Joe Biden, White House Truth Teller - Newsweek.com

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From health-care reform to Afghanistan, Joe Biden has bucked Obama—as only a good Veep can.

By Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas | NEWSWEEK

Published Oct 10, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Oct 19, 2009

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, "Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?" Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. "And how much will we spend on Pakistan?" Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. "Well, by my calculations that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?" The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

Back in March, Biden stood alone. When Obama announced that he was launching a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan—to develop the country and make its civilians safe from the Taliban—Biden was the only one of the president's top advisers to seriously question the wisdom of this course. The vice president even authored a short paper, called "Counterterrorism-Plus," outlining his case for a better-defined, more limited mission. The president listened but promised to review his policy again only after the Afghan election in August. Biden "didn't get a lot of traction internally," says a White House staffer familiar with the debate who did not want to be named discussing internal deliberations.

In the early days of the administration, Biden was a bit of a joke in some quarters of the White House. He was never the buffoonish character portrayed by late-night comics, but his off-message blurts were the source of eye-rolling and some irritation among the president's men and women. None of the gaffes was particularly damaging, but aides who'd been with Obama through the campaign knew that the president valued very tight control. Biden himself seemed wounded by the sniggering. Asked about his gaffes by a NEWSWEEK reporter last spring, he responded a little defensively, "A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me."

Biden can still be irrepressible and long-winded. But in the Oval Office he has learned to be more disciplined without losing his edge. His persistence and truth telling have paid off, and he's found a role for himself. On Afghanistan in particular, the vice president's once lonesome position now has high-level support. The president himself seems to be looking for a middle way—not pulling out of Afghanistan, but at the same time not sending in the more than 40,000 troops requested by the U.S. ground commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Biden has also played the gadfly on health care. He hasn't advocated a particular course of action, but rather has challenged the assumptions of others. "He says the things that others at the table don't want to talk about, or which they find uncomfortable," says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Across the board, Biden's real value to the president is not really his specific advice. It's his ability to stir things up. Senior government officials who have participated in small meetings with the president and vice president have noticed Obama and Biden engaged in a duet. "The president will lean over, and they will quietly talk to each other. Biden will then question someone, make comments, and the president just leans back and seems to be taking it all in before he speaks," Attorney General Eric Holder tells NEWSWEEK. Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff, describes the interaction like this: "President Obama is one of the world's greatest listeners; you can't tell what he is thinking. He's able to watch the VP ask tough questions and doesn't have to do that himself. [In that way] he doesn't have to reveal what he's thinking. That's very valuable."

After the election, Obama spoke of wanting a "team of rivals" in the White House. That sounds very Lincolnesque, but in the wired world of cable and bloggers, rivals (or, more typically, their staffers) can quickly become leakers and troublemakers. Presidents can soon come to feel embattled and besieged; the natural inclination is to surround the presidency with yes men and true believers. Biden is a truth teller, almost congenitally so, but he is no backstabber. There is an appealing, slightly vulnerable quality about his eagerness to please. He may run off at the mouth, but he is known for his loyalty. "If there were no gaffes, there'd be no Joe. He's someone you can't help but like," says Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It is significant that when Biden dissented on Afghanistan policy in the spring, he did not go running to the press with his opinions, and he quickly got on board with administration policy.

Biden and Obama did not instantly bond. As a junior senator, Obama was not an intimate of Biden, a six-term veteran and committee chairman. The two men were rivals for the Democratic nomination until Biden dropped out in the early primaries, and Obama chose Biden as his running mate partly because he was a safe political choice, reassuring to Joe Six-Pack voters who might find Obama a little haughty. But Obama knew that Biden could be a shrewd and pointed questioner, particularly on foreign policy. In the spring of 2008, when candidate Obama was regarded as a greenhorn on foreign policy, he surprised and impressed the pundits by deftly probing Gen. David Petraeus on Iraq policy at a congressional hearing. No one but Obama knew at the time that Biden had advised him on his line of questioning.

Offered the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket that August, Biden hesitated before saying yes. He was well aware of the professional dangers of the office—from the pronouncement of John Nance Garner, FDR's first vice president, that the job was "not worth a bucket of warm piss" to Dick Cheney's attempts to run a kind of shadow presidency. Neither prospect beckoned to Biden.

That fall he told The New Yorker that his model was Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to help the young John F. Kennedy navigate the shoals of Congress. It was an odd choice: LBJ was miserable, mocked by the Kennedys as "Uncle Cornpone," and Biden risked repeating his fate with the ambitious, smart guys around Obama. More wisely, Biden consulted Walter Mondale, the former senator who became Jimmy Carter's veep and was the first to insist on an office inside the White House, near the Oval Office. Mondale advised Biden to stake out his claim, to decide what he really wanted.

The answer was access. Biden did not want an agenda or an assigned policy task or a big staff. But he did want to be in the room when the decisions were made. Obama agreed and told him he wanted Biden's "unvarnished opinion." Recounting this moment to a NEWSWEEK reporter, Biden opened his arms wide and mock-bellowed, "You've got it!"

At first Obama may have felt that he'd gotten more than he bargained for. The two men are Mutt and Jeff, warm and a little verbose versus precise and a little too cool. After serving as a committee chairman, wielding his own gavel, Biden had trouble adjusting to the bureaucratic strictures of the vice presidency. "This is the first time I've had a boss in 37 years," he told NEWSWEEK in May. To his staff, he would sometimes confess that he had talked too long or said the wrong thing at a meeting with the president—that he had to sharpen his approach.

Less than a month into the Obama presidency, Biden forthrightly, if unwisely, declared that the new administration's economic plan had a "30 percent chance" of failure. Asked about this at a press conference, Obama smiled thinly and answered, "You know, I don't remember what Joe was referring to, not surprisingly." Obama's staffers, who were lined up along the back wall at the presser, snickered along with the press.

Biden felt insulted. Through staffers, Obama apologized, protesting that he had meant no disrespect. But at one of their regularly scheduled weekly lunches, Biden directly raised the incident with the president. The veep said he was trying to be more disciplined about his own remarks, but he asked that in return the president refrain from making fun (and require his staff to do likewise). He made the point that even the impression that the president was dissing him was not only bad for Biden, but bad for the administration. The conversation cleared the air, according to White House aides who did not want to be identified discussing a private -conversation.

To demonstrate their palship (and dampen the rumors of disaffection between them), the president and vice president were photographed at one point, sleeves rolled up, eating hamburgers together. Biden worked on discretion. Asked by NEWSWEEK as he flew on Air Force Two in the spring if he could describe any moments when he had influenced the president's thinking, Biden stared down at his hands for a few seconds. "I think I should let him tell you that," he finally said. "Good answer!" exclaimed his relieved communications director, Jay Carney.

Biden can get carried away gushing on about all the time he spends with the president ("Four hours a day!") and his close relations in the administration. ("Hillary Clinton!" Biden exclaims, throwing an arm in the air. "We've been friends for 20 years! Confidants!") But in fact his many friendships forged over the years are highly useful to Obama, who had spent just four years in Washington before becoming president, and half of that on the road campaigning. Biden "knows all the players," says Emanuel. On a trip to Europe and the Middle East this summer, Biden joked and guffawed with political leaders across two continents. He was also able to privately deliver bad news and the occasional scolding in a way the president never could. With the Russians in particular, the president and vice president played good cop–bad cop. Obama publicly declared that he wanted to establish a new era of good feeling with the Kremlin while Biden reminded the Russians that Washington was watching their territorial ambitions and human-rights record.

Biden is especially useful with his former colleagues in the Senate, where he showed an unusual willingness to reach across the aisle. He is still a regular in the Senate gym and dining room. "I've seen him so much, it's like he never left," says Sen. Arlen Specter, Democrat of Pennsylvania. Though Biden initially suggested that Obama might not want to try for health-care reform in his first year in office, the veep has been conscientiously rounding up votes for months. He also brought a dose of reality to the internal discussions over how far the administration could go. "He's been asking, 'What are the trade-offs here?'" says Emanuel. "Early on in the administration everyone thinks you can do everything everywhere. He was the one saying you need to make choices—choices within the health-care system and choices between that and other initiatives. By stating the uncomfortable—or stating the obvious if you've spent time in Congress—he helped people see with better clarity what the choices were, and the consequences of those choices." Emanuel likes to say that government is often a choice between bad and worse, and suggests Biden understands that as well as anyone in the administration.

That description perfectly captures the president's options on Afghanistan. In March, when Obama made his decision to back a counterinsurgency strategy, there was not a searching examination in the White House over the potential cost—in bodies, money, or political capital—or the real prospects for success. During the presidential campaign, Obama had declared that Afghanistan, not Iraq, was the right war, and so the assumption at the White House was that the president would have to make good on his words. He had a request for at least 30,000 more troops on his desk, and he wanted to get enough of them to Afghanistan in time to be of use for the August election. (He ultimately approved a troop increase of 21,000, to a total of 68,000.) Only Biden vigorously questioned whether America would have the patience or resources for a full-scale counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan over the long run. Obama said he'd review the situation again after the election.

In June, Obama appointed General McChrystal commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan (relieving Gen. David McKiernan, who was deemed to be insufficiently creative and forward-leaning by the Pentagon high command). The general was given 60 days to make a recommendation on how to implement the counterinsurgency strategy. McChrystal wrote a classified 66-page report (later leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post) calling for more than 40,000 additional troops and a rigorous attempt to cut down on civilian casualties. McChrystal warned that the situation was "deteriorating" and that, without reinforcements, "failure" was a real possibility.

In Washington, Biden "appeared to grow uncomfortable with the administration rushing to double down without thinking it through," says Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who served both Presidents Bush. Haass, who had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had written an op-ed in The New York Times on Aug. 20 arguing that Afghanistan was a "war of choice," not a "war of necessity"—refuting Obama's characterization in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that same week. Biden called Haass and began quizzing him, later inviting him down to dinner in Washington. "By late August, early September," says Haass, "Biden was pressing his case with the president and the other principals."

Biden has been incorrectly characterized as a dove who wants to pull out of Afghanistan. In fact, according to his "Counterterrorism-Plus" paper, he wants to maintain a large troop presence. He also favors a greater emphasis on training Afghan troops—and defending Kabul and Kandahar—than on chasing the Taliban around the countryside, and he wants more diplomatic efforts to try to peel away those Taliban who can be bought with money or other inducements (like political power). He is leery of massive attempts at nation building and more hopeful that the United States can work with local warlords than with the corrupt and inept central government in Kabul. On a grander strategic level, he wants to tilt the administration's efforts more toward Pakistan (to "make the problem PakAf, not AfPak"), reasoning that Al Qaeda—the real threat to the United States—is hiding out not in Afghanistan but in nuclear-armed -Pakistan.

Biden was once a liberal interventionist. During the 1990s he pushed to use force in the Balkans to stop Serb territorial aggression and genocide. But he has always been a member of the Vietnam generation, and, unlike some younger members of the administration, including the president, he has a firsthand memory of American defeat. "There are a lot of differences [between Vietnam and Afghanistan]," says Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska and a Vietnam vet who often talks to Biden, "but one of the similarities is how easily and quickly a nation can get bogged down in a very dangerous part of the world. It's easy to get into but not easy to get out. The more troops you throw in places, the more difficult it is to work it out because you have an investment to protect."

Long Washington experience has made Biden a political realist, if not a bit of a cynic. Shortly after 9/11, he described to NEWSWEEK's Michael Hirsh how he had been summoned to the White House for a heart-to-heart with George W. Bush. Bush reassured him that the United States would not abandon Afghanistan after routing Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Bush 43 even indirectly criticized Bush 41, who had turned away from the Afghans in 1989—after the United States had covertly helped the mujahedin rout the Soviet invaders. Biden warned Bush that the commitment would cost billions and take years and a large multinational force, but he was encouraged by the president's enthusiasm. As Biden was leaving the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer asked him to stop outside at the press stakeout to show that Bush's policies had bipartisan support. Biden agreed, but then Fleischer hesitated. "You're not going to say anything about 'nation building,' are you?" he asked. Biden dryly retorted, "You mean, what the president talked about for the last hour?" For Biden, the story encapsulated all the "phoniness" of the endless debate of America's role overseas. The Republicans had slammed Bill Clinton for years over nation building, but now that they were engaging in some of it themselves, they wanted to do it by another name.

On trips to Afghanistan with congressional delegations, Biden gradually grew disillusioned with President Hamid Karzai, who had seemed like such a heroic and hopeful figure in 2002. At a dinner Biden attended with Karzai and several other senators in early 2008, Karzai obstinately refused to concede that his government was riddled with corruption. Exasperated, Biden threw down his napkin and walked out.

Obama also had doubts, dating back to when he met Karzai during the campaign. But this August, as it appeared that Karzai or his followers had committed vast fraud in the election, other Obama administration officials also began to seriously doubt whether Karzai was worth the candle. Biden's earlier warnings began to take on more resonance in the White House war councils.

Biden, it should be noted, has not always showed the most clear-eyed judgment. In 1990 he voted against American involvement in the first Gulf war, which turned out to be a relatively low-cost success, whereas he voted for the invasion of Iraq, which turned into a near fiasco. He opposed the 2007 Iraq surge, which rescued the American effort from near defeat.

The president relies on Biden's judgment, but he may be more interested in having his veep play the devil's advocate. One senses, from both his track record and his recent remarks, that Obama is comfortable with having Biden push from one side and General McChrystal push from the other. Last week the president told congressional leaders that he did not plan on drawing down troops in Afghanistan, but by the same token he was rethinking the full-scale counterinsurgency strategy proposed by McChrystal. Obama has shown a penchant for splitting the difference, for finding the middle way on tough policy issues.

Some administration officials, led by Biden, appear to hope that American forces can rely more on counterterrorism operations—attacks by Predator drones and small elite units on terrorist hiding places—to hold Afghanistan together and defeat Al Qaeda. But critics call this "splitting the baby" and say it'll never work. As a senior civilian Pentagon official points out, "No one has more experience with counterterrorism than McChrystal," who ran black ops in Iraq and Afghanistan for five years. "If there was an easier, better way, he'd be pushing for it," says this official, who would not be quoted discussing internal deliberations. Opinions within the intelligence community are split, according to current and former operatives. Some back McChrystal's view that the only way to obtain the intelligence necessary to conduct counterterror operations is by a counterinsurgency campaign that protects civilians. Yet a significant minority of intelligence officials, at the CIA and elsewhere, doubt that more troops will make much difference; some think the additional forces could be counterproductive.

Senior military officials backing Mc-Chrystal have not given up hope that Obama will fully support the general, not Biden, and order tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan. It is impossible to know with certainty where Obama will come out on this; the strategy meetings will go on until atleast next week. But the presidentwill have confidence that whatever he decides, he will have challenged all assumptions and thrashed out all views. He can also be confident that he won't be second-guessed by his vice president. Biden is determined to be a "team player," says a close friend who asked for anonymity while commenting on Biden's motivations. "He wants to help the president. Joe is someone who is probably not going to run again. This is the apex of his career, and there is no separate agenda. There are people close to the president who are driven crazy by Joe's candor," says the friend. "But that's what you get with Joe."

With Daniel Klaidman, Michael Hirsh, Mark Hosenball, and Jeffrey Bartholet in Washington

Bloomberg To Acquire BusinessWeek Magazine - washingtonpost.com

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By Michael Liedtke
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Bloomberg is buying BusinessWeek magazine in a deal that brings together a financial news service specializing in rapid-fire updates with a print publication struggling to adapt to the Internet's information whirlwind.

Terms of the sale, announced Tuesday, were not disclosed. Citing unnamed people privy to the negotiations, BusinessWeek pegged the acquisition price at $2 million to $5 million in cash. Bloomberg also would be responsible for paying other costs, such as severance pay to any of the roughly 400 BusinessWeek employees who might be laid off, the magazine's Web site reported.

Bloomberg, a privately held company started by Michael R. Bloomberg, now mayor of New York, expects to take control of BusinessWeek by the end of the year. That ends BusinessWeek's 80-year run as part of McGraw-Hill, which also owns the Standard & Poor's credit rating agency.

McGraw-Hill put BusinessWeek on the auction block in July, apparently fed up with the losses that have been mounting at the magazine as its advertising revenue plunged.

The acquisition represents one of Bloomberg's boldest and riskiest attempts to extend its audience beyond its main mode of communication -- the roughly 300,000 electronic terminals that it has set up in the offices of money managers, traders, bankers and other financial services professionals around the world.

Bloomberg did not immediately discuss how it might reshape the magazine's coverage or how its takeover will affect the publication's staff.

It appears that those decisions will be left to Norman Pearlstine, a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and Time's former editor in chief. Currently Bloomberg's chief content officer, Pearlstine will become BusinessWeek's chairman.

With a circulation of about 921,000, BusinessWeek has been doing a better job retaining subscribers than keeping advertisers. The total number of advertising pages sold by the magazine has plummeted from a peak of 6,000 in 2000 to fewer than 1,900 last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

This is the second deal announced this month that gives Bloomberg a new springboard to reach a wider audience. It is also joining forces with The Washington Post in a partnership that will put Bloomberg stories in The Post's print edition and Web site and include a jointly operated news service targeting other newspapers.

Assaults Sustained in E. Congo - washingtonpost.com

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By Carley Petesch
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 13 -- More than 1,000 civilians have been killed and nearly 900,000 displaced in eastern Congo by Rwandan Hutu militiamen and Congolese forces since January, humanitarian groups said Tuesday.

The report released by a coalition of 84 organizations said that many of the killings were carried out by Rwandan Hutu militiamen. Congolese government soldiers also have targeted civilians, the report said.

A Congolese military operation has been aimed at forcing out the Hutu militiamen, many of whom sought refuge in neighboring Congo after participating in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, which killed more than 500,000 people.

But the groups said Tuesday that the military operation, which is backed by a U.N. peacekeeping force, is not doing enough to protect civilians in the region.

"The human rights and humanitarian consequences of the current military operation are simply disastrous," said Marcel Stoessel of Oxfam.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, known as MONUC, has backed the Congolese army in eastern Congo since March, after a joint Congolese and Rwandan operation against the Rwandan Hutu militiamen.

Lt. Col. Jean-Paul Dietrich, military spokesman for the mission, said the United Nations is working hard to protect civilians in the region.

"We are in conversations with the government, who knows our position on this subject -- the officers who have committed these crimes cannot participate in the army and should be tried by the international or national judicial systems," he said.

However, U.N. officials have said that they do not have enough boots on the ground to perform effectively in Congo, a country bigger than Western Europe but with only 300 miles of paved roads.

The 3,000 additional U.N. peacekeepers authorized by the U.N. Security Council in November are only just arriving in the region, the report said.

"The U.N. needs to make it clear that if the Congolese government wants its continued military support, the army should remove abusive soldiers from command positions and its soldiers should stop attacking civilians," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

U.S. Seeks to Ease Pakistanis' Concerns Before Obama Signs Aid Bill - washingtonpost.com

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By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 1:42 AM

President Obama will sign a bill providing Pakistan $7.5 billion in economic aid this week after Congress issues a statement designed to placate Pakistanis' objections that conditions attached to the legislation violate their sovereignty, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

The joint House-Senate statement, negotiated over the past several days, will emphasize mutual respect between the two countries, officials said, and "clarify" provisions in the bill requiring administration reports to Congress on Pakistan's expenditures, its progress in combating Islamist insurgents and the extent of civilian control over the Pakistani military.

A White House signing ceremony scheduled for Wednesday was postponed late Tuesday night due to scheduling problems, an administration official said.

"Pakistan will not compromise on its sovereignty. I have put on the table our concerns," Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said after a meeting Tuesday with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who sponsored the bill with the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.).

Qureshi, who hailed the aid package as a "strong signal" of U.S. support on a visit to Washington just last week, was sent back from Islamabad on an emergency mission after Pakistan's military and opposition leaders criticized the bill as insulting and patronizing. Pakistani officials have suggested that military and opposition objections reflect Pakistani political maneuvering to undermine the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

The U.S. relationship with Pakistan is a critical component of Obama's evolving strategy on the Afghanistan war. The president will hold his fifth closed-door meeting about Afghanistan and Pakistan with top national security aides Wednesday. Despite growing pressure from Republican lawmakers to quickly approve a recommendation from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, to deploy tens of thousands more troops, an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said deliberations would continue into next week and possibly beyond.

"We are going through a very deliberative process," Obama said Tuesday, adding that he expected it to be completed "in the coming weeks." The White House last week deferred a scheduled personal appearance by McChrystal, saying that he would have an opportunity to "present his case" to Obama and his senior aides before a final decision was made.

Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who protested that war, said Tuesday that he was "very wary" of sending more troops to Afghanistan unless the administration can determine "what is achievable, measured against the legitimate interests of the United States, primary among which is al-Qaeda."

Departing Wednesday on a five-day trip to the region, Kerry told the Reuters news agency that after meeting with McChrystal, he "may decide that there is a doable strategy that achieves the goals I set out, that requires some additional troops." But he said that he was wary because of "past experience and . . . some of the challenges that I see."

Obama has said the U.S. goal in the region is to dismantle and defeat Pakistan-based al-Qaeda, leading a number of Democrats to question even the existing American military presence in Afghanistan, where nearly 100,000 U.S. and NATO troops are engaged in what McChrystal has called a "deteriorating" fight against the Taliban.

The president has ruled out a significant decrease in troops. Options under White House consideration range from adopting McChrystal's recommendation all or in part to a status quo troop presence with increased focus on reconciliation with some Taliban elements and escalation of missile attacks on al-Qaeda and other insurgent strongholds across the border in Pakistan.

The upheaval in Pakistan over the aid package has been an unanticipated complication in the White House deliberations. The bill, designed to bolster the position of the civilian government and quell rising anti-Americanism, was first introduced in 2008 by then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Lugar, and co-sponsored by then-Sen. Barack Obama. Like the current bill, it provided Pakistan with $1.5 billion in annual economic aid for five years. But it languished amid criticism that the Pakistan government, headed by the military until last year, had misused and failed to account for much of the $10 billion it received during the Bush administration.

Kerry and Lugar revived the package this year after Obama pledged to sharply increase assistance to Zardari's government, elected last year. But some lawmakers, particularly in the House, insisted that the aid be conditioned on regular administration assurances that the money was being well spent and the Pakistani military remained under civilian control.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.), who sponsored a version of the bill in that chamber, said in an interview Tuesday that although "billions have gone down a rat hole in the past" in Pakistan, he did not want to "micromanage" the country's use of the new money. In what he called a "massive demonstration of self-restraint," Congress had imposed "no earmarks" on the bill but "only accountability to make sure it's getting to the Pakistani people."

The legislation requires Obama to inform Congress in detail of his Pakistan strategy and instructs Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to send reports on its implementation every six months. Some in Pakistan have taken exception to such provisions, but Berman said the bill had been "mischaracterized" there.

The president must sign the bill within 10 days of its Oct. 5 transmittal by Congress, excluding Sundays, or it automatically becomes law. The "joint explanatory statement," to be issued by Congress possibly as early as Wednesday, Berman said, will "make clear we think it is a very important relationship" and that there is "no intention of infringing the sovereignty of Pakistan."

The "joint explanatory statement" to be issued by Congress on Wednesday, he said, will "make clear we think it is a very important relationship" and that there is "no intention of infringing the sovereignty of Pakistan."

Iraqi Election Uncertain; Troops Drawdown Could Be Affected - washingtonpost.com

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By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

BAGHDAD, Oct. 13 -- American officials in Baghdad urged Iraqi lawmakers Tuesday to pass an election law crucial for organizing a January vote that the Obama administration considers key to withdrawing U.S. combat troops.

In a statement, U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and Gen. Ray Odierno, the American military commander here, said they were concerned that parliament hasn't yet reached an agreement on the law. They urged lawmakers "to act expeditiously on this important legislation that will set the terms for successful, transparent political participation in this milestone event." A day earlier, Ad Melkert, the U.N. representative in Iraq, voiced similar concerns.

Lawmakers have resumed negotiations over the legislation, which election officials said must be approved by Thursday to give them enough time to organize the parliamentary vote.

But stark differences among politicians suggest the Iraqis might miss the deadline, and the statement from Hill and Odierno underlined U.S. concerns about the possible consequences. U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned that postponing the vote beyond January would lead to violating the constitution and throwing Iraq's nascent political system into limbo.

So far, two key contentious issues have held up the legislation. The first is how the vote should be conducted in Kirkuk, a northern oil-rich city that is contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. The results there could be deployed by parties to reinforce their claims over the city. The second issue is how to organize the ballot -- whether voters will choose an electoral list, individual candidates or a mixture of both.

"Every party wants a law that would guarantee its interests and victory," said Ezzeddine al-Dawla, a Sunni lawmaker.

"We don't have solutions," added Wael Abdel Latif, a Shiite independent lawmaker.

If the Iraqis miss the Thursday deadline, the election will be organized under a 2005 law by which voters chose only an electoral list, not individual candidates. After the election, party leaders name politicians to occupy the seats they won.

Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has denounced that law, insisting that parliament adopt legislation that would allow voters to choose individual candidates, known as the open list, as a way to bring new figures into the political fray. It is politically impossible for any Shiite party or politician to openly contest Sistani's will, meaning that some version of the open list is likely.

"We will not vote if they adopt the closed list system," said Mohamad Jawad Gilian, who owns a mobile phone store in Tweirij, south of Baghdad. "We want to know who we are voting for. We want to elect people who'd work for us, people we can trust."

Brig. Gen. Steven Lanza, the chief spokesman for U.S. forces here, said during a news conference this week that the next significant drawdown in numbers of U.S. troops would take place after the election, now scheduled for Jan. 16.

"I really think the elections will be a point of departure," Lanza said.

The Obama administration has set a deadline of August for U.S. combat troops to withdraw from Iraq. About 50,000 are expected to remain, most of them in a training capacity. Under a U.S.-Iraqi agreement, all troops must leave by the end of 2011.

Meanwhile, the Oil Ministry on Tuesday postponed until January its second bidding round for oil and gas fields. In a statement, the ministry said that 45 companies would be allowed to bid in the auction to develop 10 fields. The round was originally scheduled for mid-December. The ministry did not explain the delay.

In the first round, held in June, the country awarded one contract out of the eight offered.

EPA Releases '07 Climate Document Rejected by Bush Team - washingtonpost.com

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By Dina Cappiello
Associated Press
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

An e-mail message buried by the Bush administration because of its conclusions on global warming surfaced Tuesday, nearly two years after it was first sent to the White House and never opened.

The e-mail and the 28-page document attached to it, released Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency, show that the agency concluded in December 2007 that six gases linked to global warming pose dangers to public welfare, and wanted to take steps to regulate their release from automobiles and the burning of gasoline.

The document specifically cites global warming's effects on air quality, agriculture, forestry, water resources and coastal areas as endangering public welfare.

That finding was rejected by the Bush White House, which strongly opposed using the Clean Air Act to address climate change and stalled on producing an "endangerment finding" that had been ordered by the Supreme Court in 2007.

As a result, the Dec. 5, 2007, e-mail sent by the agency to Susan Dudley, who headed the regulatory division at the Office of Management and Budget was never opened, according to Jason Burnett, the then-EPA official that wrote it.

The Bush administration and then-EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson also refused to release the document, which is labeled "deliberative, do not distribute," to Democratic lawmakers. The White House instead allowed three senators to review it in July 2008, when excerpts were released.

The Obama administration made a similar determination in April but also concluded that greenhouse gases endanger public health. The EPA is currently drafting the first greenhouse gas standards for automobiles and recently signaled that it would attempt to reduce climate-altering pollution from refineries, factories and other large industrial sources.

In response, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican lawmakers have criticized the EPA's reasoning and called for a more thorough vetting of the science. An internal review by a dozen federal agencies released in May also raised questions about the EPA's conclusion, saying the agency could have been more balanced and raising questions about the difficulty in linking global warming to health effects.

The agency released the e-mail and documents after receiving requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

Adora Andy, a spokeswoman for EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, said the draft shows that the science in 2007 was as clear as it is today.

"The conclusions reached then by the EPA scientists should have been made public and should have been considered," she said Tuesday.

Resilience, Hope and Family Remain Along Recession Road

Image by betbele via Flickr

By Theresa Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

This is the last installment of Half a Tank, a four-month quest to find people whose lives have been altered by a flattened economy.

When we first met Danny Glass, he was sitting in a tent, half-naked, too weak to put on pants.

He knew he was dying.

"Can I ask a favor?" he said to Michael Williamson, the Washington Post photographer with whom I traveled across the country this summer. "Can I use one of those photos for my obituary?"

That was in June. Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago: Michael and I stand in that same tangle of woods behind a motor vehicles office in Woodbridge, but we see no Danny, just the rain-soaked remnants of his belongings: a stained couch cushion he used as a mattress. A plastic water bowl for a dog he surrendered to a better home. A hospital wristband with his name on one side and the words "fall risk" on the other.

Michael and I don't know whether to feel relief or sadness. We don't know whether Danny is dead or in the clean bed he hadn't had in a long while.

About four months had passed since we began a road trip across the country and into the lives of hundreds of Americans affected by the recession. We would drive more than 20,000 miles, down highways and through back roads, talking to everyone from an Elvis impersonator in Memphis to an asphalt paver in Las Vegas.

On our lowest days, we pulled ticks from our hair and cried in a darkened car, weighed down by what we'd just witnessed. On our best, we laughed with a couple we picked up on the side of the road and marveled at the resiliency of those who had lost everything except hope.

We would pass through 30 states without getting a ticket, stay in more cheap motels than Tom Bodett -- including one with barbed wire outside the door -- and find stories of hardship wherever we stopped.

In Tennessee, we'd meet a young couple unable to afford a $186 engagement ring from Wal-Mart. In Florida, we'd find a recently laid-off UPS worker on a bed of concrete outside a church, writing a letter to his mother. And in Colorado, we'd spend an evening with a 36-year-old industrial designer who'd lost her job, two homes and a sense of who she was.

But all that would come later.

When Michael and I met Danny, we had no idea what was ahead of us. We didn't know whether we'd find a country dinged by the financial crisis or crippled by it. All we knew was that for the newly homeless -- men and women forced by foreclosures and unemployment to seek out borrowed couches, crowded shelters and unfamiliar streets -- Danny was an example of life at its lowest. If there was a bottom to hit, he was there, sitting inches from a mountain of empty Thunderbird bottles, the contents of which had eaten away at his liver.

How many people would the recession push to that point? How many people would be sitting in the woods a decade from now because of what happened to them this year?

That Danny was smart and charming was clear even at his weakest. He kissed my hand when I reached to shake his. "Sometimes," he told me, "when you don't appear to be anything, that's when you're someone." His blue eyes were haunting, if only because they hinted at a man much younger than he looked.

Michael and I promised to come back at the end of our trip to check on him.

That's why we were standing at the tent on a recent weekday and that's why, when we found it vacant, we started digging through a pile of garbage a foot high. We found only hints that no one had been there for a while: old prescription pill bottles, newspapers from June.

Danny wasn't at the local hospital. An employee there who knew him suggested I try the morgue. But that wasn't necessary.

Danny was an extreme example of what we had seen all along the road: men and women determined to survive despite their circumstances. The couple with the ring on layaway decided not to wait for better days and got married with a $50 ring instead. The UPS man wrote not only about his laments, but his hopes. "I'm lost," his letter read. "There got to be a job out there some where." And the industrial designer who once cried every day discovered a middle ground between fierce autonomy and forced dependence.

As for Danny, no one forced help on him. He asked for it. Just weeks after we met him, he called Gayle Sanders, director of the Hilda M. Barg Homeless Prevention Center in Woodbridge, which is operated by Volunteers of America.

"I don't want to die alone and have somebody find me in two weeks," Sanders said Danny told her. She and her husband picked him up. In his first weeks at the shelter, he could not walk and could barely talk. The nursing assistant at the hospice told Sanders that Danny had just weeks to live.

Danny remembers none of this. All he knows is he woke up in a bed, not knowing how he had gotten there.

"There's certain points of my life that are lost forever in my memory bank," he said. "And it's probably best I don't remember."

He now lives in a nursing home where he has a bed with clean sheets and a table topped with cards from relatives he hadn't talked to in decades.

Until we visited Danny there, he hadn't seen the photo Michael had taken of him in the woods. It showed a bearded, gaunt-faced old man with large bags under his eyes.

"It's like walking through the twilight zone, looking at that and looking back at the situation I was in," said Danny, who is 53.

Danny is the first to blame himself for where he ended up. He remembers feeding the homeless in Georgetown in the mid-1970s. He slowly became one of them. "I was so drunk up most of the time I don't even know when the fall really started," he said. "Drinking for me was as normal as breathing."

As we spoke, Danny clutched a newly assembled photo album. One call at a time, Sanders was able to find Danny's relatives in Texas and Florida and piece together how a man ends up in the woods. In one picture, Danny cradles a phone, talking to a brother he hadn't seen for more than 30 years.

Dennis Glass, 48, of Abilene, Tex., said he had been trying to find Danny for years. He was in sixth grade when Danny left the children's home where the brothers and their two sisters landed after their father left and their youngest brother died under their mother's care.

Dennis returned to the home in the 1990s to look for traces of his relatives. He found many but could never locate Danny. That is, until he received an e-mail from a cousin who had heard from Sanders.

Files Dennis found at the home included results of IQ tests: Danny had scored the highest of the siblings.

"When you look at the pictures of him as a child, there is such potential, such promise, such hope," said Dennis, who has visited Danny once and plans another trip soon. "Compare that to what you saw of Danny and the tent and it's, 'How did this happen?' We all make choices. You just have to go back and say, 'How much of this is your own choice, and how much of this is what life dealt you?' "

Danny, who said he has stopped drinking, is planning ahead. He wants to talk to high school students about peer pressure, using his life as a warning.

Michael and I also changed on the road. We barely knew each other when we set out on this trip, but by the end, we could predict what the other would order at a restaurant and knew when the emotions of the day had become too much. In the months we were gone, recession-related headlines went from alarming to guardedly optimistic, but we know that for many the crisis is not over. For those who lost jobs or homes, there are still fears, still unknowns.

Even stories with happy endings came with uncertainties. The couple who couldn't afford the ring still lack jobs. The UPS worker fell so far out of the mainstream that I couldn't find him again -- no cellphone, no address. And the woman who lost two homes could not bring herself to attend a wedding in her home town recently because there would be a dress to buy and the inevitable job questions she was not ready to answer.

Danny's health has improved so much that he has been told he no longer qualifies for hospice care and must be out of the nursing home in a month. He can stay at the shelter for 30 days after that. Then, he doesn't know where he'll go.

He doesn't like to think about it, but there's always a tent in the woods.

"I'm trying to go forward," Danny said. "I'm trying to not go back. But I don't see any other opportunities on my horizon. At least I know I can survive if I have to get in that situation again."

To read other Half a Tank entries, go to voices.washingtonpost.com/recession-road.

U.S. Sees Saudi Program as an Option for Yemeni Detainees - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Four years after Khalid al-Jehani's release from the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the 34-year-old Saudi lives a peaceful life in this sprawling coastal city. He has a car, a job and a well-furnished apartment -- courtesy of the Saudi government.

The rehabilitation of militants such as Jehani has convinced the Obama administration that Saudi Arabia is the ideal place to send dozens of Yemenis being held at Guantanamo. For months, U.S. officials have applied pressure on Riyadh. But Saudi officials say their success with former detainees such as Jehani lies in members of his family and tribe, who keep constant watch over him, and cannot be duplicated with those whose social networks and roots lie outside Saudi Arabia.

"If I try to do something bad, my family will tell the government about me," said Jehani, who joined a radical Islamist movement in the Philippines and trained al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. "How can you trust that will happen with a family living in Yemen?"

As President Obama's promised January deadline to close Guantanamo approaches, the fate of 97 Yemenis remains the administration's biggest obstacle to closing the facility and forging a new detention policy. They are the largest community left at Guantanamo, roughly half of the prisoners who remain there, and are viewed as among the most radicalized, with deep jihadist roots inside Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.

Yemen is ruled by a weak central government battling an insurgency in the north, secessionists in the south and a growing al-Qaeda presence. The Obama administration is unwilling to send the detainees there because it has no faith in Yemeni security guarantees. Only 15 Yemenis have been sent back to Yemen in the past seven years, even as hundreds of Saudi and Afghan detainees have gone home.

Most countries that have agreed to resettle detainees from other countries are willing to take only those who have been cleared for release by the courts or by a Justice Department-led review team and who cannot be returned to their home countries because of fears of torture or other abuse.

The Yemenis do not meet those criteria. The majority of them have not been cleared for release. Moreover, the United States is reluctant to repatriate the 26 Yemenis who have been cleared, citing security concerns. That heightens suspicions among Saudi officials, as well as among European nations, that the Yemeni detainees constitute a risk they do not want to take.

Despite the impasse, U.S. officials hope to send the majority of the Yemenis to Saudi Arabia. They would be the only detainees, other than Saudis, sent there. "The talks with the Saudi and Yemeni governments over the disposition of the Yemeni detainees have been productive and are ongoing," an administration official said.

Publicly, Saudi officials have said they will accept the Yemenis only if they come willingly. Privately, Saudi officials interviewed here say they would like to find a different solution. If Saudi Arabia were to accept the Yemenis -- a decision that most observers say will require the blessing of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz -- it risks becoming a greater al-Qaeda target. The kingdom also has close ties to Yemen's government, which would probably consider the detainees' transfer to Saudi Arabia a public embarrassment. Yemen has publicly declared that it wants its detainees to return home.

If the Yemenis participated and then rejoined al-Qaeda, it would be a severe blow to the program as well as to the kingdom's pride.

"It's a no-win situation for the Saudis. They can't rehabilitate these guys, and they don't want to become America's jailor," said Christopher Boucek, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied the rehabilitation program.

Ties That Bind

When detainees from Guantanamo land in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a high-ranking member of the Saudi ruling family and head of the kingdom's counterterrorism operations, personally informs their families that their sons have returned home.

A mix of religious, psychological and social programs wean participants off extremist ideology. At least 1,500 detainees have been released from the six-month-long program. Of the 120 detainees from Guantanamo, 108 have graduated; more than 80 percent remain active participants in the rehabilitation efforts and have not rejoined al-Qaeda, Saudi officials said. Nearly 20 percent have escaped abroad, disappeared or been rearrested.

Human rights groups have criticized the program, saying people have been detained without being charged. Earlier this year, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that it was hard to measure the program's success. It has released "mostly minor offenders," and "many of the more hardened terrorists do not undergo rehabilitation," he said, according to a declassified document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that was obtained and released by the Federation of American Scientists.

Upon a detainee's release, family and tribal leaders sign guarantees vouching that he will not return to terrorism. At stake is their honor and family name -- essential in Saudi society. Security officials keep in close contact but rely heavily on the family to alert them to any potential problems. Financial assistance flows freely -- for education, jobs and marriage. Jehani said the government even paid for his wife's fertility treatment.

"When you get married and have children, you are busy," said Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, who heads the counter-radicalization unit at the Saudi Interior Ministry. "You value the meaning of life, and you understand the culture of death more."

At the rehabilitation center last weekend, teachers learned that the baby son of one graduate, a former Guantanamo detainee, had died. Ahmed Gelan, the program coordinator, immediately called him to offer condolences -- and assistance.

"If we don't help the family, al-Qaeda will," said Hameed al-Shaygi, a sociologist at the center.

Shaygi said the system could never be as effective with the Yemeni detainees. Only about 20 of the Yemenis have some familial ties inside Saudi Arabia, and it is unclear how strong those are. "How will their families work with us?" Shaygi asked. Also, Yemenis and Saudis practice different strains of Sunni Islam. The vast majority of Saudis are in a higher economic class than Yemenis, which could lead to resentment.

"We will have a Riyadh-namo," Shaygi concluded. "We will become a target of al-Qaeda. Saudis will be seen as continuing what the Americans are doing."

High Stakes All Around

Saudi officials say they are most concerned about the Yemenis after graduation. In February, the government released a list of 85 most-wanted Saudi terrorists. At least 11 were graduates of the program; most had fled abroad, including at least two across the kingdom's porous southern border into Yemen.

They included Saeed al-Shehri, who became the second-ranking leader of al-Qaeda's wing in Yemen, and Mohammed Awfi, who became an al-Qaeda field commander. "You cannot guarantee results," said Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman. "What we are doing is like a last-chance effort. We can't put them behind bars since we have nothing against them."

Six weeks ago, a Saudi militant -- No. 40 on the most-wanted list -- nearly assassinated Prince Nayef after crossing over from Yemen with a bomb hidden in his body. "The Saudis have no way of controlling them once they leave for Yemen," Boucek said. "But the world will hold the Saudis responsible."

The stakes are high for the Obama administration, too. Barring a deal with Saudi Arabia, most of the Yemenis could end up in some system of prolonged detention, justified by the administration under the laws of war. And if Guantanamo is closed, they could end up in a prison camp on U.S. soil, probably on a military base, ensuring more political headaches for Obama.

Still, Saudi Arabia has a vested interest in ensuring the Yemenis don't rejoin al-Qaeda. One scenario, said Boucek, is that Saudi Arabia might be willing to host the Yemenis for a few months to buy the U.S. and Yemeni governments time to find a solution.

In interviews, some Saudi and Western officials said a possible solution is for the United States, Saudi Arabia and others to build a rehabilitation program in Yemen. But with Yemen plagued by official corruption and domestic turbulence, many are skeptical.

"Will this succeed with all the Yemenis? Maybe not," Jehani said. "Even in Saudi Arabia, it has not succeeded 100 percent."

Finn reported from Washington.

In Downturn, Military Reports Historic Recruiting Success

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In Midst of Downturn, All Targets Are Met

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

For the first time in more than 35 years, the U.S. military has met all of its annual recruiting goals, as hundreds of thousands of young people have enlisted despite the near-certainty that they will go to war.

The Pentagon, which made the announcement Tuesday, said the economic downturn and rising joblessness, as well as bonuses and other factors, had led more qualified youths to enlist.

The military has not seen such across-the-board successes since the all-volunteer force was established in 1973, after Congress ended the draft following the Vietnam War. In recent years, the military has often fallen short of some of its recruiting targets. The Army, in particular, has struggled to fill its ranks, admitting more high school dropouts, overweight youths and even felons.

Yet during the current budget year, which ended Sept. 30, recruiters met their targets in both numbers and quality for all components of active-duty and reserve forces.

"We delivered beyond anything the framers of the all-volunteer force would have anticipated," Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy, said at a Pentagon news conference.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are considered by experts to be an unprecedented test of the volunteer military's resilience. Its ability to bring fresh recruits into the force is critical not only to increasing the overall size of the Army and Marine Corps, but to ensuring that additional units are available to rotate into conflict zones. Some Army units sent overseas recently have been deployed at less than full strength.

As lengthy, multiple combat tours place U.S. forces under enormous stress, the willingness of young people to enlist has surprised even military leaders, experts said.

The military is suffering "strains that are tragic in personal lives, but institutionally the ground forces have held together and are not broken. They are even recovering a little bit as we speak," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Still, it is difficult to predict how much stress the volunteer military can take as it navigates uncharted waters, experts said.

"There is no way to tell at what point the Army will break in the sense of mass desertion, or people unwilling to stay in, or not meeting recruiting quotas," O'Hanlon said.

Overall, the Defense Department brought in 168,900 active-duty troops, or 103 percent of the goal for the fiscal year, officials said. It reached 104 percent of the goal for recruitment of National Guard and reserve forces.

The quality of recruits also improved, with about 95 percent reporting that they had received high school diplomas; last year, 83 percent of the Army's active-duty recruits had diplomas, short of the goal of 90 percent. The active-duty Army this year admitted only 1.5 percent of recruits who scored in the lowest acceptable category on the standard qualification test; in recent years, that figure had reached nearly 4 percent.

Carr said strong recruitment was driven by economic conditions that have made civilian jobs scarce, along with other factors such as pay increases and investment in recruiting budgets.

The recession "was a force," Carr said, and, "given the unemployment that we had not directly forecast, allowed us to be for much of the year in a very favorable position."

Historically, there has been a strong correlation between rising unemployment and increases in "high quality" enlistments, according to Curt Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accession policy.

Carr said the Defense Department spent about $10,000 on advertising, marketing, recruiters and other budget items per recruit, with the Army spending more than double that, at $22,000.

"The unemployment . . . left us with more dollars per recruit than proved to be minimally necessary," he said.

Carr also credited hefty enlistment bonuses for the military's success, saying 40 percent of recruits received an average bonus of $14,000, compared with $12,000 on average in 2008. The size of the bonus varied by service, with the Army, which has the toughest mission, offering more.

Maj. Gen. Donald Campbell, head of the Army's recruiting command, said one factor in its success was putting a large number of recruiters on the streets.

"I think the most important thing that helps us with success, whether you're talking money, resources, advertising, is having the right number of recruiters, soldiers on the ground," he said.

In recent years, military officials cited the intensity of the fighting in Iraq as dampening interest in military service among 17-to-24-year-olds and, in particular, lessening the support of parents and other influential adults. But Pentagon officials said earlier this year that the declining violence in Iraq had made young people more willing to sign up.

Carr said that given the success this year, the Pentagon is cutting its $5 billion recruiting budget by 11 percent for next year.

Refugees of Diversity - The American Prospect

Image by Worker101 via Flickr

by Rich Benjamin

Imagine moving to a place where you can leave your front door unlocked as you run errands. Where the community enjoys a winning ratio of playgrounds to potholes. Where you can turn your kids loose at 3 P.M., not worry, then see them in time for supper. Where the neighbors greet you by name. Where your trouble-free high school feels like a de-facto private school. Where if you play hooky from work, you can drive just 20 minutes and put your sailboat on the water. Where you can joyride off-road vehicles (Snowmobiles! ATVs! Mountain bikes! Rock crawlers!) on nature's bold terrain. Where your family and abundant friends feel close to the soil. Where suburban blight has yet to spoil vistas. Just imagine.

If you could move to such a place, would you?

If so, you would join a growing number of white Americans homesteading in a constellation of small towns and so-called "exurbs" that are extremely white. They are creating communal pods that cannily preserve a white-bread world, a throwback to an imagined past with "authentic" 1950s values but with the nifty suburban amenities available today.

Call these places White Meccas. Or White Wonderlands. Or Caucasian Arcadias. Or Blanched Bunker Communities. Or White Archipelagos. I call them Whitopias.

What exactly is a Whitopia? A Whitopia (pronounced why-toh-pee-uh) is whiter than the nation, its respective region, and its state. It has posted at least 6 percent population growth since 2000. The majority of that growth (often upward of 90 percent) is from white migrants. And a Whitopia has a je ne sais quoi -- an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.

A prediction that made headlines across the United States 10 years ago is fast becoming a reality: By 2042, whites will no longer be the American majority. With growing and intermixed minority populations, the country is following California, Texas, New Mexico, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia, which have "minority" populations that are in the "majority." Twelve other states have populations that are more than 20 percent Hispanic, black, and/or Asian. Soon, the words "majority" and "minority" may have no meaning. And as immigrant populations -- overwhelmingly people of color -- increase in cities and suburbs, more and more whites are living in small towns and exurbs.

"So many of the people that are here have come from areas where they have seen diversity done badly," says Carol Sapp, a prominent civic and business leader in St. George, Utah, a bona fide Whitopia.

Another resident, Christine Blum, moved to St. George in 2004 after living for 24 years in Los Angeles. "When I lived in California, everyone was a liberal, pretty much," recalls Blum, the president of the local Republican women's group. "I wanted to be around people who shared my political views." She remembers the conversations in California where liberals bashed the GOP, and the social settings in which she felt censored. "It's like, I don't want to say what I really think, 'cause they're going to think I'm an evil, right-wing fascist." In California, she worked in the animation field, mostly for Disney, and as an assistant director on King of the Hill. She came to St. George to escape the big city and to start a new career as a cartoonist and illustrator.

Blum says she doesn't miss the many hues in L.A.'s population: "For me it's just the restaurants."

Denise Larsen moved to the St. George area from Milwaukee with her husband and young daughters in 1997. "When we heard the gang shootings, we thought, 'It's time to move,'" Larsen tells me over soda pop at Wendy's. "This kid tried to leave a gang; they shot up his dad down the block from us. I guess you don't try and leave a gang. We could no longer let our kids ride their bikes around. Here, they could ride all the way down to the Virgin River, and we don't have to worry about it." For a mother frustrated with having her daughters bused across town due to a desegregation order, fed up with shoveling snow, and terrified of the gunshots ringing out, her new, Whitopian community is the perfect elixir.

***

Bill Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., has been documenting white population loss from ethnically diverse "melting-pot suburbs" for decades. And that loss is significant. During the 1990s, the suburbs of greater Los Angeles lost 381,000 whites, and other California suburbs, such as Oakland and Riverside?San Bernardino, and also the Bergen-Passaic suburbs in New Jersey, lost more than 70,000 whites each. The rate of white population loss from the melting-pot suburbs of Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, and several other major suburban areas exceeded the rate of out-migration from their central cities.

"The Ozzies and Harriets of the 1990s are bypassing the suburbs or big cities in favor of more livable, homogenous small towns and rural areas," Frey presciently forecast in 1994, when this phenomenon was nowhere near its maturity.

To be sure, race and immigration are not the only factors pushing whites from cities and melting-pot suburbs. Whites, like Americans of all races, have felt pushed by stagnant job opportunities, pricey housing markets, congestion and traffic, crumbling public facilities and services, and neighborhoods that seem hostile to raising children. Quality-of-life and pocket-book factors matter greatly.

Matthew Dowd, a founder of ViaNovo, a blue-chip management and communications consulting firm with clients worldwide, who also served as chief strategist for Bush-Cheney '04, explained to me in a telephone interview that Americans don't trust the unfolding economy, regardless of who is in the White House. "Unemployment numbers, inflation rates, and all those figures don't really tell the story anymore, because people have lost some faith in all the major institutions of the country -- from churches, to political parties, to the government -- and so they have this great deal of anxiety about what they can count on." Dowd believes this anxiety has bred a longing for strong communities, though he doesn't get into the racial traits of those communities. "Part of what's happened in our society over the last 20 years," he adds, "is that people have lost their connection to each other and to the community organizations that they or their parents or their grandparents participated in. So they're looking for this sort of new community."

This type of "new community" is really back to the basics, placing as it does a premium on sporting, volunteerism, neighbors, friends, faith, family, and hearth. Its inhabitants are bonded by a common investment and vision. This vision matters as much as economics -- Whitopia has grown briskly during past recessions and throughout the economic roar of the late 1990s.

It's impossible not to notice the abundance of families and the value St. George places on them. Scores of kids cram into story time at the public library, where the librarians dress up as book characters. Hordes of boys play baseball at the neighborhood Snow Canyon Little League complex on weekday nights. Youngsters zigzag the fields at the Kicks soccer leagues on Saturday mornings. Teens compete in calf tying, bull-and-bronc roping, and steer wrestling at the rodeo arena.

"The California I grew up in was a little paradise," says Phyllis Sears, an 83-year-old resident of neighboring Kayenta. Other residents compare the dry mecca to the Southern California of decades past.

The high tide of Whitopian migration typically crests at two pivotal moments in the life cycle: when residents start raising children and when they retire. Children and senior citizens face very different challenges, but both age groups are more vulnerable than young and middle-aged adults. Children and seniors particularly require physical and emotional security in their home and community. Hostages to the dictates of time -- the demands of the future and the spells of the past -- parents carve idealized lives for their kids, just as the elderly guard idealized memories. Thinking seriously about childhood whisks a potent undercurrent of nostalgia into Whitopian dreaming.

Whitopian migration results from tempting pulls as much as alarming pushes. The places luring so many white Americans are revealing. The five towns posting the largest white growth rates between 2000 and 2004 -- St. George, Utah; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; Bend, Oregon; Prescott, Arizona; and Greeley, Colorado -- were already overwhelmingly white. Certainly whiter than the places that new arrivals left behind and whiter than the country in general. We know why white folks are pushed from big cites and their inner-ring suburbs. The Whitopian pull includes economic opportunity, more house for your dollar, a yearning for the countryside, and a nostalgic charm.

Most whites are not drawn to a place explicitly because it teems with other white people. Rather, the place's very whiteness implies other perceived qualities. Americans associate a homogeneous white neighborhood with higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, cleanliness, safety, and comfort. These seemingly race-neutral qualities are subconsciously inseparable from race and class in many whites' minds. Race is often used as a proxy for those neighborhood traits. And, if a neighborhood is known to have those traits, many whites presume -- without giving it a thought -- that the neighborhood will be majority white.

As much as creative elites in Manhattan and Hollywood might like to dismiss this trend as corn-fed racism, or to ridicule it as boringly bourgeois, it is our present and future. Sorry, city sophisticates. Between 1990 and 2000, America's suburban periphery grew by 17 million people. By contrast, city cores grew by a fraction -- only 3 million people. In the years since, outer suburban and exurban counties have grown at triple the rate of urban counties. For all the noise over gentrification and metrosexuals, the real action will continue on the periphery: steady white migration, resilient economies, and disproportionate political power.

Barack Obama's presidency has roused pointed disdain across vast swaths of America, expanses whose majority-white locals dismiss the audacity of hope as the banality of hype. Such scorn might confront any Democrat in the White House, but particularly a black one with a "Muslim sounding" name, who "isn't one of us."

Despite a flatlining economy and the most unpopular incumbent president in the history of polling, John McCain trounced Obama among white voters, 55 percent to 43 percent. Of the 245 U.S. counties that qualify as "exurbs," McCain beat Obama in 209 of them, most often by double-digit margins.

Obama may personify a nation's giant social strides, but he is no panacea to lingering economic and racial inequality. "I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy," Obama said in his much-touted speech on race in 2008. Indeed, America remains a highly segregated society in which whites, Hispanics, and blacks inhabit different neighborhoods and attend different schools of vastly different quality.

Obama's presidency raises the stakes in a battle royale between two versions of America: one (call it ObamaNation) that is segregated yet slap-happy with its diversity, and another (Whitopia) that does not mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers -- as long as these trends do not overwhelm the white dominant culture.

"Americans Say They Like Diverse Communities -- Election, Census Trends Suggest Otherwise," declares the title of a 2009 study released by the Pew Research Center. Despite most respondents' stated preference for diversity, the study concludes, "American communities have grown more racially, politically, and economically homogenous in recent decades, according to the analyses of 2008 election returns and U.S. Census data. ... When the subject is community diversity, Americans talk one way but behave another."

***

When those pop-up lists beckon you from your Web browser ("Retire in Style: Fifteen Hotspots!"), or those snappy guidebooks flirt with you from the bookstore shelves (America's 25 Best Places to Live!), ever notice how white they are?

Think of Whitopia in three ways -- as small towns, boomtowns, and dream towns. Some Whitopias are fiber-optic Mayberrys, small towns and counties that take pride in their ordinariness. Other Whitopias are boomtowns, entrepreneurial hotbeds that lure a steady stream of businesses, knowledge workers, and families. In these low-tax, incentive-rich places, the costs of living and doing business are cheaper than in the big-shot cities (even during the present recession). Finally, there are dream towns, Whitopias whose shimmery lakes, lush forests and parks, top-notch ski resorts, demanding golf courses, and deluxe real estate attract the upscale whites who just love their natural and man-made amenities.

In short, the lure of Whitopia includes affordable mortgages and old-time values for modest-income families (small towns), economic prospects for blue-collar and high-income professionals (boomtowns), and luxuriant recreation and choice homes for the privileged (dream towns).

Geography matters less than it once did in the workplace, but more in Americans' personal lives. Cell phones, BlackBerrys, laptops, networked file servers, point-'n-click travel booking, e-mail, and the Internet make physical offices more obsolete and permit much of the skilled work force to telecommute. And though Americans grow increasingly enamored of virtual offices, they are just as enamored of real communities. The digital revolution has intensified people's ambivalence over physical offices precisely as our attachment to our homes and natural surroundings is becoming more dear. As such, Whitopian towns are made possible by the digital revolution and made "necessary" by long-standing social and cultural anxiety.

America has more than a few towns stagnating in the Rust Belt and boarded-up whistle stops dotting the Great Plains that are 95 percent white or more: Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Marquette, Kansas, say. Offering "homesteading programs" and post-college perks, such places are practically bribing their bright kids with incentives to stick around. They do not qualify as Whitopias.

Whitopias are about motion, the movement of people, opportunities, capital, and ideas. A fascinating set of upwardly mobile and already-rich white folks are migrating to America's small towns and exurbs. In this moment of global economic flux and domestic uncertainty -- where the elevator to the American dream seems out of service -- mobility, or immobility, takes on new urgency.

Two prolonged military conflicts abroad, a domestic values war, a volatile economy, bitter political partisanship -- and decades-old percolation of transience, isolation, and sprawl -- have created a perfect storm of anxiety and social dislocation among many white Americans. If these conditions aren't the best lubricants for white racial tribalism, anti-immigration sentiment -- an existential crisis, even, in conservative white America -- I don't know what are.