The U.S. financial problems could go from bad to catastrophic if China stops lending us money. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (in photo) expressed concern today about the safety of China’s $1 trillion investment in American government debt. “We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S.,” he said. “Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.”
Here are the top five most influential women in the world for 2009, according to Real Clear World:
No. 5. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, president of Argentina.
No. 4. Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister of Ukraine.
No. 3. Indra Nooyi, chairwoman and CEO of PepsiCo.
No. 2. Hillary Clinton, U.S. secretary of state.
No. 1. Angela Merkel (in photo), chancellor of Germany
“We think they do, quite frankly.” — Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked on CNN Sunday whether Iran has “enough fissile material to make a bomb”
“They’re not close to a weapon at this point, and so there is some time” for diplomatic efforts. — Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation”
“We have said many times that a nuclear weapon has no place in Iran’s defense doctrine.” — Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hasan Qashqavi, speaking on Monday
Good for Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, for continuing his fight to reform the outdated U.S. trade policies with Cuba, and especially to free up agricultural and food exports tightened under the Bush administration. In a letter sent last week to President-elect Barack Obama, Moran wrote: “Reform of U.S. trade policy with Cuba can facilitate new markets for U.S. goods and provide a means for our country’s democratic principles to reach Cuban citizens. Development of more practical trade rules will also deter Cuban purchases from other more oppressive governments like Venezuela or China. This is especially the case with nonluxury items like food and medicine.”
Good for Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., for his continuing leadership in the Senate on Africa. On Wednesday he introduced, with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Brownback said in a statement: “With over 250,000 people displaced in the last two months, sporadic fighting between armed groups, rape and sexual violence thriving on impunity, this forgotten crisis continues to pass through each of our hands without our knowledge. Exploited minerals, used in our daily electronics, are being smuggled out of eastern Congo which in turn are funding armed groups and allowing this conflict to continue. We call on the electronics industry for transparency in their products, we call for an immediate cease-fire and negotiations towards a political solution to this conflict, and we call on the international community to not allow Congo to fall into the shadows once again and be so easily forgotten.” On Thursday the U.N. Security Council approved sending 3,100 more soldiers and police to Congo, but there is more the world community can and should do to quell the violence and respond to the resulting humanitarian crisis.
“When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia stood before the United Nations last week to proclaim his opposition to ‘religious intolerance,’ anyone listening would have to think: Of all the gall!” wrote Joel Brinkley. Yet no one who attended the conference, including President Bush, pointed out the hypocrisy. “Saudi Arabia, it happens, is the world’s most intolerant state on religious matters,” Brinkley noted. “Sure, many other nations are guilty of atrocities committed in the name of religion. We humans have a long and sorry history of that. Today, however, only in Saudi Arabia are these rules institutionalized on such a broad scale – and enforced.”
The whole world was watching Tuesday night, and now it’s weighing in. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour sees a “tsunami of goodwill” accompanying Barack Obama’s victory, observing that the Times of London said Obama “had revitalized U.S. politics. In Germany, Der Spiegel called Obama’s rise ‘astonishing,’ while the Times of India called Obama an ‘advocate of strong partnership with India.’ Al-Jazeera said Obama had ‘surfed to power on a wave of voter discontent generated by the failures of President George Bush and the Republican Party’ and added that he faces ‘unique challenges.’ It continued that his country was ‘sick of war.’”
Sarah Palin said during her ABC News interview last week that if Georgia joined NATO (which she supports) and Moscow attacked again, America might have to fight the Russians. “In other words,” columnist Trudy Rubin wrote, “the world’s two biggest nuclear powers would engage in battle, after avoiding such a catastrophe for the whole Cold War.”
“Are we really ready to go to war over Tbilisi?” Rubin asked.
She also asked for clarification from John McCain about what his views are. She noted that McCain has described himself as a “realist idealist” on foreign policy, but it is unclear whether he is more of a realist (in the mold of former Secretary of State James Baker) or more of an idealist (such as the neoconservatives who wanted to remake the Middle East).
Does the Bush administration really see tanks, fighter jets, missiles and warships as peacemakers? “The Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005,” reported the New York Times, naming Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Romania, Poland and Morocco among recent customers, including some that use U.S. aid to buy the weapons.
Bruce Lemkin, an Air Force deputy undersecretary, said the dealing “is about building a more secure world” and asked: “Would you rather they bought the weapons and aircraft from other countries? Because they will.”
Not too surprisingly, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev took a pro-Russian view of the Georgia crisis in a New York Times commentary. Gorbachev wrote: “Russia did not want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili. He would not have dared to attack without outside support. Once he did, Russia could not afford inaction.” Gorbachev also blamed the West for mounting “a propaganda attack against Russia, with the American news media leading the way.” He also suggested that the West might have been behind the confrontation. “It is still not quite clear whether the West was aware of Mr. Saakashvili’s plans to invade South Ossetia, and this is a serious matter,” he wrote. “What is clear is that Western assistance in training Georgian troops and shipping large supplies of arms had been pushing the region toward war rather than peace.”
Why haven’t there been any protests during the Olympics in the government-approved protest areas at three Beijing parks? Simple: As of Wednesday, the Chinese government hadn’t granted a single permit to protest. And it sentenced two elderly Chinese women to a year of labor re-education after they wouldn’t stop trying to get a permit, the Washington Post reported. So much for openness.
It’s hard to work up many tears over today’s resignation of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, who abused the Bush administration’s trust in him by firing judges and tolerating the presence of al-Qaida and the Taliban within Pakistan’s borders, among other offenses. “Today, the shadow of dictatorship that has prevailed for long over this country, that chapter has been closed,” said Information Minister Sherry Rehman. Still, Musharraf was a known quantity. Will whatever is next for this nuclear power so vital to U.S. regional interests be better or worse?
The United States’ response to Russia’s aggression against Georgia seems weak at best. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made more than 50 phone calls over the weekend, and President Bush said (between Olympics events) that when he spoke with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Putin’s puppet president, he expressed “grave concern about the disproportionate response of Russia and that we strongly condemn the bombing outside of South Ossetia.” But Putin seems undeterred by either foreign criticism or Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s signing of a cease-fire pledge.
The United States could use some of the credibility it squandered by invading Iraq about now. Lacking that, the Group of Seven, NATO, the United Nations and the European Union need to be tough and unified.
As John McCain urged today, Rice should go to Europe “to establish a common Euro-Atlantic position aimed at ending the war and supporting the independence of Georgia.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Saakashvili says that “if Georgia falls, this will also mean the fall of the West in the entire former Soviet Union and beyond. Leaders in neighboring states — whether in Ukraine, in other Caucasian states or in Central Asia — will have to consider whether the price of freedom and independence is indeed too high.”
“Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback says China will spy on Olympic visitors, including journalists and human rights activists. To which President Bush said, ‘Since when do you need an Olympics to do that?’” — Comedy writer Jim Barach, quoted in Newsday
“American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials,” the New York Times reported. “The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”
China is on the verge of an automobile boom, according to this Washington Post article. And many Chinese like SUVs and other big gas hogs. While SUV sales are tanking in most of the developed world, they’re up 43 percent in China. In fact, more big Buicks are now sold in China than in the United States.
Fifteen years ago, few Chinese owned a car. Now there are more than 15 million autos in China — and the numbers are expected to explode in coming years.
That’s not only bad news in the global fight against climate change. The growing Chinese demand for oil likely will keep U.S. gas prices high, too.
“Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president,” columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote. “What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.”
Thank goodness that war criminal Radovan Karadzic has been captured in Serbia and should soon be on his way to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands. Karadzic, who was the wartime leader of Bosnian Serbs, is accused of masterminding the siege of Sarajevo and the execution of up to 8,000 Muslims in 1995. Karadzic was able to dramatically change his appearance and, remarkably, had been living and working near Belgrade. His fellow war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic has not been found. Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was put on trial in 2002 but died before a verdict was reached.
The request Monday for an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, is an important and needed step in trying to hold him accountable for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. According to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, al-Bashir “masterminded and implemented” a plan to destroy three main ethnic groups in Darfur and, using government soldiers and Arab militias, “specifically and purposefully targeted civilians.”
But don’t expect al-Bashir to be arrested anytime soon, if ever. A three-judge panel likely won’t make a decision until this fall. If the warrant is issued, it would be up to the United Nations to try to enforce it, which may or may not happen. There already are arrest warrants for two other Sudanese leaders that are mostly being ignored. In fact, al-Bashir promoted one of those officials to be minister of humanitarian affairs.
It’s encouraging that President Bush and other leaders of the Group of Eight industrial nations — Italy, France, Japan, Russia, Britain, Germany and Canada — this week endorsed significant reductions in greenhouse gases for their nations: 50 percent cuts by 2050.
It’s still unclear, though, whether the group will finalize any agreement, and critics are right to say the 2050 target is too far in the future. Intermediate goals, they say, are needed to spur nations to take action in the short term — say, by 2020.
One group working on climate change, Oxfam International, called the G-8 agreement “another stalling tactic.”
President Bush is right about attending the opening ceremony at the Olympics in Beijing next month: “I happen to believe that not going to the opening ceremony for the games would be an affront to the Chinese people, which may make it more difficult to be able to speak frankly with the Chinese leadership.” Refusing to attend likely would have no impact on China’s bad behavior in Tibet or otherwise, as it suggested a lack of support for U.S. athletes. But Bush should use every opportunity on his trip to make China squirm about its human rights record.
“If an American first lady, or would-be first lady, described herself as a ‘tamer of men’ and had a ‘man-eating’ past filled with naked pictures, Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, sultry prone CD covers, breaking up marriages, bragging that she believes in polygamy rather than monogamy, and having a son with a married philosopher whose father she’d had an affair with, it would take more than an appearance on ‘The View’ to sweeten her image,” columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. Yet Sarkozy’s third wife is charming not only the French public and world leaders such as President Bush, but also helping raise Sarkozy’s low approval ratings. Said one political observer: “He has stopped behaving like a twit since the marriage.”
How low is world public opinion of President Bush? Former Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao are more trusted than Bush to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,†according to an international survey coordinated by the Project on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. Not that authoritarian leaders Putin and Hu rated high in trustworthiness; they just scored better than Bush.
“I guess President Bush must think Defense Secretary Robert Gates is an appeaser of terrorists. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, too. And U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker,” wrote columnist Trudy Rubin. She noted that all three support having direct talks with Iran, as Barack Obama does. “What makes the president’s remarks even more hypocritical is the abject failure of his own Iran policy,” she wrote. “No one has strengthened Iran’s hand more in the Mideast region than George W. Bush.”
Rubin argued that John McCain is hypocritical, too. “There is no way Iraq can be stabilized and U.S. troops withdrawn safely without the cooperation of Tehran,” she wrote. “McCain is fooling himself and the public if he thinks he can avoid the issue of talks.”
FYI: In case you haven’t seen it, here is the video of “Hardball” host Chris Matthews trying to get talk-radio host Kevin James to explain what former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did wrong.
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After decades of relatively low-cost food, the world is facing a global food crisis, with soaring prices for staples such as wheat and corn and rice hitting poor people especially hard and causing food riots in Haiti, Egypt and other countries.
The situation alarms food experts, who warn that looming famine and starvation could not only cause untold suffering but also foster political instability.
Several factors are behind the spike, according to experts, including the diversion of millions of acres of crops to biofuels such as corn-based ethanol. Other factors include climate change, soaring gasoline prices, and greater consumption of meat and dairy products in the developing world.
The United States and other wealthy nations must address this crisis on several fronts to avert a humanitarian disaster.
