Professor Tells Muslims to Leave Country.

Well, what do we have here? Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let's start at the top.
The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman. Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student's Association. The e-mail was in response to the students' protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were "hate speech."
Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:
?
Dear Moslem Association:
As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called "whores" in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.
This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many of my colleagues. I counsel your dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile "protests."
If you do not like the values of the West - see the 1st Amendment - you are free to leave. I hope for God's sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.
Cordially, I. S. Wichman Professor of Mechanical Engineering

As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn't like this too well. They're demanding that Wichman be reprimanded and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman. Now the chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn't believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion.
For its part, the university is standing its ground, saying the e-mail was private, and they don't intend to publicly condemn his remarks. That will probably change. Wichman says he never intended for his e-mail to be made public, and wouldn't have used the same strong language if he'd known it was going to get out. How's the left going to handle this one? If you're in favor of the freedom of speech, as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek Wichman? I doubt it.
Send this to your friends, and ask them to do the same. Tell them to keep passing it around until the whole country gets it. We are in a war. This political correctness crap is getting old and killing us.

http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/the-final-option.htmprint/

The Final Option
Posted By Administrator On May 31, 2007 @ 10:50 am In Dispatches | 42 Comments

[1] Left to Right: Lieutenant Colonel Doug Crissman; General Hamid; Sayed the interpreter. Seconds after this photo, LTC Doug Crissman grabbed General Hamid’s pistol. (Note: the pistol was already unsnapped.)

Hit, Anbar Province, Iraq

The city of Hit (pronounced “heat”) is a spot of green in the desert on the western bank of the Euphrates. The temperature is steadily rising here as the weeks melt into the mirage of summer; the haze shimmering at about 115°F now. The air was blowing hot and dry through the city Tuesday morning 29 May, when I accompanied LTC Doug Crissman for another day of meetings with local leaders in Hit and surrounding towns in Anbar Province. Crissman and the soldiers of Task Force 2-7 Infantry under his command have been welcomed in the area of Hit for about the last one hundred days. Prior to February, Hit was one of the hottest little battlegrounds of the war, with almost daily gun battles crackling through the air, mortars exploding on the bases, and bombs cratering the roads.

But none of that noise punctuated a visit last Saturday, when LTC Crissman and I walked through the downtown portion of the city. Our several-mile stroll through the market—a veritable shopping mall for the area—was filled with men, women, and children of all ages, including one rotund boy furiously slurping an ice cream before it could drip away.

Hit could have swallowed us whole that day. Although there were vehicles nearby in radio contact, we had only two soldiers as guards during our stroll. But the people mostly just waved and smiled, or wanted to talk with Crissman, who stopped now and then to engage in conversations, all while the steam building inside the pressure cookers of our helmets soaked the pads in sweat.

Many people in Hit directly attribute the resurrection of this city in large part to the courage of Iraqi Police General Ibrahim Hamid Jaza (General Hamid), who took an aggressive stand against the Al Qaeda (AQI) terrorists who had brazenly made Anbar province a home base and slaughter pad with their marketplace car bombs, beheadings, and reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they’d gutted.

Over time, AQI provided ample demonstrations of their ruthless and reckless abuses of power over civilians, shooting people for using the Internet, or watching television, or other “moral transgressions” such as smoking in public. AQI’s claim of fundamentalist piety proved to be a thin veneer that was quickly eroded by blatant drug, alcohol and prostitute use. The people of Anbar rejected AQI, but AQI was still strong and well-armed, so rejection was only a first step.

AQI operatives are not amenable to change, so there was killing to be done. General Hamid was one of the brave souls who took an early stand and went for their throats. In doing so, he demonstrated that the terrorists were also vulnerable. Some soldiers in the Task Force 2-7 began to jokingly refer to the general as “Bufford Pusser” because Hamid literally carried a big stick. But AQI wasn’t laughing; they beheaded Hamid’s son on a soccer field in the center of Hit in 2005.

About a year ago coalition forces selected Hamid to be the District Chief of Police, confirming his status as a true hero to many Americans and Iraqis. Accordingly, recent signs suggesting that Hamid might have begun flying too close to the sun were a hard and grim reality for officers in both governments, as the evidence of his corruption began to accumulate like so much wax melted off strong wings. Hamid had earned his reputation for being ferocious against terrorists, which might suffice to explain the stunning impact when, without warning or notice, LTC Crissman arrested and detained the general Tuesday afternoon.

Context is critical to understanding the circumstances, as well as for explaining why news of his arrest was absorbed with shock, but without incident. The substrate of the operating context is philosophical and hearkens back the recent [2] Values Letter penned by Commanding General David Petraeus. It reduces to one idea: Thou Shalt Not Abuse People. In democracies, the people always have the power to reject abuses of power. And the Iraqi people in the Anbar province have exercised their power to reject leaders, a rejection that happened to us here not so long ago.

In fact, once upon a recent time, the people of Anbar saw what they interpreted as abuses of power from our side, and rejected American leadership. When in April 2004, the events in Fallujah and Abu Ghraib unfolded just a short drive from Hit, people here responded with more than just a passive rejection of Americans; they also welcomed AQI and other Coalition enemies.

[3] On the morning of 29 May, we began another long day of long meetings. Our Army was giving me full access, good, bad and ugly.

For several days leading up to 29 May, I accompanied Crissman as he circulated throughout the 4,000-square kilometer piece of Iraq under his watch, meeting with various sheiks, imams, city council members, mayors, and Iraqi policemen throughout the area. Invariably, concerns about General Hamid’s conduct were frequent topics of discussion. Some local officials who had once regarded Hamid as a hero were now beginning to fear him. Allegations claimed he was committing murders (extra-judicial killings), releasing some detainees for money, abusing other detainees, making deals with various insurgent groups (to include selling them weapons and ammunition), and condoning prostitution in Hit. (It is rumored that the prostitutes had provided critical intelligence on their AQI johns.) Our side believed many of the charges, because there was growing evidence that General Hamid was engaging in criminal activity that could unravel progress towards stability here that can only be described as astounding.

Despite that Iraqi and American officials understood Hamid certainly was part of the reason for recent successes in Hit, consensus was building that Hamid was out of control. When someone floated the idea to give Hamid an early retirement, complete with a medal and a ceremony, call him a hero and sadly say goodbye to a man who, with an adjustment of values, could remain an ally in the fight, someone else countered that Hamid was too smart, too proud and too dangerous to fall for that. Hamid is an energetic man with a taste for power. Given an out, Hamid might just opt to become a full-fledged problem. The last thing Anbar Province needs is another power broker working outside the system, and especially not one with Hamid’s intelligence, cunning and contacts.

Local Iraqi officials looked to the Coalition—specifically to LTC Doug Crissman—to solve the problem. I saw them asking, which put the Coalition in a tender bind. The people of Anbar risked reaching out during these meetings, expressing a concern and sharing intelligence to support it, all while clearly expecting Americans to help solve the problem.

Tribal politics may also have been a factor: Hamid is part of the community, if the Americans took him out, that would buy cover for tribal leaders. Or maybe they honestly just needed someone with a bigger stick than Hamid’s. After all, he had helped crush AQI, and they are tough enemies. Whatever turns out to be the underlying cause, Crissman was mindful that Iraqis have their own time clocks, and a limited store of patience for Americans, who were being handed an opportunity to demonstrate leadership in action.

The people at these meetings knew that the Coalition had operated hand-in-hand with General Hamid. Iraqis here would likely interpret our continued tolerance of the situation as a sign that we were no better than the general. The problem was further complicated by the simple fact that most people on both the American and Iraqi sides actually liked Hamid . . . when he was behaving.

But Iraqi officials were clear. They wanted Hamid gone. And they wanted us to arrest him. Anbar is not one of the provinces that has been turned over to PIC control, so the task would properly fall to the Coalition. But that fact does not make the procedure any simpler. More problematic, arresting Hamid would create another vacuum. Experience keeps showing us that if we leave vacuums to chance, fortune tends to rush despots to fill voids.

A secret mission called Operation Police Call was planned. Hamid was to be arrested. Senior Coalition and Iraqi leadership including Prime Minister Maliki were to be apprised of the arrest if it was ordered. Yet events would so conspire on Tuesday that LTC Crissman would initiate the capture himself.

On the morning of 29 May, we began another long day of visiting police stations and other facilities. Every meeting began with the official agenda: there are 576 police hiring slots to fill, and LTC Crissman had been making great effort to distribute the hiring slots over various tribes and geographical boundaries so that everyone became stakeholders in the resulting security program. Everyone gets something, everyone is represented and responsible, and no tribe or town is left behind. The Abu Nimr tribe, the dominant tribe in the area, was trying to grab too many slots. And so during one meeting with sheiks and police commanders, while perhaps a hundred potential recruits were waiting outside for screening, tribal sheiks and police chiefs were haggling over details with Crissman. Crissman was diplomatically laying down the ground rules—yet again—that would assure that the Abu Nimr tribe would not get the massive proportion of slots it was intent upon claiming. I watched him draw two pie charts on a piece of paper to illustrate (through his interpreter) how a particular police unit needed to be both geographically and tribally divided in order to be truly representative of the population.

There was no plan whatsoever to arrest General Hamid that day. But events were unfolding, and the proto-neural communication network that our forces and the Iraqis have been establishing around the area was starting to work. Information was flowing about the heartbeat of the city of Hit, and the area, into the JCC (Joint Coordination Center, where our people have a headquarters with Iraqi police). And that information would force LTC Crissman’s hand because intelligence strongly indicated that Iraqi citizens were going to be killed if action wasn’t taken immediately.

[4] A ruckus started outside among the recruits, so I pulled on my body armor and helmet, snapped a still photo and walked outside.

[5] The video would show a scene far more chaotic than the one this still photo captured. Men everywhere carried assault rifles, and there were machine guns mounted on Iraqi trucks. Some men began cocking their weapons while shouting and screaming at each other, and there was some pushing and intense yelling.

[6] I scanned the rooftops and saw some of our guys point automatic weapons down at the crowd below, and one of which was aimed straight at me. I waved my hand high in the air at the soldier or Marine.

I waded into the crowd of men and came into another group of our soldiers and asked what was happening. Nobody exactly knew, but I could see some of our guys trying to isolate the troublemakers. One of Crissman’s men took away a man who looked fit to be tied. The soldier took the screaming man behind a humvee and gave him an ice-cold water from the cooler, told him to calm down, which worked actually, until another man carrying a gun started screaming again.

One of Crissman’s young soldiers spontaneously confronted that man and told him in colorful terms that if he didn’t back off (the man was brandishing a machine gun) that he was going to get handcuffed. The issue prompting the angry mob scene was the shortage of hiring orders, which translates to a shortage of paychecks. The situation was tense and could have become a firefight, but I did not truly sense imminent bloodshed or I would have stayed inside. By now, Iraqi police commanders had waded into the crowd and begun calming things down, so we headed back inside to our meeting.

On the way in, I realized one of Crissman’s soldiers had been shadowing me, watching my back, when he made eye contact with another soldier and said, “You got him now? I need to get back out there.” “I got him.” Our soldiers take good care of writers and always keep watch during situations.

About 90 minutes later, we were heading back up the road to another planned, but unscheduled engagement. While we had been in meetings, an Iraqi policeman named Major Walid had gone to General Hamid’s office to investigate an allegation that Hamid had accepted a bribe not to detain a known insurgent. Hamid was believed by the Coalition and the Iraqis to be harboring Zayid Yusef Jarwan, a terrorist who operates in Ramadi, and allegations that Hamid might have been involved in releasing Jarwan for cash surfaced.

So at about 1100 local time, Major Walid, a newly-appointed Iraqi Police Investigator, had been summoned to Hamid’s office because he had been asking tough questions as he investigated the allegations. Crissman would tell me that, “Based on no less than five heart-to-heart discussions, Hamid has known he has been on thin ice with both Coalition Forces and the Iraqi population he serves. Reports indicate Hamid physically beat Major Walid in his office and essentially told him to cease his investigation.”

By about noon, the JCC in Hit was getting reports that fliers were being distributed in Hit complaining that Hamid was selling insurgents back to the insurgency. The fliers called on Coalition Forces to do something. Other fliers, believed to be the products of Hamid, were showing up saying the allegations were false.

Around 1300, two members of the Hit City Council arrived at the JCC demanding that the Coalition do something. If not, they feared that the people of Hit would take care of it. The people were saying clearly that they did not want to attack the police general, but enough was enough. A mob intent on lynching Hamid would surely confront an armed contingent of his supporters, and American forces would be involved in the crossfire. Nobody needed a return to that, which would only undermine LTC Crissman’s daily efforts to instill confidence in the people here that there would be a rule of law and that no one—not even the Chief of Police—was above it.

We were already on the road, and had stopped by Hamid’s house, but not to arrest him. LTC Crissman just wanted to show his face and keep in close contact with Hamid, but the general was not home. So the commander told the small patrol to head to Hamid’s office at the Hit District Headquarters. As we drove the humvees north on ROUTE TROUT along the mighty Euphrates, the chain of events described above unfolded for Crissman on his command radio net. At 1315, Crissman got the first indication that this might not be a typical meeting.

[7] As we pulled into the police station, seven trucks filled with heavily armed men were heading out. At the time, I did not know about any of the events of the past few hours—about the dueling accusation fliers, or the beating of Major Walid, for instance.

[8] Our soldiers knew these police because they had spent much time with them.

Although I’ve been in many Iraqi police stations, this was the first time I can recall entering a station and having the distinct impression that for some reason a firefight might be imminent with the police. There are always concerns that one, or a few, police might do something, but I have always seen the police stations as semi-safe havens, except for how al Qaeda and other groups like to mortar IP stations or level them with truck bombs. Our guys seemed ready to fight the police, something I’d also never before seen.

Importantly, none of this was overt. Nobody was pointing weapons at each other or shouting; nothing like that. Nobody was threatening anyone. Unlike the loud ruckus earlier where men had cocked their weapons, and our guys on the roof were aiming just over my head at machine guns I had not seen (making me think one of our guys was aiming at me), I did not sense that a shootout was forthcoming that time. Yet this time there was no posturing whatsoever, but I could smell the danger as clearly as high voltage.

[9] LTC Crissman had done operations with General Hamid for four months, and couldn’t recall ever seeing Hamid carrying a rifle, yet here he was with an MP-5 submachine gun, and a pistol. Crissman also noticed that the man behind Hamid (in this photo) normally is very neat, but his clothes were mussed, leading Crissman to suspect he was perhaps involved with roughing up Major Walid less than two hours ago.

We were outnumbered—at least two to one, but probably closer to three to one. There were police on the roof with machine guns and AK-47s. Based on other information that I had no knowledge of at the time, LTC Crissman believed that General Hamid was taking his posse out to confront those who were gathering to confront him. Right before our very eyes was evidence in support of that theory: seven truckloads of armed Iraqi police and more armed officers on the rooftops to back them up.

When Crissman met Hamid on the ground outside of their vehicles he calmly exchanged the cultural greetings, hugs, and handshakes and attempted to vent the pressure. He smiled and asked where everyone was going. The general’s response was that they were heading into Hit to have lunch and invited LTC Crissman to join them. Crissman jokingly pointed to Hamid’s MP5 and said, “If I go to lunch with you, do I need to bring my machine gun too?” Crissman’s interpreter translated and there were smiles and laughter, until Crissman asked if he could talk with Hamid inside his office.

Moments earlier, as we rolled up and saw those seven Iraqi Police vehicles filled with men, Crissman had secretly called for a platoon-sized QRF (Quick Reaction Force) backup in Bradley vehicles. Unbeknownst to anyone on the scene at the time except Crissman, the QRF were all running to their machines as we were heading to Hamid’s office. Still, nobody knew what was about to happen, and Crissman himself had only minutes earlier decided it was time to end this thing.

He had also called his executive officer on the radio and told him to call his boss and let him know what he thought was about to happen—Coalition Force detainment of an Iraqi Police Chief—something that normally requires advance notification and permission. So we all sat in Hamid’s office, and I made video.

After about 15 minutes of discussion, we heard the Bradleys rumbling outside. I knew something was going down, but still had no idea what. As I watched Crissman deal with Hamid, I wasn’t getting any clues. Meanwhile, video was still rolling when the Bradley company commander, CPT Dan Fitch, entered the General’s office, and sat in on the meeting for some minutes. I saw Crissman and Fitch use some kind of verbal code. It appeared perfectly natural, but I have spent so much time with our soldiers that I knew he had just passed some kind of message, although I had no idea what it was about. CPT Fitch left the room. Crissman continued discussing seemingly important, but unrelated issues with General Hamid, all while his soldiers from Task Force 2-7 Infantry were outside, quietly separating Iraqi police, disarming and flex-cuffing them. No shots fired. No punches thrown. No bruises.

Inside the office, General Hamid had unslung his submachine gun and propped it up against the wall. I had noticed earlier that General Hamid’s pistol holster was unsnapped, making the weapon virtually effortless to draw. Perhaps it was an accident that caused the holster to unsnap. But for some reason, and I have no idea why, I thought highly unlikely for a military man like Hamid.

When CPT Fitch came back in, he handed Crissman a note. Crissman read it, and then said something out loud about the Sergeant Major not being able to make it to the meeting. The general was fond of the sergeant major, and Crissman had used this as one of his innocuous discussion points moments earlier. I thought, That’s bullshit. What’s going on?

[10] Suddenly, LTC Crissman asked me if I would like to photograph him and Hamid together. I turned off the video and pulled up the camera for a few shots.

I have written before about how keen Iraqi Police and Iraqi Army officers are to have their photographs taken—particularly with Coalition Forces. Photos of Hamid were plastered over the wall behind his desk. Crissman stood calmly beside Hamid and smiled as I snapped a couple of photos. After the last photo, Crissman deftly grabbed Hamid’s pistol out of his unsnapped holster, smiled, and said, “This hurts me more than it hurts you, but I’m going to need you to come with me, General.”

Hamid seemed confused at first, as if his friend Crissman were just admiring Hamid’s Glock pistol. Hamid just kept smiling as Crissman politely said that Hamid was to be detained.

LTC Crissman, acting solely on his own and with no direct orders from above, saw that a bloodbath was about to be unleashed, and pulled a plan out of the sky. Yes, there had been a plan already afoot, but Crissman “fragged” it early, managing to arrest an entire police station without a shot being fired, and using me as a photo-op to distract a proud, some might say vain, general just long enough to disarm him.

[11] Fourteen men and General Hamid were arrested. Hamid asked for a cigarette and a soldier offered.

[12] Polite but ready: the soldier kept his own pistol out of Hamid’s sight, but he was ready.

[13] General Hamid was not actually a prisoner of war: his problems are with the Iraqi government, not with ours. Potentially, though, he could hang. (Note: As it turns out, “General” Hamid was not actually a “general” either. Although he’d claimed the rank for so long that everyone called him “General,” Hamid is actually a Colonel. This information was not available until after Hamid’s arrest.)

The tensions at the station were contained, but the mission still needed to ensure that conditions remained peaceful in the area. One of the challenges TF 2-7 faces is establishing a rule of law—something enduring that will be simple, effective, and enforceable even after Coalition forces leave. Tuesday’s events created intense challenges, but also provided an otherwise difficult-to-generate opportunity to further the mission. We dropped off the prisoners at a small American base nearby, and LTC Crissman continued to the JCC, where Crissman had asked all the police chiefs in the area to assemble.

[14] LTC Crissman had asked all the police chiefs in the area to assemble there for a meeting that I sat in on and videotaped.

Crissman told the assembled chiefs the truth about what happened, and though they looked nervous at first, they seemed on board. Already, there was information of a possible reprisal attack, and so Crissman asked the chiefs to help him detain a couple of men in particular who might deliver reprisals. The police chiefs conferred among themselves and detained the men within hours. Crissman said he had already ordered the reinforcement of all the Iraqi Police stations in the city as well as the only bridge across the Euphrates in the city. He wanted a curfew to be established for three days. He was transparent with the police. He told them exactly what happened and what the next steps entailed. They responded with cooperation.

These meetings were as important as the arrests that apparently derailed a bloodbath. Our own generals and Iraqi officials needed to know about the arrest, but Crissman also realized that his most immediate problem was making sure everyone in Hit—many people admire Hamid and we’ve seen that Iraqis will defend their own—realized that this was not a coup or precipitous action done at the whim of the Coalition, but was requested by the region’s leaders.

People needed to be made aware immediately that Hamid was not being summarily jailed. So instead of stopping the mission and heading back to base after dropping off the fifteen prisoners, Crissman kept meeting with local leaders and reassuring the people.

[15]

After the meeting with the police chiefs, we were already 15 minutes late to an emergency meeting of the Hit City Council. At least one of the Council members thought Hamid was still a hero, but most others agreed that what had happened needed to be done and thanked Crissman.

The clock on the wall in the above photo is accurate and shows the time as about 5:36 PM. TF 2-7 had taken General Hamid more than three hours earlier, and the follow-up actions were still in progress. This meeting ground on and on, with armed men all around. Crissman’s men, the security detachment for the mayor, the guards for the City Council building, etc. Again, we Americans were far outnumbered, but not a speck of trouble happened and I sensed practically zero danger, although word came in during the meeting that the governor of Anbar had just canceled his Wednesday trip to Hit (News that a high-ranking American official would write to me the next day).

As the meeting drew to a close, and Crissman indicated he needed to leave, the commander reiterated once more that he had not arrested General Hamid for himself or for Coalition Forces, but instead for the people of Hit. They all nodded in agreement and support and there were a few “Shukrans” (thank-yous) muttered. Crissman then said he needed to go call his boss since he had just arrested an Iraqi general and a few people might be a little upset about that. The council members seemed stunned. I was stunned, having not realized until that moment that Crissman had simply seen the shot and taken it. I said to one of our soldiers, “That was brilliant.”

[16] Iraqis respect men of action and conviction and they recognize and respond to leadership. In Hit on Tuesday they put the rule of law over any one man.

When Crissman said with full sincerity that he probably was in trouble, and then joked that he might need a place to stay, the council burst into laughter, with members saying he could live in Hit. In a way, he already does.

Sustainable Consumption: The Push for Using Less
Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a two-part report on the emergence of sustainable consumption as a major policy debate and how it will affect consumers, businesses and policymakers.
By Bart Mongoven
With the world's major energy consumers seriously searching for ways to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and guarantee constant energy supplies, we are seeing the beginning of a revolution in energy production. The focus on finding new energy systems is mainly an outgrowth of economic and geopolitical concerns, in that none of the big three consumers -- the United States, Europe and China -- wants to continue to pay spiraling energy costs or be held hostage to foreign producers. A secondary aspect of this new interest is a search for "cleaner" alternatives.

Both the United States and China, for example, have substantial coal resources, but neither sees complete reliance on coal as a panacea because of coal's impact on air pollution (especially in China) and climate change. Europe, meanwhile, is leading the charge on the climate change issue to the point that it appears willing to trade some energy security for new systems that seem less likely to exacerbate climate change.

After decades of struggling to bring their concerns over the air-polluting and climate-changing side-effects of fossil fuel use to the forefront, environmental activists finally are getting results. Governments and industries that are developing new energy systems will factor in climate change and air quality. In essence, however, as these secondary energy-related issues move from the drawing board to the boardroom, control over them has shifted from the activists who created and promoted the issue to the business crowd that is charged with instituting solutions. This has left the idealists searching for new ways to hold power over the direction of energy policy.

In response, the idealists appear to be taking on a new long-term challenge -- one focused on changing how consumers, especially in the United States and Europe, view consumption. The sustainable consumption movement is focused not merely on energy conservation -- though that certainly would be an important result -- but rather on the development of a personal ethic that has subscribers using as little energy and as few products as possible to achieve their desired standard of living. At its core will be an emphasis on changing people's attitudes toward what has "value" and what does not, while convincing them to view technological developments in terms of whether they are safe in the long run. (Some argue, for example, that while the use of DDT 50 years ago solved the food-shortage problem, it replaced it with a litany of human health and ecological problems that continue to plague society).

New Expressions of Value
Adherents to the sustainable consumption ethic -- those seeking to encourage cleaner or less environmentally intrusive sources of energy and other resources -- are targeting a broad range of industries and processes, and an equally broad range of downstream users of energy, natural resources and consumer products (especially the end-user, the individual consumer). Insofar as sustainable consumption is an effort to mold the purchasing decisions of consumers, it is an attempt to change everyday values. It seeks to promote consciousness of the wider-ranging consequences -- and particularly environmental consequences -- of everyday decisions. Consumers who adopt this ethic, then, would think hard before deciding which appliances they buy, how they heat their homes and how they get to work. The ethic of sustainable consumption reduces the value of a good to a particular individual, and increases the value one places on that good's wider social implications.
In addition to bringing new values to the fore in daily decision-making, sustainable consumption also entails altering the way one weighs those values. Sustainable consumption's most ardent adherents are not content to accept trade-offs: An object's value to one person can never trump its long-term effects on society or the environment.
To an extent, then, sustainable consumption asks people to place the community ahead of the individual.

New Views of Technology
At the center of this movement is the argument that an increasing number of problems industrialized societies face are caused by the unintended consequences of solutions to the timeless problems of food, heat and shelter. Sustainable consumption activists argue that, for example, the energy systems people have built to solve the problems of heating homes, transporting goods and creating products are creating new problems, such as nuclear waste, climate change, air pollution and the risk of nuclear reactor meltdowns, which have a negative impact on quality of life. Similarly, advocates argue that many of the materials in the consumer products that improve our quality of life actually have a negative impact on health -- and therefore on quality of life.

The problem is encapsulated in the trade-offs in compact florescent light bulbs. These bulbs decrease energy use dramatically, but they contain mercury and mercury vapors not found in incandescent bulbs. For realists, it becomes a question of risk assessment and priorities: Compact florescent bulbs are on the rise because scientists have found that the amount of mercury in the bulb poses no health threat and they consider the environment less harmed by the mercury than the environmental costs of the power that heats the bulb. The sustainable consumption movement sees this as a false choice and argues that industry needs to develop ways of illuminating rooms that use as little energy as possible without resorting to "solutions" that trade one problem for another. This is the logic that holds that nuclear power, which helps on climate change, is nonetheless unacceptable because it simply replaces one problem with another.

What the Issue Offers
The basic foundation of the move toward advocacy of sustainable consumption is already in place, and the current direction of the larger energy debate is spurring activists to explore what sustainable consumption offers them as an issue.

The movement currently is strongest in Europe, where the conservation ethic among consumers is far stronger than in North America. Solid waste already has become an emotional issue for many Europeans -- and many consider the American reliance on disposable consumer products to be distasteful. One must look only at the packaging of consumer products in Europe to see the degree to which regulators have heard this message from the public. The movement in Europe is handicapped, however, by its close relationship to the wider environmental movement. While this has allowed it to be promoted much more quickly in Europe, where environmentalism is a far more mainstream concern, it also has pigeonholed it as an environmental issue, rather than a larger, more encompassing social issue.
In the United States, on the other hand, the issue is somewhat detached from environmentalism, which will work to its benefit in the long run because environmentalism has such a narrow following in the United States. Furthermore, because it has environmental overtones, those trying to unite the larger liberal "progressive" political constituency in the United States have come to view sustainable consumption as a core tenet of their strategy.
The developing progressive coalition has coalesced around the recognition that voters in the United States have overwhelmingly rejected progressive liberal issues -- even though it seems to them that most Americans generally share their values. The result has been a feeling among liberal Democrats that they have a communication problem, rather than unpopular ideas. In essence what they have come to realize is, while their platform might be a good one -- for example, who wants more smog or a larger hole in the ozone? -- they have failed to sell it to the general public.
To make that sale, progressive activists are building on the work of linguistics professor George Lakoff, who forwarded the notion of expressing the message in terms of what the activists are fighting for, rather than what they oppose. Moreover, they are especially targeting a large group of Americans -- as much as one-third of the population -- whom one demographer has identified as "cultural creatives." The term refers to people who do not fit neatly into traditional categories such as activist, liberal or conservative, but who nonetheless are creating new mechanisms of social change to address issues they care about, such as the environment, peace and social justice. These cultural creatives do not identify themselves as members of a cohesive group, and many are not even aware that so many others like them exist. A subset of this group, the progressive activists, however, aims to create a cohesive movement around these people, and harness this group's potential to shape a new American agenda.
Putting it into Practice
To express their priorities in terms of what they support, progressive groups have begun to rally around a new set of ideas that can be proposed in a positive way. Among these are notions of fairness, justice and the relationship between health and the environment (which encompasses sustainable consumption). Each of these allows progressives to maintain their traditional views, but to talk in positive terms, rather than negative. And this strategy has gained the attention of big business and certain unions and politicians.
In practice, this emerging movement will bring a new set of arguments that emphasize what regulators, businesses and consumers know about new technologies and what they cannot know. Progressives increasingly are saying that moving forward with new technologies without knowing the impact of a product, phenomenon or process on human health or society is no longer acceptable. Thus, as the United States and Europe look for new energy systems to replace those that have brought the current slew of unintended consequences, what will emerge is not simply a push toward an ideal form of energy or toward reduced consumption, but the promotion of an ethic that will look to balance supply and demand while placing the onus on the developers of new technologies to find innovative solutions that do not result in long-term problems. It is the natural follow-on to the idealists' loss of control on climate change and nuclear power.
From a business perspective, bounties await the best innovators. Entering the world of sustainable consumption is fraught with danger for companies, however, because they bear the burden of proving that the product has no negative implications now or in the future.
If the sustainable consumption movement begins to attract public attention -- and thus begins to change how people view their relationship to products -- future debates on energy and other major industrial issues will focus increasingly on whether new technologies should move beyond "acceptable risk" as a standard of safety (as in the mercury light bulb example) to a no-risk standard. In that case, then, new technologies that foster conservation have a far better chance of succeeding than those that focus on making products more efficient.
The reality is that it is difficult to conceive of new energy-generating technologies that are free of environmental drawbacks. Solar panels use an array of toxic chemicals, while windmills alter landscapes and kill birds. On the other hand, the simple concept of using and disposing of less easily passes any filter sustainable consumption advocates put in place. Despite the all-encompassing nature of its ideas, then, the impact of the sustainable consumption movement is likely to be one-sided -- a continual press for conservation.

Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges
By Mitt Romney
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007

Summary: Washington is as divided on foreign policy as it has been at any point in the last 50 years. As the "greatest generation" did before us, we must move beyond political camps to unite around bold actions in order to build a strong America and a safer world. We must strengthen our military and economy, achieve energy independence, reenergize civilian and interagency capabilities, and revitalize our alliances.
Mitt Romney, Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

WASHINGTON DIVIDED

Less than six years after 9/11, Washington is as divided and conflicted over foreign policy as it has been at any point in the last 50 years. Senator Arthur Vandenberg once famously declared that "politics stops at the water's edge"; today, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee declares that our major political parties should carry out two separate foreign policies. The Senate unanimously confirmed General David Petraeus, who pledged to implement a new strategy, as the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Yet just weeks later, the Senate began crafting legislation specifically designed to stop that new strategy. More broadly, lines have been drawn between those labeled "realists" and those labeled "neoconservatives." Yet these terms mean little when even the most committed neoconservative recognizes that any successful policy must be grounded in reality and even the most hardened realist admits that much of the United States' power and influence stems from its values and ideals.

In the midst of these divisions, the American people -- and many others around the world -- have increasing doubts about the United States' direction and role in the world. Indeed, it seems that concern about Washington's divisiveness and capability to meet today's challenges is the one thing that unites us all. We need new thinking on foreign policy and an overarching strategy that can unite the United States and its allies -- not around a particular political camp or foreign policy school but around a shared understanding of how to meet a new generation of challenges.

A GENERATION'S LEGACY OF LEADERSHIP

Today's challenges are daunting. They include the conflict in Iraq, the resurgence of the Taliban, and global terrorist networks made even more menacing by the threat of nuclear proliferation. While Iran's leaders relentlessly pursue nuclear weapons capabilities and spout genocidal threats against Israel, the world largely stands silent, unable to agree on effective sanctions even as each day the danger grows. Genocide ravages Darfur even as the world stands frozen. In Latin America, leaders such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez seek to reverse the spread of freedom and return to failed authoritarian policies. AIDS and potential new pandemics threaten us in an interconnected world. The economic rise of China and other countries across Asia poses a different type of challenge. It is easy to understand why Americans -- and many others around the world -- feel so much unease and uncertainty. Yet although we face fundamentally different issues today, the United States has a history of rising to meet even greater challenges. Indeed, we need not look to ancient history, but only to the courage and determination of our parents and grandparents to see a stark contrast with the confusion and infighting of Washington today. Just over 60 years ago, we were in the midst of a global war that would take the lives of tens of millions. The outcome was far from certain. General Dwight Eisenhower drafted a short note before the D-day landings at Normandy accepting full responsibility "in case of failure."

The invasion did not fail. Yet no sooner had we defeated fascism than we were engaged in a 50-year struggle with communism. Those whom the journalist Tom Brokaw memorialized as "the greatest generation" made the tough choices that allowed us to prevail in these struggles. And it was not just our Washington leaders who were decisive. In the 1940s, Americans rationed and saved, and mothers and daughters enlisted to work in factories. Together with the GIs who returned home, they built this country's prosperity and fueled a sense of optimism. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, America pursued learning and innovation to lead the world in space, technology, and productivity -- outcompeting the Soviets and driving them to an economic bankruptcy that matched their moral bankruptcy.

In the aftermath of World War II and with the coming of the Cold War, members of "the greatest generation" united America and the free world around shared values and actions that changed history. They unified U.S. military and security efforts, creating the Department of Defense and the National Security Council. They rethought U.S. approaches to the world, building the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Peace Corps. They forged alliances, such as NATO, that magnified the power of freedom and created a world trading system that helped launch the greatest expansion of economic and political freedom and development in history. Our times call for equally bold leadership and for a renewed sense of service and shared sacrifice among Americans and our allies around the world.

A NEW GENERATION OF CHALLENGES

Today, the nation's attention is focused on Iraq. All Americans want U.S. troops to come home as soon as possible. But walking away now or dividing Iraq up into parts and walking away later would present grave risks to the United States and the world. Iran could seize the Shiite south, al Qaeda could dominate the Sunni west, and Kurdish nationalism could destabilize the border with Turkey. A regional conflict could ensue, perhaps even requiring the return of U.S. troops under far worse circumstances. There is no guarantee that the new strategy pursued by General Petraeus will ultimately succeed, but the stakes are too high and the potential fallout too great to deny our military leaders and troops on the ground the resources and the time needed to give it an opportunity to succeed.

Many still fail to comprehend the extent of the threat posed by radical Islam, specifically by those extremists who promote violent jihad against the United States and the universal values Americans espouse. Understandably, the nation tends to focus on Afghanistan and Iraq, where American men and women are dying. We think in terms of countries because countries were our enemies in the last century's great conflicts. The congressional debate in Washington has largely, and myopically, focused on whether troops should be redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan, as if these were isolated issues. Yet the jihad is much broader than any one nation, or even several nations. It is broader than the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Radical Islam has one goal: to replace all modern Islamic states with a worldwide caliphate while destroying the United States and converting all nonbelievers, forcibly if necessary, to Islam. This plan sounds irrational, and it is. But it is no more irrational than the policies pursued by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and Stalin's Soviet Union during the Cold War. And the threat is just as real.

In the current conflict, the balance of forces is not nearly as close as during the early days of World War II and at critical points during the Cold War. There is no comparison between the economic, diplomatic, technological, and military resources of the civilized world today and those of the terrorist organizations and states that threaten it. Perhaps most important is the incredible resourcefulness of the American people and their unmatched education, inventiveness, and dedication. But today's threats are fundamentally different from those we grew used to confronting during World War II and the Cold War. Our enemies now have sleeper cells rather than armies. They use indiscriminate terror rather than tanks. Their soldiers -- as well as their victims -- include children. They count radical clergy among their generals. They communicate via the Internet. They recruit in schools, houses of worship, and prisons. They pursue nuclear weapons not as a strategic deterrent but as an offensive tool of terror.

The jihadist threat is the defining challenge of our generation and is symptomatic of a range of new global realities. It is common to the point of cliché to talk about how much the world has changed since 9/11. Our president led a dramatic response to the events of that day and has taken action to protect the U.S. homeland. Yet if one looks at our tools of national power, what is surprising is not how much has changed since then but how little. While we wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. troop levels and our investment in the military as a percentage of GDP remain lower than at any time of major conflict since World War II. Decades after the oil shocks of the 1970s highlighted the United States' vulnerability, we remain dangerously dependent on foreign oil. Many of our instruments of national security were created not only before most Americans had access to the Internet and cell phones but also before they had televisions. Our difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with disturbing gaps in our intelligence, are well known. A growing number of experts question whether we have the capabilities to meet various transnational challenges, ranging from pandemic diseases to international terrorism. And while the United Nations has stood impotent in the face of genocide in Sudan and has been unable to address Iran's rush to build dangerous nuclear capabilities, we have done little more than tweak international alliances and antiquated institutions.

While the difficult struggle in Iraq dominates the political debate, we cannot let current polls and political dynamics drive us to repeat mistakes the United States has made at critical moments of doubt and uncertainty about our role in the world. Twice in the last several decades, following the end of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the United States became dangerously unprepared. Today, among our main challenges are an Iranian regime and an al Qaeda network that developed while we let down our defenses. Whether or not the current "surge" in troop levels in Iraq succeeds, the United States and our allies need to be prepared to deal not only with the struggle against jihadists but with a new generation of challenges that go far beyond any single nation or conflict.

We need an honest debate about what policies and what sacrifices will ensure a strong America and a safe world. As President Ronald Reagan once observed, "There have been four wars in my lifetime. None of them came about because the United States was too strong." A strong America requires a strong military and a strong economy. And we need to take further action if we are to remain strong and if we are to build a safe world, with peace, prosperity, freedom, and dignity. Doing so will be controversial, and it will be strongly resisted because it will require dramatic changes to Cold War institutions and approaches. The Cold War is over, and the world that too many of our current capabilities and alliances were created to address no longer exists. We cannot remain mired in the past.

Change is difficult in and of itself. And it is especially hard to summon the will necessary to set a new course in the absence of a clear and convincing crisis. Look at how long it took the U.S. government to confront the reality of jihadism. Extremists bombed our marines in Lebanon. They bombed our embassies in East Africa. They bombed the U.S.S. Cole. They even set off a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center before we truly saw the threat they posed.

Change will require sacrifice from the American people. But I believe America is ready for the challenge. To meet it, we need to focus on four key pillars of action.

BUILDING U.S. MILITARY AND ECONOMIC STRENGTH

First, we need to increase our investment in national defense. This means adding at least 100,000 troops and making a long-overdue investment in equipment, armament, weapons systems, and strategic defense. The need to support our troops is repeated like a mantra in Washington. Yet little has been said about the commitment of resources needed to make this more than an empty phrase.

After President George H. W. Bush left office, in 1993, the Clinton administration began to dismantle the military, taking advantage of what has been called a "peace dividend" from the end of the Cold War. It took a dividend, but we did not get the peace. It seems that our leaders had come to believe that war and security threats were gone forever; as Charles Krauthammer observed, we took a holiday from history. Meanwhile, we lost about 500,000 military personnel and about $50 billion a year in military spending. The U.S. Army lost four active divisions and two reserve divisions. The U.S. Navy lost almost 80 ships. The U.S. Air Force saw its active personnel decrease by 30 percent. The Marines' personnel dropped by 22,000.

And we purchased only a small fraction of the equipment needed to maintain our strength, living off the assets that had been purchased in prior decades. The equipment and armament gap continues to this day. Even as we have increased defense spending to meet the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, our budgets for procurement and modernization have lagged behind. This is a troubling scenario for the future, and it puts our country and our troops -- present and future -- at risk, as we wring the life out of old and inadequate equipment.

The Bush administration has proposed an increase in defense spending for next year. This is an important first step, but we are going to need at least an additional $30-$40 billion annually over the next several years to modernize our military, fill gaps in troop levels, ease the strain on our National Guard and Reserves, and support our wounded soldiers. Looking at military spending over time as a percentage of GDP provides an interesting perspective. During World War II, the United States made huge sacrifices, investing more than a third of its economic activity to fight the war. As we confronted different enemies, such as those in Korea, our investment in defense responded accordingly. Since then, slowly but surely, it has decreased significantly. Through the buildup under President Reagan, it reached six percent of GDP in 1986 and helped turn the tide against the Soviet Union. Yet during the Clinton years, defense spending was dangerously reduced. More recently, although spending has increased, less than four percent of our GDP has been devoted to baseline defense spending. These ebbs and flows stemming from political dynamics have increased the costs and the uncertainty of our military preparedness.

The next president should commit to spending a minimum of four percent of GDP on national defense. Increased spending should not mean increased waste, however. A team of private-sector leaders and defense experts should carry out a stem-to-stern analysis of military purchasing. Accounts need to be thoroughly scrutinized to eliminate excessive contractor and supplier charges and prevent deals for equipment and programs that do more for politicians' popularity in their home districts than for the nation's protection. Congress needs to set stricter lobbying rules and keep a far more watchful eye on self-serving politicians, current and past, in regard to these matters.

The United States' strength goes beyond its military capacity. Indeed, a nation cannot remain a military superpower if it has a second-tier economy. The weakness of the Soviet economy was a vulnerability that President Reagan exploited. Our ability to influence the world also vitally depends on our ability to maintain our economic lead through policies such as smaller government, lower taxes, better schools and health care, greater investment in technology, and the promotion of free trade, while maintaining the strength of America's families, values, and moral leadership.

ENERGY INDEPENDENCE

Second, the United States must become energy independent. This does not mean no longer importing or using oil. It means making sure that our nation's future will always be in our hands. Our decisions and destiny cannot be bound to the whims of oil-producing states.

We use about 25 percent of the world's oil supply to power our economy, but according to the Department of Energy, we possess only 1.7 percent of the world's crude oil reserves. Our military and economic strength depend on our becoming energy independent -- moving past symbolic measures to actually produce as much energy as we use. This could take 20 years or more; and, of course, we would continue to purchase fuel after that time. Yet we would end our strategic vulnerability to oil shutoffs by nations such as Iran, Russia, and Venezuela and stop sending almost $1 billion a day to other oil-producing nations, some of which use the money against us. At the same time, we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse gas emissions.

Energy independence will require technology that allows us to use energy more efficiently in our cars, homes, and businesses. It will also mean increasing our domestic energy production with more drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, more nuclear power, more renewable energy sources, more ethanol, more biodiesel, more solar and wind power, and a fuller exploitation of coal. Shared investments or incentives may be required to develop additional and alternative sources of energy.

We need to initiate a bold, far-reaching research initiative -- an energy revolution -- that will be our generation's equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the mission to the moon. It will be a mission to create new, economical sources of clean energy and clean ways to use the sources we have now. We will license our technology to other nations, and, of course, we will employ it at home. It will be good for our national defense, it will be good for our foreign policy, and it will be good for our economy. Moreover, even as scientists still debate how much human activity impacts the environment, we can all agree that alternative energy sources will be good for the planet. For any and all of these reasons, the time for energy independence has come.

RETHINKING AND REENERGIZING CIVILIAN CAPABILITIES

Third, we need to dramatically and fundamentally transform our civilian capabilities to promote peace, security, and freedom around the world. After World War II, America created capabilities and structures -- such as the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Agency for International Development -- to meet the challenges of a world that was radically different from that of the 1930s. In the Reagan era, the Goldwater-Nichols Act helped tear down bureaucratic boundaries that were undermining our military effectiveness, fostered unified efforts across military services, and established "joint commands," with an individual commander fully responsible for everything going on within his or her geographic region. We need the same level of dramatic rethinking and reform that took place at these critical junctures.

Today, there is no such unity among our international nonmilitary resources. There is no clear leadership and no clear line of authority. Too often, we struggle to integrate our nonmilitary instruments into coherent, timely, and effective operations. For instance, even as we face the need to strengthen the democratic underpinnings of a country such as Lebanon, our resources in education, health, banking, energy, commerce, law enforcement, and diplomacy are spread across separate bureaucracies and are under separate leadership. As a result, we have had to look on as Hezbollah has brought health care and schools to areas of Lebanon. And guess who the people followed when the conflict between Israel and Lebanon broke out last summer? Likewise, the popularity of Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank should be no surprise given that the group has provided Palestinians with the basic services that neither the international community nor the Palestinian government could deliver.

The problem has been just as evident in Iraq. In 2003, while the U.S. military moved in rapid order to topple Saddam Hussein, many of our nonmilitary resources seemed stuck in tar. Then, even as we were taking casualties and spending over $7 billion a month on the war, U.S. civilian authorities were fighting over which agency was going to pay their employees' $11 daily food allowance. In response to these problems, the White House has sought to give to a single individual the authority to oversee all the agencies operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet broad interagency challenges remain and continue to stymie our efforts not only in these areas but around the world.

It is time to move beyond the current limited approaches that call for "transformation" and truly transform our interagency and civilian capabilities. We need to fundamentally change the cultures of our civilian agencies and create dynamic, flexible, and task-based approaches that focus on results rather than bureaucracy. We need joint strategies and joint operations that go beyond the Goldwater-Nichols Act to mobilize all areas of our national power. Just as the military has divided the world into regional theaters for all of its branches, the work of our civilian agencies should be organized along common geographic boundaries. For every region, one civilian leader should have authority over and responsibility for all the relevant agencies and departments, similar to the single military commander who heads U.S. Central Command. These new leaders should be heavy hitters, with names that are recognized around the world. They should have independent objectives, budgets, and oversight. Their performance should be evaluated according to their success in promoting America's political, military, diplomatic, and economic interests in their respective regions and building the foundations of freedom, democracy, security, and peace.

REVITALIZING AND STRENGTHENING ALLIANCES

Finally, we need to strengthen old partnerships and alliances and inaugurate new ones to meet twenty-first-century challenges. The inaction, if not the breakdown, of many Cold War institutions has made many Americans skeptical of multilateralism. Nothing shows the failures of the current system more clearly than the UN Human Rights Council, an entity that has condemned the democratic government of Israel nine times while remaining virtually silent on the serial human rights abuses of the governments of Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, and Sudan. In the face of such hypocrisy, it is understandable that some Americans would be tempted to favor unilateralism. But such failures should not obscure the fact that the United States' strength is amplified when it is combined with the strength of other nations. Whether diplomatically, militarily, or economically, the United States is stronger when its friends stand alongside it.

In the changing world we face, our alliances and engagement must change, too. Clearly, the United Nations has not been able to fulfill its founding purpose of providing collective security against aggression and genocide. Thus, we need to continue to push for reform of the organization. Yet where institutions are fundamentally incapable of meeting a new generation of challenges, the United States does not have to go it alone. Instead, we must examine where existing alliances can be strengthened and reinvigorated and where new alliances need to be forged. I agree with former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar that we should build on the NATO alliance to defeat radical Islam. We need to work with our allies to pursue Aznar's call for greater coordination in military, homeland security, and nonproliferation efforts.

The challenges we now face -- especially terrorism, genocide, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction -- require global networks of intelligence and law enforcement. We should also look for new ways to strengthen regional cooperation and security partnerships with responsible actors in order to confront challenges such as the genocide in Darfur. And if the UN Human Rights Council continues to be inactive or behave hypocritically, we should unite with nations that share our commitment to defending human rights in order to promote change.

In no area is our leadership more important and more urgently needed than the Islamic world. Today, the Middle East is facing a demographic crisis: over half the population there is under 22 years old, and the GDP of all Arab nations put together remains lower than that of Spain. A growing population and a lack of jobs create fertile ground for radical Islam. The Marshall Plan showed our deep understanding that winning the Cold War would depend on far more than the strength of our military. The situation we face today is dramatically different from the one we faced in the wake of World War II. Yet it requires the same type of political attention and resolve we exhibited then. Today, thousands of Americans, such as former Senator Bill Frist, are helping to alleviate problems in the vulnerable parts of Africa and the Middle East, showing that we are a compassionate people. And other leaders in this effort, such as the musician Bono, have highlighted the need to address problems far from one's borders in today's interconnected world. Recent government efforts such as the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative of the G-8, and the Forum for the Future are a start, but they have garnered nowhere near the degree of attention, resources, and commitment necessary to address such serious problems.

If elected, one of my first acts as president would be to call for a summit of nations to address these issues. In addition to the United States, the countries convened would include other leading developed nations and moderate Muslim states. The objective of the summit would be to create a worldwide strategy to support moderate Muslims in their effort to defeat radical and violent Islam. I envision that the summit would lead to the creation of a Partnership for Prosperity and Progress: a coalition of states that would assemble resources from developed nations and use them to support public schools (not Wahhabi madrasahs), microcredit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic health care, and free-market policies in modernizing Islamic states. These resources would be drawn from public and private institutions and from volunteers and nongovernmental organizations.

A critical part of this effort would involve creating new trade and economic opportunities for the Middle East that could be powerful forces, not only economically, but also in breaking down barriers to cooperation on even the most intractable problems. Muslim countries pursuing free-trade agreements with the United States, for example, have dismantled all aspects of the Arab League's boycott of Israel. The power of trade to break down barriers and build ties is also seen in the Qualified Industrial Zone program that grants U.S. free-trade benefits to Egyptian products that incorporate materials from Israel. When the program was first suggested, some Egyptian officials balked, saying that trade with Israel would spark protests. When the program was launched, there were indeed protests -- from Egyptians who were excluded from the program and wanted to participate.

Congress must give the president the authority to move forward with these efforts so that we can expand and integrate our existing free-trade agreements in the region. A critical part of the economic resurgence and peace of postwar Europe was the United States' support for a unified market and U.S. engagement in cross-country ties. Today, we must push for more integration and cross-border cooperation in the Middle East. As a group of experts working on the Princeton Project on National Security noted recently, "The history of Europe since 1945 tells us that institutions can play a constructive role in building a framework for cooperation, channeling nationalist sentiments in a positive direction, and fostering economic development and liberalization. Yet the Middle East is one of the least institutionalized regions in the world."

Few would have thought before 1945 that the war-torn and divided nations of Europe could achieve the stability and economic growth that these states know today. Some have called for developing in the Middle East a regional organization based on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would build cooperation and encourage political, economic, and security reforms and integration. How these efforts would be institutionalized is a question that we must address in partnership with our friends in the region and key allies. Yet we cannot wait to address this problem.

Merely closing our eyes and hoping that jihadism will go away is not an acceptable solution. U.S. military action alone cannot change the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims. In the end, only Muslims themselves can defeat the violent radicals. But we must work with them. The consequences of ignoring this challenge -- such as a radicalized Islamic actor possessing nuclear weapons -- are simply unacceptable.

MOVING FORWARD

The new generation of challenges we face may seem daunting. Yet confronting challenges has always made the United States stronger. The confusion and pessimism that prevail in Washington today in no way reflect the United States' legacy or underlying strengths. I believe our current generation can match the courage, dedication, and vision of "the greatest generation." I recently had the privilege of spending some time with Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of Israel. Someone asked him about the conflict in Iraq, and he said, "You need to put this in context. America is unique in the history of the world. During this last century, there was only one nation that laid down hundreds of thousands of lives of its own sons and daughters and asked for nothing for itself." He explained that in the history of the world, whenever there has been a war, winning nations have taken the land of losing ones. "America is unique," he added. "You took no land from the Germans, no land from the Japanese. All you asked for was enough land to bury your dead."

We are a unique nation, and there is no substitute for our leadership. The difficulties we face in Iraq should neither cause us to lose faith in the United States' strength and role in the world nor blind us to the new challenges we face. Our future and that of generations to come depend on our resolve to move beyond the divisiveness in Washington today and unite America and our allies to confront a new generation of global challenges.



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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.comfort31may31,0,4272801.story
From the Baltimore Sun

Hospital ship preps for a novel mission

'Comfort' will travel to Latin America on humanitarian visit

By Robert Little
Sun Reporter

May 31, 2007

The hospital ship USNS Comfort leaves its Baltimore home today without the usual war or natural disaster on its itinerary, but preparing nonetheless for one of the busiest and most complicated missions of its 20-year service in the U.S. Navy.

Instead of rushing to a crisis, as it did in New Orleans and the Persian Gulf on recent deployments, the ship is beginning a carefully choreographed 120-day tour of Central and South America that will take it to 12 countries with varying medical and humanitarian needs.

First announced by President Bush during a visit to Latin America in March, the mission is as much about diplomacy as medicine and has caused the ship and the Navy to recast the vessel's fundamental function.

Whereas past deployments called for crewing and equipping the Comfort as a floating emergency room for treating war casualties or disaster victims, the ship's commanders have essentially scrapped the old rulebook and outfitted the vessel as a delivery vehicle for routine medical services on land, from vaccinations and eyeglass distribution to dental checkups and minor surgeries.

Rather than tying up to a pier and waiting for patients to come to it, the Comfort plans to establish medical treatment centers on shore, sometimes floating or flying them inland while the ship stays anchored off the coast. Few of the operations have been rehearsed by the Comfort's 800 crew members, most of whom have never worked together before and won't board the ship until it reaches Norfolk, Va., this weekend.

"I think I'm working harder for this deployment than I did when I was operations officer for an aircraft carrier battle group," said U.S. Navy Capt. Robert E. Kapcio, who is leading the ship's deployment. "Really, it's just a huge, huge undertaking."

Kapcio has been designated as the mission's commodore - another new concept, added to give the ship an additional layer of administrative support to deal with all the foreign governments, local humanitarian organizations and volunteers involved. The ship plans to visit each country for about a week, establishing two medical treatment centers at each port.

Planners from the Navy and the State Department have been meeting at each of the host nations to determine where the ship might stop and what services it can offer, sometimes in cooperation with non-government organizations with permanent operations there.

Many of the details are still coming together as the vessel prepares to leave Norfolk for Belize June 15, and the ship will divert from its planned schedule if a hurricane or other emergency develops in the region before October, when the ship is expected back in its Baltimore home port.

The lack of a singular mission is just one of the mission's unique qualities. Others are apparent on every deck of the ship, where crew members were at work yesterday preparing for patients and challenges they have rarely encountered.

"If we're at war, we're going to treat burns, gunshot wounds and blast injuries. If we're going to Katrina, we're treating things like broken bones," said Lt. Cmdr. Tracey Kunkel, a nurse who runs the ship's surgical spaces. "Now I'm planning for cataract surgeries, cleft lip and palate surgeries, thyroid surgery - things you'd almost never do in an emergency. It's much different."

Kunkel has also outfitted her operating rooms with supplies for treating children, a reality of humanitarian medicine that has created challenges in nearly every department of the ship. In a recovery room, new baby warmers wrapped in plastic are awaiting assembly.

In the main emergency room, one entrance has been converted into an isolation room for patients with tuberculosis or other infectious diseases. Technicians in the repair shop are inspecting and packing portable dental units, with drills, suction machines, cordless X-ray and folding chairs.

On the deck, a new helicopter shelter and two 33-foot launch boats will allow the Comfort to send doctors and medical supplies to patients on land. A stowage area has been converted into a command center for the commodore and his staff.

The mission is modeled after a tour the Comfort's sister ship, the USNS Mercy, took last year in the Pacific, visiting the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and East Timor. The ship's crew and agencies working with it treated more than 60,000 patients during the trip. The Comfort expects to treat 85,000 patients.

Calling at 12 ports is also unusual for the Comfort and poses challenges and risks for the civilian captain and crew who navigate and operate the ship. At the vessel's first stop in Belize, for instance, the 900-foot ship must navigate a circuitous, coral-lined channel. In Guyana and Suriname, where the coastline is very shallow, the ship will anchor 16 miles off the coast; people and supplies will be ferried ashore. The ship will transit the Panama Canal twice during its tour and has scheduled stops for recreation and resupply.

Designed to support combat troops, the Comfort has seen limited wartime service because of the advanced medical centers the U.S. Army and the Marines have built on land in Iraq. The vessel deployed to New York after the 2001 terrorist attacks and to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but it arrived after the worst of the crises had passed and never needed its full medical capability, causing some to question its utility.

"People were saying, 'Why do they need the hospital ships? What purpose do they serve?'" said Navy Capt. Bruce R. Boynton, commander of the ship's 1,000-bed medical facility. "But what we've seen is they can be a very, very powerful platform for projecting America's goodwill."

"Obviously we're going to have an immediate effect on some people's lives, but I think the real impact will be measured after we leave, in six months to a year from now," Kapcio said. "Hopefully we'll be able to show that we're committed to the region and committed to lasting relationships in the region."

robert.little@baltsun.com
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