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According to Laura Rozen at the Cable, we finally have a likely nominee for under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, "G." The winner if Maria Otero, president and CEO of Accion International.
But still no USAID Administrator; only 84 days into a Democratic presidential administration. My question is will there be a nominee by the end of April.
The clock is ticking . . .
I have a small request to make of every Congressional Republican and Democrat who is charging the Obama Administration with cutting defense spending: identify the exact tax that you are going to raise or the specific domestic program that you are going to eliminate in order to pay for your defense spending priority.
Political leaders from both sides of the aisle have spent 30 years telling the American people that we can have a gold-plated military and a global reach to our military power; yet at the same time enjoy some of the lowest tax rates in the industrialized world. Of course no decision better personified this generation-long irresponsibility than the decision to cut taxes at the same time we were going to war in Iraq.
The simple reality is that if politicians want to continue expanding our military while refusing to make the touch choices that fiscal responsibility demands then they need to be upfront about how they are going to pay for it. If Saxby Chambliss thinks those F-22s are so important and Jim Inhofe believes that the Future Combat Systems program is key to American security in the 21st century then challenge the American people to pay higher taxes in order to sustain those purchases. Something tells me this isn't going to happen; but I am a dreamer!
(I know after both men joined almost the entire Republican caucus in decrying and voting against the deficit spending of President Obama's stimulus package that they are of course dead set against borrowing money to pay for these programs).
It's about time those people who think $600 + billion a year in defense spending is too little put their money where their mouth is.
It's amazing how one hostage crisis involving pirates can turn an ongoing story that was basically being ignored, into a national outcry to somehow make this a top priority (Just look at the extent of the coverage) . The reality is that Somalia is a mess and a combination of counterterrorism officials and Africa experts have been warning about this issue for a while and getting very little attention. Now suddenly, there is a universal call to end the scourge of piracy. The amount of stupid things written about this in recent days is remarkable with Ralph Peters of the New York Post being perhaps the craziest of all.
I guess that is one option. Even though just about everyone who has seriously covered this issue would tell you that it would only make things worse. Or we could return to the land of reality and recognize that the piracy problem and Somalia more broadly is a serious problem that needs to be effectively managed and addressed. But we also need to deal with serious concerns regarding: the financial crisis, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Mexico, the Arab-Israeli conflict, global warming, non-proliferation, etc... The point is that Somalia and the piracy/terrorism issue belong somewhere on the list. But it would be wise to take a deep breath and evaluate our options seriously, taking into account other priorities and limited resources before doing anything rash. The whole country would benefit from a sane conversation and reasonable media coverage on this issue, instead of having a whole bunch of people who didn't even know this was an issue two weeks ago weigh in with all kinds of wacky options.
Update: Noah Shachtman breaks down the options.
Yesterday, a group of 12 former senior military officials sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to support and sign pending Congressional legislation that would repeal the travel ban for all Americans who wish to visit Cuba. The retired officers--including former SOUTHCOM Commanders Gens. James Hill and Barry McCaffrey as well as Major General Paul D. Eaton and Lt. General Claudia J. Kennedy--argue that, based on national security grounds, lifting the ban would allow us to send our best ambassadors-the American people-to engage our Cuban neighbors, thus giving America a much better chance of influencing the eventual course of Cuban affairs. The letter, coordinated by the National Security Network and the New America Foundation, also examines the negative national security impact the travel ban and overall embargo has on America's interests in the region, creating a situation where our confrontational policy of isolation towards Cuba hinders, not heightens America's overall security objectives. A full text of the letter can be found after the jump.
Continue reading "Retired Military Officers: End the Cuba Travel Ban" »
Today, in partnership with the New America Foundation, NSN released a letter from retired military officers to President Obama, urging further easing of restrictions on Cuba. You can find it here.
What We’re Reading
North Korea says it will boycott the six-party nuclear talks and re-start its weapons plant.
Protesters retreat from Thailand’s capitol. The government issued arrest warrants for 13 of the movement’s leaders and the man they support, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
An alliance between the Taliban and local militants threatens Pakistan’s vital Punjab region. Thousands of militants find safe haven in Swat Valley following a deal with the Pakistani government. Meanwhile, a USAID inspector General’s report found that the UN spent U.S. funds on ineffective projects in Afghanistan.
72% of Americans disagree with former Vice President Dick Cheney when he said that President Obama was making the U.S. less safe.
Commentary of the Day
Gideon Rachman asks whether NATO is in Afghanistan to fight for national security or universal values in the context of new Afghanistan laws curtailing women’s rights.
The LA Times discusses the consequences of the rescue of Captain Phillips.
Peter Zimmerman looks back at some pirate history and says shipping companies should use convoys to protect themselves.
Over at abu muqawama, Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation makes a point that's really been nagging at me for a few days:
I've noticed the same thing also. Here at National Security Network, our crack stuff has been on this issue, correcting misstatements; and over at TPM, Josh Marshall and Brian Beutler have been on the war path. Now I'm all for correcting the record, but there is something strange about this whole experience: shouldn't progressives want to see President Obama cut the defense budget?
Now I understand that many Republicans are spreading the "Democrats are cutting defense spending" meme because they want to portray the party as weak, but while political necessary, it's a little unseemly when Democrats bend over backwards to say "no, no we love the military so much too; we can spend half a trillion dollars as well on its bloated budget."
The fact is, from a progressive perspective there are many priorities that this country needs to focus on over the next few years - health care reform, climate change legislation, infrastructure improvement, rebuilding our civilian national security and foreign policy capacity etc. Now of course a lot of this money will in the short-term come from deficit spending. No complaints there; I think it's the right budgetary move. But we cannot borrow forever and at some point politicians have to make choices and look for places to cut spending - and let's face it the defense budget provides some real opportunities.
Now I get the idea that perhaps this is the wrong time to cut defense spending - maybe the political costs are too significant or the immediate needs for the military are too great and an immediate cut in defense spending is not feasible; but liberals aren't doing themselves any favors when they try to play the "me-too" game in defense spending. At some point this country is going to have a moment of reckoning when we wake up to the fiscal reality that low taxes and half a trillion in defense spending with massive entitlement spending is no longer feasible. For far too long when it came to making these types of choices, defense spending was off the table.
When does that end? When do we start having a real debate in this country about the amount of money we spend on defense? If this current debate is any indication, it's not going to happen any time soon. I fear that the short-term politics of pushing back on the GOP will have long-term consequences for progressive's domestic and foreign priorities - and it won't be good.
Reading this Politico piece about Gates' defense budget meeting the needs of the 'next war,' I was surprised to find that America's future adversary will most likely be, you guessed it, Iran:
Nevermind that America's problems in Iraq and Afghanistan point to weaknesses that not just Iran, but any potential adversary could exploit in a hybrid war with the U.S. And nevermind that both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs suggested that war with Iran would carry such negative repercussions for broader US interests as to make the question of capacity close to irrelevant.
Could it be possible that a war with Iran is not a fait accompli? Is it conceivable that not every element of the Obama administration's foreign policy is based around the Islamic Republic? C'mon people, gimme a frackin break!
About a year ago, the media was obnoxiously debating and the political nation was ridiculously fixated on whether Barack Obama made an unseemly finger based gesture while talking about his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. A year later? Well, I'll let a single photo from Obama's trip to Europe tell the story:
More photos of Obama's overseas trip from White House's official gallery here.
UPDATE:
Ok, maybe the picture above shows the strong substance-based rapport between Obama and Clinton, but the picture below courtesy of The Root truly demonstrates how the two really have left all those schoolyard, childish disagreements of the past behind them:
Shadow Government vexes me. Their posts are thought-provoking, if rarely amenable to my progressive disposition. But one odd trend that I've noticed is their frequent attempts to put the Obama administration's foreign policies on the same trajectory as their Bush predecessors. Seriously Peter Feaver, what unholy force compelled you to turn a diverting meditation on grand strategy into an incongrous argument for why Obama is just like Bush, but with fancier rhetoric?
I guess I'm not one of "such students," because I just don't seeing the continuities. On terrorism, there are indeed similarities between Obama and Bush, but those similarities have to be considered against an overall Obama administration world-view that seems to have done away with terrorism as a foundational element of U.S. strategy. Anyone who argues that getting rid of the Global War on Terror is just a rhetorical shift has a peculiar understanding of not just rhetoric, but terrorism, and strategy as well.
Turning to Iraq, it's worth asking how the Obama policy came to so closely resemble the Bush approach. Could it be that Obama thought of it first? The reality is that Obama was calling for timed withdrawal from Iraq long before the Bush team, facing opposition from both Iraqis and broad swaths of the American public, finally accepted limits on a war they had long preffered to view as limitless. Again, if the Bush administration made Iraq the crucible for their grand strategy, and the Obama administration explicitly rejects that view, where are the strategic continuities?
What's so ironic about Feaver's attempts to connect the concept grand strategy to chimerical resemblances between Bush and Obama is that the David Sanger piece on which Feaver bases his discussion is focused on nonproliferation. Maybe I'm not grasping the continuities, but that seems like an area where there the contrast between two administrations could not be any more profound.
Over at the Cable, Laura Rozen reports that the era of good feelings in the State Department is not being felt by everyone:
Um, I would politely suggest that the fact we are now 80 days into a Democratic Administration and we still don't have a new administrator for USAID has everything to do with the frustration that some folks are feeling.
AID is as degraded a US agency as perhaps any in the US government. In 2008, USAID had just over 2,200 employees, compared to 12,000 at the height of the Vietnam War. The agency’s diminished staff has made it almost completely dependent on NGOs and for-profit contractors to carry out its work—so much so that Sen. Patrick Leahy complained last year that “USAID has become a check writing agency for a handful of big Washington contractors and NGOs.…”
I was at a recent conference where I heard that AID has about a dozen economists and less than 10 engineers on staff. For an organization whose mandate it is to provide technical and economic assistance to developing countries, these are shockingly low numbers.
Quite simply, if you are going to have an national development agency - and you are going to take it seriously - then you need to make its ability to do its job a priority. In our recent report on improving democracy promotion and fixing the foreign assistance bureaucracy, we call for AID to be made a cabinet-level agency - and with the lack of attention that the Obama Administration is paying to this issue that is something that will have to be emanate from Congress and a potential re-write of the foreign assistance act. But not surprisingly, my confidence is not high.
But in the meantime, if the Obama Administration is really interested in making its rhetoric about development and democracy promotion being a priority in US foreign policy - they need to put somebody in charge of AID. And they need to do it immediately.