Fresh Political Uncertainties Lie on Thai Political Horizon

Supporters of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra reacts at the Pheu Thai Party building as Thailand's Supreme Court started reading its ruling on the former leader's wealth, in Bangkok, Thailand, 25 Feb 2010

A Thai Supreme Court verdict last week against former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, accused of abuse of power and concealing his wealth, has eased the political uncertainty that had gripped the country in recent months. But, new uncertainties have emerged as pro-Thaksin supporters vow to mobilize against the government to force new elections, as a way to bring Thaksin back to power.

The long-awaited Supreme Court verdict concerning telecom tycoon and former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra ended months of political uncertainties, amid fears of fresh protests after the verdict's outcome.

Initial reaction by pro-Thaksin supporters has been muted. But threats of protests this month against Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's government adds new concerns to an already troubled political landscape.

In a verdict broadcast Friday on television and radio, the panel of nine judges found Thaksin guilty of concealment of wealth and abuse of power by using his position to benefit family-linked telecommunications business.

The court called for seizure of $1.4 billion, about 60 percent of the more than $2.3 billion of family assets frozen by the state after Thaksin, who was ousted in a coup in 2006.

Thaksin faces a new round of legal cases against him and family members on charges ranging from tax avoidance to perjury.

Chulalongkorn University political scientist Pasuk Pongpaichit says the verdict ended months of uncertainty surrounding Thailland.

"Things are clearer now about what is going to happen to Mr. Thaksin. It would be very difficult for him to return to fight through his supporters here. I suspect that he will not be able to recoup any of these back," she said.

While in power for five years, Thaksin drew his support from urban and rural poor and working class people who benefited from his populist policies of low-cost health care and rural development programs.

But the urban middle and upper class accuse him of abuse of power, attacks on the media and human rights abuses. He has been in exile since 2008 to avoid a corruption verdict in absentia that sentenced him to two years jail.

In Bangkok's working-class suburb, Klong Toey, opinions were divided about the verdict. Public-opinion polls indicate fears of further potential political tension, with a majority calling for Thaksin not to appeal the decision.

Chakra Silapanongchuk, a Bangkok a taxi driver who supported the verdict, said the court ruling proved Thaksin had been corrupt, and how the former leader had used his business knowledge to carry out the corruption.

But others, such as motorbike taxi driver Sompon, said many Thais still support Thaksin, especially those from the pro-Thaskin United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship or UDD, also identified by the group's wearing of red shirts.

Sompon says he believes Thaksin faces many legal hurdles, but he is still loved by many red-shirt supporters. He said Thaksin's Peua Thai Party would win an election over the Democrat Party leader, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.

Political economist Pasuk Pongpaichit agrees. She says the verdict will act to draw more 'grassroots' sympathy for Thaksin. "If you go and talk to people at the ground level this verdict has actually increased sympathy to Mr. Thaksin among his supporters. So in other words he has not lost any support. So this political asset in terms of his supporters has actually increased," said Pasuk.

The UDD say it will mobilize protests against Prime Minister Abhisit's government with the goal of forcing the government to resign. Some observers fear violence, while others say it will be a major test for both the UDD's support base and for the government's survival.

Kudeb Saikrajang is a member of the parliamentary opposition Peua Thai Party who believes underlying sympathy for Thaksin triggered by the verdict will draw more people to the protests. "If they can mobilize people and stay for a while, I think the government has to make it clear when they are going, otherwise they cannot rule. Neutral people will ask then what they will do. I think the best way is to dissolve the house; then the government can save face," said Kudeb.

The protests are expected to see a return to the larger street demonstrations that were at the heart of the pro-Thaksin movement in early 2009. In April 2009 protests in Bangkok and a seaside resort where red-shirt protesters crashed a conference hall of regional leaders forcing the gathering to be canceled. Troops were called out to quell the protests.

For the city of Bangkok, questions remain whether fresh street protests will end peacefully or push the government to again use emergency legislation to quell violence.

Memo From Tripoli - Unknotting Father’s Reins in Hope of ‘Reinventing’ Libya

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

TRIPOLI, Libya — Prying open a closed economy is no easy job, especially if the country in question is Libya — a nation that has spent more than two decades with its back turned to the world. It becomes all the more challenging when doing so means taking on the legacy of your father and fighting an entrenched bureaucracy with little interest in serious change.

Yet that is the goal of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son and possible successor to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, as he sets out to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism introduced by his father 40 years ago.

“It is hard work reinventing a country,” he said in an interview last month, as he slouched on a sofa in his villa in the hills above Tripoli, picking at a tray of fruit including fresh dates brought to him by a black-suited waiter. “But that is what we are doing. We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.”

In the last few years, Mr. Qaddafi, 37, who has a doctorate from the London School of Economics, flawless English and a bold independent streak, has emerged as the Western-friendly face of Libya and symbol of its hopes for reform and openness. When he was nominated last year to lead a powerful government body overseeing tribal leaders, analysts saw it as a sign of his father’s endorsement.

But in Libya’s opaque politics, little is seldom as it appears. And it is far from clear to what extent the younger Mr. Qaddafi’s vision is official policy or wishful dreaming.

Despite his broad international appeal and evidence of popular support at home, analysts say that resistance to his pell-mell approach to modernization appears to be building.

Recently the government curtailed the operations of two crusading newspapers he backed. His entreaties for Western investment were undercut last month when the government imposed a visa ban on more than 20 European countries hoping to do business here. And the old, bellicose Libya seemed to hold sway last week when Colonel Qaddafi escalated a running feud with Switzerland by declaring a “jihad” against it.

The developments have bolstered the view that the hard-line faction championed by Seif Qaddafi’s equally ambitious older brother, Mutassim, the country’s national security adviser, was gaining ground.

“A lot of people have jumped on Seif’s bandwagon as if he were the future of Libya,” said Dana Moss, a Libya expert and the author of a forthcoming monograph on United States-Libya relations. “But that is not clear yet. In a future Libyan system both Seif and Mutassim will have a say, but the question is who will have more of a say.”

Since Libya agreed to renounce its nuclear weapons, an initiative led by Seif Qaddafi, and began to mend ties with the West in the last decade, experts predicted that the opening of the economy would soon follow, spurred by privatization and an influx of foreign investment beyond the presence of international oil companies.

Those expectations were buoyed last October when Seif Qaddafi was proposed to lead the umbrella grouping of local leaders, a position that would give him, like his brother, a voice in the government and an official platform to further his reform agenda.

But months later, he has yet to accept the job. In his first public comments on the subject in London in January, Seif Qaddafi said that until Libya adopted democratic institutions he would stay on the political sideline.

“I will not accept any position unless there is a new constitution, new laws and transparent elections,” he said. “Everyone should have access to public office. We should not have a monopoly on power.”

Instead, he has continued his high-wire act, using his status to occasionally challenge his father’s ways — pushing for openness, opposing the ubiquitous revolutionary committees, allowing human rights critics into the country — while trying to retain his viability as his father’s successor.

Some analysts see his reluctance to enter government as a calculated strategy to retain the aura of an outsider, to rise above the political infighting just as his father did in 1972 when he removed himself from government and adopted the title Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.

Free of bureaucratic restraints, Seif Qaddafi has been able to propose far-reaching ideas: tax-free investment zones, a tax haven for foreigners, the abolition of visa requirements and the development of luxury hotels.

“We can be the Dubai of North Africa,” he said, citing Libya’s proximity to Europe (the flight from London to Tripoli is under three hours), its abundant energy reserves and 1,200 miles of mostly unspoiled Mediterranean coastline. In the den of his villa, where a stuffed white tiger lay in watchful repose, a fountain gurgled peaceably nearby and the air was thick with incense, the idea seemed plausible. Libya is wealthier than debt-ridden, oil-poor Dubai. Its $15,000 gross domestic product per person ranks it above Poland, Mexico and Chile, according to the World Bank. The government’s sovereign fund, a reserve of oil revenues, boasts $65 billion. And the government has announced plans to invest $130 billion over the next three years to improve infrastructure.

But a descent into the center of Tripoli offers a bracing dose of reality. The streets are strewn with garbage, there are gaping holes in the sidewalks, tourist-friendly hotels and restaurants are few and far between. And while a number of seaside hotels are being built, the city largely ignores its most spectacular asset, the Mediterranean.

Unemployment is estimated as high as 30 percent and much of the potential work force is insufficiently trained.

“The whole country looks like a construction site,” said Mustafa Fetouri, a political analyst based in Tripoli. “But it is developing and growing Libya’s people, that is the real problem. We are not Dubai.”

Libya’s market economy remains more aspirational than real. On a recent weekday morning at the nascent Tripoli stock exchange, 10 or so brokers sat looking blankly at their screens while a handful of customers waited languorously nearby. Ten companies trade on the exchange, which says it does $400,000 worth of business on an average day.

“The cost of running the stock market is more than the daily trading volume,” said Shokri M. Ghanem, the chairman of the National Oil Corporation, the state oil company.

That scene is unlikely to change until the government releases its tight grip on the economy. But Mr. Ghanem, a former prime minister who supports efforts to open the economy, said the political resistance was formidable and has been bolstered by the world financial crisis. The same oil wealth that would finance Seif Qaddafi’s vision has propped up an entrenched elite vigorously opposed to reform.

“There are certain people high up in the government that are against privatization, even though a majority of Libyans wish to go for a market economy,” Mr. Ghanem said.

That majority includes people like Muhammad Younes, 35, a mechanical engineer in Tripoli who has not had a steady job for years. Libya may be wealthy, but he has nothing to show for it, despite his fluent English and a university education.

“No work, no chances, no job,” he said with a fatalistic shrug. “Yet we have so much money. Something must be wrong.”

In Yemen’s South, Protests Could Cause More Instability

By ROBERT F. WORTH

ADEN, Yemen — Less than an hour’s drive outside this dilapidated port town, the Yemeni government’s authority is scarcely visible, and a different flag appears, that of the old independent state of South Yemen.

The flags are one sign of a rapidly spreading protest movement across the south that now threatens to turn into a violent insurgency if its demands are not met. That could further destabilize Yemen, already the poorest and one of the most troubled countries in the Arab world, and create a broader haven for Al Qaeda here.

The movement’s leaders say the Yemeni government — based in the north — has systematically discriminated against the south, expropriating land, expelling southerners from their jobs and starving them of public money. They speak with deep nostalgia of the 128-year British occupation in South Yemen, saying the British, who withdrew in 1967, fostered the rule of law, tolerance and prosperity. The north, they say, respects only the gun.

In recent months, calls for secession have grown louder after a harsh government crackdown on demonstrations and opposition newspapers. The movement’s leaders say that they believe in peaceful protest, but that their ability to control younger and more violent supporters is fraying.

“It is too late for half measures or reforms,” said Zahra Saleh Abdullah, one of the few Southern Movement leaders who agreed to be identified in print. “We demand an independent southern republic, and we have the right to defend ourselves if they continue to kill us and imprison us.”

Another movement leader, sitting across the room, held up a coin minted under the British in 1964 and pointed to the words engraved on it: South Arabia.

“This is our true identity, not Yemen,” he said. “A southern republic or death.”

Public outrage swelled last month after Yemeni security forces laid siege to the house of a prominent newspaper editor in Aden, setting off a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire as the editor and his young children cowered inside. (The government said he was stockpiling weapons.) They were not injured, but the clash left at least one of the family’s guards dead and others wounded, fueling more demonstrations. All told, more than 100 people have been killed in clashes with the police since the movement began in 2007, its leaders say, and about 1,500 supporters remain in prison.

In some rural areas of South Yemen, police officers refuse to wear their uniforms for fear of being shot, according to several accounts from local residents.

The Yemeni government has largely dismissed the movement as a small band of malcontents and has repeatedly accused its leaders of being affiliated with Al Qaeda.

The movement’s leaders call that an outrageous perversion of the truth: they say that they stand for law, tolerance and democracy, and that it is the north that has a history of using jihadists as proxy warriors. But some human rights workers say a shared hatred of the government could be creating a sense of unity between some members of the movement — which is broad and very loosely organized — and members of Al Qaeda.

Perhaps a greater danger, some say, is the spread of lawlessness across the south if the movement’s demands for greater equity are not addressed and it grows more violent. The movement’s own internal contradictions also pose a real threat.

“There is no clear leadership, everyone wants to be the boss,” said Afra Khaled Hariri, a lawyer here who has represented arrested members of the movement. The movement’s leaders include socialists and Islamists with wildly different goals and unresolved disputes dating to internal conflicts between socialist factions that left thousands of southerners dead during the 1980s.

“If the movement succeeds in making a separate state, I expect disaster because of our bloody past,” Ms. Hariri said. And Aden — the heart of the British protectorate and the base of the south’s intelligentsia — would be the chief victim, she added.

For that reason, some in the south say, the best solution is not secession, but a political accommodation in which the north agrees to address some of the movement’s main grievances about land expropriation and job discrimination. Many also say that moving away from Yemen’s highly centralized system of government and granting the provinces more power to govern themselves would ease tensions.

So far the government has shown little sign it intends to do that.

Behind the Southern Movement’s protests is an old belief that North and South Yemen are fundamentally different societies, and that their unification — achieved with great fanfare on both sides in 1990 — has been a failure.

The differences are apparent even to a first-time visitor. Aden has churches, parks, a smaller model of Big Ben and a stately garden where a statue of Queen Victoria presides. The roads, though a little faded, are generally better than those in the north. It is a commonplace that people respect red lights and driving lanes here, unlike in the north.

The people of the south are generally better educated, a legacy not only of the British but of the Socialist government that ruled here during the 1970s. Although they shattered the economy and suppressed their opponents brutally, the Socialists also put an end to harmful tribal practices like child marriage, championed women’s equality and achieved some of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world.

All those achievements have since collapsed: literacy and education have dropped precipitously across the south, child marriage has returned and lawlessness prevails.

Many here blame the north for all that. A brief civil war broke out in 1994, during which the north used jihadists who had fought in Afghanistan as proxy fighters.

“They want to push us into backwardness so we are like them,” said Ali Abdo, a professor of transportation engineering at Aden University and a member of a party that supports decentralization but not secession. “Aden was tolerant: there were Jews, Christians, Muslims all living together here. The North is not.”

The Southern Movement began in 2007 with protests led by former military officers who said they had been mistreated and denied pensions after the 1994 civil war. Gradually, it has grown to encompass other groups. Last year, it received a large boost when Tareq al-Fadhli, a former Afghan jihadist and ally of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, defected to the movement.

The movement now includes a substantial body of powerful tribal figures as well as Aden-based intellectuals and political figures. There is a 42-member leadership committee, though it is not clear how many of the movement’s supporters it represents. Most supporters seem to acknowledge Ali Salim al-Bidh, the exiled former president of South Yemen, as their leader. Mr. Bidh emerged from years of silence recently and began actively advocating southern independence.

The movement has its own songs, which can be heard blasting from the open windows of cars in southern towns. “We swear to God, we will not put up with this corrupt dictator and his gang, even if the whole sky erupts in fire,” goes one song by Aboud Khawaja, a singer now based in Qatar.

This month, a 27-year-old man named Faris Tamah was arrested near Aden while playing that song from his car stereo, and he was later shot to death in prison after being tortured, said several movement supporters who know his family and say they saw a medical report. Yemen’s government-run newspapers later ran an article saying that Mr. Tamah was arrested for drunken driving and committed suicide in custody by grabbing an officer’s gun and shooting himself. “The movement began with demands, but they were refused and the pressure grew,” Professor Abdo said. “Now, the movement is in every house in the south.”

How the GOP Sees It

Image via Wikipedia

What Republicans would do if given carte blanche to run the country.

By Katie Connolly, Michael Hirsh and Weston Kosova | NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010

"We've offered to work with the president all year. We've been shut out, shut out, and shut out." —House GOP leader John Boehner

Such is the lament of the party out of power in Washington. Republicans on Capitol Hill say they have many good ideas and want to join with President Obama and the Democrats to alleviate the country's problems. They want to collaborate on a health-care bill, a jobs bill, a clean-energy bill. But they can't, because the Democrats—intent on pushing through a radical agenda that is out of touch with real Americans—won't listen to them. Republicans want to help the president succeed, but he won't let them.

This isn't true, of course—any more than it was true when the Democrats said the same thing as they dedicated themselves to thwarting George W. Bush. In zero-sum Washington, members of the opposition party have little incentive to help the president, especially if it means the credit for their actions could accrue to him and not them. If politics is the art of compromise, then politics as practiced in the capital is the art of preventing compromise at all costs. This is why, infuriatingly, our elected officials spend so much time plotting ways to stick it to the other side with "filibuster-proof super-majorities" and "nuclear options," while the unemployment rate hovers in the double digits and 46 million Americans go without health insurance. It is why not a single GOP senator voted for the health-care bill now stalled in Congress, and why Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned against a GOP-inspired plan for a deficit commission once Obama endorsed the idea.

A handful of Republicans—Sen. Olympia Snowe on health care, Sen. Bob Corker on financial reform—have tried on their own to break from this tit-for-tat and deal with Democrats. They see what most politicians know but don't talk about: that on many issues, the differences between the two sides are not nearly so great as the party bosses would have us believe. Too often it is politics, not policy, that stymies progress. Certainly Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, scornful of Republican ideas and motives, have not gone out of their way to solicit Republican views. And the GOP leadership has made known its displeasure at moderates' overtures to the other side. Some of Snowe's colleagues treated her like an apostate. Corker has been frustrated in his efforts. "We've probably had the most selfish generation in Congress … in modern times," says Corker. "It's beyond belief to me that the deficit commission did not pass."

There is a luxury to being the party of "no." As Obama himself has now discovered, it is much easier (and, to some, more viscerally satisfying) to stop something in Washington than to start it. But what if the Republicans had their way? What if Obama and the Democrats simply stepped aside and allowed the GOP to take charge of fixing the nation's troubles? What would they do—and how different would it be, really, from the Democratic proposals Republicans say are so extreme that compromise is all but impossible? A guide to what the GOP wants:

JOBS
For Republican leaders, there is one way to create new jobs that trumps all others: tax cuts. Leave more money in the hands of business owners, Republicans say, and they will use it to place orders—stimulating job growth—or hire new workers themselves. "We're not going to look to Washington to create the jobs," says GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, summing up the Republican liturgy. Most in the party (like most Americans, according to polls) want nothing to do with another expensive stimulus that would smack of expanded government. Yet the GOP has also rejected Democratic bills that tried to lure Republicans by including significant tax cuts. Earlier this year Republican Sen. Charles Grassley reached an agreement with Democratic Sen. Max Baucus on an $85 billion jobs bill. It combined small-business tax breaks with an injection of money for the Highway Trust Fund, more unemployment insurance, and agriculture emergency assistance. Other Republicans resisted Grassley's entreaties to sign on, even though the bill was adorned with the tax-credit extensions for businesses that Republicans wanted.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wound up withdrawing the bill the same day he offered it. Democrats had complained that Republicans were going to slam them for the expensive bill, despite the GOP gifts it contained. Reid replaced it with a meager $15 billion version, made up mostly of tax breaks for businesses that Democrats and Republicans agree on. But such small-bore efforts aren't likely to make much of a difference. That leaves the Republicans in a tough spot. Obama is out there boasting that the stimulus plan the GOP rejected saved jobs in the worst months of the recession. Now Republican leaders risk being seen as lining up against any bill that contains spending to promote job growth, even if it also includes the tax cuts they favor. To avoid the appearance that they're merely obstructing, they'll have to come up with something better than that.

Next: The Debt »

THE DEBT
How big a problem is the $1.4 trillion budget deficit and the ever-expanding national debt? (Just FYI, the debt now tops $12 trillion and grows an average of $3.87 billion each day.) Pose that question to five economists and prepare for five different answers. Some believe a large debt burden could cripple the economy and scare off foreign creditors. Others say that the numbers, though scary to look at, are still manageably low as a percentage of the overall economy. Democrats worry that attacking the deficit too harshly now could result in a double-dip recession. Small-government Republicans come down squarely on the side of smaller deficits. It is an issue that goes to their deepest principles, and appeals both to their base and to the growing tea-party movement they hope to win over. Cut spending, reduce government, and restore America's strength.

Sounds great. Except that no one in either party has figured out how to do that in a way that won't cause a rebellion among the voters. Republicans attack Obama's deficit-ballooning budget every chance they get, but the GOP leadership has put forward no serious proposals that would slow, let alone reverse, the growth of government while still providing everything we demand from Washington. (Remember that George W. Bush, an avowed small-government conservative, presided over a massive increase in the size of government.) Politicians can talk all they want about eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But the truth is, we could pull the plug on the entire federal bureaucracy and it would barely make a difference. The real problem is runaway costs in three sacred entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Until something is done to bring them under control before the baby boomers start retiring en masse, the rest is just talk.

This is no secret. Ross Perot was screaming about it two decades ago. Yet Republicans and Democrats are equally afraid of speaking honestly about the looming crunch. One Republican, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has introduced a detailed proposal to cut the deficit by reining in Medicare and Social Security spending. It would shift some of the burden from the government to individuals and introduce, among other things, a voucher system for Medicare. The result? Ryan has attracted just nine Republican cosponsors and zero Democrats. Small-government gospel or not, the overwhelming majority of Ryan's colleagues won't risk being anywhere in the vicinity of the truth on this one, especially in an election year.

Next: Health Care »

HEALTH CARE
When President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress last September to push for health-care reform, Republicans engaged in a quiet protest. They brought along copies of what they said was a GOP health-care bill, and waved them at the president to show that they too had a plan, and it was better than his. It made for good TV, but in reality there was no unified GOP bill; the Republicans hadn't actually agreed on an alternative to the Democratic reforms they were working so hard to kill.

Since then, House Republicans have come forward with a plan to rival the Democratic versions now sitting idle in the House and Senate. It has a catchy name—the Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act—and its authors proudly say that they got the job done in a mere 219 pages of Washington-speak; the House Democratic version weighs in at 1,990 pages. The GOP bill would prevent insurers from dropping people from their rolls if they got sick; ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get insurance; and require insurance companies to let children stay on their parents' plans until they reach their mid-20s.

Nothing new there. All those provisions are part of the Democratic bills. But that's where the similarities end. The two parties have different goals in reforming health care. Democrats believe that more government regulation of the health-insurance industry is needed to make sure just about everyone can get coverage while at the same time controlling rising costs. Republicans want the opposite: to free health-insurance companies from regulation and allow market forces to bring down costs and provide affordable insurance options.

To do this, Republicans would allow insurers to sell policies across state lines and encourage small businesses to band together to leverage their bargaining power. Democrats aren't necessarily opposed to this idea. "That is why we created the national insurance exchange," says Democratic Rep. John Dingell, who argues that creating a marketplace where both individuals and small businesses can shop for insurance plans "will spread risks, reduce costs, and help everyone get into the system." But there are big differences in how the two parties envision this working. Democrats favor one vast nationwide pool and would require insurers to offer plans that meet government minimum requirements for coverage and costs so the industry can't steer the old and sick into more expensive plans with stingier benefits.

Republicans see that as intrusive government meddling. They want a system of small, self-selecting pools of people with similar needs. The free market will see to it that insurance companies meet demand, they say—a claim that is met with skepticism by many economists and health-care analysts, who note that it hasn't worked that way in places where such ideas have been tried. "Republicans trust the American people to do what's best for themselves, instead of turning decisions over to a bureaucrat," says Boehner's spokesman, Michael Steel.

Take genuine philosophical differences and layer on this sort of chest-thumping, and it's not hard to see why health-care reform, once considered a sure thing this year, now seems anything but. It's also not hard to see why the public is fed up. According to the new newsweek Poll, Americans say they oppose Obama's health-care plan 51 to 37 percent. Yet they overwhelmingly favor its specific provisions: 73 percent want to require businesses to offer insurance; 78 percent are in favor of requiring insurance companies to cover everyone, regardless of their health; and 81 percent like the idea of insurance exchanges. Still, when those polled were told that those things are part of Obama's plan, support jumped just 10 percent.

Next: Foreign Policy »

FOREIGN POLICY
Oddly enough—given the sharp exchanges between Obama and John McCain during the 2008 campaign—this is probably the area of policy where there are the fewest disagreements between the parties. That may be because it's where Obama has tacked most rightward since taking office, blunting opposition. Whereas Republicans pounded the administration last summer for its months-long review of the war in Afghanistan, now the White House appears to be having some success in combating the Taliban and persuading Pakistan to crack down hard on militants. One sticking point: Obama's insistence that he'll start bringing troops home from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011—a deadline McCain and other Republican hawks oppose.

On Iran, after a long, not very successful effort at outreach, Obama is likewise taking a tougher line on sanctions. On China, he announced new arms sales to Taiwan and met last week with the Dalai Lama, quieting conservative critics who said he was too soft on the communist regime. All these policies mesh with GOP goals. Even Dick Cheney admitted that he approves of Obama's direction in Afghanistan, and most Republicans support the president's slow, cautious Iraq-withdrawal timetable.

Next: Terrorism »

TERRORISM
Now here is where the serious disagreements set in. Few issues have caused more acrimony between Republicans and Democrats than what to do with detainees still being held at Guantánamo Bay and with other captured terrorist suspects. President Obama—like President Bush and McCain—wants to close Gitmo, in part because it has become a propaganda tool for Al Qaeda and its allies. Many Republicans want to keep it open, if only to prevent Obama from carrying out his intention of moving some of the men to prisons within the United States. Republican leaders are even more strongly opposed to the administration's plan to try terror suspects in federal civilian courts instead of military tribunals.

The dispute over the prisoners comes down to a core disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, and one that isn't easily bridged: should captured terror suspects be regarded as criminals subject to the U.S. criminal-justice system, or as enemy combatants subject to military justice? This divide was highlighted at the end of last year with the arrest of failed Christmas Eve bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Republicans sharply criticized the Obama administration when it was revealed that the terror suspect had been read his Miranda rights and was provided a lawyer. "He should have been declared an enemy combatant so that he could have been questioned without a lawyer for a much longer period of time," says Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee. "At the right time, after all intelligence was obtained, there should have been a discussion about whether criminal charges or a military commission was appropriate."

Another lingering source of tension: interrogation methods. President Obama has banned the use of harsh techniques, and with the exception of Dick Cheney, who still declares himself a "big supporter of waterboarding," Republicans have largely backed away from that practice. But some GOP leaders continue to endorse the use of other extreme interrogation methods—stress positions, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation—that Obama stopped. "The government should be able to use any interrogation techniques that are within the boundaries of our laws and moral values, and are effective," says Bond. He would still prohibit waterboarding, but says vaguely that he "would allow our interrogators to use other lawful and effective techniques, even if they are not in the Army Field Manual." Republicans insist that revealing which methods can and cannot be used only helps the enemy train against U.S. interrogation. Bond and other Republicans argue it is important for the United States to keep its options open. If Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri were to be captured, Bond says, U.S. officials must have the ability to declare them enemy combatants so that they can be "interrogated until we have obtained every bit of intelligence they possess."

Next: Education »

EDUCATION
Since the 1980s, Republicans have led the debate on education. They have introduced some of the most successful reform ideas for improving failing schools: increasing competition and choice, raising standards and expectations, and relying on hard data to determine what works and what doesn't. Democrats, long focused on school integration and protecting teachers' unions, were slow to come around. Over the last decade, as proof grew that some of these ideas were working, Democrats began embracing many reforms first floated by the GOP. Republicans still love, and Democrats by and large still hate, the idea of vouchers, which allow families to use tax dollars to pay for private school. That aside, there's more agreement than not.

So when the Obama administration rolled out its $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative—offering rewards to the states that had the most ambitious school-reform programs—they expected an enthusiastic Republican response. Instead, nearly every Republican in Congress wound up voting against the plan because it was part of the president's stimulus package.

There may be hope for cooperation in the future. Most Republicans have good things to say about Education Secretary Arne Duncan; like Obama, he sides with the GOP on charter schools. And Republicans largely approve of the president's plans for revising Bush's No Child Left Behind program. Checker Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and an education official in the Reagan administration, believes that amid all the acrimony in Washington, "education may be the one significant policy domain where the Obama agenda is winning reasonable points from a lot of Republicans, myself included." It may not be enough to stop the shouting. But it's a place to start.

With Mark Hosenball, Pat Wingert, and Sarah Kliff

After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In

Garry Wills

During the 2008 primary campaigns, there was a constant muted roar telling Barack Obama to become more aggressive, to answer wild allegations against him, to “stand up to” Hillary Clinton or his other rivals. He rightly saw that would boomerang against him. The last thing he could appear was an angry black man. Harry Reid, with his derided comments in the book Game Change, was basically right. It was helpful that Obama, the first black man with a realistic chance at the presidency, was lighter skinned and better spoken than, say, an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. He was the anti-Sharpton, not railing against American racism. He was more a Sidney Poitier than a Shirley Chisholm.

He was hopeful, optimistic, patriotic—all necessary qualities in the mold-breaker; he was soothing, not threatening. He promised to unite red and blue states, to end a period of bitter divisiveness in Washington. To many it mattered more that he was the anti-Bush than that he was the anti-Sharpton.

The Great Leap

By Christopher Hayes

This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.

December 22, 2009

AVENGING ANGELS

In the heart of downtown Chongqing, a sprawling city-state in Western China on the banks of the Yangtze River, a six-story tower commemorates those who died in what the Chinese call "the anti-Japanese war." After Japan invaded in 1937, the government moved the capital of China upriver from Nanjing to Chongqing. That decision brought with it Japanese bombs, and the city was destroyed during the war. A year after Mao Zedong founded the New China in 1949, he commemorated the fallen with the People's Liberation Memorial Tower. I was told by a guide at the city's exhibition center that just twenty years ago the memorial was the tallest building in the city. Today, the tower sits in the shadow of at least three mountainous skyscrapers in the central business district. Situated at the intersection of a pedestrian shopping mall, the tower looms about as large on the Chongqing skyline as a hotdog stand on Manhattan's.

My first trip to China--sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation--came just over a month after the People's Republic celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Those six decades can be cleaved in half: the first act, 1949-78, were the years of Mao, famine and the cultural revolution; the second, the three decades since then, the years of Deng, "reforms" and the "opening up," as the Chinese call it. And yet as far as China has come in terms of wealth (and the concentration thereof), it remains a very poor country: it ranks 100 among the world's nations in terms of per capita GDP, according to the IMF. "Our biggest challenge is not from without but from within," Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told us, citing (obliquely, as the Chinese we talked to were wont to do) the potential for instability as China continues on its trajectory. "It has become the consensus of the elites that China should stay on the right track: the past thirty years have resulted in remarkable achievements in all aspects of China. We hope that in the same vein, but in different emphasis, China could have another thirty years."

But is another thirty years like the past thirty even possible? The third act of New China begins as a world financial crisis reveals the deep flaws of global neoliberal capitalism and as a diminishing fossil fuel supply and rising global temperatures escalate the competition for resources. Meanwhile, China is in the midst of the largest project of industrialization and urbanization in human history, one that requires massive amounts of capital and fossil fuel. It's like watching a jeep race up a mountain road as an avalanche begins to cascade downward from above.

At a tour of a car factory in Chongqing, the guide from Chang'an Motors pointed to the boxy gray minivans rolling off the assembly line and, beaming, said, "There are 800 million Chinese peasants who need these cars!"

He's right, of course. China "should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom," as Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, told us. But 800 million new cars--think about that for a moment.

What's happening in China is at once awe-inspiring and monstrous. Its mixture of planning and markets, autocracy and federalism, competence and corruption both supports and refutes every argument one could make about models of political economy. There is a risk, after two weeks in a country of 1.3 billion people, of falling prey to false certainties: like a traveler airlifted onto the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro who returns home to tell everyone that Africa is covered in snow.

This danger was compounded by the fact that the trip was sponsored by an independent, Hong Kong-based nonprofit whose founder, Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chinese chief executive of Hong Kong, is very close to the Chinese leadership; and our hosts on the mainland side, who chaperoned us from interview to interview, were Communist Party members and former government officials. We had a few painfully staged interactions with "ordinary people" (including an elderly tangerine farmer who couldn't remember the year of a specific agricultural reform but knew that it was during the "5th plenary of the 16th Central Committee").

We did, however, have an opportunity to speak with dozens of members of the Chinese elite: officials, academics and businessmen. And China happens to be a country where the elites hold tremendous power. Indeed, they seem to have seamlessly melded Leninist vanguardism with American-style best-and-brightest meritocracy: "Let me put it simply," said former Shanghai mayor and current president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xu Kuangdi. "Most successful businessmen or scholars or engineers--they have become party members of the CPC."

China's New Deal

There is no formal social contract that regulates the relationship between members of this ruling class and the people they rule, but there does seem to be an implicit one. It is roughly this: we (the government) provide you (the citizens) with 8 to10 percent annual GDP growth, 24 million new jobs a year and the chance to win the capitalist lottery of sending your son or daughter off to a prestigious school with the promise of a life of industrialized luxury. In exchange: you don't question the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is not the easiest contract for the government to uphold, and it has already shown some signs of fraying. As recently as 2007, there were 80,000 protests a year in China, and the Internet has given a platform to increasingly rambunctious critics of government policies. The most potent issue is corruption, which captured wide public attention in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when many blamed corruption for the fact that school buildings that collapsed had dodged building codes. Several Chinese officials told us corruption was the biggest threat the party faces, the "threat from within," as one put it. Despite high-profile "crackdowns" (such as a trial currently under way in Chongqing involving 9,000 suspects), a recent China News Agency poll shows that corruption remains the number-one issue on the minds of Chinese citizens.

Corruption aside, there are also the raw economic challenges of maintaining hypergrowth, particularly at a moment of global contraction. Exports make up 35 percent of Chinese GDP; in the past year they fell by 25 percent. There are 6 million recent college graduates who need to find jobs. One Chinese hedge fund manager showed us an article for a newspaper about new graduates flooding a job fair, where the ratio of attendees to jobs was 7.5 to 1. What would happen, I asked one local party official in Yichang, a city near the infamous Three Gorges Dam, if unemployment in China went to 10 percent? Before he answered by saying that such a situation would be impossible under the current system, one of our chaperones, a very savvy diplomat who had served in the foreign ministry, leaned over to me and said, sotto voce, "The government would collapse." He chuckled after he said it, but I think he was only half joking.

When you talk to Chinese officials, they seem competent, focused and obsessed with stability (if also, sometimes, arrogant and pedantic). But occasionally you can glimpse the dangers and threats to the established order that lurk just outside the frame. "Chinese government officials face a lot of pressures," Wen Tianping, the spokesman for Chongqing's municipal government, told us. "We work under extreme pressures and we have a lot of difficulties."

The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.

The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.

"They can be migrant workers forever," said Paul Mak, a Chinese-American businessman in Shanghai who has worked for the American company Mary Kay in Shanghai for twelve years. "A migrant worker cannot become a resident of Shanghai. Now if you have a college degree you can come but not without education. You have a class of people in this limbo."

This marginal population freaks out the Chinese authorities because they desperately wish to avoid the experience of so many other developing countries, from Brazil to India, which have seen the growth of massive, ungovernable miserable slums in their largest cities. "We have learned many lessons from other countries, including the so-called Latin American trap during the urbanization process," said Wen. "The governments didn't think thoroughly about urbanization. Huge numbers of villagers came to the cities and they couldn't find a job. That's why there are so many slums." In a concession to its inability to control the migrant flow, the government in Shanghai recently announced reforms that allow migrant workers to send their children to public school in the city where they are working. As important as it is to keep unauthorized migrants at bay, creating a vast migrant underclass of uneducated children is an outcome the government decided to avoid.

Atop the urban-rural divide is a stark class divide as well. Peasants are the original Chinese revolutionary class, hundreds of millions of whom remain chained to a life of crushing preindustrial penury while oligarchs in Shanghai and Beijing live lives that would make even a Goldman Sachs banker blush. One night in Shanghai we dined at a glass-enclosed restaurant on the roof of an art museum where entrees went for upward of $40. In 2007 per capita net income for China's approximately 800 million farmers was just $50 a month. Managing the flow and settlement of people from country to town is also a means of managing the potentially most explosive source of social tensions.

Making No Small Plans

This is where Chongqing comes in. "Chongqing is a miniature of the whole of China," said municipal spokesman Wen. Roughly the size of Maine, it contains 31 million people, one major city (Chongqing, population 5 million) and a number of satellite cities. In 1997 it was elevated to provincial status so that the municipal government could focus on the internal migration from rural to urban areas, all within its municipal boundaries. "The central government hopes to have an experiment here to explore ways to address the problems we are facing: where should the 20 million people go on such a large scale?"

The key, in the eyes of the government that runs Chongqing, is planning. "We have plans, timetables and goals in our minds whenever we do anything," said Qian Lee, who works in the local government's foreign economic outreach bureau.

"We as a government give guidance and sort of categorize those who want to come to the cities," Wen said. "There are several tiers.... The first group of villagers will go to the downtown center. The second group will go to six regional centers we are building. And the third group will go to the urban places that are closest to their home villages, such as the country towns and townships.... We have thirty-one district centers and 103 towns." For each of these three tiers--downtown Chongqing, the six satellites and the thirty-one district centers--the government has annual targeted population levels for the next three years.

Chongqing is so proud of this planned vision it has constructed a $50 million exhibition hall on the banks of the Yangtze that showcases its past, present and future. Its centerpiece is an 892-square-meter scale model of the city. The tour guide flips a switch, and a comic-book night descends on the model; the rivers glow indigo. She flips another switch and lights up several dozen clusters of buildings, future projections of structures that will be completed in the next five years, then the next ten. Finally she puts all the lights on to reveal the future of Chongqing in all its miniature glory.

The tour ends in a room with a 360-degree, full-screen projection of a computer-rendered flyover of the future metropolis. Unlike the real smogbound and dreary Chongqing, it is bathed in piercing sunlight, and because of software limitations or of an oversight by the creators, not one of the humans who populate this new world--its expensive waterside condos, outdoor stadium and grand office building lobbies--is Chinese.

The ethos that animates this exhibition hall, a High Modernist faith in progress brought about by "scientific" planning, is so distant from the demoralized America of 2009 that my time in the city felt like a visit to Chicago in 1890 on the eve of the World's Fair. (Shanghai will be hosting the World Expo next year.) There's no larger representation of this animating faith than the Three Gorges Dam, which we toured one afternoon. The project took fifteen years and cost $30 billion. It will eventually provide up to 4 percent of China's electricity (the equivalent of about 500 coal-fired power plants). In order to build it, 1.25 million people were forced out of their homes on the banks of the Yangzte, and 1,500 archaeological sites, including ancient temples, were drowned.

To the Chinese elites we talked with, though, the future is everything. Although Chinese civilization (and administrative bureaucracy) is 5,000 years old, no one seemed interested in talking about anything that occurred before 1978. Such intense futurism is easy to lampoon, but it also seems the only worldview one could hold on to in the face of the challenges Chinese planners must overcome. Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain. It is no small thing to design a sewer system for a city growing at that pace. Just ask the 10 million residents of Mumbai's slums, whose lives are literally mired in shit because there is no access to a sewage system. So if the dark side of Chongqing is the triumph of Robert Moses's vision over that of Jane Jacobs, the silver lining is that--at a technical level, at least--this vision is pursued and executed with what seemed like an impressive degree of mastery.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

The Chinese affection for urban planning is closely connected to their belief in the virtues of economic planning. The fable we are told about China, particularly by neoliberals, who hold it up as a model of how capitalism has delivered millions from poverty, is that the market reforms have produced growth and prosperity by throwing off the shackles of state intervention. It's a deeply incomplete story: the commanding heights of the economy (telecom, energy, transportation and, most important, finance) remain in state control. There are four major state-owned banks in China, which together have an 80 percent market share.

Planning of the sort undertaken by the central government is viewed in the United States as a disastrous and discredited anachronism, as if the Chinese national weather service were relying on astrology. But whatever inefficiencies the heavy state footprint introduces, the largely government-run financial sector has protected China not only from the ravages of the financial crisis but also the kind of massive misallocation of capital that the global financial system has produced in the West over the past ten years. In fact, Qian Lee, who works for the municipal government in Chongqing, couldn't help but gloat about the benefits of the Chinese approach: "This has been discussed by Internet users in China who say when Obama comes to China that he can discuss with Hu Jintao about the importance of plans. This is something I think we can present to our American friend."

In dealing with the effects of the downturn, the state has devoted itself with impressive vigor to making sure growth is maintained and unemployment doesn't spike: the central government passed a 4 trillion RMB stimulus program (70 percent of its annual budget), the state-owned banks flooded the economy with investment capital and state-owned enterprises were directed not to lay anyone off. The result is that most, if not nearly all of the growth China experienced this year almost certainly came from state-led investment. Weighed down by the collapse of American consumption and the worst global recession since China began its reforms, the state was able to drag the economy over the 8 percent finish line, holding up its part of the unwritten social contract. This is no small accomplishment, but it is an open question whether it can replicate this feat next year, should global demand continue to be depressed.

Like the Death Star, the corporatist behemoth that is the Chinese economy is intimidating to behold, but it is not without its vulnerabilities. The abominable lack of a social safety net helps produce the high savings rate that most economists say stands as the single biggest obstacle to making the necessary transition to an economy driven more by domestic consumption (not to mention basic justice and security for hundreds of millions of people). This is connected to the much deeper problem of distribution, which presents economic and political challenges, although those two categories bear a strange, sometimes mysterious relationship to each other. "We do worry about equality," says Shanghai Institutes for International Studies president Yang Jiemian. "We do need to focus on distribution, allocation of rights, taxes, hospitals, healthcare."

When you raise the issue of distribution with other Chinese officials, they acknowledge the problem (they are nothing if not vigilant about emerging threats to their managerial order) but caution that achieving a more equal society will take time. Xu Kuangdi, former Shanghai mayor and party bigwig, was just one of several men we spoke with who cited Deng Xiaoping's exhortation to members of the party when he launched his reforms: "Let some people get rich first."

The question is, Just how many is "some," how rich is "rich," and how long does "first" last?

China has undoubtedly made some progress on this front: improving rural healthcare, ending taxes on farmers and even passing a labor law with a minimum wage, overtime and other protections (over the objections, I hasten to point out, of the US Chamber of Commerce). But while everything in China on the business side seems to move as fast as Shanghai's Maglev train, which goes 430 kilometers an hour, the project of equality, justice and social welfare proceeds much more slowly.

Xu argued that this is all part of the plan: "Let's look at our neighboring Asian countries," he said. "South Korea: its peak developing speed was reached using military rule.... Indonesia was successful during the reign of Suharto but recently it faces stalemate and difficulties." The reason that democracy is an obstacle to economic progress, Xu said, is that "the poor people want to divide the property of the rich people.... If we Chinese copied the directly elected situation today, people will say, 'I want everyone to have a good job.' Someone will say, 'I will divide the property of the rich people to poor people,' and he will be elected. It is useless: parity will not solve the problem of economic development. That is why we are taking a gradual and step-by-step approach in reform. As Mr. Deng said, we will cross the river by touching the stones. We will not get ourselves drowned, and we will cross the river."

While Xu, as a party leader, had the latitude to speak in explicit terms, almost no one else discussed politics so frankly. In China, economics stands in for politics as the substance of public debate and conversation. You cannot call for elections or for a free Tibet, but you can publish heated polemics about the government's decisions to continue to purchase US treasury bonds.

Where and When East Meets West

But Wang Hui, the lone dissident we spoke with during our time in China, says the state's attempts to maintain a strong and stark dividing line between legitimate critiques of its economic policy-making and illegitimate critiques of its very foundation doesn't always work. China's nominally socialist orientation, Wang argued, has provided many of its citizens with a vocabulary with which to criticize the state. "The paradoxical situation is that many ordinary people can use [Marxism] to defend their own interest because there is a real contradiction between the theoretical claim and what happens in reality."

A participant in the Tiananmen uprising, Wang spent time in re-education camps before going on to edit an independent journal that criticized the government from, for lack of a better word, the left. We met for lunch in a restaurant on the campus of Beijing's Tsinghua University, and as Wang spoke about politics in China, our two chaperones grew more and more uncomfortable, staring down at their plates in silence as if Wang were sharing graphic details of his sex life. It was a reminder that explicitly political debates are taboo. But Wang's point is that there is a public sphere in China, cramped though it may be, and it's beginning to have an effect: if an issue seizes the public's attention, the government now finds itself forced to respond. "It's really up to whether or not you have the capacity to break through that certain kind of barrier and create some kind of space" for public debate, he said.

A few days earlier, over dinner in Chongqing, Zhang Haiqing, a local municipal official, complained to me at length about the uncivil and vicious attacks that local bloggers were incessantly launching toward the government over this or that proposal. He almost sounded like an American politician.

We tend to view China as posing an alternative and threatening model for the future, one that's by turns seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after a while I wondered if we aren't in some way converging with our supposed rival. China has managed the transition from a repressive, authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oligarchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace.

On one of my last mornings in Beijing, I stumbled upon the "Better English" section of China Daily, which offers readers chances to learn new English phrases. One of them was, "Maybe I'm going out on a limb, but I think we still have to invest in it."

I may be going out on a limb, but I don't think either country is going to be able to make this system work.

About Christopher Hayes

Christopher Hayes is The Nation's Washington, DC Editor. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation,The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. He is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation. His wife works in the White House Counsel's office.

One year later: How Obama has learned to become a wartime commander in chief

Image by tsevis via Flickr

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

Through a haze of grief, Dona Griffin watched President Obama turn toward her, opening his arms to offer a hug.

A midnight knock on her door the previous evening had brought her from her home in Terre Haute, Ind., to the morgue at Dover Air Force Base and into a presidential embrace. The body of her son, Army Sgt. Dale R. Griffin, and those of 17 other Americans killed in Afghanistan waited in the frigid hold of a military cargo plane standing on the runway.

Obama had flown in by helicopter from Washington. Nearing a decision about whether to send thousands more troops to the battlefield, he wanted to witness the homecoming of dead soldiers.

The visit was part of an eclectic self-education program Obama has undertaken to become a wartime commander in chief. He has emerged as a president uncomfortable with the swagger and rhetoric traditionally used to rally troops, favoring an image of public solemnity as he wrestles with the moral consequences of war. Republicans have criticized him for being reticent in the face of crisis and for taking too long to set strategy.

Image by Lisa Norwood via Flickr

But even as Obama has sought to convey an image of a deliberate leader preoccupied with the battle's human toll, he has used military power at least as aggressively as his Republican predecessor did during the waning years of his administration. In his first year in office, Obama has set in motion plans to triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan; expanded operations against U.S. enemies in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen; and, in one early instance of his willingness to use deadly force, authorized Special Forces snipers to kill three Somali pirates holding an American hostage.

The politician who brashly opposed the Iraq invasion has had more than 443 U.S. service members die while serving under his command. On a chilly October evening, in a stark waiting room at Dover, he leaned toward Dona Griffin less than 24 hours after she learned that her 29-year-old son had been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

"I found myself with my hand in his, and he was asking if there's anything he could do," she recalled. "I put my left hand behind his left elbow, and leaned forward, and whispered in his ear, 'Mr. President, please don't leave our troops hanging.' "

Hoops with troops

In the fall of 2002, as the Bush administration rallied the country for an invasion of Iraq, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, appeared at an antiwar demonstration in Chicago's Federal Plaza.

"I'm not opposed to all wars," he told a crowd made up of many who were. "I'm opposed to dumb wars."

Obama never served in the military, and early in the speech he cited his maternal grandfather as a kind of surrogate. A World War II veteran who "fought in Patton's Army," Stanley Dunham embodied for him the necessity to fight those who will not yield to anything but force.

"I think he came to office with a sophisticated understanding of the use of power and when it is necessary," said David Axelrod, a senior adviser who began working with Obama the year he delivered the "dumb war" speech. "What no one can understand before coming to the office, though, is the gravity that surrounds those decisions."

Obama prepared early. As a candidate, he made several unannounced visits to retired Gen. Colin L. Powell at his Alexandria office, seeking advice about leadership and command from perhaps the most famous soldier of his generation. Powell had worked at the highest levels of government, in uniform and as a civilian, and Obama trusted him to offer counsel free of partisan prejudice.

"He understood that this was something he'd never done before and that he'd have to learn it on the job," said Powell, who said Obama has "done well as commander in chief." "He was also confident in his ability to surround himself with people who could help him learn it."

On the campaign trail, Obama was perceived as vulnerable on national security, which his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), sought to make his own. The son and grandson of Navy admirals, McCain was a war hero whom most Americans could envision as commander in chief.

Obama, a first-term U.S. senator of cool temperament, was harder to imagine in the role. In July 2008, he stepped off a plane at a U.S. staging base in Kuwait for his first encounter with troops in a theater of war as a possible next president. It was an opportunity to put some doubts to rest.

Obama was tired from the long flight, and a hip injury limited a basketball game to an informal shoot-around session. But the Senate staff members accompanying him were stunned when, on arriving at the gym, they discovered that more than 1,000 service members had packed the stands to watch. Some of Obama's aides worried that a poor showing would yield images of Commander Air Ball.

"Just make a shot or two, and that'll be all right," Antony J. Blinken, then the director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff and now Vice President Biden's national security adviser, told Obama.

"Oh, I'll make the shot," he answered.

He squared up behind the three-point arc for a jump shot that zipped through the net. The troops erupted, and a potentially awkward encounter ended in a moment of schoolyard glory, with future commander and troops appearing largely as equals. As president, months later, he would take a more paternal view of his relationship with his forces.

A change of mind

Upon taking office, Obama moved quickly to imprint his view of war on the vast national security apparatus, drawing criticism from conservatives in doing so. Within days, he banned the use of torture in interrogation and ordered the closing of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan. 22, 2010 -- a deadline that will be missed.

The executive orders were part of a review of the Bush-era protocols that framed the "global war on terror," a term Obama immediately discouraged his advisers from using because he said it overstated al-Qaeda's strength. To the former constitutional law lecturer, the refinements in language and policy strengthened the moral argument for war.

Obama, in his new role, disregarded the advice of his military commanders and heeded the demands of civil libertarians after a campaign in which he promised a more transparent government.

Over the initial objection of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, the president allowed the release in April of the Bush-era memos that served as the legal justification for what were called "enhanced interrogation methods." That same month, the administration announced that it would comply with a court order demanding the release of as many as 2,000 photographs depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and other U.S.-run detention sites.

Gen. Ray Odierno, his commander in Iraq, opposed the decision, and Obama viewed a sampling of the photos. He changed his mind, saying that making the pictures public would "further inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in danger."

"There are more than 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm's way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as commander in chief," Obama said in a speech at the National Archives explaining his decision.

Civil libertarians, with whom Obama had once sided, felt betrayed. Republicans saw the decisions as an unworkable compromise. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute within minutes of Obama's address, former vice president Richard B. Cheney said, "The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism."

He added: "But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed."

Military relationships

In May, Obama fired his commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, becoming the first president since Harry S. Truman to relieve a commanding general in a theater of war. He acted largely on advice from Gates, and a senior adviser described the firing as "a significant moment" in making the battle his own.

Obama replaced him with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who outlined a plan calling for vastly more resources at a time of rising deficits and public opposition to the war at home.

The general also began selling his plan publicly before Obama had carried out what would become a three-month strategy review. During an appearance in London, McChrystal said a change in his strategy that would require fewer troops and a more narrowly defined mission would be "shortsighted."

A day later, Obama, who was in Denmark pitching Chicago's Olympic bid, summoned the general for a meeting there. The two had met in person only once previously, and Obama's aides said he did not use the brief meeting to criticize McChrystal for his public remarks, even in the privacy of Air Force One.

A senior administration official said the president was "frustrated" by the military's public appeal, but Obama, unwilling to jeopardize relations with his Afghanistan commander, kept those feelings private.

Obama intended a more formal, arm's-length relationship with his generals than the one favored by George W. Bush, who spoke frequently with his then-commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, even though several officers were above him at the time.

"This is a president who is going to respect the chain of command," said another senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president's thinking. "He feels like it is the most efficient way to receive information and maintain control of the process."

Commander to troops

During White House deliberations on national security, Obama has kept his own counsel as he has made decisions, according to his aides and senior officials. But this methodical style, during the fall review of the Afghanistan strategy, provoked criticism -- mainly from Republicans -- that he was dithering.

Obama's Democratic Party worried that a novice commander in chief would succumb to the wishes of his generals at the expense of his wide-ranging domestic reform agenda, which was already threatened by the rising costs of war.

Aides said Obama looked to President John F. Kennedy's relationship with the military, in particular how he managed the Cuban missile crisis when his military leaders urged a quick strike on the island, an act he resisted. One senior adviser said Obama valued Kennedy's "think before you shoot" ethos.

He also drew from the experience of GOP presidents. "What he took from Eisenhower is that everything you do as commander in chief must be seen for how it affects your other goals," a senior administration official said.

Those goals were also threatened by events outside the Situation Room. As reports of a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Tex., arrived on Nov. 5, Obama worried chiefly about morale in the exhausted ranks. The largest Army post in the country had churned with overseas deployments for eight years.

That Maj. Nidal M. Hasan was Muslim and that he allegedly opened fire at a staging area for departing troops, killing 13 people, complicated the message Obama was called on to deliver to an angry community. For months as president, he had described Islam as a religion of peace.

Under a late-fall Texas sun, a breeze lightly flapping the American and unit flags behind him, Obama eulogized each of the dead by name. As he spoke, he had already decided that tens of thousands of additional troops would be needed in Afghanistan, and in the cadences of a slow march, he ended with a tribute meant for the military more broadly.

"We need not look to the past for greatness," he said, "because it is before our very eyes."

The speech, one aide said, was intended to be a message "from the commander in chief directly to his troops."

The next day was Veterans Day, and Obama spent a rain-soaked morning at Arlington National Cemetery, where, following tradition, he laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He then strayed from script to walk, umbrella-less, among the bleach-white headstones of Section 60, where the dead from Afghanistan and Iraq are buried. He talked with the few family members he found there.

Hundreds of miles away in Terre Haute, the town gathered to bury Dale Griffin, the young sergeant whose remains Obama had helped receive at Dover more than a week earlier.

"He opened himself up to understand," Dona Griffin said. "I respect that. Some lessons are harder than others and we'd rather avoid them. But I was thankful he was there."

'Bookends'

Traveling in Asia over the next nine days, Obama began to consider a pair of seemingly incongruous speeches that he was scheduled to give by the end of the year.

In the first, he planned to announce an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and a date for a withdrawal to begin. In the next, he would accept the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had sheepishly declared earlier that he did not deserve. He began to think of the two, in the words of a senior adviser, as "bookends."

One evening on Air Force One, Obama called to his cabin chief speechwriter Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, who had been helping draft his foreign policy speeches since 2007. He wanted to talk about his Nobel lecture, as the acceptance speech is known.

"He said he didn't want to give the same speech on nonproliferation, climate change and other issues associated with the prize," Rhodes recalled. "He wanted to step back and give a speech that wasn't just of this moment in time but would last in history."

Obama asked them to prepare for him a list of readings that Rhodes described as a "modern-day take on war and peace -- from Churchill to King." He also asked for writings by theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Reinhold Niebuhr on the morality of war.

On his return to Washington, Obama worked through the final details of his Afghanistan strategy and chose the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as the venue for his announcement. The audience of cadets was the future officers corps in Afghanistan, and his advisers said he wanted to speak to them directly.

"He was very clear to me that we were not going to beat our chests in the speech," Rhodes said. "He told me we were not going to treat war as a glorious endeavor to be celebrated."

With his Dover visit still vivid, Obama told the cadets that "as your commander in chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined and worthy of your service."

"I know that this decision asks even more of you -- a military that, along with your families, has already borne the heaviest of all burdens," he said, and afterward, waded into the crowd of gray tunics to shake hands and talk.

In the following days, the president had his staff summon some clergy members for a meeting. He wanted them to hear the reasoning behind his Afghanistan strategy. And he wanted his staff to solicit their opinions on the ethical implications of war as he prepared his "bookend" speech in Oslo, scheduled for the following week.

Peg Chemberlin, president of the National Council of Churches, was among about 25 religious leaders who assembled at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building the first week of December. She described the hours-long session as "more than just a briefing, but a discussion" on the morality of war. White House staff members took notes for the president.

Obama wrote his Nobel address, which he delivered Dec. 10 under the vaulted ceilings of Oslo's City Hall, around the theme of "just war."

"I think this is a president who sees a theological element in his work," Chemberlin said. "Would I have liked to have been more deeply and more often involved in his thinking on this? Yes. But we were happy to be a part of it when we were."

During vacation, a wait

Throughout the year, Obama has tried at home and overseas to define the country's enemy in a way that preserves the viability of his outreach to the Islamic world.

He warned in Oslo that "no holy war can ever be a just war," citing causes from the Crusades through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to make his case. Just over two weeks later, on Christmas Day, a 23-year-old Muslim man from Nigeria allegedly tried to bomb a Northwest Airlines plane as it approached Detroit.

On vacation in Hawaii at the time, Obama took several days before addressing the nation. By waiting, he had hoped to deprive al-Qaeda of a public relations victory of a presidential overreaction. To his critics, Obama was absent as commander in chief when the country needed reassurance.

Behind the scenes, the United States twice that month -- on Dec. 17 and 24 -- provided intelligence and other assistance to Yemeni forces battling the same branch of al-Qaeda that had sent the Nigerian.

Back in Washington, Obama chastised senior officials for the lapses that could allow someone to come so close to bringing down an airliner. In contrast with his quiet handling of McChrystal, a White House aide emphasized to reporters that Obama had called the oversights "a screw-up." In public, Obama spoke angrily about "systemic failures," and while he criticized his intelligence agencies for faulty analysis, he declared that "ultimately, the buck stops with me."

"We are at war," he said.