September 28, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
This is good.

The Entitlements People

By DAVID BROOKS
If you live in Washington or just visit for a few days, you may run into the entitlement people. Some of them are former senators, cabinet officers or other previously powerful folks. Others are maverick members of Congress or agency heads, who are not in a position to set policy but are prominent enough to get noticed.

They bombard you with alarming statistics about unsustainable entitlements. The U.S. government has $43 trillion in unfunded liabilities, or $350,000 for every taxpayer. Standard & Poor’s projects that in 2012, the U.S. will lose its AAA bond rating.

Everyone listens and puts on a long face to show that they, too, are gravely concerned. The facts are indisputable, and everybody agrees abstractly that something really must be done. But then the conversation is over and most people are relieved to slip back into a different reality.

In the different reality, everybody plays by Mardi Gras rules. The norms are different, masks are worn and certain unpleasant facts fall away. Presidential candidates vow to offset the cost of health care plans through “cost savings” measures, and everybody pretends those savings are actually real. Republicans promise tax cuts and people pretend those pledges are not absurd. Democrats vow to pay for their grand spending plans by raising taxes on the rich, even though each one percent increase in the top tax rate only produces $6 billion in revenue.

The Mardi Gras norms are built on a fiction — that the current budgetary path is sustainable — and once you enter that fiction, then all sorts of other fictions become necessary and trickery piles upon trickery until all the standards of behavior are turned upside down.

These habits infect everything they touch, even a straightforward and successful program like the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-chip.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of uninsured children has been declining steadily for years. It shouldn’t be that costly or hard to insure the ones that are left.

And yet because S-chip is a product of the current climate, the expansion plan in Congress has all sorts of corruptions and dishonesties built in.

First, it perpetuates a smoke screen of obfuscation between who pays and who chooses. States have an incentive to ramp up benefits because they know that most of the cost will be borne by taxpayers somewhere else.

Second, it entices children out of private and into public insurance, even though after 2012 it cannot cover the cost.

Third, it creates a fund-raising mechanism cowardly in the extreme. Politicians in Washington like to talk in the abstract about shared sacrifice. They could go to the American people and say: We need to insure more children and to do that we’re going to raise broad-based taxes slightly.
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But that’s honest and direct, and therefore impermissible. Instead, this program is funded by raising taxes on smokers, who generally are much poorer than average Americans and much less educated. High school dropouts smoke at roughly three times the rates of college graduates.

They are also among the most demoralized people in society. Recent sociological research shows that most Americans regard smoking as a sign of low-class, unattractive behavior — and most smokers see it this way, too. Research by Kip Viscusi of Harvard suggests that smokers actually overestimate the dangers of their habit; they believe they are killing themselves even faster than they really are.

The S-chip bill takes money from these relatively poor, politically immobilized people and shifts it to those making up to $62,000 a year. Nobody is raising a tax on wine consumption or gasoline consumption to pay for this benefit. Instead, Congress is taxing the weakest possible group in order to shift benefits to others, some of whom are middle class.

There’s always been trickery in budgeting and sin taxes are far from new, but somehow over the decades there’s been a revolution in morals. Deficits, obfuscations and trickeries that were once unthinkable are now the norm.

It is a truth of human nature that people both agree with and resent the fogies who object. And yet, there they were this week. Democrats and Republicans like Frank Wolf, Jim Cooper, Judd Gregg, Kent Conrad and George Voinovich introduced legislation to create an entitlements commission with teeth. The commission would come up with a plan to restore fiscal balance, and the plan would immediately go to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

The commission probably couldn’t control underlying health care costs, which are driving all this. But it would at least define deviancy upward, and puncture the Mardi Gras rules. And everyone nods, approves and looks away.

COVER STORY: “Tension between Sunnis, Shiites emerging in USA,” by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA Today, 25 September 2007, p. 1A.
ARTICLE: “Suicide bomber attacks meeting of Shiites, Sunnis,” by Associated Press, USA Today, 25 September 2007, p. 9A.

Only natural that things get more tense over here between Shia and Sunni. But our country is a rare place for Islam, an environment where Shia and Sunni regularly and unremarkably pray together in the same mosques, something that stuns Muslim journalists when they cover our scene.
As one journalist from India recently put it:
“It is something we never see at home. They want to kill each other everywhere except in the USA.”
You think he really said “USA,” or did the paper tweak that quote?
But yeah, you’re going to see splintering and fracturing of Muslims here in the States, because the environment simply allows it, which is why the spread of the concept of “big tent Islam” is so crucial and fascinating to watch.
We’ve seen this with Christianity in the past (indeed, Stephen Prothero argues that the rise of non-denominational Christianity in the USA [damn, now they’ve got me doing it!] was fed by, and fed into, the rise of public schooling in the early 1800s) and with Judaism (we’re all one big happy, Judeo-Christian family, are we not?) and with Buddhism (which is being secularized beyond recognition in some quarters) and with Hinduism (just check out yoga at the YMCA).
And so it’s going to happen with Islam here in America: the religious “reformation” people are looking for will happen.
Read on:
At a time when rising numbers of American Protestants are attending non-denominational community churches and referring to themselves simply as Christians rather than Baptists, Methodists or Lutherans, a similar thing is happening among Muslims in the USA.
“It’s a whole new era,” says [Muslim sociologist Eboo] Patel. “The bulk of the American Muslim community is overwhelmingly young, under age 40. And they are experiencing a huge momentum toward ‘big-tent Islam.’”
“We don’t want to be defined by the classification of history and the Middle East. The Quran is our authority,” says Salim Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Al-Marayati, a Shiite married to a Sunni, expects to see 10,000 Muslims of all sects celebrate the Eid [feast at the end of Ramadan] with the Islamic Center of Southern California next month in Los Angeles.
He calls himself “Sushi,” the popular term for a combination of Sunni and Shiite. Once the glib nickname for the children of intermarried couples, it has become shorthand for Muslim who blur sectarian lines.
Gotta love “Sushi.” Yet another example of Japan’s successful cultural exports! Seriously. A term people choose for themselves because the word strikes them as cool.
None of this is to suggest that America grows less religious, because just the opposite is true. But don’t confuse rising religiosity (more faith and more practice) with rising religion (the institutions and hierarchies and sectarianism that come with them).
The rule set on religion gets looser in America even as people get more intense about it. It becomes more personalized and direct and about “the book.”
And it becomes non-denominational as a result.
Read Stephen Prothero’s history of faith in America in his Religious Literacy, and you’ll see the argument plain as day.
Yet another reason why I do not worry about losing any “Long War.” The outcome was never in doubt. Just our belief in ourselves.

U.N. General Assembly: Security Challenges and Intelligence Opportunities
September 26, 2007 1747 GMT

By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

Autumn in the northern United States is a time when birds and other migratory creatures begin to head south in anticipation of the coming winter chill. This week in the early autumn also marks the high point in another migration, when leaders and intelligence officers from across the world flock to New York for the annual U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) session. This intricate annual ritual includes much pomp and politicking, demonstrations of power -- and a good deal of espionage.

Although many of the heads of state and foreign ministers participating in the UNGA's 62nd annual session are friendly to the United States, others are not. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in fact, is generally considered quite unsavory -- to the point that some Americans wish him ill. But when Ahmadinejad is in the United States, his safety is the responsibility of the U.S. government, which takes great pains to carry out its mandate. The visit of such a vocal, colorful and controversial leader as Ahmadinejad, however, creates tremendous security challenges for the U.S. Secret Service and the other agencies supporting its protective mission.

In addition to security headaches, such trips also give the U.S. government an outstanding opportunity to collect intelligence on a leader such as Ahmadinejad, who comes from a country where it is difficult for U.S. intelligence agencies to operate. Such intelligence not only aids in understanding what makes him tick, but also helps the U.S. government formulate strategy on how best to approach and negotiate with his government in the future.

Security Challenges

By its very nature, the annual UNGA session presents security problems. The concentration of so many world leaders in one place is a powerful magnet for the international press -- as well as protesters who seek to exploit the media presence to get their messages out to a worldwide audience. Moreover, the UNGA almost always discusses hot-button issues such as wars, human rights issues, climate change and territorial disputes, providing further fodder for the press and the protesters. In fact, several protests take place each day near the United Nations -- some that have permits and some that pop up spontaneously. One memorable spontaneous protest occurred during the UNGA meeting in 1991, when Haiti's military launched a coup that forced Haitian President Bertrand Aristide into exile. That night, tens of thousands of Haitians participated in a huge impromptu demonstration in front of the U.N. complex. The protesters, demanding U.N. action to reinstate Aristide, lit large bonfires in the center of First Avenue and then danced and sang around them until the wee hours of the morning.

Demonstrators sometimes will intentionally cross the line from peaceful protest to physical assault so their arrests will result in press coverage for their issue of choice. These illegal actions might have little or no direct correlation to the object of their protest. For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s a group called the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) came to the UNGA every year to protest the U.S. government's policy toward El Salvador, and members of the group sought to be arrested in order to publicize their cause. The activists, however, not only would target Salvadoran leaders, but also would jump on any target of opportunity that came by at the time they wanted to be arrested. In consecutive years CISPES members assaulted the unlucky motorcades of the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers to publicize their cause.

Into this general environment comes Ahmadinejad, whose position as the president of Iran, as well as his past rhetoric concerning the United States, Israel and the Holocaust, presents a large panorama of security challenges. During this latest trip to the United States, Ahmadinejad has been protested by a constellation of groups, including Iranian dissidents, Jews, human rights groups, women's rights groups and ordinary Americans.

Since the Iranian Revolution, Iranian dignitaries visiting the United Nations have consistently been met by hostile protesters. Some of the protesters are affiliated with groups such as the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), the Iraq-based Iranian opposition group that the U.S. government has designated a foreign terrorist organization. MEK members and sympathizers have not conducted attacks in the United States, but they have assaulted Iranian officials during events such as UNGA -- especially lower-level members of the Iranian delegations not covered by U.S. protective details. The MEK, however, has on occasion attempted to impede, embarrass or assault Iranian dignitaries such as the president or foreign minister. In an incident a number of years ago, Iranian dissidents mistook the Cuban foreign minister for a similar-looking Iranian foreign minister and hurled eggs at his motorcade

In addition to the demonstration threat, the number of world leaders and the confluence of international press also raise concerns that militants will attempt to conduct an attack during the UNGA. During UNGA sessions, jihadists have surveilled dignitaries such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's then-Foreign Minister Amr Moussa and then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, going so far as to plan attacks against these officials as well as temporary diplomatic residences such as the Waldorf-Astoria and U.N. Plaza hotels.

But perhaps the most acute and least understood and appreciated threat is that posed by the mentally disturbed individual acting alone. This is especially true in the case of a high-profile protectee such as Ahmadinejad, whose position and rhetoric make him a magnet for such people. As demonstrated by attackers such as John Hinckley, Sirhan Sirhan and Mark David Chapman, mentally disturbed individuals have long posed a significant threat to high-profile figures in the United States.

Because of this general threat environment, the strong anti-Iranian sentiment and the Iranians' mistrust of Americans, the Iranians understandably send a large, armed protective detail with dignitaries such as Ahmadinejad. This not only creates security and protocol issues for the U.S. Secret Service and Diplomatic Security Service special agents as they haggle and jostle with foreign security officers over whose agents will be assigned where in the protective formation and motorcade, but it also a creates a condition in which the American protective detail feels the need to protect American citizens from the aggression of the foreign security officers, who will sometimes shove, point weapons at or otherwise intimidate people. Foreign security officers have been known not only to conduct themselves this way toward peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights (most protesters are not violent) but also sometimes to act aggressively toward ordinary people on the street.

Intelligence Opportunities

This history of action directed against Iranian dignitaries has led to another interesting migratory phenomenon. Every year, a number of tough-looking Iranian-American "volunteers" travel to New York from various places around the United States to provide additional security for the Iranian delegates. It speaks volumes that these men, who identify themselves as medical doctors and university students, are trusted by a foreign government with such a sensitive assignment. This group is one the MEK would love to infiltrate. This role is especially significant because Iranian intelligence officers assigned to or visiting the United Nations are restricted to a 25-mile radius from U.N. Headquarters. Eager to collect intelligence outside of that 25-mile zone, the Iranians also call on these U.S. citizens -- whose movements are not restricted, of course -- to carry out the work. These security and intelligence-collection duties bring them to the attention of U.S. agents, who then investigate them and monitor their activities even after they return to their home cities. Moreover, auxiliary Iranian intelligence and security officers can be quite aggressive in their efforts to collect intelligence on anti-Iranian demonstrators during the UNGA, and some of them have been assaulted while attempting to infiltrate the demonstrations. These skirmishes give the U.S. agents watching the crowd further insight into these people.

Iranian intelligence officers are not the only ones who have had their collection efforts hampered by the break in diplomatic relations that followed the 1979 revolution in Iran and the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Not having an embassy in Tehran has made it very difficult for the United States to participate in the standard embassy-based espionage that every country practices. The U.S. government can and does use case officers who operate in Iran under nonofficial cover. It also recruits Iranians from outside of the country -- to supply information from outside or to return home as spies. Those methods, however, do not provide the same flow of intelligence on a country's leadership as does having an embassy in the capital and meeting regularly with government officials.

Because of this, Ahmadinejad's trip to New York has given the U.S. government a unique window of opportunity to gather intelligence. Of course, whom he meets and what they discuss is carefully scrutinized, but even seemingly small bits of information such as his sleeping habits, shopping purchases, diet and any medications he takes or books he reads also are pored over by psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors and leadership analysis experts at the CIA and elsewhere. This leadership analysis is done in an effort to understand his current behavior and to predict or anticipate his actions in future situations.

The opportunity to watch members of Ahmadinejad's entourage is another significant intelligence window. All eyes are naturally turned to Ahmadinejad himself, but a significant amount of intelligence also can be gained by watching the lesser-known straphangers -- especially those who are confirmed or suspected intelligence officers. Such individuals usually view attendance at the UNGA sessions as an opportunity to travel to New York and pursue their own agenda, and they frequently can be seen attempting to slip away for meetings on the side. Identifying these people, discovering who they are meeting and why can be a significant intelligence coup. In some ways, monitoring these individuals is more critical than watching Ahmadinejad himself.

Ahmadinejad is but one of the hundreds of dignitaries who will visit New York during the UNGA, though he is one of the relatively few who will be afforded a U.S. protective detail. This dramatic dance of dignitaries, media, protesters and espionage agents will be played out many times until the 62nd UNGA session ends Oct. 3.

Op-Ed Columnist
Lead, Follow or Move Aside

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 26, 2007
China today is entering a really delicate phase on the climate-energy issue — the phase I like to call “The Wal-Mart environmental moment.” I wish the same could be said of America and President Bush.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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The “Wal-Mart environmental moment” starts with the C.E.O. adopting a green branding strategy as a purely defensive, public relations, marketing move. Then an accident happens — someone in the shipping department takes it seriously and comes up with a new way to package the latest product and saves $100,000. This gets the attention of the C.E.O., who turns to his P.R. adviser and says, “Well, isn’t that interesting? Get me a sustainability expert. Let’s do this some more.”

The company then hires a sustainability officer, and he starts showing how green design, manufacturing and materials can save money in other areas. Then the really smart C.E.O.’s realize they have to become their own C.E.O. — chief energy officer — and they start demanding that energy efficiency become core to everything the company does, from how its employees travel to how its products are manufactured.

That is the transition that Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., has presided over in the past few years.

Last July, Mr. Scott was visiting a Wal-Mart in Las Vegas on a day when the temperature was more than 100 degrees. He happened to notice that a Wal-Mart staple — inexpensive Styrofoam coolers — were not being promoted by the store’s associates. As Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart’s vice president for sustainability, told me: “Lee walked into the store and said, ‘It’s 105 degrees. Why aren’t we selling any coolers?’ The associates said, ‘We don’t want to sell Styrofoam coolers because of their impact on the environment.’ So Lee called us afterwards and said: ‘We’re going to have to figure this out.’ By that he meant innovation of a different kind of cooler” that doesn’t come from petroleum-based Styrofoam, which is not biodegradable and usually not recycled.

Wal-Mart on Monday also announced a partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (C.D.P.) to measure the amount of energy used to create products throughout its supply chain — many of which come from China.

Said C.D.P. Chief Executive Paul Dickinson: “Wal-Mart will encourage its suppliers to measure and manage their greenhouse gas emissions, and ultimately reduce the total carbon footprint of Wal-Mart’s indirect emissions. We look forward to other global corporations following Wal-Mart’s lead.”

China’s leadership is not where Lee Scott is yet. Chinese officials still put their highest priority on growing G.D.P. — their bottom line. But for the first time, the costs of this breakneck growth are becoming so obvious on China’s air, glaciers and rivers that the leadership asked for briefings on global warming. Many Chinese mayors are looking to get clean-technology industries — like wind turbines and solar — started in their cities.

At such a key time, if the U.S. government adopted a real carbon-reducing strategy, as California and Wal-Mart have, rather than the obfuscations of the Bush team, it would have a huge impact on China and only trigger more innovation in America.

Mr. Bush will be convening his climate photo op — oops, I mean “conference” — in Washington tomorrow, which will include Chinese and Indian officials. But, as Rob Watson, the C.E.O. of EcoTech International, which works on environmental issues in China put it: “The Chinese are not going to take anything we say seriously if we don’t set an example ourselves.”

David Moskovitz, who directs the Regulatory Assistance Project, a nonprofit that helps promote green policies in China, was even more blunt: “The most frequent and difficult question we get in China with every policy initiative we put forward is: ‘If it is so good, why aren’t you doing it?’ It’s hard to answer — and somewhat embarrassing. So we point to good examples that some American states, or cities, or companies are implementing — but not to the federal government. We can’t point to America.”

Too bad. “It was America which put environmentalism on the world’s agenda in the 1970s and

’80s,” recalled Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president for Conservation International. “But since then, somehow, the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet has gone to the back of the line.”

Leadership is about “follow me” not “after you.” Getting our national climate regulations in order is necessary, but it will not be sufficient to move China. We have to show them what Wal-Mart is showing its competitors — that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more profitable, more healthy, more innovative, more efficient, more successful. If Wal-Mart can lead, and California can lead, why can’t America?

Brazil's Lula defends Iran's nuclear rights

Reuters - Tuesday, September 25 11:17 pm
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Iran has the right to proceed with peaceful nuclear research and should not be punished just because of Western suspicions it wants to make an atomic bomb, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Tuesday.

"So far, Iran has committed no crime regarding the U.N. guidelines on nuclear weapons," Lula told reporters as he prepared to return to Brazil after delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

"Nobody should be punished in advance," said Lula, whose country started enriching uranium for its nuclear power plants last year, causing only limited international attention.

Meanwhile, concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions are among the hottest topics on the agenda of the U.N. assembly. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said failure to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons could destabilize the world.

Tehran insists it seeks to master technology to generate atomic power although Western nations believe it is running a covert bomb program.

The United Nations has demanded Iran halt its nuclear enrichment program, and has slapped two rounds of sanctions on Tehran for refusing. The United States is pressing for a third round of sanctions.

"If Iran wants to enrich uranium, if it wants to handle the nuclear issue in a peaceful way like Brazil does, that is Iran's right," Lula said, adding however that all countries are subject to U.N. guidelines.

Iran agreed with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on August 21 to explain the scope of its nuclear program.

Iran's Natanz enrichment plant is expected to start producing usable quantities of nuclear fuel in the coming months. Such plants can also produce uranium for weapons.

(Reporting by Walter Brandimarte)