Newsflash: That Bush Speech for Economic Salvation

Non-Event of the Day

The President, who had to give a boiler-plate speech at the UN yesterday on religious belief and common values (which, forgive me, still doesn't square with Iraq 2003), then took on his important task. At the Manhattan Institute, he gave a keep-the-faith, flight-from-reality speech:

People say, are you confident about our future? And the answer is, absolutely. And it's easy to be confident when you're a city like New York City. After all, there's an unbelievable spirit in this city.

Bush's mission was to explain to the true believers --- not the religious one, the free-market ones --- that, after this weekend's global economic summit got through its first four tasks (like "understanding the causes of the global crisis"), it would get to the most important duty:

"reaffirming our conviction that free market principles offer the surest path to lasting prosperity"

That, of course, is not an action plan. It's a slogan, like the mantra from the Bush Administration's key global document --- the 2002 National Security Strategy --- of "freedom, free markets, and free trade".

Bush, however, had to cover his possibly-not-so-free market backside, having pushed for $700 billion of Government money to prop up the financial and banking sectors as well as the nationalisation of America's largest mortgage brokers. So he murmured, "I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown," and then said...

Well, nothing of substance, really. Regulation of credit default swaps, financial co-operation, and other tinkering phrases. Filler to get to this, the opener for the second half of the speech:

While reforms in the financial sector are essential, the long-term solution to today's problems is sustained economic growth. And the surest path to that growth is free markets and free people.

Well, George, you can put the faith all you want but "sustained economic growth" isn't exactly the Number One Prospect right now. Recession is, and any speech of meaning --- rather than ideological flutterings --- would recognise the immediate dilemma for the US Government.

Paul Krugman, who doesn't hold elective office and thus doesn't owe that office to activists in places like the Manhattan Institute, grabbed hold of Dilemma Horns this morning:

We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction.

Krugman then gets to the heart of the matter and thus his recommendation:

All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion.

It's a suggestion that would have Bush's speech into a real event, especially if Krugman had put the down-side half of his proposal: how do you finance that $600 billion when the Federal Government is on the verge of a $1 trillion deficit in 2009?

Instead, here's your Presidential economic reassurance:

We saw [America's] resilience after September the 11th, 2001, when our nation recovered from a brutal attack.

Of course, only the worst-taste blogger would extrapolate from this: America's economic salvation lies in another Al Qa'eda spectacular.

Wandren PD

Our partner, Ali Fisher, runs one of the best sites considering public diplomacy. His latest entry on Wandren PD takes on the issue of how to "win hearts and minds":

There have been many attempts to pin down what Public Diplomacy is about, and as I’m currently finishing editing The Trials of Public Diplomacy, this has been at the forefront of my mind. Rather than seeking another definition to encapsulate (or exclude) certain actors, methodologies, or bureaucracies, I’ve been seeking to think about what PD is it at its core.

To me it is attempting to influence behaviour to change the odds of certain outcomes occurring....

The Saviour of the Republican Party: Truck Nutz

Republican activists, trying to rebuild after the elections, have launched a website called Rebuild the Party to solicit ideas.

Early returns, however, have been a bit unexpected. The top two proposals are to link up with libertarian activists: "Reach Out to Ron Paul and the Campaign for Freedom" and "Make Room for Libertarians". The libertarian influence --- and possibly hijacking of the poll --- is also evident in "Abolish the Federal Reserve System" and "Step Away from the Drug War", and there are calls for "Fair Tax Reform".

At Number Four, however, is the idea that may bring the Party back in Congress and into the White House: "Truck Nutz for All". I am told that Truck Nutz is a metal ornament that you can hang off the trailer hitch of your pick-up truck. While I'm not sure how I could attach this to the rusting rear bumper of my Renault Laguna, it does seem to be a political initiative with a lot of potential.

(Sad update: Since the Internet chattering classes picked up on "Truck Nutz for All", it has been pulled --- quite undemocratically or un-Republicanly --- from the Rebuild the Party website.)

Palin 2012? Here's a Clue....

My relatives tell me of an interesting political development in Georgia (the American one, not the Caucacus one).

Because Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss failed to get 50 percent of the vote on Election Night, he has to fight Democrat Jim Martin in a runoff on 2 December. Since the swing of a Senate seat to the Democrats could be quite signficant, especially with the outcome in Minnesota up in the air, national politicians are doing some serious campaignin' for the candidates.

John McCain is due in Marietta, Georgia, today for a rally. Republican organisers also wanted Sarah Palin to journey to the Peach State, but she's turned them down. Apparently, she's "too busy".

Really? Sister Sarah certainly wasn't too busy for a series of nationally-televised interviews this week to give her definitive reading on the McCain campaign, and I bet she won't be passing on a high-profile appearance at the Republican Governors' Conference this weekend.

Fancy a good in-fight? Watch this space....

Fact x Importance = News: Pakistan

There have been a swirl of news stories in the last 72 hours about the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. Beyond the escalation in bombings and shootings, the most significant may offer clues to future US policy.

These three articles, in particular, raised eyebrows. On Tuesday Antony Loyd in The Times of London and , Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph, and Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the New York Times reported that they had found "Taliban maps, manuals and propaganda...at training camps in Pakistan showing the sophistication of the insurgent's operations in the country's tribal areas". Perlez and Shah wrote of "tunnels [that] stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart." Loyd's dramatic narrative spoke of a map "which is not the work of a renegade gunman resistant to central authority; it is the assessment of a skilled and experienced fighter, and begins to explain how more than 400 Pakistani soldiers have been killed or wounded since August in Bajaur". It was Farmer, however, who offered the chilling sentence: "Britain and America...believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, has been in Bajaur."

With respect to Perlez/Shah, Loyd, and Farmer, the significance of their reports was not their discovery. It is not surprising, given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, that Taliban --- many of whose leaders were educated in Pakistani madrassas --- would be in the Northwest Frontier. And it would be a very poor, or foolhardy, fighter who would wander around without a map or a few leaflets to try and win converts to the cause. No, the significance of the stories is in the answer to the question: how did reporters for two British newspapers and the top print outlet in the United States suddenly make the same discovery?

Because all the reporters were taken there by the Pakistani military, who were at hand to emphasise (in the exact same words in the two articles), "There were students here taking notes on bomb-making and guerrilla warfare." Loyd took his piece further with the help of an "eminent Pakistani political figure": "Al-Qaeda and the Taleban...set up a joint headquarters in 2004 as an 'Islamic emirate' in North Waziristan, headed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taleban commander." The tribal areas were "today the same as Afghanistan was before September 11 - controlled by foreign and local militants who fight a war on both sides of the border.”

So the Pakistanis, having lost more than 400 soldiers in fighting in the Northwest Frontier since August, have launched a PR campaign to establish the need for further and, presumably, more aggressive operations. It's not just a question of Pakistani troops, however.

Note Perlez's reference to tunnels which can only be blown apart by 500-pound bombs. The military branch with the majority of those bombs is not the Pakistani Air Force; it's their American counterparts. While it was Pakistanis who took the Western journalists to Bajaur, there should be no doubt: this is also part of an American campaign to justify continuing "hot pursuit" operations into the Northwest Frontier, even at the cost of civilian casualties.

And even at the possible cost to the Pakistani Government. A notable absence in all three stories was any comment from members of the Zardari Administration, unless Loyd's mysterious "eminent political figure" happens to be the Prime Minister in disguise.

Increasingly, it's looking like US forces are working with Pakistani military, who in turn are distinct from the purported political leaders of Pakistan. The implications of that co-operation, and effective internal split in the Pakistani ruling elite, may be far more significant than any more tunnels that intrepid Western journalists happen to "discover".