National Security – DIME
Trouble To The South, Washington Times ...Howard Whetzel, October 30, 2008, Pg. 21
…Iranian Hezbollah has set up training camps in Venezuela. It is expected that these “trainers” will then expand their operations, reported to be drug and weapons smuggling, and money laundering, to the countries Iran has established diplomatic relations with in the region. This is not news to the United States. The U.S. Navy and State Department are both well aware of this recent activity.
Still No. 1 (Washington Post)…Robert Kagan, October 30, 2008; Page A23
…Meanwhile, American military power is unmatched. While the Chinese and Russian militaries are both growing, America’s is growing, too, and continues to outpace them technologically. Russian and Chinese power is growing relative to their neighbors and their regions, which will pose strategic problems, but that is because American allies, especially in Europe, have systematically neglected their defenses.
America’s image is certainly damaged, as measured by global polls, but the practical effects of this are far from clear.
War Threatened Over Anti-North Leaflets
(Washington Times)…Jack Kim, Reuters News Agency, Oct 29, 2008.
North Korea’s military threatened on Tuesday to use everything in its arsenal to reduce South Korea to rubble unless Seoul stops civic groups from sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets into the communist state.
FBI Warns Of Cartel Arming, by Sara A. Carter, The Washington Times, October 26, 2008, Pg. 1
…”These particular types of activities by the cartels show their increased strength and the serious threat they pose to the national security in the U.S.,” the official said. “It’s not getting better but worse along the border. Unfortunately, the drug wars we’ve seen in Mexico are now spilling significantly into the United States.”
Deciding to agree to disagree, Indianapolis Star, Oct26, 2008.
It’s a strange year. Were I asked by the man in the moon to describe the political leanings of our country, I’d say Americans were center-right. Yet we’ve had nearly two terms of a frustrating and until recently ill-prosecuted conflict in Iraq, economic troubles and widespread criticism from abroad. We’ve seen a level of White House arrogance that has troubled even some Republicans. That’s why many Americans seem willing to forgo their center-right tendencies to consider the case of a liberal and little-tested African-American U.S. senator from Chicago.
For The Star’s editorial board, with its history of mostly right-of-center positions and our desire to maintain consistency without being outwardly partisan, it became a tough and in the end extraordinarily difficult choice.
‘That Was Amateur Night’, (Newsweek)…John Barry, Nov 3, 2008.
Interview with Robert Gates … More dangerous than the Cold War …
Look around. Iran. North Korea. A Russia that people have a hard time figuring out what to make of. The Chinese are not so much a security challenge, but they clearly have some very significant military modernization programs underway that are worrisome. North Korea: what’s going to happen now? The entirety of Central Asia, where you have pressures on them from Russia to toe the line, and their wanting to maintain some sense of independence—but how much? Again, nobody knows where that line is… The problems that Pakistan faces. So you’ve got all of these. You’ve got the whole Israeli-Palestinian-Syrian challenge. In our own hemisphere, Venezuela. And then, of course, there is Al Qaeda and a variety of violent extremists that are still very much out there. That’s a pretty long list of challenges that the new guys need to be prepared to deal with from day one.
An ambitious agenda.
Yes, and one of the many obstacles to reform is that, at the top of government, the urgent always tends to crowd out the important. And that tension has gotten worse now, I think, because of the complexity of the world we face. I recall Henry Kissinger in 1970. There had been the Syrian invasion of Jordan. I think something was going on in Lebanon. And we had discovered the Soviets were building a submarine base in Cuba. I always thought Kissinger managing two or three crises at the same time was an act of legerdemain. I tell you: that was amateur night compared to the world today.
Risk Management 2.0: Overcoming the Current Financial Crisis and Restoring Stability and Prosperity with a New Perspective on Risk by Bob Tapscott and Don Tapscott, Oct 2008.
The “risk bubble” has broken. Restoring long-term confidence in the financial services industry of the US and other industrialized nations will require more than government intervention, fresh capital, and updated regulations.
Building on the digitization of everything financial, participating organizations (issuers, investors, and intermediaries) need to become Next Generation Enterprises. This requires a new industry model built on the four principles of Wikinomics: transparency, peering, sharing intellectual property, and acting globally. Call it Risk Management 2.0.
The current credit crunch was predictable.
In 2005, Yale economist Robert J. Shiller published the now famous index tracking housing prices back to 1800 (Figure 1). Over a 200 (!) year period, housing values in the U.S. only went 20% above the inflation- adjusted 1800 price level three times, and each was the peak of a bubble that quickly collapsed.
From 1997 to 2005, U.S. housing prices rose from 10% above the inflation-adjusted level to 100% higher. How any economist, regulator, or central banker could look at the chart below and not surmise that something was amiss is astounding.
HIGHLY recommend looking at Figure 1: Historical Home Values … from 1890 on page 4 of the report.
Extracts fro the FAQ page.
What is the mission of this website? Most broadly, to accumulate and analyze polling and political data in way that is informed, accurate and attractive. Most narrowly, to give you the best possible objective assessment of the likely outcome of upcoming elections.
What is the significance of the number 538? 538 is the number of electors in the electoral college.
Casualty Of The Surge, (Washington Post)…Michael Gerson, Oct 24, 2008.
The dramatic success of the surge in Iraq is not a central issue in the current presidential race. It did, however, set its shape — and may help determine its outcome in an unexpected way.
John McCain won the nomination of his party, in large part, as a vindicated prophet. After visiting Iraq in the summer of 2003, he argued on “Meet the Press” that “the men and women in the military are doing a superb job. . . . The problem is that they don’t have enough resources. There’s not enough of them, and we are in a very serious situation, in my view, a race against time.” McCain added, “Time is not on our side …
This raises the question: If McCain benefited politically from being correct about the surge, why has Barack Obama not been punished for opposing it?
It was, after all, the single most important decision Obama has made as a public official. His judgment? “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” This initial reluctance is perhaps understandable; many shared it. But Obama persisted in his skepticism after the results became evident. Even in July of this year, he argued, “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.”
But the main reason Obama has escaped the political consequences of his poor judgment on the surge has been the success of the surge itself, which has taken the issue almost entirely off the table.
So Obama is left with a pleasing paradox: The successes of a strategy he opposed may have paved his way to the presidency.
And McCain is left with a poignant comfort. He once said he would rather lose an election than lose a war. He may lose an election, in part, because he helped win a war.
The Philippines: America’s Other War On Terrorism(McClatchy Newspapers (mcclatchydc.com))…Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers, Oct 22, 2008.
…On a Southeast Asian front that’s vital yet largely unfamiliar to most Americans, some 500 U.S. Special Operations Forces and their Filipino counterparts have been fighting a different, unconventional — and seemingly successful — war against Islamic terrorist groups with links to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida.
The lessons of this relatively low-budget effort could be invaluable as the next U.S. president assumes the task of fighting Islamic extremism with a federal Treasury drained by the nation’s economic woes and the Army and Marine Corps strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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