BEIRUT, Lebanon — The funeral of a prominent dissident cleric in the holy Iranian city of Qum turned into a huge and furious antigovernment rally on Monday, raising the possibility that the cleric’s death could serve as a catalyst for an opposition movement that has been locked in a stalemate with the authorities.
As mourners carried the body of the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, tens of thousands of his supporters surged through the streets of Qum, chanting denunciations of the leadership in Tehran that would have been unthinkable only months ago: “Our shame, our shame, our idiot leader!” and “Dictator, this is your last message: The people of Iran are rising!”
Although the police mostly stayed clear during the funeral procession, some skirmishes broke out between protesters and members of the hard-line Basij militia. As the mourners dispersed, security forces flooded the streets, blocking all roads around the ayatollah’s house, and some militia members tore down posters of him, witnesses said.
The funeral of Ayatollah Montazeri, who died in his sleep on Sunday at the age of 87, appears to have put Iran’s rulers in a difficult position. They had to pay public respect to a senior religious scholar who helped build Iran’s theocracy and was once the heir apparent to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Yet they are also keenly aware that his mourning rites could set off further protests, especially as Iranians commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr, on the Ashura holiday this Sunday.
More broadly, the continuing protests underscore a deadlock between the opposition and the government, which wants to avoid the cycle of martyrdom and mourning for dead protesters that helped create Iran’s revolution, analysts say.
“The demonstrators can’t dislodge the government, and so far they have not been able to build a broader national movement,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But the government is also stuck: they don’t want to shoot people or move to a broader crackdown, so they’re left hoping this all fizzles out.”
If the protests become larger or more violent in the next week, he added, the government may well take a more aggressive and riskier approach, arresting opposition leaders like Mir Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi.
Both Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi were in Qum for the funeral, and as Mr. Moussavi was returning to Tehran a group of Basij members on motorbikes repeatedly cut off his car and then attacked it, according to the Rahe Sabz Web site. The attackers smashed one of the car’s rear windows, injuring one of Mr. Moussavi’s bodyguards and provoking a fight with other guards. Mr. Moussavi was not hurt, the Web site said.
The government made some conciliatory gestures Monday, including a respectful statement of condolence from the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that was read aloud at the funeral. The statement hailed him as a “well-versed jurist and a prominent master” and said “many disciples have benefited greatly from him,” according to state-run Press TV.
But the statement also described Ayatollah Montazeri’s break with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 as a mistake. That line provoked jeers and shouts of “Death to the dictator!” — shouts that were audible in video posted on the Internet. In one clip, protesters could be seen shaking their fists and chanting, “We don’t want rationed condolences!”
“Words cannot describe the glory of the funeral,” said Ahmad Montazeri, the ayatollah’s son, in a telephone interview on Monday night. But he added that 200 to 300 Basij members had partly disrupted the ceremony, and that by evening Basij members and security forces had filled the streets and occupied the grand mosque of Qum, preventing the family from holding a planned mourning ceremony there.
The government jammed phones and Internet service through much of the day, and the BBC’s Persian service, a crucial source of information for many Iranians, suspended broadcasts, saying the government had been jamming it since Ayatollah Montazeri’s death on Sunday.
There were also protests in Najafabad, Ayatollah Montazeri’s birthplace. Videos posted on the Internet showed large crowds of people chanting “Dictator, dictator, Montazeri is alive!” and “Oh, Montazeri, your path will be followed even if the dictator shoots us all!” Banners in the bright green color of the opposition movement were visible.
The protests in Najafabad, which began Sunday, were apparently set off in part by disrespectful reports about Ayatollah Montazeri’s death on right-wing news sites, including Fars News, which initially referred to him without the title “ayatollah.”
Iran’s hard-liners have long spoken dismissively of Ayatollah Montazeri, who was under house arrest from 1997 to 2003 for his antigovernment critiques. In the months since June’s disputed presidential election, he had unleashed a series of extraordinary denunciations of the government crackdown on protesters, declaring that the government was neither democratic nor Islamic and that Ayatollah Khamenei was unfit to be the supreme leader. He also dismissed the results of the election, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won officially by a landslide, as fraudulent, echoing the claims of opposition leaders.
Ayatollah Montazeri’s criticisms carried a special weight because of his status as Iran’s most senior cleric. And despite the fact that many younger opposition supporters are generally hostile to clerics, his advocacy was meaningful to them.
“It was important that the most senior cleric, politically and religiously, came out and supported the people,” said Mohsen Kadivar, a former student of Ayatollah Montazeri who is now a visiting scholar at York University in Toronto.
Ayatollah Montazeri’s defense of Iran’s opposition also helped to unite its religious and secular wings, some analysts say. And he may turn out to be more influential in death than he was in life.
“His death has become a pretext for the movement to expand,” said Fatimeh Haghighhatjoo, a former member of Iran’s Parliament who is now a visiting scholar at Boston University. “He was the only cleric who gave up power and supported human rights, the characteristic that earned him respect from various political factions.”
Robert F. Worth reported from Beirut, and Nazila Fathi from Toronto.
BAGHDAD — As a priest led prayers for a few dozen worshipers inside St. Joseph Chaldean Church here on Sunday, Iraqi police officers stood guard outside. They blocked the street to traffic and frisked those who entered for explosive belts.
At churches in Baghdad this week, Christians are being asked for identification to determine if they have names that security force members recognize as Christian. Some churches around the northern city of Mosul are digging in, surrounding their buildings with giant earthen berms to prevent car bombers from getting too close.
For Christians in Iraq, this will be a year of canceled holiday celebrations and of Christmas Masses spent under the protective watch of police officers and soldiers because of a spate of threats by extremist groups to bomb churches on Christmas Day.
“I’m very sad that we are not able to have our rituals for Christmas this year and not have a sermon, but we do not want any Christians to be harmed,” said Edward Poles, a Christian priest at Sa’a Church in Mosul, which was bombed last week, though no one was killed.
In Baghdad, Christians said they are as fearful as they have been since 2006, when the outbreak of sectarian warfare forced many to leave their neighborhoods for months at a time.
“There will be no celebration or anything of that sort,” said Duraid Issam, a 41-year-old clerk. “We will keep it quiet because things are really bad. We are not targeted only at churches, but even in our houses because they will plant bombs outside our homes as well.”
There are no dependable figures on the number of Christians in Iraq, but the community had been estimated to number about 750,000 before the United States-led invasion in 2003.
Since then, they have become targets of killings and kidnappings, leading thousands to flee.
Many who remain are frightened and have taken precautions to conceal signs of their faith. Celebrations this year will be even more low key because Christmas coincides with the Muslim observance of Ashura, a time of mourning for Shiite Muslims.
“Our celebrations will not be open and will be restricted to going to the church in the morning,” said Naeil Victor, a 58-year-old teacher in the southern city of Basra. “My children are upset because they have been waiting for this Christmas for a year now, but my wife and my father understand what is going on around them.”
Some churches have dozens of soldiers and police officers positioned around them after the government placed security personnel on high alert because they received the names of churches that extremist groups said would be bombed on Christmas Day. Other churches have received individual threats.
In Mosul, during the past month, three churches have been bombed, killing a baby and wounding 40 other people. Last week, a Christian man in Mosul was shot dead as he walked down a street.
At least one church there has decided to relocate its Christmas Mass from Mosul to a small town about 30 miles north because parishioners feel it will be safer for them.
“We have moved the rituals for Christmas to the town of Qereqush, fearing that the Christians might be harmed in this insecure and unsafe city,” said the Rev. Behnam Asaad of Qahira Church. “We have distributed cards and fliers to the Christian families of this church informing them about the time and place where we will have the celebration, but we fear that assassinations might take place even after Christmas.”
Father Asaad said that he had received letters as recently as Monday from armed groups threatening to blow up churches and monasteries, including his own, if they celebrated Christmas.
Many Christians however, said they were unconcerned about the possibility of being attacked, saying they were suffering no more than other Iraqis.
“They are targeting not only us, but all Iraqis,” said Ann Benjamin, 26, after she walked through a phalanx of security personnel to attend Mass this week at Al Qaleb Al Aqdas (Sacred Heart) Church in the Karada district of Baghdad. “I am not afraid of going to church — even if I die there, I will be happy to die in God’s home.”
Those who plan to celebrate said they will mark Christmas by attending Mass, buying gifts and making traditional sweets, like klecha, a date-filled pastry.
“Today I bought my Christmas tree and decorated it just like every year and bought gifts and new clothes for the children,” said Sami Jalal, a 33-year-old engineer in Basra.
Mr. Jalal said what he desired most however, was for Iraq’s long period of violence against Christian and Muslim alike to come to an end.
“I hope,” he said, “that this ordeal will soon be wiped off the nation.”
Reporting was contributed by Duraid Adnan, Sa’ad al-Izzi and Muhammed al-Obaidi from Baghdad, and employees of The New York Times from Mosul and Basra.
TOKYO — A growing deficit, a spat with Washington, a campaign finance investigation and broken promises: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s first 100 days in office in Japan have been anything but smooth.
Four months after a landslide election swept aside a half-century of virtual one-party rule, Mr. Hatoyama’s agenda for a new Japan is under threat amid policy missteps and the harsh realities facing Japan, which has the world’s second-largest economy. Further complicating his work is a vocal fringe party in his coalition that is at odds with Mr. Hatoyama over government spending plans and debt levels.
“Mr. Hatoyama needs to regain control. He is letting the tail wag the dog,” said Noriko Hama, professor of economics at the Doshisha Graduate School of Business in Kyoto. “Japan’s economy could backslide.”
Mr. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party rode to power on a promise to end pork-barrel spending on public works projects championed by the long-ruling Liberal Democrats and divert the money to tax cuts and handouts that would bolster household incomes.
In recent weeks, a government task force has staged a public review of proposed government spending for the next fiscal year, cutting budgets and demanding that projects that are not urgent be postponed or abolished.
But those cuts came to less than a fourth of the government’s target of $32.8 billion — too little to make a dent in a burgeoning budget packed with stimulus measures to drive spending and bolster employment after the country’s worst recession since World War II.
The lack of progress on budget-cutting has fed jitters over the sustainability of Japan’s public debt, which is approaching twice its gross domestic product. Analysts say the government is likely to go well beyond a limit of $480 billion, it has set for next year.
Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii reiterated Tuesday that the government would stick to that target. “The ¥44 trillion is a promise Prime Minister Hatoyama made to the public,” he said.
But tight finances forced Mr. Hatoyama to renege this week on a pledge to abolish a tax on gasoline. The government has also backtracked on a promise to eliminate highway tolls, though it vows to keep other parts of its campaign manifesto, like offering cash handouts to families raising children.
“The public understands that finances are tight,” Mr. Hatoyama told reporters Tuesday, after apologizing for going back on his word. “I am sure the public wishes for the money to be put to work to help stimulate the economy.”
Though the public has been largely patient with Mr. Hatoyama, his popularity has started to slide. Approval ratings for his government skidded to 48 percent from a post-election high of 71 percent in a weekend survey by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings began to drop after he waffled on whether to renegotiate a 2006 deal to relocate a United States air base on the island of Okinawa.
The leader has also become embroiled in a campaign finance scandal involving $4 million in donations that prosecutors say were improperly reported. He told prosecutors this week in a written statement that he had no knowledge of the money, which Japanese newspapers said may have been contributions from his wealthy family disguised as donations.
At the heart of Mr. Hatoyama’s troubles, however, is Japan’s faltering economy. Although the country technically emerged from recession earlier this year, it remains mired in a deflationary cycle of falling prices, profits, wages and spending. A sustained rise in the value of the yen has also hurt the export-dependent economy. The government has pressed Japan’s central bank to flood financial markets with money to to spur the economy, but with limited results.
As the economy has floundered, tax revenue has dried up. Mr. Fujii has said he expected tax receipts for the year ending in March to come to a 25-year low of just over $400 billion, or $100 billion less than an initial estimate. That is also less than the government’s deficit for the current fiscal year — almost $590 billion.
The shortfall is sending the government scrambling to secure resources any way it can to keep from adding to its debt. Keeping the gasoline surcharge will bring in about $27 billion, economists say. The Hatoyama administration also decided Tuesday to raise Japan’s tobacco tax by a few cents per cigarette beginning Oct. 1, Bloomberg News reported.
In the meantime, an uneasy alliance with a fringe party is threatening to send budgets even higher. At the heart of the matter is Shizuka Kamei, banking minister and head of the tiny but strategically important People’s New Party.
Last month, Mr. Kamei fought successfully for a much-larger-than-planned $78 billion supplementary budget for the current fiscal year.
A former Liberal Democrat with strong ties to the construction industry, Mr. Kamei has been vocal in calling for a return to public works, raising fears in some circles that Japan could unleash projects on a country already chock-full of dams and roads.
“Coalition governments are prone to running up budget deficits,” Ryutaro Kono, a Tokyo-based economist at BNP Paribas, warned in a recent note. “There is an incentive for each coalition member to get their pet programs approved to highlight their profile.”
Moreover, Mr. Kamei has led the charge to freeze the privatization of the state-run postal savings bank, which has long been accused of squandering domestic savings. That would undo years of reforms introduced by the Liberal Democrats themselves to resuscitate Japan’s long-stagnant economy.
Mr. Hatoyama’s government is eager to show progress on Japan’s economy as his government faces its first test at the polls in mid-2010, when voters will choose members of the upper house of Parliament.
“Mr. Hatoyama is trying to bring about change, yet he faces resistance from within his own camp,” Professor Hama of Doshisha said. “If Mr. Hatoyama isn’t careful, Japan will find itself back in the dark old days.”
By Stephanie McCrummen Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, December 22, 2009; A10
KIAMBAA, KENYA -- Nearly two years after a wave of post-election violence brought this East African nation to the brink of civil war, Joseph Ngaruiya has learned to ride his bike with one leg, the other having never fully healed from machete cuts. He's learned to tolerate the "sorrys" and small talk of neighbors who he believes hacked him nearly to death and burned a church here, killing 36 people in one the worst days of the ethnic bloodletting.
What he has not managed, he says, is to summon sufficient faith in their apologies or in justice to keep him from buying an AK-47 once he gathers enough money.
"To stay the way we were that time, unarmed, we can't," said Ngaruiya, 38, who was among hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kikuyus driven from this western farming region by Kalenjin tribal militias after the disputed December 2007 election. "Next time, it will be much worse."
Despite a power-sharing deal and a reform agenda intended to rescue this nation from collapse, the situation remains dangerously volatile, troubling U.S. officials who are already juggling other worries in the region. With Kenya's eastern neighbor, Somalia, at war with al-Qaeda-linked rebels and its northwestern neighbor, Sudan, sliding toward civil war, U.S. officials say a stable Kenya is more crucial than ever.
But the coalition government of President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader turned prime minister Raila Odinga has remained entrenched in the divisive tribal politics that led to the ethnic violence.
The government has moved slowly on reforms, blocking any domestic judicial process for trying the perpetrators of the violence, who are widely believed to include Kenya's political elites.
The International Criminal Court recently announced its own investigation, which is likely to focus on a few top leaders alleged to have orchestrated violence.
"Leaders and people are going into their tribal cocoons, where they feel they are safe," said Ken Wafula, director of the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, a Kenyan human rights group. "Unless something is done, we are waiting for an explosion that would be very disastrous."
Rift Valley violence
Perhaps nowhere is the situation more fragile than here in the rolling, green Rift Valley. Some of the worst ethnic violence played out in this western region after Odinga accused Kibaki, who is Kikuyu, of stealing the 2007 presidential election. What followed has been described by investigations as a well-planned bloodbath in which Odinga's Kalenjin supporters burned houses and farms and otherwise drove Kikuyus out of the Rift Valley with bows, arrows and machetes. Kikuyu gangs soon organized their own ethnically driven retaliation against Odinga supporters. In all, more than 1,000 people were killed.
Though the tribal calculus could change this time, depending on political alliances in Nairobi, the capital, people speak with near certainty of a repeat of that violence, only this time with guns.
According to Wafula and others, Kalenjin and Kikuyu self-defense militias are forming, some of them including retired military commanders. And while reports of people buying guns are difficult to verify -- and Kenya's gun laws are strict -- Kenyan police earlier this month intercepted a cache of 100,000 bullets, military-grade weapons and uniforms being smuggled with the assistance of local police, which has lent some credence to the claims.
Sitting in his mud-walled house, Joseph Ngaruiya said that he knows where to get a gun when he's ready.
"You go near the swamp by the Ugandan border," said the former shopkeeper, who rescued his wife, daughter and four boys from the burning church. "You can't miss."
It was late afternoon, and Ngaruiya ran his fingers absently along the machete scars that divide his face and crease his skull. He was tired from riding his bike to town, where he has tried without luck to find work. Groceries, shops, and bus and truck companies seem interested in hiring only Kalenjin these days, he said, because of the possibility that Kikuyu-dominated businesses will be burned, as they were last time.
When he thought about it, he said, the post-election crisis taught him not that tribalism is a destructive tool of political elites but that his tribe is perhaps his only refuge anymore. The Kalenjin, he figured, have decided the same.
"We Kikuyus, we are uniting," Ngaruiya said. "And the Kalenjin, they follow their leaders so strongly. We know that. This thing has made tribalism stronger."
Kiambaa, a mostly Kikuyu community of yellowy fields and shaded red dirt paths, is relatively quiet these days; only about half of its residents have returned from tented displacement camps. Where the church was burned, two rows of low, wooden crosses, already overgrown with weeds, mark the graves of people who died inside, most of whom were women and children.
Tensions here remain so high that local Kalenjin leaders objected to building more permanent cement graves or a memorial, saying it would amount to an admission of guilt, or even a curse.
'It's taking too long'
One of those objectors is Alfred Kiplamai Bor, an influential Kalenjin elder whose sprawling family farm is just across a barbed wire fence from Kiambaa. He is accused of helping to finance Kalenjin militias, which poured across his farm to attack his neighbors at Kiambaa, a charge he denies. Bor's sons were recently acquitted in a Kenyan court of charges that they directed the militias and helped burn the church, a trial that many Kikuyu victims said was deeply flawed.
Bor, 88, calls Kikuyu neighbors "thieves" and accuses them of a sordid array of tribal practices that he calls "uncivilized."
"They are not wanted here," said the elder, sitting at his home on a little hill, where he's hosted some of Kenya's top Kalenjin leaders. "To solve this thing, it's very difficult."
Before the election, the Bors bought sugar and other goods from Kikuyus in Kiambaa. Kikuyus walked to Bor's farm for milk and corn. With few exceptions, those simple gestures of trust have not resumed.
One of Bor's sons, Emmanuel, said he does not share his father's views, though he feels in some way captive to them. When the militias arrived at his farm on New Year's Day -- by his count, more than 1,000 young men smeared with mud to disguise their faces -- he said he had little choice but to pretend to join them. Had he declined, he said, he might have been killed. When he arrived at the burning church, he said, his conscience told him to help. He said he yelled at the militias to open the church door before the building collapsed. He was there to rescue his neighbors, he said, not to burn them.
"These are people I've grown up with here," Emmanuel Bor said. "I don't know why they've not come back. This reconciliation is worrying. It's taking too long."
He walked outside his house then, across his field, under the barbed wire and into Kiambaa. It was getting dark, and the silence of the place was odd.
"This place was so full and busy," Bor said, walking past burned-out houses. "But listen now -- only bats. What keeps people away? I really don't understand." There are some Kikuyu neighbors who believe the younger Bor's story and have been branded traitors for it. Others said that even if they wanted to believe him, they cannot.
"We don't know what they are planning," said Regina Muthoni Nyokobi, whose mother died in her wheelchair in the church fire and who sometimes dreams of revenge. "We don't know their hearts."
The Pakistani army may or may not decide to take power once again in Islamabad. Off and on, for decades, Pakistan has been ruled by its military, usually with American support or acquiescence. During the 1980s, General Zia ruled Pakistan, after seizing power in a coup d'etat against President Bhutto, later hanging him, and he Islamicized Pakistan, squashing the country's secular tradition, then cooperating with the CIA and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s jihad against the USSR and its Afghan allies. In the 1990s, General Musharraf seized power, and he ruled for more than a decade, overtly and covertly supporting the Taliban's rule -- and, after 2001, the Taliban-led insurgency. To this day, for reasons of state, Pakistan's army continues to support the Taliban.
A new round of political upheaval has been triggered in Pakistan, with the Supreme Court's decision to void the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that provided a get-out-of-jail-free card to key civilian leaders of Pakistan. Included among those leaders are its utterly corrupt president, Asif Ali Zardari, and several top officials, including the minister of defense and the minister of interior. Those ministers, and others, have been told by the authorities not to leave town, i.e., they are forbidden to travel abroad, and pressure is on Zardari to resign.
If Pakistan has any hope of breaking the military's stranglehold on power, that hope rests in the civilian parties, including Zardari's Pakistan People's Party -- the party of the late President Bhutto and his daughter, Benazir, Zardari's late wife, who was assassinated on her return from exile -- and the more religious-centered Pakistan Muslim League (N) of the Sharif brothers, including Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister. Neither the PPP and the Muslim League, however, are true mass-based political parties. Instead, they have become vehicles for the personal and political ambitions of the corrupt families who control them. By default, the leadership of the democratic, civilian movement in Pakistan has fallen instead to the lawyers' movement and to the courts, but it's hard to see how those forces could emerge as a credible political movement that could lead the country. In Pakistan, nominally a democracy, actual democrats are few and far between, and it will take a long time for any of Pakistan's political parties and movements to put down roots and grow into true democratic parties. Meanwhile, it isn't clear that the army will allow that to happen.
Will the army take over? Right now, most analysts suggest that the army can bide its time, sitting back and watching the civilians flounder, confident in the knowledge that they can seize power at any time.
What does this mean for President Obama's Afghanistan policy?
Having committed 100,000 US troops to the war, the Obama administration finds itself in a quandary. Its own generals have acknowledged that the war cannot be won militarily. They know that success in Afghanistan, even as they define it, depends on a political settlement. And they know that the Afghan insurgency -- and its three interrelated commands, i.e., the Taliban in Quetta, the Hekmatyar party, and the Haqqani group -- is sheltered in Pakistan, whose leaders support and/or tolerate them. Out of frustration, and aware that the United States cannot neutralize the Afghan insurgency as long as it has bases and logistical support in Pakistan, the Obama administration is putting the squeeze on Pakistan, threatening to bomb insurgent command centers in Quetta, a populous city of nearly one million, and pounding its fist to demand that Pakistan halt its support for the insurgents.
The danger for the United States in this strategy is that Pakistan has a stranglehold over US forces in Afghanistan. If the United States tries to push the Pakistani military too hard, it can respond by interfering with, reducing, or -- in extreme circumstances -- cutting off US supply routes through Pakistan to US forces fighting the war in Afghanistan. There's precedent for this. Not too long ago, Pakistan briefly cut off the US supply chain. And, especially with the coming addition of 30,000 US forces, the United States will be even more dependent on Pakistan for day-to-day supplies, including food, fuel, and armaments. (The vast bulk of US supplies travel overland from the port of Karachi, through Pakistan, and over the treacherous mountain passes to US bases in Afghanistan.
In other words, the US war in Afghanistan against the Taliban is hostage, logistically, to the Taliban's main allies, the Pakistani military.
It isn't clear what the Obama team is thinking. Perhaps they believe that the civilian government in Islamabad, which is somewhat less pro-Taliban than the military, and somewhat more open to a political deal with India, Pakistan's arch rival, can somehow change Pakistan's policy of supporting the Taliban and other terrorist groups, such as the fanatics who attacked Mumbai and the myriad Kashmir-oriented terror groups that Pakistan supports. But because the Pakistani army, and its intelligence service, the ISI, holds most of the cards, that's not too likely. Perhaps they believe that they can force the Pakistani army to capitulate, in part by threats of US military assault on Quetta and other insurgent strongholds, but there's no indication that will happen.
Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist formerly with the RAND Corporation, believes that if greater pressure is put on Pakistan, it will lash out. "There's not a lot of evidence that Pakistan conciliates. It's a neurologically insecure state, and in the past they've tended to respond to pressure with asymmetric warfare," she says, meaning support for Islamic insurgents and terrorism. The Pakistani army hates the United States, she says, and by going after the Taliban the United States is "going after Pakistan's strategic assets." In response, Pakistan might well decide to cut off the US supply chain, after which the whole US war effort in Afghanistan would collapse. "Pakistan knows this!" says Fair. And by sending even more troops into Afghanistan, the United States has made itself more, not less, dependent on the good graces of the Pakistani army, she says.
That's why it's critical for the United States to seek a political deal with Pakistan, and with its Taliban allies. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both of which support the Taliban and both of which are nominally US allies, can persuade the Taliban to make a deal. For Pakistan, such a deal would have to protect what it sees as its vital interests in Afghanistan, most of which revolve around preventing the expansion of India's influence there.
Despite Obama's foolish policy of escalating the war, and despite the dangerous pressure on Pakistan militarily (including the reported threat to attack Quetta), there are some reports that the United States is quietly engaged in an unofficial dialogue with the Taliban, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. By promising to start withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan in July, 2011, Obama has started down the road to true negotiations. For most of the Taliban, if not its most incorrible extremists, what they want is a timetable for a US withdrawal, plus a greater share of power in ruling Afghanistan. That's Pakistan's key interest as well. As I wrote in The Nation special issue on Afghanistan in October, in an essay called "How to Get Out":
"The president should encourage the convening of an international Bonn II conference involving the UN, the major world powers and Afghanistan's neighbors--including Iran, India and Pakistan--to support the renegotiation of the Afghanistan compact. At the table must be representatives of all of Afghanistan's stakeholders, including the Taliban and their allies. In advance of that, the United States should join other nations and the UN to persuade President Karzai, his main electoral opponents and other Afghan politicians to form a coalition that would create an interim caretaker regime until the establishment of a more broadly based government.
"At the same time, the United States must launch a diplomatic surge aimed at persuading, cajoling and bribing Afghanistan's neighbors to support the effort, including Taliban supporters, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and opponents, including Iran, India and Russia. Obama must recognize that Pakistan is a key part of the problem, not the solution: the Afghan Taliban are not a formless, leaderless group. They are an arm of Pakistan's army and its intelligence service, the ISI, and they have an address: Rawalpindi, the garrison city that is the headquarters for the Pakistani military. The message of the world community to the Pakistani military must be clear: Pakistan's legitimate interests in Afghanistan will be recognized, but Pakistani support of terrorist groups, whether aimed at Afghanistan or Kashmir, is simply not acceptable.
"As a central part of the diplomatic effort, Obama must strongly encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to bring key elements of the three interlinked insurgency movements--the Taliban, the Hezb-i-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Haqqani network--to the bargaining table. Elements of those groups that opt not to participate are unlikely to present more than a nuisance challenge to the government in Kabul, if cut off from Pakistani support. China, Pakistan's ally, which has a vital interest in Central Asia, should be willing to use its influence in Pakistan to make sure Islamabad and Rawalpindi are on board.
"Similarly, Obama will have to work to get Iran, India and Russia to help persuade the remnants of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance (mostly Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras) to make room in Kabul for an enlarged Pashtun role, including the Taliban, in what could become a stable power-sharing arrangement. The ongoing US-Iran talks can be a useful forum to reach agreement between Washington and Tehran on common interests in stabilizing Afghanistan.
"Last, the United States must take the lead in creating a global Marshall Plan to help Afghanistan rebuild its war-shattered economy, build a passable infrastructure and establish the rudiments of a national government. The United States must be realistic about what it can accomplish--and what it cannot. It cannot remake Afghan society, change its cultural mores, modernize its religious outlook, educate its women or reshape the tribal system that prevails in its rural villages. It can break Al Qaeda and, as it exits, leave behind at least the possibility that Afghans will begin to create a sustainable society. But it must recognize, above all, that what it leaves behind won't be pretty."
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."
ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians--OSHA inspectors, insurance agents, religious workers--in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens has reported a web-exclusive companion piece on ICE agents' ruse operations.
Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.
I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g) program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.
A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening."
Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far Away." Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN's Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known to a court."
The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers, documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as well as cover-ups.
ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for its lack of a real-time locator database.
It is not surprising to find that, with no detention rules and being off the map spatially and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are acting in ways that are unconscionable and unlawful. According to Ahilan Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà , you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."
It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.
Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. "No one could visit; they couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local market."
Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the "enhanced interrogation" techniques promoted by the Bush White House and later set aside by the Justice Department because of concerns that they amounted to torture. Although without the intent to elicit information, ICE under the Obama administration was holding people charged with a civil infraction in conditions approaching those no longer authorized for accused terrorists.
According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City, "Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere. You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card, was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy here."
Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained why he would like ICE to release its entire list of subfield office addresses and phone numbers. "If they're detaining someone, I will need to contact the people on the list. If I can advocate on a person's behalf and provide documents, a lot of complications could be avoided."
Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a typical subfield office at the rear of CentreWest Commons, an office park adjacent to gated communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford University Press production plant. ICE's low-lying brick building with a bright blue awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US flag. People in shackles and handcuffs are shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do have signs. The agents, who are armed, might not wear uniforms and drive their passengers in unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani Martinez-Moore, who lives nearby and coordinates the North Carolina Network of Immigrant Advocates, did not know people were being held there until she read about it on my blog.
In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison, where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an immigration judge."
Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.
Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list was "not releasable" and that it was "law enforcement sensitive," but coordinator for community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait e-mailed me a partial list of addresses and no phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete list, including telephone numbers, in response to a FOIA request. That list, received in November and dated September 2009, is about forty locations shy of the 186 subfield offices mentioned in the Schriro report and omits thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job announcement seeking applicants for immigration enforcement agents. These include ICE postings in Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado; Pembroke Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The anonymous ICE official neither answered questions about why I was sent an incomplete list nor accounted for the disparity in official explanations of the list's confidentiality.
ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. Everyone knows that detention centers are in sparsely populated areas, but according to Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director of migrant and refugee rights, "Quite a lot of communities don't know they're detaining thousands of people, because the signs say Service Processing Center," not Detention Center, although the latter designation is used for privately contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail stated that the "service processing" term was first used when the centers were run by the predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization Service, "because these facilities were used to process aliens for deportation," ignoring the fact that these structures were and are distinctive for confining people and not the Orwellian "processing."
Even the largest complexes, which are usually off side roads from small highways, are visible only if you drive right up to the entrance. Unlike federal prisons, detention centers post no road signs to guide travelers. The anonymous ICE official would not provide a reason for this disparity.
ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in one of the grooviest buildings in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Tommy Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer and a star of A&E's reality show Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force, is part of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of the Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and alongside Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, both fancy venues for two other Food Network stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali. Above their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Someone who had been working in that building for about a year said he had heard rumors of FBI agents, though he didn't see one until nine months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun through the lobby. In November, at midday, he saw two men in plain clothes walk a third man in handcuffs through a side-street door behind Craftsteak. "It was weird, creepy," he said, adding that the whole arrangement made him uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you wonder, what are they hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"
Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a professor of visual arts at New York University, pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding federal agents in the "worldwide center of visuality and public space," referring to the galleries and High Line park among these buildings. Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a participatory democracy to work, you need to have real-time visual evidence of what is going on" and not just knowledge by professors who file a FOIA request or even readers of a Nation article.
In response to a question about the absence of signs at subfield offices, the ICE e-mail stated, "ICE attempts to place signs wherever possible, however there are many variables to consider such as shared buildings, law enforcement activities, zoning laws, etc." Except for "law enforcement activities," the reasons did not apply to the facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.
The Obama administration continued to ignore complaints about the LA subfield office known as B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. In September, the parties reached a settlement. The ACLU's Arulanantham said, "I never understood what [ICE] had to gain. The fact that after we filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it more mysterious" as to why their months of earlier negotiation brought few results. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira Loma Detention Center had space. When I asked if ICE was trying to punish people by bringing them to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."
Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than fodder for a law school hypothetical about whether intentional or unintentional rights violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE punished several Iraqi hunger strikers in Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully held for more than six months after agreeing to deportation--by shuffling them between a variety of different facilities, ensuring that they would not encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. This went on from weeks to months, according to Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the National Immigration Forum. "The message was, We're going to make you disappear."
As an alternative to the system of unmarked subfield offices and unaccountable agents, consider the approach of neighborhood police precincts, where dangerous criminals are held every day and police carry out their work in full view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens watch out for strange police actions, and know where to look if a family member is missing; local accountability helps discourage misconduct. ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws is abetted by their ability to scurry back to secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and resulting inhibitions that arise when law enforcement officers develop relationships with the communities they serve.
Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests says POLICE in large letters. Working out of a heretofore secret location--Manhunters has no exterior shots--one that his supervisor had requested I not reveal, gives their operation the trappings of a secret police. An attorney who had a client held in a subfield office said on background, "The president released in January a memorandum about transparency, but that's not happening. He says one thing, but we have these clandestine operations, akin to extraordinary renditions within the United States. They're misguided as to what their true mission is, and they are doing things contrary to the best interests of the country."
Want to know what's wrong -- really wrong -- with the health-care "reform" bill being pushed through the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid?
Ask a nurse.
"It is tragic to see the promise from Washington this year for genuine, comprehensive reform ground down to a seriously flawed bill that could actually exacerbate the health-care crisis and financial insecurity for American families, and that cedes far too much additional power to the tyranny of a callous insurance industry," says National Nurses Union co-president Karen Higgins, RN.
"Sadly," adds Higgins, "we have ended up with legislation that fails to meet the test of true health-care reform, guaranteeing high quality, cost effective care for all Americans, and instead are further locking into place a system that entrenches the choke-hold of the profit-making insurance giants on our health. If this bill passes, the industry will become more powerful and could be beyond the reach of reform for generations."
The 150,000-member NNU, the largest union and professional organization of registered nurses in the U.S., condemned Reid's bill -- which is expected to gain Senate approval this week -- as a deeply flawed measure that grants too much power to the nation's largest private and for-profit insurers.
1. The individual mandate forcing all those without coverage to buy private insurance, with insufficient cost controls on skyrocketing premiums and other insurance costs.
2. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.
3. An affordability mirage. Congressional Budget Office estimates say a family of four with a household income of $54,000 would be expected to pay 17 percent of their income, $9,000, on healthcare exposing too many families to grave financial risk.
4. The excise tax on comprehensive insurance plans which will encourage employers to reduce benefits, shift more costs to employees, promote proliferation of high-deductible plans, and lead to more self-rationing of care and medical bankruptcies, especially as more plans are subject to the tax every year due to the lack of adequate price controls. A Towers-Perrin survey in September found 30 percent of employers said they would reduce employment if their health costs go up, 86 percent said they'd pass the higher costs to their employees.
5. Major loopholes in the insurance reforms that promise bans on exclusion for pre-existing conditions, and no cancellations for sickness. The loopholes include:
· Provisions permitting insurers and companies to more than double charges to employees who fail "wellness" programs because they have diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol readings, or other medical conditions.
· Insurers are permitted to sell policies "across state lines", exempting patient protections passed in other states. Insurers will thus set up in the least regulated states in a race to the bottom threatening public protections won by consumers in various states.
· Insurers can charge four times more based on age plus more for certain conditions, and continue to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.
· Insurers may continue to rescind policies for "fraud or intentional misrepresentation" – the main pretext insurance companies now use to cancel coverage.
6. Minimal oversight on insurance denials of care; a report by the California Nurses Association/NNOC in September found that six of California's largest insurers have rejected more than one-fifth of all claims since 2002.
7. Inadequate limits on drug prices, especially after Senate rejection of an amendment, to protect a White House deal with pharmaceutical giants, allowing pharmacies and wholesalers to import lower-cost drugs.
8. New burdens for our public safety net. With a shortage of primary care physicians and a continuing fiscal crisis at the state and local level, public hospitals and clinics will be a dumping ground for those the private system doesn't want.
9. Reduced reproductive rights for women.
10. No single standard of care. Our multi-tiered system remains with access to care still determined by ability to pay. Nothing changes in basic structure of the system; healthcare remains a privilege, not a right.
In fairness to Reid and his fellow Senate Democrats, most of the flaws in their bill are also present in the House bill. And that's the really depressing part.
While members of the Obama administration and key senators claim that the legislation should be enacted because it seeks to expand coverage, places new regulations on insurers and might be improved in the House-Senate conference committee, NNU co-president Deborah Burger, RN, offers a more realistic diagnosis:
"Those wishful statements ignore the reality that much of the expanded coverage is based on forced purchase of private insurance without effective controls on industry pricing practices or real competition and gaping loopholes in the insurance reforms."
Contrary to countless reports, the debacle in Copenhagen was not everyone's fault. It did not happen because human beings are incapable of agreeing, or are inherently self-destructive. Nor was it all was China's fault, or the fault of the hapless UN.
There's plenty of blame to go around, but there was one country that possessed unique power to change the game. It didn't use it. If Barack Obama had come to Copenhagen with a transformative and inspiring commitment to getting the U.S.economy off fossil fuels, all the other major emitters would have stepped up. The EU, Japan, China and India had all indicated that they were willing to increase their levels of commitment, but only if the U.S. took the lead. Instead of leading, Obama arrived with embarrassingly low targets and the heavy emitters of the world took their cue from him.
(The "deal" that was ultimately rammed through was nothing more than a grubby pact between the world's biggest emitters: I'll pretend that you are doing something about climate change if you pretend that I am too. Deal? Deal.)
I understand all the arguments about not promising what he can't deliver, about the dysfunction of the U.S. Senate, about the art of the possible. But spare me the lecture about how little power poor Obama has. No President since FDR has been handed as many opportunities to transform the U.S. into something that doesn't threaten the stability of life on this planet. He has refused to use each and every one of them. Let's look at the big three.
Blown Opportunity Number 1: The Stimulus Package When Obama came to office he had a free hand and a blank check to design a spending package to stimulate the economy. He could have used that power to fashion what many were calling a "Green New Deal" -- to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. Instead, he experimented disastrously with reaching across the aisle to Republicans, low-balling the size of the stimulus and blowing much of it on tax cuts. Sure, he spent some money on weatherization, but public transit was inexplicably short changed while highways that perpetuate car culture won big.
Blown Opportunity Number 2: The Auto Bailouts Speaking of the car culture, when Obama took office he also found himself in charge of two of the big three automakers, and all of the emissions for which they are responsible. A visionary leader committed to the fight against climate chaos would obviously have used that power to dramatically reengineer the failing industry so that its factories could build the infrastructure of the green economy the world desperately needs. Instead Obama saw his role as uninspiring down-sizer in chief, leaving the fundamentals of the industry unchanged.
Blown Opportunity Number 3: The Bank Bailouts Obama, it's worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees -- it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn't tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it's harder than ever to get a loan.
Imagine if these three huge economic engines -- the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill -- had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.
Whether the bill had passed or not, by the time Copenhagen had rolled around, the U.S. would already have been well on its way to dramatically cutting emissions, poised to inspire, rather than disappoint, the rest of the world.
There are very few U.S. Presidents who have squandered as many once-in-a-generation opportunities as Barack Obama. More than anyone else, the Copenhagen failure belongs to him.
Research support for Naomi Klein's reporting from Copenhagen was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
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