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Cornering the "Biggest Evil"
Papers predict the imminent capture of Osama Bin Laden.
By Michael Young
Posted Monday, Feb. 23, 2004, at 9:13 AM PT


A day after yet another suicide attack in Israel, many newspapers predictably led with the hearings that began today at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the legality of Israel's separation wall in the occupied Palestinian territories. However, another weekend story was developing, despite the absence of any confirmation, namely a report that Osama Bin Laden had been spotted and surrounded in tribal portions of Pakistan.

The first newspaper to highlight the Bin Laden story was Britain's Sunday Express, which reported that the al-Qaida leader had been found and surrounded by U.S. forces in a border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to a report on the Express story by Australia's Sunday Telegraph, the British tabloid, "known for its sometimes colorful scoops," claimed Bin Laden "is in a mountainous area to the north of the Pakistani city of Quetta. The region is said to be peopled with bin Laden supporters and the terrorist leader is estimated to also have 50 of his fanatical bodyguards with him. ... The claim is attributed to 'a well-placed intelligence source' in Washington, who is quoted as saying: '[Bin Laden] is boxed in.' " A subsequent story on the Express Web site qualified the initial report. The paper noted:

New operations aimed at cornering al-Qaeda and Taliban holdouts sheltering in the Pakistani tribal belt where Osama bin Laden may be hiding are soon to get under way. ... Bin Laden was not the immediate target of the operation, said one senior Pakistani intelligence official. But he said the hope was that the operation would net clues that would ultimately lead to the "biggest evil."

The Arabic press also picked up on the story. On Monday, the London-based Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat put a story on its front page under this neutral headline, "There Are Reports of Al-Qaida Leaders Being Surrounded." The story cited a U.S. Defense Department spokesman neither confirming nor denying Bin Laden's "location and whether he had been surrounded." The paper went on to say, much like the Express, that reports suggested "thousands of Pakistani troops" were preparing to attack border areas in Waziristan, near Afghanistan, "in the event of a refusal by the tribes [living in the areas] to hand over members of al-Qaida." Al-Hayat, another London-based Saudi newspaper, put the same story on its front page, noting that 8,000 Pakistani troops would join 4,000 others already in Waziristan, with the aim of capturing Bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Pakistan's Dawn quoted the country's information and broadcasting minister, Shaikh Rashid Ahmed, denying the Express story. According to the story, "[Ahmad] said the army had not started any operation. It [had] only strengthened its force to secure the borders of the country." However, it was fairly clear from the article that the minister was keen to avoid a sense that Pakistan was collaborating with foreign forces against his country's tribesmen: "Neither [Pakistani forces] will join any other country's force nor any other country's force will join them," he said.

In the more sedate surroundings of The Hague, the U. N. International Court of Justice was set to begin hearings on the legality of Israel's West Bank separation wall. Israel has protested the hearings, arguing that the wall is necessary for Israeli security, and will not be participating in the ICJ hearings in an official capacity.

The start of the hearings came a day after a suicide bombing killed eight people in a bus in Jerusalem. Reporting on the attack, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz noted that two guards had entered the bus but had been unable to spot the attacker, a 23-year-old man from a village near Bethlehem. Several officials linked the bombing to the ICJ proceedings, and the Jerusalem police chief, Maj. Gen. Mickey Levy, recognized this when he said, "There were no specific warnings about [the attack]; but because of the trial about the fence, this is a problematic week, and the preparations were in keeping with this."

As the ICJ hearings got underway, the Palestinian delegate was the first witness. According to the English-language Web site of Israel's Maariv: "Palestinian UN representative, Nasser al-Kidwa, was the first the address the court. In a scathing attack on Israel, al-Kidwa said: 'The wall will render the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impossible.' " Kidwa was referring to the fact that Palestinians, and indeed many others, see the wall as an Israeli instrument for the de facto annexation of large swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank. To get a sense of just what is at stake in terms of size, Al-Hayat published an almost-page-sized map of the West Bank showing the contours of the wall in its Monday's edition. Whatever the wall's final path, many people, even Palestinians, will agree the bus attack did little to advance Palestinian arguments on the need to tear down the barrier.


Michael Young is opinion editor at the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

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Unhip, Unhip Al Hurra
The Middle East hates its new TV station.
By Ed Finn
Posted Friday, Feb. 20, 2004, at 9:18 AM PT


In its first week of broadcasting to the Middle East, U.S.-funded satellite station Al Hurra has earned little praise from its target audience. Al Hurra (which means "the free one" in Arabic) started broadcasting Valentine's Day as a none-too-subtle answer to Al Jazeera and other regional media's unfavorable reporting on U.S. foreign policy.

Al Hurra is just the latest in a string of Middle Eastern public diplomacy efforts for the United States--previous highlights include the Arab-language Radio Sawa and Hi magazine. The station kicked off its programming with an exclusive interview with President Bush and offers a mix of international news, documentaries, and talk shows.

Many Arab commentators were quick to condemn Al Hurra, some even before it aired. Writing last week, Rami Khouri of Lebanon's Daily Star threw down the gauntlet: Al Hurra "will be an entertaining, expensive and irrelevant hoax. Where do they get this stuff from? Why do they keep insulting us like this?" Syria's Tishrin skipped bafflement and moved directly to outrage: "This station is part of a project to recolonize the Arab homeland that the United States seeks to implement through a carrot-and-stick policy." (Translation courtesy of BBC Monitoring.)

A few contrarians did speak up to defend the network's arrival, though they did so out of principle rather than any love of its message. Britain's Guardian quoted an Egyptian news executive arguing: "Everyone is entitled to express his or her opinion. This is an open sky and nobody should be afraid of that." The London-based Arab paper Al-Sharq al-Awsat pooh-poohed those who saw the channel as "an American plot to 'brainwash' the Arabs" and argued that "a nation scared of a satellite station, regardless of its source or color, is a shy and timid nation."

The problem, everyone agreed, was not the station's programming but rather U.S. policies, especially regarding Israel. The Guardian interviewed Cairo natives about the new show, and reported: "[M]ost Cairenes said they simply do not trust Bush. If he cared about human rights, then he would help the Palestinians, they say." Al-Khaleej of the United Arab Emirates noted, "If U.S. policy in the region was sound and convincing, they would not resort to cosmetic means to improve their image" (Arabic translation in the last two paragraphs courtesy of BBC Monitoring.)

Middle Eastern papers were nearly unanimous in arguing that American support of Israel and its occupation of Iraq are the issues that fuel anti-American sentiment--and Al Hurra can do little to disguise this. The Jordan Times put it in terms even an American could understand:

No amount of sweet words and pretty pictures will change the reality of an Israeli occupation, soon in its 37th year, or the chaos in Iraq, both of which can be directly attributed to American policy. No one here is going to be convinced of America's benign intentions as long as these issues remain unresolved. It all seems so obvious, at least to most of the people of this region, that, to borrow the phrase of an American cultural icon, "doh!"

Ed Finn is a writer in New York. You can e-mail him at ed@edfinn.net.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2095806/

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THE RIGHT'S PHONY OUTRAGE OVER DEFICITS.
Crocodile Tears
by Jonathan Chait


Printer friendly
Post date 02.23.04 | Issue date 03.01.04 E-mail this article

o trace the Republican Party's evolving view of the deficit during the Bush years, one need only turn to the editorials of The Wall Street Journal. In the spring of 2001, before the enactment of President Bush's first tax cut, the Journal editors were still floating in the Pollyannaish world of ever-growing surpluses. "Even if Congress passes Mr. Bush's entire tax cut," an April editorial pronounced, "federal debt will fall to an estimated 14.4% of GDP by fiscal 2006. In other words, federal debt is not even remotely a problem." A month earlier, when Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle warned that Bush's tax cuts would "consume nearly all the surplus," the Journal replied, "The truth is that if instead of $5.6 trillion, the surplus were $56 trillion, Senator Daschle and the like would still be yammering about 'irresponsible' tax cuts."

Even after the surplus disappeared, the Journal remained sanguine. In February 2002, the editors observed, "Another Beltway lament is that the Bush tax cuts have sent the budget into deficit. ... But total revenues are projected to rebound smartly in 2003." When, rather than rebound, revenue fell again in 2003, the Journal was still undeterred. "The new antitax argument is to lament 'a decade of deficits' to come," insisted a March 2003 editorial. "This ignores the fact that the U.S. debt in public hands remains about 36% of GDP." Nine days later, another editorial sneered, "Yes, we know, there is the 'deficit.'" (The sarcastic quotation marks are a particularly amusing touch, as if to say, "Oh, riiight, the budget's in 'deficit.' Whatever you say, Daschle.")

In the last few weeks, however, Journal readers may have detected a faint note of concern. Tucked into one of its perennial jeremiads against congressional profligacy, a January 20 editorial worried that "the ostensibly small-government GOP seems totally oblivious to the fact that all this spending puts its future economic agenda in jeopardy. Appropriations do mean taxes, after all, even if they're deferred taxes." For those who don't follow this debate closely, "deferred taxes" is a euphemism for deficits. The Journal is finally acknowledging that, with the budget a half-trillion dollars in the red, the baby-boomers about to retire, and no sign of relief on the horizon, the country may have a wee fiscal problem on its hands.

The Journal lays the blame for this state of affairs on out-of-control domestic spending. Recent editorials have denounced "drunken GOP sailors" and threatened "a conservative revolt over runaway spending." And, indeed, these sentiments reflect pretty well the position of the conservative movement more generally. "As 2003 closes, the nation finds itself burdened by runaway federal spending and massive looming structural budget deficits," argued an oft-cited paper by the Heritage Foundation released last December. "Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances," complained columnist George Will. Indeed, in the last few weeks, all the arms of the conservative intellectual apparatus--National Review, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and sundry right-wing talk-show hosts--have flayed the administration and congressional Republicans for their profligacy. Meanwhile, conservatives in Congress have vowed to slash Bush's latest budget request.

And so, in a relatively short span of time, the conservative view of the deficit has gone from myopic denial to borderline hysteria. It is a sign of genuine progress that Bush's allies finally admit that vast, structural deficits pose a threat to the continued health of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, they have misdiagnosed the nature of that threat, which is posed by tax cuts and national security spending, which they support, not by domestic spending. The conservative uprising may seem like bracing intellectual honesty, but in fact it's an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that the policies they champion have failed even on their own terms.



he anti-spending backlash has gained such traction--even some liberals are buying into it--because it contains a few grains of truth. First, spending has risen noticeably. The catch is that it has risen from historically low levels. In each of the last three fiscal years of the Clinton administration, federal spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) reached no higher than 18.6 percent--lower than at any point since 1966. Today, at just over 20 percent of GDP, outlays are higher, but they're still not terribly high by post-Great Society standards. In fact, in 2004, Washington will still consume a lower share of the economy than it did during any year between 1975 and 1996.

Second, it's also true that Republicans have embraced spending programs that would make Milton Friedman turn over in his University of Chicago office. According to Congressional Quarterly, after Republicans took control of Congress, they "embraced the practice of earmarking"--the term of art for circumventing the normal appropriations practice to slip in hometown projects--"taking it to a degree unimagined when the Republican revolutionaries of 1994 prepared to storm the capitol." But, while pork-barrel spending may be a powerful symbol of GOP hypocrisy, it's not a terribly large part of the $2.4 trillion federal budget. Likewise, some of Bush's spending initiatives have attracted attention disproportionate to their size. Bush made an enormous fuss over his commitment to increase education spending, but education still accounts for a mere 2.76 percent of the budget. Conservatives are rightly upset about his funding increase for the National Endowment for the Arts, but, however shaky arts subsidies may be in principle, their $18 million cost is peanuts. Even the farm bill, at $180 billion over ten years, is, again, notable more for its hypocritical pandering--Bush revived an archaic and unjustifiable subsidy that Bill Clinton had phased out--than its scale.



ather, the most expensive spending programs under Bush have been for defense, homeland security, and international aid. None of these areas has grown fat. To the contrary, the military is overstretched, homeland security underfunded, and aid programs to build strong governments and civil societies that can resist radical Islam woefully inadequate. Still, if you add up the cost of all the legislation enacted since Bush took office--as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did--these three areas account for 30 percent of that cost. New entitlements account for 13 percent, and, with the Medicare benefit projected to grow, that share will increase over time. But, rather than tackle these areas of spending--or address the elephant in the living room, the president's tax cuts, which account for 55 percent of the "cost" of legislation under Bush (more on this later)--conservatives have focused the brunt of their fiscal wrath upon a relatively small and innocuous slice of the federal budget called domestic discretionary spending.

Discretionary spending includes everything the government does other than entitlements, defense, and interest on the national debt. All of this--from national highways to scientific research to public housing--accounts for a mere 17 percent of the overall budget. It makes up a still smaller 3 percent of the total cost of legislation passed under Bush, and its impact on the budget pales beside the tax cuts. But, because many of these programs lack strong political constituencies--at least when compared with heavyweights like Medicare--they are taking the brunt of the conservative attack. Heritage paints the growth in discretionary spending as insidious: "[N]on-defense discretionary spending," argues its December backgrounder, "has reached 3.9 percent of GDP ($3,900 per household) for the first time in nearly 20 years." But most of that increase has come from homeland security. The Center for American Progress found that, over the last decade, domestic programs unrelated to security have grown from 3.3 percent of GDP to--da-dum!--3.4 percent of GDP.

Trying to balance the budget by squeezing domestic discretionary spending is like trying to lose weight by giving up that slice of tomato on your cheeseburger. Not that Republicans aren't trying anyway: GOP leaders have proposed a total freeze on discretionary spending this year. Doing so would save $2 billion. To grasp the absurdity of that effort, keep in mind that this year's deficit is expected to top $500 billion. Even if Congress persuaded Bush to completely eliminate all discretionary programs including homeland security, that would still leave Washington with $137 billion in red ink.

The big picture, then, is this: Overall spending has crept up a bit, now taking up 1.6 percent more of the economy than it did when Bush took office, but it remains modest by modern standards. The really spectacular change is in tax revenue, which has fallen from 20.9 percent to 15.8 percent of GDP since Bush took office. The collapse in revenue, in other words, has been more than three times the growth in spending. This year, revenue will account for a smaller share of the economy than in any year since 1950. Now, it's true that much of that revenue loss stems from broader economic factors, not just tax cuts. But, even if you look only at deficit increases caused directly by legislative action, the cost of the tax cuts is still nearly five times the size of all the non-security spending increases and accounts for more than all new spending (defense, homeland security, and domestic) put together.



hy, then, do conservatives fixate on the role of spending in producing the deficit? For one thing, doing so allows them to pressure the Bush administration and Congress to squeeze spending, which is what they want to do anyway. More important, it allows them to avoid acknowledging that they were (and continue to be) spectacularly wrong about the fiscal impact of the Bush tax cuts.

Recall for a moment that, when asked why it made sense to address a temporary economic slowdown by opening a permanent drain on federal revenue, conservatives offered up two fiscal defenses. The first was the basic supply-side claim that, by unleashing new incentives, the tax cuts would permanently raise economic growth, which in turn would create additional tax revenue. Therefore, they concluded, the tax cut would cost the government far less than official projections suggested. Heritage fellow Daniel Mitchell asserted in 2001 that "tax cuts will not result in nearly as much foregone revenue as static forecasts suggests [sic]." That same year, Journal editorials touted claims by the American Enterprise Institute's John Makin and Harvard University's Martin Feldstein that Bush's tax cuts would in fact "yield a net revenue loss of only 65% of the officially estimated $1.6 trillion costs." So far, of course, revenue has dropped far, far more than official estimates forecasted. (Which should not come as a surprise: In 1993, those same supply-siders argued that Clinton's tax hike would cause revenue to grow far less than official projections held, or perhaps even to decline, and instead they skyrocketed. It's as if the economic gods delight in humiliating the supply-siders.)

The second, and more popular, justification for tax cuts was that, by draining revenue from Washington, they would keep a lid on spending. Curiously enough, some of the people who endorsed this argument were the same ones who insisted tax cuts wouldn't actually drain much revenue. (As the Journal editorialized in January 2001, "[T]here is also a devastating political argument against using the surplus to pay down the debt. There won't be any. Congress has demonstrated, again and again, it cannot control itself when there is money to be spent.") But this argument had its greatest appeal to those conservatives not inclined to accept supply-side fantasies. Writing in these pages three years ago, my colleague Andrew Sullivan argued, "[I]f there is one thing we have learned in the past 20 years, it's that controlling government spending is simply impossible without deficits" ("Downsize," May 14, 2001). He also predicted, "One of the tax cut's effects will surely be that the United States won't be able to afford a vastly expanded Medicare drug benefit." Oops.

Today, the very same conservatives who insisted tax cuts were necessary to hold down spending now concede that Bush has increased spending at a faster rate than Clinton. None of them have admitted it, but their theory has failed. Though Republicans control all branches of government, there is still no political will for significant spending cuts. (Remember, the most draconian proposal by House conservatives would reduce the half-trillion-dollar deficit by $2 billion, or 0.4 percent.) The only question, then, is whether we should pay for the current level of spending or make future generations pay for it, with interest.



he great fallacy of the starve-the-beast theory of tax cuts is that it assumes Washington will spend whatever it can afford, and no more. There is no empirical evidence to support his claim. The best study of this, in fact, suggests just the opposite. In 2002, Richard Kogan, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, examined federal budgets since 1976. He found that when revenue rises, spending tends to fall, and, when revenue falls, spending tends to rise. (Economy geeks take note: He also found that this strong correlation held even if you control for the state of the economy.)

Just look at recent history. Washington tends to restrain spending when there is bipartisan agreement on the need for fiscal responsibility. When you remove the restraints on one side of the equation--taxes or spending--you tend to lose the restraints on the other side, too. Since Bush only got his initial tax cuts by dismissing debt reduction and then pooh-poohing deficits as small and temporary, no wonder there wasn't any public demand for taking a chainsaw to the federal budget. It's true that Congress cut back on domestic spending during Ronald Reagan's presidency, but it did so only after Reagan canceled some of his own tax cuts and raised other taxes in 1982 and 1983. Two of the most successful efforts to restrain spending--in 1990 under George H. W. Bush and in 1993 under Clinton--both combined tax hikes with limits on spending. These two episodes, plus the 1995 showdown with Newt Gingrich, all proved the same thing: You can get voters to accept spending restraint for the purpose of shared goals like restoring national solvency, but not for partisan goals like giving the rich a tax cut.

If you really want to reduce the size of government, you have to reduce entitlement spending. Conservatives may hope that, if they drive the country close enough to insolvency, they will one day force the public to swallow otherwise unacceptable cuts in Medicare and Social Security. But this is a pipe dream. Public support for these entitlement programs is so strong that voters will always find alternatives. If it comes down to a choice between slashing Social Security and raising taxes, polls have always shown, voters prefer to raise taxes. Indeed, the only way Republicans ever get tax cuts enacted is by insisting that popular entitlements won't be touched and dismissing any suggestion to the contrary as partisan demagoguery.

Ultimately, conservatives may have been seduced by the success of Bush's dishonesty. Bush won approval for his tax cut by convincing Americans it wouldn't come at the expense of priorities they valued more. As Sullivan bluntly confessed in his 2001 column endorsing the tax cut, "The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of 'compassionate conservatism' shows how uphill the struggle is. Yes, some of the time he is full of it on his economic policies. But a certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state." The public, in other words, needed to be fooled into supporting the tax cuts. The first round of fooling, about the extent to which the tax cuts would go to the wealthy at the expense of more popular priorities, went well enough--but, then, most voters don't know how much money their boss saved on taxes. They do know, however, how much their mothers' Social Security checks are worth, which is why the second round of fooling--i.e., getting them to sign off on substantial spending cuts--isn't likely to go anywhere. The simple fact is that, in the long run, conservatives can't affect their hoped-for "retrenchment of government power" without obtaining the consent of the public. What they can do is dig the country into a deep fiscal hole trying.

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.

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>> ECONOMIST...

Trade and employment

The new jobs migration

Feb 19th 2004
From The Economist print edition


Foreign competition now affects services as well as manufacturing. Good






FOR the past 250 years, politicians and hard-headed men of business have diligently ignored what economics has to say about the gains from trade--much as they may pretend, or in some cases even believe, that they are paying close attention. Except for those on the hard left, politicians of every ideological stripe these days swear their allegiance to the basic principle of free trade. Businessmen say the same. So when either group issues its calls for barriers against foreign competition, it is never because free trade is wrong in principle, it is because foreigners are cheating somehow, rendering the principles void. Or else it is because something about the way the world works has changed, so that the basic principles, ever valid in themselves, need to be adjusted. And those adjustments, of course, then oblige these staunch defenders of free-trade-in-principle to call for all manner of restrictions on trade.

In this way, protectionism is periodically refreshed and reinvented. Anti-trade sentiment, especially in the United States, is currently having one of its strongest revivals in years. Earlier bogus "new conditions" that were deemed to undermine the orthodox case for liberal trade included the growth of cross-border capital flows, the recognition that some industries exposed to foreign competition may have strategic or network significance for the wider economy, and concerns over exploitation of workers in developing countries. Today's bogus new condition, which is proving far more potent in political terms than any of these others, is the fact that international competition is now impinging on industries previously sheltered from it by the constraints of technology and geography.
The new protectionism
It is no longer just manufacturing that is feeling the pressure of foreign competition. It is no longer just dirty blue-collar jobs that are moving offshore. Jobs in services are now migrating as well, some of them requiring advanced skills, notably in computer programming. Services constitute much the larger part of every advanced economy. At the end of this process, what will be left? Gosh, Adam Smith never thought of this. Trade policy needs to be completely rethought.

Well, actually, no. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, pointed out recently that if services can be sourced more cheaply overseas than at home, it is to America's advantage to seize that opportunity. This simple restatement of the logic of liberal trade brought derision down on Mr Mankiw's head--and the supposedly pro-trade administration he works for conspicuously failed to defend the plain truth he had advanced. That was disturbing.

John Kerry, who leads the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, is at best a tepid and fluctuating proponent of trade, given to calling bosses who invest overseas "Benedict Arnolds". His main competitor, the beguiling John Edwards, who did unexpectedly well in the Wisconsin primary this week, has fastened on trade as his winning issue: he is for clenching his jaw and keeping American jobs in America, etc. And the media are simply lapping it up. CNN's flagship business-news programme, Lou Dobbs Tonight, which you might expect to strive for economic literacy, has embarked on a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda, with its host greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault.

The fact that foreign competition now impinges on services as well as manufacturing raises no new issues of principle whatever. If a car can be made more cheaply in Mexico, it should be. If a telephone enquiry can be processed more cheaply in India, it should be. All such transactions raise real incomes on both sides, as resources are advantageously redeployed, with added investment and growth in the exporting country, and lower prices in the importing country. Yes, trade is a positive-sum game. (Adam Smith did think of that.)



How disruptive?
The movement of jobs to the developing countries does not alter the overall level of employment in the advanced economies; however, the pattern of employment, to be sure, does change. In the aggregate, this is desirable, just as it is desirable that labour-saving technological progress should change the pattern of employment. (By the way, does anyone still believe that labour-saving technology destroys jobs overall?) So far as the effects on individuals are concerned, this process does have consequences that need to be examined and, in some cases, softened. Adequate private and public investment in skills and lifelong education is paramount in this new world, and is where attention should be focusing. But the image conjured up by the self-interested purveyors of alarm, of a hollowed-out America with relentlessly rising unemployment, is not just false but absurd.

The new jobs migration, while raising no new issues of principle, may indeed involve bigger political and economic strains than earlier bursts of expanding trade. Workers in manufacturing had long understood that they were exposed to the challenge of competition from overseas. Workers in services hitherto believed they were not: it is unsettling to be disabused. Also, it is true that the sheer scale of service-sector employment within an advanced economy arouses anxiety, unwarranted though it may be, about how disruptive the new forces of competition will be.

At the moment, the likely disruption to patterns of employment is surely being exaggerated. The actual and prospective migration of service-sector jobs is small, and likely to remain so, compared with the background level of job creation and destruction in an economy with as much vitality as America's. And technological and geographical constraints will continue to keep many service-sector jobs close to the customer. In some ways, in fact, this is a pity: the greater the disruption, the greater the benefits. As competition forces some jobs in services abroad, it will call forth the creation of new jobs in services in their place. And on average they will be better, higher-paying jobs than the ones that migrate. The evidence shows this is happening (see article). In practice as well as in principle, the fusty old idea of comparative advantage still works.
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Terror's Friend in Court
Injustice in progress.



This week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), popularly known as the World Court, is holding hearings that could result in an advisory opinion concerning the security fence now under construction by Israel. The immediate object of the exercise is to provide Arab and other opponents of the fence a new stick with which to pummel the Israelis. It is predictable, however, that the nation that stands to lose the most, ultimately, from the court's verdict -- that is, its decision to interfere with the steps sovereign nations take concerning their security needs and how to satisfy them -- will be the United States.



The court has been drawn into this precedent-establishing case by the United Nations' General Assembly, in which every member nation gets one vote, and the lowest common denominator of anti-Western and, most especially, anti-Israeli sentiment usually enjoys overwhelming majorities. Ninety nations in the General Assembly voted to approve a resolution put forward by Israel's enemies to portray the security barrier as an illegal and inhumane device, not least because of its location, in parts, on territory claimed by Palestinians.

Despite the opposition of the United States and some two dozen of the world's other leading nations, the ICJ is poised to do just that. After what will likely be perfunctory hearings starting Monday in the Hague, the Court is expected to render a conclusion that will legitimate a new torrent of invective against Israel. Worse, it may well precipitate demands that the U.N.'s Security Council give force to the Court's findings by imposing sanctions on Israel if it fails to halt construction of the fence. The Bush administration would be under intense pressure not to veto such sanctions, given its own stated opposition to the fence's construction (a position not seen as inconsistent with its view on the procedural question of whether the ICJ should be addressing this issue).

This process will penalize Israel, or at least further contribute to its pariah status in the United Nations, for doing nothing more than trying to protect its people from murderous suicide bombers and other terrorists in the most passive and nonviolent manner imaginable. Those much given to castigating the Jewish state for engaging in the sorts of counterterrorism operations that have resulted in the destruction of Palestinian terror cells, their leaders and bomb makers, and, on occasion, the unintended deaths of innocent bystanders, should commend Israel for adopting such a humane alternative.

To be sure, some of those now opposing Israel's security barrier might be willing to mute their criticism if only Israel would have the fence follow a different course; specifically, if it were to fence off the West Bank in much the same way Israel has protected itself from terrorists based in the Gaza Strip, namely along the so-called "Green Line" demarcating the territory Israel controlled prior to the 1967 Six-Day War from the areas it conquered during that conflict.

Doing so, however, would deny the fence's anti-terror protection to many tens of thousands of Israelis living in the West Bank. It would also effectively constitute a status quo ante boundary that would reward the Palestinians for their refusal to make peace with Israel. The upshot can only be further to intensify the confidence Yasser Arafat and his ilk already enjoy. Continued intransigence will eventually result in the realization of their ultimate and unchanging aspiration -- the destruction of the State of Israel.

Unfortunately, the United States has an even bigger stake in this ICJ proceeding than the injury that will befall its most reliable and valuable -- and only democratic -- ally in the Middle East. As Ruth Wedgwood, one of the nation's most eminent and highly regarded experts on international law, recently put it:

The U.S. has no veto in the General Assembly, and we need to be concerned about the evasion of consent-based rules for international adjudication. The next request for an Advisory Opinion could ask the court, without U.S. consent, to pronounce on the legality of the war in Iraq or American attempts to stop the proliferation of nuclear material. Such opinions -- even though non-binding under the U.N. Charter -- are dangerous, because they are seen by the "victors" as conferring legitimacy on their position.
Indeed, one can only imagine the measures the United States would otherwise have taken to protect its citizens that it might now feel pressured to avoid, for fear of being subjected to General Assembly requests for World Court intervention and adverse opinions. Our conduct of the war on terror, including legal steps intended to secure the homeland -- e.g., perhaps, our own security fence along the Mexican border -- could conceivably be denounced by the ICJ and, thereafter, be viewed as illegitimate by the international community.

No good can come of any of this. While John Kerry clearly fancies the idea of expanding the power of the United Nations and subordinating American sovereignty to its dictates, most Americans appreciate that that would be a formula for disaster.

The United States should make clear to the United Nations that, as a matter of principle, it would be injurious to this country's future relationship with and funding for the International Court of Justice and its parent organization, the U.N., for the Court to issue an advisory opinion on the Israeli security fence. As Professor Wedgwood notes, the World Court has the right to decline to do so "in compelling circumstances." This certainly fits the bill.

-- Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and an NRO contributing editor.
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The Great Iranian Election Fiasco
What actually happened; what we must do.



Even for a regime that excels in deception, the announcement by the Iranian government that nearly half the eligible voters cast their ballots in Friday's election is an extraordinary bit of effrontery. And even those Western "news" outlets that decided to pronounce the turnout "low" (the BBC, of course, echoed the party line by talking about a large turnout), did so by comparing the official numbers with those of the last parliamentary election, when more than 60 percent voted for the toothless "reformers."



The real numbers are a tiny fragment of the official ones. The overall turnout came in at about twelve percent, with Tehran a bit lower, and places like Isfahan and Qom (of all places, the headquarters of the Shiite religious elite) closer to five percent. The only major city with a substantially higher turnout was Kerman, due to a local factor: A widely hated hardliner was running, and many people judged it more important to demonstrate their contempt for him personally by voting for others than to show their rejection of the regime en bloc by abstaining.

It shouldn't have been hard to get this story right, at least in its broad outlines. A leading member of the old parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, was asked why he did badly, and he replied, publicly: "because the people boycotted the election."

Keep in mind that the reporters knew full well that all but a handful of polling sites in Tehran -- the only place they were able to observe, thanks to the usual clampdown on information -- were virtually dead. They knew, or should have known, that the regime had trotted out more than 10,000 "mobile voting booths," that is to say, trucks driving around inviting people to vote. They surely heard the stories -- widely repeated on Iranian web sites -- of thousands of phony ballots, and of citizens being forced to turn over their identity cards, thus making it possible for others to pose as legitimate voters. They must also have heard that high-school students were warned that if they did not vote they would never get into the universities.

But they did not report any of this. The Washington Post's Karl Vick wrote an upbeat report, as if the hardliners had won a normal election, and CNN's legendary Ms. Amanpour stressed that Iran was changing for the better since the dress code for women had loosened a bit in the past few years. Neither seemed to know that there were violent protests throughout the country, that several people had been killed and scores wounded by the regime's thugs, and that highways were blocked because the regime was afraid the protests would spread. There was enough electoral fraud to fill any Western news report, had the correspondents wished to do so. As the website www.iranvajahan.net reported, "In Firoozabad, Fars, people clashed with the Law Enforcement Forces when a cleric by the name of Yunesi-Sarcheshmeyi was declared the winner. In Miando-ab, West Azerbijan, some of the cheaters have publicly confessed how they were taught by a cleric to remove the voting stamp from their ID cards and vote again. In Malekan in East Azerbijan, people were told that 45,000 are eligible to vote, yet the number of declared votes for candidates totaled 50,000! Everyone including children and old people have poured into the streets of Malekan and there is non-stop running battles with the Law Enforcement Forces." The Student Movement Coordinating Committee for Democracy in Iran recorded violent clashes in Izeh, a southern city where a local politician was murdered by security forces when he protested his exclusion from the electoral list. Other protests were reported from Khorram-Abad, Firoozabad, and Dehdasht in the south, in Isfahan, and near the Afghan border in Mashad, Sabze-war, Nelshaboor, and Tchenaran.

Instead of this important information, we get the usual election-day analysis, as if a real election had been conducted, and one could understand something important about Iranian public opinion from the official numbers.

Oddly, the wild distortion of the real results does show something that the mullahs do not want us to know. They fear the Iranian people, knowing how deeply the people hate them, and they believe they must continue to tell a big lie about popular support for the regime. But the people know better. Thus, the demonstrations.

The regime clearly intends to clamp down even harder in the immediate future. Hints of this were seen in the run-up to the election, when Internet sites and foreign broadcasts were jammed, the few remaining opposition newspapers shut down, and thousands of security forces poured into the major cities. One wonders whether any Western government is prepared to speak the truth about Iran, or whether they are so determined to arrive at make-believe deals -- for terrorists that are never delivered, for promises to stop the nuclear program, that are broken within minutes of their announcement, or for help fighting terrorism while the regime does everything in its power to support the terrorists -- that they will play along and pretend, as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has put it, that "Iran is a democracy."

For those interested in exposing hypocrisy, it is hard to find a better example than all those noble souls who denounced Operation Iraqi Freedom as a callous operation to gain control over Iraqi oil, but who remain silent as country after country, from Europe to Japan, appeases the Iranian tyrants precisely in order to win oil concessions.

Meanwhile, the only Western leader who consistently speaks the truth about Iran is President George W. Bush, and the phony intellectuals of the West continue to call him a fool and a fascist. Meanwhile, his most likely Democrat opponent, Senator John Kerry, sends an e-mail to Tehran Times, Iran's official English-language newspaper, promising that relations between the United States and Iran would improve enormously if Kerry were to be elected next November.

Finally, perhaps our enterprising journalists could ask the administration how it can be, three years after inauguration, that we still have no Iran policy. Yes, Virginia, there is still no National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) on Iran, even though Iran is the world's leading sponsor of terrorism, and we claim to be in a war against the terror masters.

Faster, please.
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200402231057.asp