Ruminations, July 6,2008

Ruminations, July 6, 2008

Barack Obama – the people’s choice
Barack Obama is a unique candidate for office. He is the only one who can please both liberals and conservatives. Don’t think so?

On Iraq:
He will please liberals by abandoning President Bush’s policies and removing American troops as soon as possible.
He will please conservatives because his policies will not be appreciably different than current policies (so his representatives have told Iraq’s foreign minister.)

On trade:
He will please liberals by abandoning NAFTA, CAFTA, free trade deals with Columbia and Korea.

He will please conservatives because he said that he is in favor of free trade and his economic advisor told Canadians that he will not change NAFTA.

Corporate taxes:
He will please liberals by applying windfall taxes on large corporations
He will please conservatives by reducing corporate taxes.

On guns
He will please liberals because he was in favor of Washington D.C.’s limits on hand guns.
He will please conservatives because he agrees with the Supreme Court decision that overturned Washington’s hand gun law.

On Israel:
He will please liberals because his advisor (Robert Malley) held discussions with Hamas and another advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, agrees with Harvard authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their criticism of Israel’s influence on American foreign policy.

He will please conservatives because he has said that “Israel’s security is sacrosanct,” and that he would “ensure that Israel could defend itself from any threat.”

On campaign finance reform:
He will please liberals because he pledged to use public financing for his presidential campaign.

He will please conservatives because he has abandoned public financing.

On protecting telecommunications companies:
He will please liberals because he opposed a bill which sheltered telecommunications companies from lawsuits if they provided information to government security agencies.

He will please conservative because he voted for such a bill.

In summary, Obama supports everything that liberals and conservatives support. The only problem is that, assuming Obama is elected president, he may find it harder to deliver on his positions than to talk about his positions.

Why We Went to War in Iraq
A few weeks ago, we wrote of Douglas Feith’s book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Feith, under secretary of defense from 2001-2005, wrote of the decisions and process that led to the United States going to war against Iraq in 2003. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week, Feith summarized the basis for the decision. You can find it here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121504452359324921.html

Incidentally, the proceeds of Feith’s book are being donated to charities for veterans and their families. How often do you recall a Washington insider writing a book and doing that with the proceeds?

Saddam’s Nukes
Remember the weapons of mass destruction that we never found in Iraq? The Globe and Mail of Toronto, Canada’s leading newspaper, reported this weekend that Canada is now home to 550 metric tons of yellowcake shipped from Iraq, “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.” The existence of the material and its movement was kept secret for fear of alerting terrorists who obviously would have other designs for the nuclear material.

While yellowcake can be enriched for use in nuclear weapons, Canada plans to use it to produce nuclear power.

After Saddam’s nuclear facilities were destroyed, he held on to the yellowcake for 22 years rather than sell it. I wonder what he planned to do with it.

The Million Muslim March
This marks the third anniversary of Ahmed H. al-Rahim’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In July 2005, al-Rahim, a Muslim Iraqi-American, suggested that American Muslims show their patriotism by marching on Washington. Al-Rahim American wanted Muslims to demonstrate their solidarity with Americans of other faiths in opposition to the insurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and their support of American efforts to set up a democracy.

Now, three years later, al-Rahim is still waiting for 999,999 more Muslims to sign up.

Can Do? Maybe Not
Americans have always had a “can-do” attitude. We could do anything. Defeat fascism? Sure. Build an interstate highway system? Piece of cake. Name it and we can do it. Or, at least, we used to be able to do it.

In 1931, construction on the Empire State Building was completed after 13 months. How about a new World Trade Center? So far, the new WTC has taken seven years and is optimistically expected to take another 10 years. What has happened since 1930?

In the 1920s and 1930s we built massive bridges and tunnels that continue to serve to this day. In New York, it took seven years to build the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. With that acquired experience, it took only three years build a second tunnel and get traffic flowing through the Lincoln Tunnel. The George Washington Bridge took four years to build and the Golden Gate Bridge also took four years and came in under budget. With all that experience and modern technology, we should be great at things like bridges and tunnels. What happened between the 1930s and the 1980s and why did it take 25 years and almost $15 billion to complete the “Big Dig” in Boston – an over-budget project that has over a thousand leaks and pieces of concrete falling down?

Have we made projects just too big? Too complex? Maybe it’s not the size or complexity. After all, the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur took four years to build – considerably less than the new World Trade Center will take. The 31-mile Chunnel (linking Britain and France) took six years to build.

I don’t know. Maybe Asia and Europe are now the can-do folks. Maybe we’ve become a nation of legal experts, politicians and bureaucrats who create plans and memos but can’t build a darn thing. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.

Dinner for four
Jay Leno remarked that only one in four Americans approve of President George Bush. That means, if the President sits down to dinner with his wife and two daughters…

Quote without comment
"It ought to be celebrated by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.” -- John Adams, writing of the Fourth of July.




Robert J. Kulak
West Hartford, Connecticut