation to these other centers of formulating policy," says current White House science adviser Jack Marburger.

Holdren had been planning to attend a staff meeting this morning with colleagues at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he heads the technology and science program. But instead, he flew today to Chicago to meet with the transition team and prepare for the announcement; initial plans are to release the official news of the appointment on a weekly radio program that Obama records and will be broadcast on Saturday. The transition office declined to comment.

Holdren is well known for his work on energy, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Trained in fluid dynamics and plasma physics, Holdren branched out into policy early in his career. He has led the Woods Hole Research Center for the past 3 years and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceInsider) in 2006.

—Eli Kintisch

CNN's Zain Verjee interview: State Secretary Condi Rice

MRC's transcript of CNN correspondent Zain Verjee interview with State Secretary Condi Rice, aired on Wednesday night’s Anderson Cooper 360:

VERJEE: Staying in Iraq, the shoe-throwing incident, it was really a symbol in so many ways in the Arab world of utter contempt for President Bush.

RICE: And it was one journalist among several who were sitting there respectfully, and I hope it isn’t allowed over time to obscure the fact that this was the President of the United States standing in Baghdad next to the democratically elected Shia Prime Minister of a multi-confessional Iraq that has just signed agreements of friendship and cooperation with the United States for the long term.

VERJEE: But the man may have been one journalist, but he was viewed throughout much of the Arab world as a real hero.

RICE: Oh, I –

VERJEE: My question is –

RICE: I have heard so many people –

VERJEE: My question to you is: Does it bother you that with all the diplomacy that you’ve done, President Bush’s policies, the policies that you’ve carried out that the U.S. is so loathed around the world?

RICE: Zain, the United States is not loathed. The policies of the United States are sometimes not liked. People don’t like that we’ve had to say hard things and do hard things about terrorism. People don’t like that we’ve spoken fiercely for the right of Israel to defend itself at the same time that we’ve advocated for a Palestinian state. But I have to go back. So many people in and around when that incident happened told me how embarrassed they were by the fact that that had happened. But the crux –

VERJEE: But didn’t it upset you? Didn’t it?

RICE: No, no, only that the focus of those who are supposed to be reporting for history didn’t focus on the historical moment, which is that this was the President of the United States in Baghdad, for goodness’ sakes, with a freely elected prime minister in a show of friendship. It didn’t get reported that the Iraqi band spent apparently several – all night trying to learn our national anthem and did it really rather well.

Other questions Verjee made:

-- "What about North Korea? At every step in this deal, the North Koreans have made promises, they’ve broken them, they’ve made demands, you’ve made concessions, you’ve moved your red lines. Your critics say that really what happened was, was the North Koreans were just playing you like a violin."

-- "What about the Middle East? You really put in a lot of effort. And made progress when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But do you ever think to yourself, gosh, you know, I really wish that we started this kind of engagement a long time ago at the beginning of the Bush Administration, not toward the end? Do you ever think about that?"

-- "The worst breach of national security in the history of the United States came under your watch....Did you ever consider resigning?"

-- "One of the issues raised by some of your critics, they say that as National Security Advisor you were really steamrolled by Vice President Cheney, by former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and didn’t present a broad enough view to the President. Do you think you did?" Rice replied: "Certainly, the principals had their say, and as National Security Advisor I faithfully presented to the President what his principals were thinking – all of them."

Verjee wrapped up the interview by asking if Rice voted for Obama (she avoided an answer) and "Was Sarah Palin a bad choice?" (Rice praised her as historic for women.)


h/t: Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

"I know, I know there are reasons not to love this country, and to fear her"

Sent to Anna Bosch's blog in the federally owned Spanish radio and TV company, RTVE:

hola, cuatro apuntes acerca de lo que vemos en este blog:

1 A partir de la lectura de la presentación de Da. Anna Bosch (Perfil):

"…Ya, ya sé que hay razones para no querer a este país, y para temerlo, pero entiendo que sería redundante enumerarlas porque, según todas las encuestas y sondeos, las tenéis muy, muy presentes. Citando un clásico de Hollywood, nobody's perfect."

Primera idea: no nos imaginamos un corresponsal de la emisora sostenida con dinero del contribuyente trabajando en, digamos, Corea del Norte, o Libia antes de renunciar a su programa nuclear militar, o Afghanistan con los taliban, y que se pudiera considerar neutral escribiendo algo como lo que acabamos de citar. ¿No sería mejor, por parecer neutral, evitar pronunciamientos así?

2 Respecto a lo de "Con la inclusión de Sarah Palin en el ticket y las perspectivas de derrota la campaña de John McCain ha virado a la derecha, a la extrema derecha" ("Una de las dos Américas ha de helarte el corazón"), segunda idea: ¿no parece raro que alguien que trabaja para, entre otras cosas, dejar un registro al que acudan los historiadores en el futuro escriba lo de "extrema derecha"?

3 Respecto a "en algunos actos de Palin han abundados gritos o comentarios del público que asustan. Gritos de "que lo maten" "traidor" "terrorista" referidos a Barack Obama" ("Una de las dos Américas ha de helarte el corazón"), lo que recuerdamos de esas alegaciones es que:
according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley [...] "The Secret Service did not hear any threatening statements directed at targets under its protection and no threatening statements were reported to us by law enforcement or citizens at the event," Wiley told Radar. Also unclear: whether the remark was directed at Obama or Ayers if the words were actually "kill" and "him."


Yo particularmente no he visto aún rectificación de Dana Milbank, Washington Post, pero, tercera idea, como tantas otras veces, sirva esto para que aprendamos más prudencia, más paciencia, y no citar como verdades históricas cosas que nos dicen nuestros amigos o colegas, 98% de los cuales piensan de política como nosotros mismos.

4 Cuarta idea: a lo mejor no es suficiente citar como medios que uno admira (por tanto, escucha/lee/vee más que los demás) los que aparecen en el perfil:

"El New York Times, el Washington Post, la NPR y la PBS…"

ya que no son medios bipartidistas ¿Puede ser que parte de la realidad se escape por no leer/ver/oír con igual frecuencia otros medios? La admiración sentida (después de Lauren Bacall, nada menos) ¿no es peligrosa para la objetividad?


Gracias por la oportunidad de expresar nuestras inquietudes,

Jorge Mata
Press Office
Bipartisan Alliance,
a Society for the Study and Defense of the US Constitution, where Republicans and Democrats meet.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Yale magazine: A Green Agenda for Obama's First 100 Days

Environmentalists offer the president-elect their advice on the priorities he should set for his administration.

Excerpts:

Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

I believe the most important initiative that President Obama should undertake would be to announce an ambitious plan for reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases on par with what the European Union has put forward — namely the 20-20-20 plan. This would require the U.S. to cut its emissions by 20 percent over 1990 levels, as well as generate 20 percent of its electricity through renewable energy sources, by 2020. Everything else would flow out of this set of goals, because business and industry would take immediate action in developing new technologies and refining existing ones to make them economically viable before 2020.

One major area in which the new President could bring about a major structural change would be to strengthen passenger railway transport in the U.S. by providing low interest loans to build high-speed lines that would lure passengers away from air travel. Simultaneously, the new administration must mandate stringent mileage standards to produce energy-efficient cars. States and local governments should be provided with financial support to carry out energy-efficiency retrofits in existing buildings and ensure much higher targets of energy efficiency in new construction.

The U.S. should also donate liberally to the adaptation fund that hopefully will be part of the new agreement on climate change to be negotiated by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen. Several poor countries that bear no responsibility for the increase in greenhouse gases will need major resources to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and as a matter of international justice, the U.S. must play a large role in these adaptation efforts.

I would tell the new President that all these measures would not only meet the challenge of climate change and establish the willingness of the U.S. to be part of the solution, but would also ensure energy security for the U.S. in the future and create much-needed new employment.

Rove: Organizing the White House Is Obama's First Test

Organizing the White House Is Obama's First Test, by Karl Rove
All presidents come to realize how much structure matters

Excerpts:

As he organizes his presidency, Barack Obama continues to receive glowing reviews. Three out of four Americans approve of how he's handling his transition.

But organizing and operating the White House will be a much bigger challenge than he can possibly yet understand.

Consider national security. Mr. Obama's team has the advantage of inheriting procedures and structures that stretch back to President Harry Truman's 1947 reforms, which created the National Security Council. But there's historically been tension over the roles of the national security adviser and secretary of state. How that tension is resolved depends largely on the able National Security Adviser-designate, James Jones.

Mr. Jones has been Marine Corps commandant and NATO supreme allied commander, posts whose occupants are treated as demigods. How easily will he fit into a staff role? Will Mr. Jones see his responsibility as ensuring the president receives a broad range of options, or will he put a higher priority on advocating his own substantive views? Could Mr. Jones's personal relationship with so many top brass undermine Secretary Robert Gates's control of the Pentagon during what could be Mr. Gates's last year at Defense?

[...]

To this complicated mix Mr. Obama has added a White House energy and climate-change czar, former Clinton-era EPA Administrator Carol Browner. Which raises these questions: Will the EPA and its legions of experts still lead policy development, or will the new climate czar? Will the CEQ lose authority to Ms. Browner? There are many strong people in Mr. Obama's environmental arena. Who's in charge, and how will those relationships shake out?

Mr. Obama's new Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, Tom Daschle, has never run anything but will have responsibility for one of the government's most complicated departments. And while Mr. Daschle may have lost his last campaign, he's lost none of his skill at internecine warfare. The wily Washington insider also grabbed the title of director of the White House Office of Health Reform. The creation of this new Daschle-led office clearly downgrades both the DPC and the National Economic Council, which have traditionally split White House action on health issues. [...]


Finally, the Obama team continues discussing how to use its campaign email list. According to press reports, the aim is to "place pressure on key legislators." But that raises problems beyond irritating representatives and senators who will resent the White House for making their lives more difficult. Ethics and election law expert Tom Josefiak of Holtzman Vogel PLLC says the Obama White House should reread the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel's opinions about The Anti-Lobbying Act. One in 1988 warned: "We caution against grassroots appeals, even by the President, that involve substantial expenditures of appropriated funds." This suggests putting the email list on White House servers is a problem.

And who will direct and pay the organizers that the transition team may hire to lead these White House lobbying efforts? Former FEC Chairman Michael Toner, now of Bryan Cave LLP, says running a new grass-roots advocacy group out of the White House could create serious election-law difficulties. The FEC has imposed large civil penalties on some advocacy groups for failing to register as political committees and abide by hard-dollar contribution limits. Also, any White House advocacy group runs the risk of being treated as a Democratic National Committee affiliate, triggering shared contribution limits, reporting requirements, and a prohibition on soft-money contributions. Given Mr. Obama's professed support of campaign finance reform, he could ill afford any of these problems.

Mr. Obama is assembling a strong and intelligent team of people with muscular views and large personalities. Will the individual parts cohere into a well-functioning whole? Things that sound good often work less well in reality. Having served in the White House for nearly seven years and carefully studied how the modern presidency functions, it strikes me that some of Mr. Obama's steps may make smooth operations harder. [...]

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.



About Karl Rove

Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.