Taking Stock
Michael Hirsch is getting pretty shrill here:
Here’s one measure. Seven years ago today, on Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri–two men who have dedicated their lives to killing as many Americans as they can–were living in Afghanistan. Their hosts, the Taliban, possessed only primitive weapons and rode around in Toyota pickup trucks.
Today, bin Laden and Zawahiri are almost certainly living in Pakistan. Their hosts, the Pakistanis, have an arsenal of nuclear bombs and missiles with which to fire them. And the Pakistanis, including many in the military and ISI, or intel service, are becoming more anti-American as the Bush administration embraces their mortal enemy, India, with a technology-rich new strategic partnership. Under this deal, Washington will forgive India’s decision to go nuclear and not even require that it abandon nuclear testing. And we will inadvertently send a message to every other major would-be nuclear power in the world (like Iran): You too can rejoin the international community if you wait long enough! So keep at it.
To be fairer to the Bush administration than Hirsch becomes later in the article, this is legitimately difficult stuff, and it’s not really all that shocking that they haven’t managed to brilliant solve the intertwined political, economic, and security dilemmas of Pakistan and its neighbors. That said, it’s really galling that they haven’t really been trying. Instead they decided to focus their attention on something else that they thought would be easier — Iraq — and then screw that up.
18 Responses to “Taking Stock”
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September 11th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/12444.html
It’s amazing that Bush, Cheney, McCain, et al have the gall to crawl out of their holes and to lecture us today.
McCain is a man who can’t answer how many houses he owns, because it’s too embarassing that the true number is something like 13. McCain is a man who has told us all with a straight face that he thinks that you can’t be rich if you have less than $5 million. In a saner world, there would be no question that this guy wouln’t be elected president, because barely anyone would be willing to vote for him.
The Republicans are a dishonor and shame to us all.
They have skyjacked our institutions– they have hijacked our media, our government and our military through lies and dirty tricks, and they are crashing our own institutions into us, ruining our environment, teaching our kids lies about science and reality, sending our people off to die in pointless military theatres of operations, squandering our public money and freeing the rich from paying a modest amount of taxes as the price for being extremely successful and powerful in this country. These “Republicans” beray us and stab us in the back every damn day, just like they did leading up to and after 9/11.
Remember, it’s not just McCain– every single option the Republicans put in front of our noses as a potential Presidential candidate this year has been a corrupt incompetent. Rudy Giuliani, who recently as last night was credited by Barack and David Letterman with somehow helping around 9/11 (probably due to media lies or Republian coercion) was actually working against first responders and 9/11 families both before and after 9/11. Rudy Giuliani was specifically responsible for making sure the firefighters had faulty equipment (like the Republicans never gave New Orleans proper levies before Katrina– probably because they didn’t like how black the city was before Katrina), for moving the City’s emergency command headquarters to a much less effective location so it could be a convenient babe-nest, and for working against the wishes and interests of First Responders who worked on 9/11 and of 9/11 families and widows in the days, weeks and months after the attacks. Yet the piece of walking scum takes credit for the work of people who actually helped on 9/11 and tries to turn the attacks into a political boon for him. In a saner world, this guy wouldn’t be able to get a single minute of air-time on any television station, except to report on how corrupt, unworthy to call himself an American, and assinine he is.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Mir Amir Kansi who killed two people outside CIA headquarters in 1993 and hid out in the same border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan where bin Laden is most likely hiding, where the Clinton administration tracked him down and arrested him in 1997.
September 11th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Republicans Hijacked 911, by Keith Olberman on 9/11! Courage to Speak Truth!
http://www.jedreport.com/2008/09/special-commen...
Never again should a President you want to have a beer with be allowed to lie the American public into a False & Phony war and ignore the real war as George W. Bush was able too! National Security strength, I don’t think so, after all 911 happened on the Republicans’ watch, but they distorted that message too and you would think that Democrats are weak on national security! Politicans who lie to the public are engaged in a betrayal of the public trust and such distortion should be deemed unethical and in some cases, criminal!
And, it is an outrage or should be that the government can give millions of dollars to CEO’s from the failed Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac and yet, cannot give a second stimulus check to American citizens in these hard economic times?
Republicans say No to a second stimulus while the Democrats say Yes to a second stimulus!
Is the Republican Congress working for CEO’s or are they working for you, the people?
September 11th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
“That said, it’s really galling that they haven’t really been trying. Instead they decided to focus their attention on something else that they thought would be easier — Iraq — and then screw that up.”
Wasn’t Obama criticising the Republicans for not violating Pakistan’s sovereignty? Which is it? Now we’re unnessarily pissing them off? Not sure I understand.
Iraq was about draining the swamp.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Iraq was about draining the swamp.
Good metaphor! Also, Ecuador was about draining the lizard. And Bhutan was about windsurfing on Mount Baldy. And Lichtenstein was about aligning the flay-rods that had gone askew on the treadle.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I love the smell of metaphors in the morning.
It smells like … damp albumen.
You know? One day this rhetorical war will be over.
September 11th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Good metaphor! Also, Ecuador was about draining the lizard. And Bhutan was about windsurfing on Mount Baldy. And Lichtenstein was about aligning the flay-rods that had gone askew on the treadle.
Hey ignorant Internet putz, you’re right Iraq is an inconsequential country, unlike say, neighbor Saudi Arabia:
September 11, 2008
Saudis Vow to Ignore OPEC Decision to Cut Production
By JAD MOUAWAD
VIENNA — Hours after suffering a rare setback in a negotiating session at OPEC’s headquarters, Saudi Arabian officials assured world markets on Wednesday that they would ignore the wishes of other cartel members and continue to pump plenty of oil.
The late-night bargaining session ended early Wednesday morning with a surprise declaration that OPEC would cut production to shore up sagging prices. Saudi negotiators publicly endorsed that position, but then spent much of Wednesday privately spreading the word that they did not feel bound by it.
The back-and-forth illustrated new pressures and power politics at play in the group that controls 40 percent of the world’s oil production. The meeting could be a harbinger of things to come for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as the cartel faces its most difficult challenge in years: how to respond to falling oil prices in a weakening global economic climate.
The confusion surrounding this week’s meeting slowed the decline in prices as oil markets struggled to understand the cartel’s byzantine politics. Oil closed Wednesday at $102.58 a barrel in New York trading, a decline of 68 cents.
After a 30 percent drop in prices since July, and with oil seemingly headed below the psychological milestone of $100 a barrel, OPEC producers are getting anxious. The cartel’s president, Chakib Khelil, said the group was particularly concerned that slowing demand for oil was creating a glut in the market that might provoke a collapse in prices.
Still, going into the meeting, Saudi Arabia was expected to prevail in its stated goal of keeping enough oil on the market to drive prices below $100 a barrel. The Saudi view is that lowering prices moderately now will shore up the world economy and prevent a recession that would cause oil prices to collapse. The Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, described the markets as being “well balanced” when he arrived in Vienna.
But after a six-hour private meeting, OPEC ministers decided to pare their production by complying strictly with targets that had been set up last year but were largely ignored. According to Mr. Khelil, who is also Algeria’s oil minister, OPEC’s actual production would have to be lowered by about 500,000 barrels a day within the next 40 days.
“We are oversupplying the market, and we are cutting that oversupply,” said Abdalla Salem el-Badri, the group’s secretary general. “We don’t want to see these prices decline dramatically.”
It remained unclear Wednesday exactly how the Saudis lost the argument behind closed doors. And despite the OPEC communiqué, it is far from clear that OPEC members will actually reduce their output. After a short night, Saudi officials were quick to reassure markets.
“Saudi Arabia will meet the market’s demand,” a senior OPEC delegate said. “We will see what the market requires and we will not leave a customer without oil. The policy has not changed.”
The Saudi message is to wait and see where demand is headed before eventually paring supplies. The Saudis made their strategy clear Wednesday in informal talks and briefings with some oil industry analysts and reporters, but as is their custom, they would not speak for attribution because they did not want to appear to undermine a collective OPEC decision.
In June, King Abdullah pledged that his country would pump at full tilt to bring prices down. In August, the kingdom increased its production to 9.7 million barrels a day, the highest in three decades. Saudi Arabia is now producing around 9.5 million barrels a day, 600,000 barrels a day more than its quota.
“This seems to set Saudi Arabia up as the unilateral decision-maker on output for the fall,” said Greg Priddy, an energy analyst at Eurasia Group, in a research note. “Clearly, other OPEC members are not going to trim their own production without Saudi Arabia returning to its quota. Saudi Arabia also seems to be eager to avoid headlines about it cutting production in advance of the U.S. elections.”
Adding to the confusion, OPEC said that two new members, Angola and Ecuador, were given new production quotas while Indonesia, a member since 1962 that has become a net importer of oil in recent years, was suspending its membership in the organization by the end of the year. OPEC officials had trouble explaining precisely how much production would need to be cut. Mr. Badri also declined to provide new targets for each member state.
OPEC’s discordant message is a reflection of the competing policies at play within the group, which includes countries like Kuwait, Nigeria, and its newest and smallest member, Ecuador. Some countries are carefully managing their oil windfall, while others are spending freely with the expectation that prices will remain high.
Moderate and pro-Western states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are aware that high energy costs are hurting demand and might push consumers to seek alternatives to oil. These countries want to see prices fall below $100 a barrel to ease political enmity against the cartel.
Another group, composed of OPEC’s traditional price hawks, increasingly needs high prices to finance a wide range of social and military policies. Analysts say they believe that Iran and Venezuela, for example, cannot afford prices below $100 a barrel as they seek to project power in their respective regions.
As OPEC worked to push up prices from lows reached in the late 1990s, members of the cartel all shared the same interests and were willing to leave their differences aside. But now that demand is weakening and prices are falling, some analysts say they believe that tensions within the group are resurfacing. In past years, OPEC has been notoriously bad at maintaining discipline in its ranks when prices fall.
The perception that OPEC was unwilling to do its part to bring down prices brought sharp criticism Wednesday from Western officials. “We’d like to see more oil on the market, not less,” the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, said at a briefing.
The decision represents a rare case of the cartel going against the position of its biggest member. As he walked from his hotel to the OPEC headquarters on Tuesday evening, Mr. Naimi, the Saudi minister, seemed particularly proud of his country’s efforts to pump as much oil as needed to push down prices.
“It was hard work,” Mr. Naimi said, strolling along the city’s cobbled streets. “The market is in a very healthy position.”
Six hours later, Mr. Naimi left the meeting without a word of public comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/business/worldbusiness/11oil.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&pagewanted=print
September 11th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
So Peter K, you went from swamp-draining to OPEC production quotas. Does that mean you think the invasion of Iraq was all about oil?
September 11th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
I think there’s an ‘understanding’ that India won’t restart nuclear testing – for whatever that’s worth.
September 14th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Osama bin Laden is dead, people. Even the CIA has stopped hopefully attributing new tapes to clearly be his voice / image. Dead, dead, dead. Can we move on?
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