June 10, 2007
Sarkozy’s Party on the Way to a Big Victory

By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS, June 10 — President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right camp was on course to win a landslide victory in Parliament today after the first round of France’s legislative elections, cementing his power to implement reforms in Europe’s third-largest economy.

The Union for a Popular Movement obtained 41.3 percent of the vote, according to preliminary estimates by the CSA polling institute, a score that is expected to give the party between 360 and 470 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly after the second round of voting June 17, three pollsters said.

The main opposition camp, the Socialist Party, received an estimated 27.2 percent, putting it on course for 60 to 170 seats, pollsters said, reinforcing the sense of disarray that has reigned on the left ever since Ségolène Royal lost to Mr. Sarkozy in last month’s presidential race.

Mr. Sarkozy’s party, which has set itself the unofficial goal of winning 400 seats, has been widely expected to obtain a comfortable majority, but the preliminary results today exceeded even optimistic forecasts.

It is the first time since 1978 that an outgoing parliamentary majority has been re-elected, a result favored by a recent change to synchronize the presidential and parliamentary terms. But with the Gaullist camp set to expand its dominance in Parliament from the current 359 seats, commentators said the result was also a sign that French voters trusted Mr. Sarkozy to jolt their country out of a collective sense of decline.

Minutes after the first exit polls, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, head of Mr. Sarkozy’s Popular Movement, hailed the result as a strong endorsement of the president and his platform.

“It is a success,” Mr. Raffarin said in an election broadcast on the TF1 network. “The drive Nicolas Sarkozy gave to French politics was confirmed by the French people. They have confirmed their choice en masse.”

Mr. Sarkozy has been eager to maximize his mandate, reminding voters repeatedly in recent weeks of his intention to implement an ambitious agenda of change. Eleven ministers of his 15 are running in the election, including Prime Minister François Fillon, in a bid to maximize their legitimacy. None of them will actually take up their seats, but if any of them were to lose, they would be asked to leave the government. Tonight only one of them, the minister of sustainable development, Alain Juppé, faced a risk of defeat. If the presidential campaign was a roller coaster of suspense and passion that culminated in a turnout of 84 percent on May 6, the parliamentary election has failed to spark nearly as much interest among voters. Only 60.4 percent turned out to cast their ballots, according to an early estimate by CSA. That would be a record low under France’s fifth Republic and an illustration that this election has come to be seen as a mere vote of confirmation or, as newspapers here described it, the “third round” of the presidential election.

A victory of the Gaullist movement has been so widely predicted that the opposition has merely urged voters not to hand the new head of state too large a majority.

The Socialists sought to put on a brave face tonight.

“There is a second round in which the results can be improved,” said Laurent Fabius, a senior member of the party.

If the Socialist Party suffered in the first round of the legislative ballot, smaller parties received an even harder blow. A new centrist party, led by François Bayrou, who finished third in the presidential election, came nowhere close to the nearly 19 percent its leader received last month, getting only an estimated 7.4 percent of the national vote. The centrists, like their Green counterparts, have little hope of winning the 20 seats necessary to constitute a parliamentary group and get access to the financing that comes with that status. The Communist Party risks losing its parliamentary group, while the far-right Front National, who have no lawmakers in the outgoing assembly, are not expected to win any this time either.

A majority in Parliament makes Mr. Sarkozy the most powerful leader in Europe and one of the most powerful presidents in France’s recent history.

Elected for five years, the French head of state is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has the right to dissolve the National Assembly.

To be sure, a parliamentary majority is no guarantee for swift change.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who 10 years ago won a landslide on a platform of pragmatism and personal drive not unlike that of Mr. Sarkozy, shied away from overhauling Britain’s health and education systems in his first term. In former President Jacques Chirac’s second term, the center-right controlled nearly two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly. But the government was deeply unpopular and unable to break a sense of stagnation permeating the country’s elite, particularly after the French rejected one of Mr. Chirac’s pet projects, a European constitution, in May 2005. Last year, lawmakers swiftly abrogated legislation creating a more flexible work contract for young people after two months of street protests.

In his first four weeks in office, Mr. Sarkozy has signaled that he is determined to use his powers to implement his election promises and, unlike his predecessors, get personally involved in the process.

“I want to be a president who governs,” he vowed after his election.

Two bills — one proposing a number of tax cuts and the other tightening sentencing rules for repeat offenders — are ready to be submitted to the newly elected assembly in an extraordinary session over the summer.

If these measures are the most popular in Mr. Sarkozy’s reform package, a more revolutionary catalogue of measures, all at one point tried and abandoned by previous administrations under pressure from labor unions, are to follow. Over the next year, the new president plans to make it easier to hire and fire; allow universities to select students and charge fees; and overhaul generous public sector pensions.

According to commentators, the larger the parliamentary majority, the slimmer the legitimacy for unions to paralyze the country with strikes and demonstrations.

“Strong parliamentary backing is a decisive factor in transforming the country,” an editorial in the right-leaning Figaro said in its weekend edition. “Given what awaits him, Sarkozy will need it.”

Home
Connecting dots in a complex world
editorials and opinion
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
Scripps Howard News Service
Friday, June 08, 2007

As someone who's written books on American grand strategy post-9/11, a lot of young people send me e-mails asking which educational experiences will prepare them best for this tumultuous world. I tell them: Study any and every foreign language you can.

There are two types of people in the world: those who believe there are two types of people in the world and those who don't. I fall into the first camp.

I believe the world is divided between vertical thinkers, or those who specialize deeply in certain skills and subject matters, and horizontal thinkers, or those whose essential skill lies in connecting the dots across various subjects and synthesizing new combinations.

You might call the latter group "generalists," but that term underestimates the essential talent involved in such intellectual arbitrage -- the ability to translate between disparate tribes and their distinct languages. Subtract that bridging capacity and globalization truly becomes as disintegrating as critics fear, but expand it and we leverage the specialized skills necessary to manage rising complexity.

Our invasion of Iraq offers a case in point. There's no question the U.S. government possesses all the necessary skill sets for state-building; the trick comes in actually getting all these disparate agencies to work together synergistically. Inside the Pentagon, the military spent years getting the four services to operate with one another seamlessly -- the doctrine of "jointness." That's why we win wars so effectively.

But getting Defense to cooperate with State to cooperate with Commerce to .... That far more complex collaboration, known as the "interagency" process, remains dysfunctional. That's why we've lost the peace in Iraq -- too much vertical thinking pursued in isolation, with balkanized operations resulting in outcomes that often negate one another. It's the connections between economics and security, for example, that we understand least, not how to encourage job creation or kill bad guys.

America is not short on expertise. Frankly, it needs more people who are experts at talking to experts -- both government and private sector -- and translating between them.

You might say it all comes down to management, but that only points up another problem. Managers tend to be vertical thinkers who've simply risen to the top. On average, their translation skills are no better than the personnel they lead. Indeed, their dated knowledge often makes them worse.

The vast bulk of what I do as a grand strategist involves translating thinking from one subject domain into another. There really is nothing new under the sun; it's just that the combinations are endless. I took a lot of economics and history and political-science across a decade of college, and although my Ph.D. reads "government," my doctorate's really in how to recognize good ideas and reconceptualize and/or combine them in new ways.

Studying foreign languages obviously makes you smarter about foreign cultures, but, quite frankly, that's the least important reason for learning other tongues if you want to become a truly horizontal thinker.

What studying languages teaches you is how to master new vocabularies and the logic that underlies them. In a world with specialized lexicons for almost every profession, that's a huge skill.

Studying languages immerses you in the thought processes of others, giving you different lenses for viewing the world. It puts you in the other guy's shoes, which is crucial for out-of-the-box thinking.

Language study also boosts your skills at mimicry, which is more important than you think. If you really want to connect with skilled experts, you have to get inside their comfort zone, and one of the best ways to do that is to play the part. Languages teach you that, because to speak Russian, for example, you've got to act a bit Russian.

Finally, nothing helps you understand your own native tongue better than studying others. It'll vastly improve your speaking and writing and even your reading skills.

I've studied four foreign languages and, quite frankly, I don't speak any of them well today. But I consider the years I put in on each to have been incredibly worthwhile, generating much of the intellectual muscle that animates my work as a writer, speaker, strategist and executive.

Simply put, if you want to connect the dots across this increasingly balkanized world, you've got to be able to learn new languages on a continuous basis.

(Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom(at)thomaspmbarnett.com.)

May 23: 2954
May 27: 3000
May 30: 3018
June 3: 3071
June 4, 3085
June 5, 3102
June 6, 3120 ll:59 p.m.
June 7 3130
June 8: 3147 / 7p
June 9 3165 .... 9:30p

June 10, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel Discovers Oil

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BEERSHEBA, Israel

Lucien Bronicki is one of Israel’s foremost experts in geothermal power, but when I ran into him last week at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s Negev Desert, all he wanted to talk about was oil wells. Israel, he told me, had discovered oil.

Pointing to a room full of young Israeli high-tech college seniors, Mr. Bronicki remarked: “These are our oil wells.”

It was quite a scene. Once a year Ben Gurion students in biomedical engineering, software, electrical engineering and computing create elaborate displays of their senior projects or — as in the case of a student-made robot that sidled up to me — demonstrate devices they’ve invented.

On this occasion, Yossi Vardi, the godfather of Israeli venture capitalism — ever since he backed the four young Israelis who invented the first Internetwide instant messaging system, Mirabilis, which was sold to AOL for $400 million in 1998 — brought some of his venture capital pals, like Mr. Bronicki, down to Ben Gurion to scout out potential start-ups and to mentor the grads.

The first student exhibit I visited was by Yuval Sharoni, 26, an electrical engineering senior, whose project was titled an “Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images” (which has to do with military targeting). When I told him I was from The Times, he declared: “This project is going to make the front page, I’m telling you.” The cover of Popular Mechanics, maybe, but it could one day make the Nasdaq, where Israel now has the most companies listed of any nation outside of the United States.

“Today, every Israeli Jewish mother wants her son to be a dropout and go create a start-up,” said Mr. Vardi, who is currently invested in 38 different ones.

Which gets to the point of this column: If you want to know why Israel’s stock market and car sales are at record highs — while Israel’s government is paralyzed by scandals and war with Hamas and doesn’t even have a finance minister — it’s because of this ecosystem of young innovators and venture capitalists. Last year, VCs poured about $1.4 billion into Israeli start-ups, which puts Israel in a league with India and China.

Israel is Exhibit A of an economic phenomenon I see a lot these days. Of course, competition between countries and between companies still matters. But when the world becomes this flat — with so many distributed tools of innovation and connectivity empowering individuals from anywhere to compete, connect and collaborate — the most important competition is between you and your own imagination, because energetic, innovative and connected individuals can now act on their imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.

Those countries and companies that empower their individuals to imagine and act quickly on their imagination are going to thrive. So while there are reasons to be pessimistic about Israel these days, there is one huge reason for optimism: this country has a culture that nurtures and rewards individual imagination — one with no respect for limits or hierarchies, or fear of failure. It’s a perfect fit with this era of globalization.

“We are not investing in products or business plans today, but in people who have the ability to imagine and connect dots,” said Nimrod Kozlovski, a top Israeli expert on Internet law who also works with start-ups. Israel is not good at building big companies, he explained, but it is very good at producing people who say, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could do this ...,” then create a start-up to do it — which is later bought out and expanded by an Intel, Microsoft or Google.

“The motto here is not work hard but dream hard,” Mr. Kozlovski added. “I had some guy come see me the other day and say, ‘You know Google? They make a lot of money, very famous, right? They’re not that good. We have a much better system that correlates to the cognitive process of searching. Google is worth $50 billion? Probably we can match their numbers.’ He was dead serious.”

My guess is that the flatter the world becomes, the wider the economic gap we will see between those countries that empower individual imagination and those that don’t. High oil prices can temporarily disguise that gap, but it’s growing.

Iran’s ignorant president, who keeps babbling about how Israel is going to disappear, ought to pay a visit to Ben Gurion and see these rooms buzzing with student innovators, with projects called “Integration Points for IP Multimedia Subsystems” and “Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance.” These are oil wells that don’t run dry.

June 10, 2007
Chinese Leave Guantánamo for Albanian Limbo

By TIM GOLDEN
TIRANA, Albania — Ahktar Qassim Basit says he is not angry about the four years he spent as an American prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before his captors mumbled a brief apology and flew him to this drab Balkan capital to begin a new life as a refugee.

It is this new life in Albania, Mr. Basit and other former Guantánamo detainees say, that is driving them to desperation.

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

“We suffered very much at Guantánamo, but we continue to suffer here,” Mr. Basit said. “The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: we have no place to go.”

Mr. Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China’s Communist government. Only Albania’s pro-American government would give them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States. Instead, American diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that Chinese officials have warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

“The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world,” the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, “has not been for lack of trying.”

Many American officials privately describe the Uighurs’ plight as one of the more troubling episodes of the Bush administration’s detention program. The case also provides a view of the remarkable difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantánamo in response to domestic and international criticism.

The refugees in Tirana seem to have little sense of how to influence the global chess game in which they have become involved. They spend most of their days behind the refugee center’s high, cinderblock walls, reading the Koran, studying Albanian and waiting for a turn on the center’s lone desktop computer. They avoid the gravelly soccer field because it reminds them of one they looked out on at Guantánamo.

With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania on Sunday, the Uighurs and three other former Guantánamo detainees here are also asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs and other support they have been told to expect.

One morning in mid-May, the five Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) got permission to leave the refugee center, rode buses downtown and trooped to the offices of the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha. An aide said Mr. Berisha was too busy to see them, but promised to pass along their entreaties.

“We said, if you can’t deliver what you have promised, please ask George W. Bush to find another country for us,” another of the former prisoners, Abu Bakker Qassim, recalled.

Officials of the Albanian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the refugees, declined to comment on their treatment.

The 22 Uighurs who ended up at Guantánamo were part of a group of about three dozen Uighur men who were staying at a hamlet in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, not far from Tora Bora, when United States forces began bombing the area in October 2001.

Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

The youngest, Ayoub Haji Mamet, who was 18 when he was captured, had a quixotic plan to make his way across Europe and then fly to the United States to attend school.

International human rights groups have long accused the Chinese authorities of oppressing the roughly nine million Uighurs in Xinjiang, where there have been occasional acts of separatist violence. The State Department’s own 2006 human rights report for China describes ethnic discrimination, the suppression of Muslim religious freedom and the persecution of those thought to be separatists, many of whom have been executed.

Pentagon officials have described the Uighur hamlet in Afghanistan as a separatist training camp that was at least loosely aligned with the Taliban. Lawyers for the men dispute that characterization. But in interviews, the Uighurs in Albania described a tiny, primitive outpost run by secretive members of some sort of Uighur liberation group.

The men who arrived there were given chores to do and beans to eat. Most of them were assigned aliases and shown how to fire an old AK-47 assault rifle, the only weapon they saw. One American intelligence official said that some of the Uighurs still at Guantánamo received more extensive training. The leader of the hamlet, a man called Abdul Musin, told visitors that they could stay on if they wanted to “liberate” other Uighurs, the men said, but that they were also free to go.

“We do not know if he belonged to any group,” said Mr. Qassim, 38, the oldest of the five detainees. “We were not allowed to ask any questions.”

In mid-October of 2001, American planes bombed the Uighur hamlet, killing at least one man and sending the rest fleeing over the mountains into Pakistan. Villagers there sheltered and fed the Uighurs but then betrayed them to local security forces, which turned them over to the United States military.

By June 2002, nearly all the Uighurs had been sent from military detention centers in Afghanistan to Guantánamo. They described their imprisonment as bewildering and traumatic, punctuated by moments of the absurd. After they were cleared for release, they were able to watch cartoons and Harry Potter movies, until Mr. Mamet smashed the television because of what he said was the guards’ refusal to take him to a doctor. The set was replaced with one made in China, the men said dismissively; it broke after a week.

Several of the Uighurs said their most traumatic experience at Guantánamo was their interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials in September 2002. The Chinese “had all of our files from the Americans,” Mr. Qassim said, threatened them repeatedly and insisted that the prisoners return with them to China. They refused.

But American intelligence personnel at Guantánamo soon began to doubt that most of the Uighurs represented a real terrorist threat, officials who served there said. By late 2003, senior national security officials in Washington cleared most of the Uighurs for release — 14, by one official’s count.

Some officials at the Pentagon advocated sending the Uighurs back to China, and the State Department eventually sought and received assurances from the Chinese that they would treat the men humanely. But senior officials finally decided not to repatriate them, citing China’s past treatment of the Uighur minority.

The State Department began approaching both Muslim countries like Turkey and those with small Uighur communities, like Germany and Sweden. However, the search was interrupted in September 2004, when the Pentagon set up panels at Guantánamo to decide whether the prisoners there, including the 22 Uighurs, were being rightfully held. Although most of the Uighurs had already been cleared for release, the review panels found that all but six were in fact enemy combatants.

The boards were told to review the Uighur cases again, officials said. This time, they found that only five could be freed. (Subsequent annual reviews have cleared 15 of the 17 remaining detainees.)

The State Department then began casting its net more widely. One prospect was the west African republic of Gabon, which has a small Muslim minority. Gabon’s long-ruling president, Omar Bongo, said he was open to accepting the Uighurs. But according to two officials, he wanted not only compensation for resettling the refugees, but support for international loans to his government and a meeting with President Bush at the White House. He had already had one such meeting just months earlier, on May 26, 2004.

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said her government would not discuss its specific diplomatic efforts regarding the Uighurs. But in a statement, the embassy described the Uighurs at Guantánamo as “suspects of the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorist forces which constitute part of international terrorist forces,” and it said they should face justice in China.

Beijing’s ambassador to Albania has met at least three times with Mr. Berisha, the prime minister, to demand the Uighurs’ repatriation, Albanian officials said. Albania has since told Washington it cannot accept any more of the Uighur detainees.

“But we helped as much as we could,” the Albanian foreign minister, Lulzim Basha, said in an interview.

American officials said China has also been active in Germany, which has heard appeals about the Uighurs from high-level White House and State Department officials, as well as international human rights groups.

“One of the problems we’ve encountered is that they say, why doesn’t the U.S. take some of these people?” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who has lobbied European governments to accept some of the Uighurs and other Guantánamo detainees.

American officials said they considered that idea. But two officials said it was shot down in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that the men would be barred from entering the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act because they had been linked to a terrorist group or received “military-type training” from a group that engaged in terrorism.

Although American officials said they had compensated the Albanian government generously for taking the refugee, American diplomats in Tirana have paid little attention to the fate of the five Uighurs and the three other former Guantánamo detainees here, an Egyptian, an Algerian and an Uzbek.

“We’ve never talked to them,” said an American official who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter. “We don’t monitor them. They’re not our citizens, and there is no reason for us to.”

The official attributed the shortcomings of the Albanian resettlement effort to “routine bureaucratic problems.”

The Tirana representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has helped to organize and finance the refugee program in Albania, sounded more frustrated with the slow pace of resettlement.

“The government of Albania agreed to provide asylum to these people,” the official, Hossein Kheradmand, said. “We are not talking about 5,000 or 6,000 people; we are talking about eight people.”

The detainees have tried to fend for themselves. Mr. Mamet, the only one of the Uighurs who is single, found a young Albanian Muslim woman to marry but the arrangement collapsed when he could not move out of the refugee center. The others seem torn between longing for their families, who may never be able to leave China, and hope that they might someday start over again.

After what the men said have been endless promises of help from Albanian officials, they asked late last year to be moved to another country. They were told that because they were in a “safe” country, the United Nations could not relocate them. And anyway, no other country would have them. Lately, the men have been considering a hunger strike, a method of protest they occasionally used in Cuba.

“After four and a half years, we thought we had escaped from Guantánamo, but we are still living under that shadow,” Mr. Qassim said. “Sometimes we think it would be better to go die in our homeland than to stay here.”

Raymond Bonner contributed reporting from Washington.