Глоссарий эвфемизмов политического дискурса американских и британских сми

1) Abyss – crisis

2) Action - aggression

3) Ailing – declining

4) Ally – troop

5) Bribery – money politics

6) Campaign – war

7) Capital punishment – retribution

8) Collateral damage - murder

9) Commitment – obligation

10) Conflict – war

11) Contribution – tax

12) Defense Department – War Department

13) Demise – murder

14) Difficult time – crisis

15) Elect – appoint

16) Erratic – restless

17) Exhausted – destructed

18) Firepower – weapon

19) Forces – troops

20) Guest workers – migrant workers

21) Seizure – crisis

22) Incursion - invasion

23) Involvement – power

24) Irresponsible – extravagant

25) Manpower – troop

26) Mastermind of the surge – agent

27) Mission -war

28) Obtain – seize

29) Operation – war

30) Opposition research - Watergate

31) Pacification - destruction

32) Recession – crisis

33) Recovery – renewing

34) Revive – reinforce

35) Topple – kill

36) Tutelage – power

37) Uncertain times – crisis

38) Unconvincing – suspicious

39) Unstable – aggressive

40) Visual surveillance - spying

41) Well-off – rich

Приложение 6

From The times

March 4, 2009

Obama promises better days, calls for nation to pull together

Richard Burden

WASHINGTON - President Obama, tempering the series of grim economic diagnoses he has delivered in recent weeks, sounded a new note of optimism last night, vowing that "America will emerge stronger than before" from the Wall Street meltdown and mortgage crisis that has sent the country into a deep recession.

"The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation," Obama said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress. "Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure. What is required now is for this country to pull together, confront boldly the challenges we face, and take responsibility for our future once more."

The remarks - while not officially a State of the Union address, since Obama has been in office only five weeks - had all the trappings of one: a national television audience, the walk to the rostrum through glad-handing lawmakers, the ordinary Americans sitting in the gallery and pointed out as living examples, and the series of standing ovations.

Obama used the occasion to explain the steps he has taken to revive the economy, and also to lay out a broader agenda, including a healthcare overhaul, improvements to education, and energy independence - campaign promises that have been subsumed by poor economic news."Now is the time to act boldly and wisely - to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity," he said. "Now is the time to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, healthcare, and education that will grow our economy." Obama also touched on the wars in Iraq, where he plans to withdraw most US combat troops by the summer of 2010, and Afghanistan, where he is dispatching 17,000 more troops this spring. But the ailing economy was a dominant theme in Obama's address, with the president urging worried Americans to unite to get through a crisis he said would eventually abate.

"The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere. But while our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken; though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama said to resounding applause.

Obama still faces a reluctant and energized GOP minority, which has emerged from two devastating elections to form a determined and unified front against Obama's economic agenda. The president's $787 billion stimulus plan passed without a single House Republican vote, and garnered just three aye votes from Senate GOP moderates.

Delivering the official Republican response to Obama, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal accused Democrats of "irresponsible" spending that would leave the next generation in crippling debt.

From The Times

March 3, 2009

MoD keeps powder dry as Nato awaits President Obama's plea for troops

Michael Evans, Defence Editor

Military options for sending more British troops to Afghanistan are being studied across Whitehall in preparation for an appeal by President Obama for every Nato member to deploy additional manpower and firepower there.

The US President, however, is not expected to make any personal appeal to Gordon Brown when the two leaders meet in Washington today and the Prime Minister has not taken with him any British pledge of reinforcements.

The Prime Minister and the President appear to have agreed to defer the issue of whether Britain will add to its 8,300-troop presence in Afghanistan until the matter is raised within the Nato alliance at its 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg on April 3.

Whitehall sources said that Mr Brown and Mr Obama were expected to make a joint statement after today’s meeting in which they would underline the efforts the US and Britain have taken together against the Taleban in Afghanistan.

There would also be a focus on the need for greater participation by civilian specialists to increase the level of reconstruction in the country.

Military options are being drawn up by the Ministry of Defence in consultation with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This is because of the expectation that Mr Obama will use the Strasbourg summit – his first opportunity to address the alliance directly – to emphasise the importance of the mission in Afghanistan and the need to increase the number of combat troops serving in the most unstable areas.

Amid reports that Taleban groups based in Pakistan are planning to join forces and confront Western troops, military commanders involved in the Afghanistan campaign have urged the alliance to send more soldiers. Mr Obama is expected to make an appeal to all Nato members to raise their contribution, either with more manpower or increased investment.

One senior source said that although the Prime Minister was not planning to talk about extra British troops in Washington, options had been drawn up.

The Prime Minister caught Whitehall off guard last year when he announced during a visit to Baghdad that some British troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by Christmas. This led to some confusion, and in later clarifications it emerged that the troops would not begin to leave until later this month.

Military options include two additional deployments that have already been approved by the MoD: the seven Merlin helicopters currently in Iraq are to be transferred to Afghanistan, although it will cost £50 million – and take up to four months – to modify them; and about 300 explosives experts are to be sent to deal with the growing threat from roadside bombs.

Britain’s contribution to Afghanistan is to be increased on a small scale in October when Major-General Nick Carter takes command of Regional Command South headquarters.

From The Times

March 3, 2009

Gordon Brown travels in hope of new special relationship

Philip Webster and Tom Baldwin, Washington

Gordon Brown sought a decisive break with the Bush-Blair era by heralding a special relationship that places economic harmony ahead of military cooperation. Before flying out of Britain for a meeting with President Obama today, he said: “Past British prime ministers have gone to Washington to talk about wars. I’m going to talk about stability for the future.”

Mr Brown will use a speech to both Houses of Congress to warn that protectionist tendencies –as held by many senior Democrats in his audience – risk making the recession worse. He will offer strong backing to Mr Obama’s green agenda in the teeth of fierce domestic opposition.

He is the first European leader to visit the President and hopes to use the opportunity to secure a global response to the economic crisis before next month’s G20 summit in London.

Praising Mr Obama’s economic stimulus package, the Prime Minister said: “If America and Britain did similar things for the economy then the effects would be magnified.”

He acknowledged public concerns that the invasion of Iraq had damaged the transatlantic partnership. “I want to talk about the renewal of our relationship for new times,” he said.

In an interview with talkSPORT, he hinted that the stiff reserve he displayed towards George Bush on his first visit to Washington as Prime Minister had been replaced by warmth for a President he sees as a fellow progressive: “I think the impression he has given of America to the world is transformative. I think people’s view of America is changing as a result.”

He will support Mr Obama in efforts to reduce dependence on foreign oil and achieve a low-carbon economy that could, he says, create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the world and drive economic recovery.

Mr Brown will also call on countries to renounce protectionism as one of the six key elements of a “global new deal” at the G20 summit on April 2. Mr Obama is under pressure to protect jobs by putting up trade barriers.

Other items on the agenda today will be Afghanistan, the Middle East and climate change, plus an attempt by Mr Brown to get Mr Obama’s commitment to the goal of universal access to primary education by 2015.

Tony Blair will be in Washington for a climate change conference but is not expected to meet his successor.

From The Economist

Nov 27th 2008

Iraq

Is it really coming right?

IT SHOULD be momentous. In Baghdad in the middle of this week, after fierce debate and protests on the streets, Iraq’s fractious parliament at last voted to approve a withdrawal agreement with the United States, under which all American troops will leave the country by the end of 2011. And yet the mood of this exhausted country is far from jubilant.

In Mosul, 320km (200 miles) north of Baghdad up the Tigris river, the governor of Nineveh province, Doraid Kashmoula, furrows his brow, fiddles with his worry-beads in one hand, stubs out yet another cigarette with the other and reels off a litany of woe in his dankly curtained office. The scion of a prominent Sunni Arab family, he took the job two years ago after his predecessor, his cousin, was assassinated.

Since then he has survived half a dozen murder attempts. His son, a brother and four cousins have been killed by insurgents. His house has been burnt down. He is protected both by the Kurdish guerrillas, who control the eastern half of the city and a clutch of fortified government buildings in the western half, and by the Iraqi army and police, with American forces at their shoulder, when he ventures farther afield.

“Security is slowly getting better,” he says, without much conviction. At present the insurgents carry out about ten attacks a day in his province, including car bombs and ambushes, mostly in the vicinity of Mosul. In each of the past four months, more than 100 civilians and about a score of army and police have been killed, according to official figures.

The provincial council’s chairman, another Sunni Arab, tells a similar tale. From a drawer in his desk he takes a sheet of paper displaying 12 coloured photographs of “martyrs”: four brothers and eight cousins, all murdered because of their kinship to himself. A councillor representing the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), a long-established Sunni outfit which heads the main Sunni block in the national parliament and is led by one of the country’s two vice-presidents, Tariq al-Hashemi, says that 420 of his party members in Mosul have been killed in the past two years. Nineveh’s deputy governor, a Kurd, says that 1,600 of his people in Mosul have died at the hands of insurgents since the American invasion—as have “many more Arabs”.

Nobody knows how many insurgents operate in the area. Maybe 5,000, says the council chairman, describing a spectrum from al-Qaeda fanatics to secular Baathists. “Plus a million supporters,” he adds, with a mirthless laugh. As the Americans and their Iraqi army allies successfully hunt them down elsewhere in Iraq, many have gravitated to Mosul. It is close to Syria, from which foreign jihadists still infiltrate. The city has a history of Baathist loyalty to Saddam Hussein and hostility to the Shias, who count for barely 5% of its people.

Iraq’s multiple fault-lines are especially visible—and occasionally bloody—in Nineveh and Mosul. Some towns in the province have a record of Shia-Sunni enmity. Nineveh has Iraq’s largest minority of Christians, themselves divided into various sects, some speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ. In a northern arc dwell the Yazidis, more than 500,000-strong they claim, who follow an ancient religion that reveres a Peacock Angel; many Muslims damn them as devil-worshippers. Then there are the Shabaks, who claim descent from Persians and follow various brands of religion, including Islam. There are also the Turkomens, stay-behinds from the days when Mosul was the capital of one of the three Ottoman vilayets (administrative regions) that were crudely lumped together to form Iraq when the Turkish empire collapsed after the first world war.

Perhaps the biggest and currently the scratchiest division is between Arabs and Kurds, who control most of the east and north of Nineveh, and account for about one-third of its population. Most of the Sunni Arabs, the province’s largest group, boycotted the last elections in 2005, so the Kurds ended up with a disproportionately large chunk of the provincial government (31 out of 41 seats in the council) and hold sway over the hapless Mr Kashmoula and the council chairman, whom the insurgents curse as puppets and traitors.

But this may soon change dramatically because the Sunnis are set to contest provincial elections due on January 31st, when they may well oust the Kurds from local power. To minimise their expected losses, the Kurds are bent on ensuring that all the non-Sunni minorities, such as the Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, vote for a Kurdish-led list of candidates.

Many people from these small minorities, together perhaps more than a tenth of the province’s people, say that the Kurds, who control the territory where most of them live, are trying to intimidate them into voting their way. The Kurds, they say, are even attempting to frighten them into fleeing east into areas more firmly controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) from its headquarters in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

In Sinjar, west of Mosul, some Yazidis, who predominate there, say the Kurds want to force them to vote for the Kurdish list. Not only would that mean increasing the Kurds’ chances of holding on to the provincial council. It would also strengthen their case to have such places as Sinjar, which are technically part of Nineveh, eventually transferred formally to Iraq’s Kurdistan region, whose area the Kurds seek to widen as much as possible.

The Christians have been hammered, in Nineveh as in the rest of Iraq: their numbers throughout the country are said to be down from 800,000 in 2003 to around 250,000 today. Earlier this year the archbishop of the ancient Chaldean church was abducted in Mosul and murdered. In October, some 10,000 Christians fled into Kurdish-held areas from close to Mosul after a dozen of them had been killed. No one is certain who the culprits were.

In any event, tension is rising across the ethno-sectarian board: between Kurds and Arabs; between Sunnis who have co-operated with government and the larger number who have not; between Kurds and minorities; and within the minorities themselves. “If we [Christians] had guns we’d kill each other too,” says a prominent Chaldean Christian. “If Mosul was peaceful, we’d want to stay in Nineveh,” says a leading Christian businessman in the town of Bartulla, just east of Mosul. “But if it isn’t, we’d like to be part of Kurdistan.”

But there is a gleam of hope that in Nineveh, as elsewhere in Iraq, the coming provincial elections may shift the dynamic of Iraqi politics, pave the way for more genuinely representative government and make it harder for the insurgents to hold the loyalty of the disgruntled. The key is that, unlike last time, the Sunni Arabs are expected to vote en masse. If Nineveh’s council took on a Sunni nationalist hue, the insurgents might be in trouble.

Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shia prime minister, is said to be reaching out to Sunni politicians, military men and tribal leaders in the hope of widening his narrow base in the Islamic Dawa party. But Iraq is entering an even more frenetic political phase than usual. The provincial elections should point, for the first time in three years, to whom the Iraqis want to run their country.

The poll will also serve as a dry run for a general election due at the end of next year. Moreover, under the tutelage of an energetic UN team in Baghdad, the system for the provincial elections provides for open lists, whereas last time they were closed. This time parties will win representation on a proportional basis in each of the 18 provinces (bar the three Kurdish ones and the disputed Kirkuk province, where elections will not take place), but voters will also be able to mark their order of preference for individual candidates on their chosen party list. Some 400-plus parties have been registered, more than 150 in Baghdad alone, with more than 14,600 candidates and 36-odd coalitions.

The main shift will be towards much stronger representation for Sunni Arabs, who have been sorely under-represented since Saddam’s demise. A battle is brewing between the established Sunni parties and an array of groups emerging out of the tribal councils that have played so crucial a part in beating back the insurgency, including al-Qaeda, especially in the western province of Anbar and along the Euphrates valley north-west of Baghdad.

A fight for supremacy within the new Shia establishment has also begun. A striking development is the emergence of Mr Maliki as a would-be strongman. Despite his wooden persona on the dais and on television, he has surprised everyone by his increasingly ruthless determination to tighten his grip. He was boosted by his success, earlier this year, when he personally directed the Iraqi army to sweep the Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical cleric, out of Iraq’s then chaotic second city, Basra. The army promptly replicated that success in the hitherto lawless Shia slums of Baghdad, known as Sadr City. Mr Maliki is also interfering with senior appointments in the armed forces: the new divisional army commander in Mosul, for instance, is said to be a brother-in-law.

He has also gained ground, even among Sunnis, by his increasingly acerbic attitude towards the Kurds, who many Arabs think have overreached themselves in the past few years. In August he sent Iraqi army units into Khanaqin, a mainly Kurdish district that is controlled by the Kurdish authorities but falls within Diyala province. He and Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, who heads the KDP, one of two rival parties that jointly run Iraqi Kurdistan, are increasingly rude to each other. Mr Barzani is said to have recently told Mr Maliki to his face: “You smell like a dictator.”

And he is rattling a lot of fellow Shias with his powers of patronage and purse. His own Dawa party has split, with his predecessor as prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, promoting himself as a stalking horse for the Sadrists, whose party has been barred from the lists. The other leading Shia party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by the ailing Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, is equally worried by what it sees as the prime minister’s authoritarian bent. In particular, Mr Maliki’s assorted rivals have complained about his setting up of “support councils” among various tribes, both Sunni and Shia, to help his party get out the vote—by means of bribery and intimidation, according to his detractors.

Competition among the Sunnis is no less fierce, especially in the tribal movement known as the Sahwa (Awakening) and the Salvation Front, which are bidding to oust candidates tied to the largest Sunni block in parliament, the National Accord Front, or Tawafuq, whose leading party is the IIP. Here too Mr Maliki has been weaving controversial alliances, backing one group against another. The political emergence of the tribes, many of which had previously supported the insurgents, is part of a new dynamic that has seen al-Qaeda and other rebel groups beaten back if not completely defeated. Mr Maliki has also been accused of having hundreds of IIP members arrested, especially in the mixed-sect Diyala province.

No one knows what the new electoral picture will be like. Some say that Mr Maliki’s Dawa will do badly, whatever the advantages of incumbency. The Sadrist movement, internally divided like so many others, is widely thought to have lost ground yet still commands the sympathy of hordes of poor Shias in such places as Sadr City and in the southern provinces. The tribal parties have never been tested.

Mr Maliki will naturally take as much credit as he can from the withdrawal agreement with the Americans. He, or so it will be claimed, has nailed down the occupiers and made them promise to leave within three years. Under the agreement, American forces, now about 146,000-strong in Iraq, will withdraw from the cities by the middle of next year. All military operations will require the assent of Iraqis. Americans will be barred from using Iraq as a launch pad to attack other countries.

There is, in fact, considerable wiggle-room in the agreement. The timing can be extended by mutual consent. Even the requirement for American troops to withdraw from city centres may be open to an elastic interpretation. The Joint Security Stations, where American troops are entrenched in mini-forts scattered across the cities, have been an essential part of the military surge which, since early last year, has stanched the terrible sectarian bloodletting, especially in Baghdad. Already they are jointly manned by Americans and Iraqis. Iraq’s generals may well be loth to remove the Americans, perhaps relabelling them as “advisers”.

The Iraqi army and national police (a kind of gendarmerie) have improved out of all recognition in the past two years and at last count numbered 266,000, alongside 257,000 local police, 36,000 border guards and more than 100,000 “Sons of Iraq”, the militias formed by the mainly Sunni tribal councils. But even their best units still rely heavily on the Americans for air support, not least the helicopters that are crucial in counter-insurgency, and for other technical skills, including communications, intelligence and logistics.

Despite the continuing horrors in Nineveh, bitter fighting in parts of Diyala, rising tension between Arabs and Kurds, and a continuing if less frequent cycle of bombs in Baghdad, the violence overall has greatly subsided from its level of two years ago. In the second half of 2006, violent civilian deaths, mostly in Baghdad, amounted to around 20,000, counted in morgues and hospitals. The latest estimates put the monthly figure at under 500 a month, still a shocking number, but an eighth of what it was. Fewer than 50 Iraqi soldiers and police were killed in October compared with 300-plus in April last year. The American military death toll has dived from 126 in May last year to 14 last month; the total since the invasion in 2003 is nearing 4,200.

But 20,000 out of Iraq’s 34,000 doctors have left (after 2,000 were murdered) and few of the 2m-plus Iraqis now living abroad (many of them middle-class professionals) are yet willing to return. In the past few weeks, suicide-bombers have killed people at the checkpoints into Baghdad’s international zone, on the road to the airport, by one of the main bridges and outside the Ministry of Trade, where eight female employees were killed. The country still offers nothing approaching a secure environment where foreigners can come and do business. A number of foreign companies, especially in the oil sector, have signed big deals. But no major foreign banks or businesses have thought it feasible to set up shop in the open in Baghdad. Though safer than it was, Baghdad is still the most dangerous capital in the world.

In any event, as the recently departed American mastermind of the surge, General David Petraeus, repeatedly said, the gains remain “fragile and reversible”. The coming elections at the beginning and end of next year will give a vivid picture of Iraq’s political balance of power. But a potentially devastating lack of consensus among the main political groups and their leaders still prevails. Corruption is rife. Many ministries are still fiefs of patronage. Family and tribal ties are what count in getting jobs. Intrigue and deceit seem to dog the management of just about every political party. No culture of tolerance or pluralism has yet emerged.

A fundamental three-way split still prevents Iraq from coming together as a country. Though it is hopeful that the Sunni Arabs, probably some 20% of the population, seem set to be drawn back into the heart of parliamentary and provincial politics next year, few of their leaders seem willing yet to acknowledge that they have lost the power that they had always held.

A former deputy prime minister, a Sunni, insisted last week that his fellow Sunnis represent “at least 50% of Iraqis, by God!” Some of the leading Shias, who by most calculations represent more than 50% of the total population, seem prepared to reach out to the Sunnis, especially the biddable tribal sheikhs, provided they accept their new position as second fiddlers. But most Shias still regard the Sunnis with suspicion. “Maliki’s worst nightmare is still waking up to find a Sunni general in charge of the country again,” says a seasoned Western observer in Baghdad.

The Kurds are enjoying a golden age of near-independence that they have never had before. Their region still feels the perkiest and safest in Iraq, though its leaders have yet to acquire truly democratic instincts. But the Kurds remain loth to make the sort of compromise over the bitterly disputed mixed Arab-Kurdish-Turkomen city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province which might in turn allow them to have more say over the oil in the area they control. Both Shia and Sunni Arabs habitually refer to the Kurds with ill-disguised contempt. American and UN diplomats fear that the Kurdish leaders, wary of being outflanked by each other on such issues as Kirkuk, are in danger of overplaying their hand—at a risk of losing much that they have already achieved.

In short, the new establishment of Shias, Sunnis and Kurds sorely needs to build a sense of nationhood. The withdrawal agreement means that it will soon be for the Iraqis alone to define their destiny. For the next few years the Americans may yet find themselves holding the ring. But once the occupiers have left, the chances that the Iraqis will entrench and cherish a stable, federal, pluralist democracy must still be rated at less than even.

From The Economist

Nov 27th 2008

The rich are the new whipping boys of British politics.

But they are less friendless than they seem.

Steeve O’Braien

A LOT of energy is expended by British think-tanks and sociologists on identifying the poor. Less attention is paid to classifying the rich. Public policy has haphazardly offered some pointers, by setting thresholds above which Britons are considered undeserving of state support, vulnerable to inheritance tax and so on; but hitherto these signals have not added up to a clear definition of richness. Most well-off people instinctively resist the idea that they are rolling in it: the rich are always different, elsewhere, someone else. So perhaps it is helpful of Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, to have offered a clear typology of wealth in his emergency budget on November 24th.

You are very rich, the chancellor implied, if you earn more than £150,000 ($230,000) a year. You are still rich if you earn more than £100,000. He told the very rich—around 400,000 taxpayers, roughly 1% of earners—that from 2011 they will pay a new top rate of income tax of 45% (the current top rate is 40%), on earnings above £150,000. Both groups—around 800,000 people altogether—will pay more tax from 2010, through the erosion of their tax-free allowances. Meanwhile, anyone earning over £40,000 is, in the government’s view, comfortable enough to cough up a few pounds extra in national-insurance contributions (though according to a rival arithmetic, £20,000 marks the real cut-off between winners and losers under the new arrangements).

Two questions arise from Mr Darling’s delineation of this hierarchy—and the jettisoning of New Labour’s iconic pledge not to raise income tax, a promise that has helped to win it three general elections. First, does it make sense for the exchequer?

The government’s case, though Mr Darling didn’t put it quite like this, runs as follows. Britain is broke; in the medium term, taxes have to rise. In a country where median full-time earnings are £24,900, people making four times that much or more ought to help fill the fiscal abyss. And although this is the first lift in the top rate of income tax for more than 30 years, it is scarcely a confiscatory levy like the legendary rates of the 1970s, when Old Labour dinosaurs roamed the Treasury.

The trouble with this argument is that the hikes will raise barely any money. The 45% rate will yield little according to the Treasury, and practically nothing according to some analysts, because of dodges and disincentives. Rather than budgetary pragmatism, the changes seem to be the fiscal equivalent of a firework set off during an earthquake—the earthquake being Mr Darling’s staggering debt projections, his Panglossian growth forecasts and a public-spending squeeze of a kind Labour once excoriated. It is fair to conclude that the real motive is diversionary and political.

Thus, the second question: is pinching the rich quite as politically clever as the government evidently believes? Pinch yourself

The political calculation seems to be that, after 11 years in office, Labour is no longer dogged by memories of the vengeful taxes and fiscal incontinence of its previous stint in power, historical anxieties that constrained its tax policy until now. That hunch may be justified: many young voters are more likely to associate Labour with persistent inequality than with IMF bail-outs. But another part of the gamble is that the country has changed too: that the incipient recession has fostered a new mood of social solidarity, a yearning to “share the pain” of the downturn—particularly if the pain is aimed at bankers and other much-loathed “spivs and speculators”. Satisfying this mood with token raids on the rich, Labour reckons, will win more votes than will be lost by severing its already frayed bond with the City. The hikes may cost it a few marginal seats in the stockbroker belt of the south-east, but they will firm up ratings farther north.

Mr Darling, and his boss, Gordon Brown, are not alone in sniffing a new political atmosphere. Even before this week’s emergency budget, some in the Conservative Party, no less, muttered about proposing a new supertax and using the proceeds to cut rates for the middle classes. The Tories now say that should they win the next election (more likely than not), and have scope for tax-cutting (rather less likely), the first beneficiaries would be businesses and those on low and middle incomes; reversing Mr Darling’s higher-rate changes would “not be a priority”. The poor rich are suddenly friendless.

Or are they? The rich may be a tiny minority, but they are not altogether alone. Indeed that was, or appeared to be, one of the basic intuitions that took New Labour to power.

New Labour’s original tax pledge was a totem of its revamped economic approach: of its acknowledgment that free markets and deregulation were, after all, the best way to maximise national prosperity and finance progressive goals. But it also implied an even greater admission: that Britain was more individualistic, more aspirational and less collectivist than Labour had previously believed. The pledge seemed to concede that Margaret Thatcher had been right about not only economic policy but also the national personality; that Britons might resent inherited privilege but were increasingly relaxed about wealth itself. New Labour realised that whereas the rich are few, the would-be rich—likewise alarmed by punitive taxes—are numerous.

It now appears that for Mr Brown and Mr Darling, at least, New Labour’s old posture on tax may not have represented the fundamental reappraisal of Britain’s psychology that it did for Tony Blair; that for them it was a necessary economic and electoral strategy, not an imaginative epiphany. Perhaps they are right about the new mood: Number 10 doubtless spent almost as much as the new taxes will extract on testing their popularity in focus groups. But it may be that the country has changed less than Mr Brown thinks, and that even in a slump the rich are less isolated than they look. More than an economic crime, pinching the rich may turn out to be a profound political mistake.

From The Economist

Nov 13th 2008

Eastern Europe awaits a new American president nervously but in hope

Peter Shrank

DETAINING the next president of the United States for three hours in what an eyewitness called a “malodorous” small room at an airport in the provincial Russian city of Perm looks, in retrospect, to have been a pretty bad idea. No matter that the Kremlin muttered an apology for delaying Barack Obama, along with his mentor on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, in August 2005. The hold-up was blamed on a muddle over paperwork—although some Russia-watchers suspected it was a calculated Kremlin snub to the Republican Mr Lugar.

Mr Obama now plays down the episode, but his first-hand experience of the Russian bureaucracy’s capacity for at best capricious incompetence and at worst vindictiveness could yet prove telling. His team of hundreds of foreign-policy experts ranges from those who see the Bush administration’s policy as dangerously confrontational to those who think it too soft. Michael McFaul, a Stanford academic who has become a caustic critic of the Kremlin, is an influential Obama adviser. But it remains to be seen how many people Mr Obama will pick from his own team, and how many from the Hillary Clinton camp of experienced Russia hands.

The Democratic Party is in general rather less hawkish than many of Mr Obama’s senior advisers. Yet the prosaic truth is that, whoever secures the top jobs in the new administration, American policy towards eastern Europe is likely to be shaped mainly by events and bureaucratic drift, not personalities. Barring a new crisis (such as another war in Georgia), eastern Europe is unlikely to get anything like as much attention as the economy. Even more conveniently, the main decisions can easily be fudged or postponed.

Thus the Bush administration is still trying to push for Ukraine to be given a clear path towards future NATO membership. It reiterated this at a recent high-level NATO-Ukraine meeting in Estonia. But if Mr Obama wants to cash in his popularity in Europe, he is more likely to do so by asking European countries to send more troops to Afghanistan, not to swallow their objections to NATO membership for two increasingly unconvincing candidates: a chaotically divided Ukraine and an erratic, indefensible Georgia.

An Obama administration may concentrate on the nitty-gritty of military reform in the Ukraine rather than grand promises of NATO membership. That would be welcome in Russia. So too might be Mr Obama’s rather more doveish line on nuclear weapons (see article). But another sore point with the Kremlin is America’s plans for missile defences, and especially for the siting of ten interceptor rockets in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic. These—if they work—might stop or deter an Iranian missile attack on America or Europe. But public opinion in the Czech Republic and Poland remains unenthusiastic. And Russia has now threatened a bunch of countermeasures, including putting nuclear-capable missiles in the Kaliningrad exclave and targeting the missile-defence installations with its own nuclear arsenal.

Mr Obama, like many Democrats, sounds sceptical on missile defence. With no money allocated to the programme by Congress, it will be easy to keep the plans alive on paper, but to do little to promote them in practice. And if talks with Russia about nuclear weapons do go ahead, a deal on missile defence might be thrown in. Czechs and Poles may feel a touch queasy as these issues are discussed over their heads; but there is little they can do about it in practice.

Nor is it likely that an Obama administration will fight hard for greater European independence from Russia’s monopoly of east-west gas pipelines. The Bush administration promoted Nabucco, a pipeline that would bring Caspian and Central Asian gas to Europe via Turkey. But a shambolic and inattentive European policy on pipelines and energy dependence in recent years has left policymakers in Washington feeling that they are wasting their time. If the Europeans cannot look after their own interests, why should America?

From The Economist

Nov 13th 2008

A turbulent few months are expected on Capitol Hill

Claudio Munos

CHANGE is coming to Congress. The oldest senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia (pictured), is to be shunted aside as chairman of the mighty appropriations committee. Mr Byrd, a Democrat, started winning elections 66 years ago, when his local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan picked him as its leader, or “Exalted Cyclops”. A senator since 1959, he is no longer a racist but is notorious for lavishing taxpayers’ cash on boondoggles named after himself. As he nears his 91st birthday, however, he is in poor health. He will be replaced by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a sprightly 84-year old.

All this turmoil is occurring at a difficult time. The world economy is having a seizure. Carmakers in Detroit are begging for a bail-out. The Democrats who control Congress would like to help President-elect Barack Obama tackle these crises. But he will not become president until January 20th. For now, George Bush is the only man who can sign (or veto) laws. And only the old Congress can pass them: the new one does not take office till January 6th. A short-term economic stimulus is needed before then, and is likely to pass. Mr Bush also wants Congress to ratify a free-trade deal with Colombia. It probably won’t.

In the House of Representatives the Democrats have a comfortable majority, which will get even bigger next year. In the Senate they currently have only a 51-49 edge, including two independents, and next year’s line-up is still unclear. The Democrats will have at least 57 seats, a hefty majority. But three seats are still undecided. Recounts of close races in Alaska and Minnesota could drag on for weeks, with allegations of cheating from both sides. And a run-off will be held in Georgia on December 2nd, as local rules require, after neither candidate won more than 50% of the vote.

If the Democrats win all three seats, which is unlikely but not impossible, they will be able to shut down Republican filibusters and ram through any law they like. Republican big beasts, including John McCain, are converging on Georgia to support Senator Saxby Chambliss in the run-off. A Democratic supermajority would mean: “No checks. No balances. No stopping them,” warns one website.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the top Democrats in the House and Senate, are furiously juggling. Even as their members jostle for jobs in the new Congress, they still have a lame-duck legislature to run. They seem to have kept a lid on the in-fighting, at least for now, but several big jobs are yet to be filled.

Since Joe Biden is moving to the White House, his plum spot as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is up for grabs. John Kerry, a former Democratic presidential nominee, says he wants it. But if Mr Obama makes him secretary of state or ambassador to the UN, the more leftish Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin would be in line. Another question-mark hangs over Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2000. This year he backed John McCain for the presidency. Many Democrats want to punish him, by stripping him of his chairmanship of the homeland security committee or even kicking him out of the Democratic caucus. But Mr Obama is said to want to let bygones be bygones.

In the House some personnel changes portend a leftward shift. Rahm Emanuel, a forceful centrist, is leaving his Chicago seat to become Mr Obama’s chief of staff. His post as Democratic caucus chairman, the number-four job in the House, goes to John Larson of Connecticut, who is somewhat further to the left. And Henry Waxman of California is challenging John Dingell of Michigan for the chairmanship of the House committee that handles energy and climate change.

A bitter battle is brewing. Many ideological greens prefer Mr Waxman, who supports tougher curbs on carbon emissions and has a more belligerent approach to corporations. Many pragmatists prefer Mr Dingell, for the same reasons. A cap-and-trade bill will be much harder to pass now that the economy is in the doldrums, says a former Clinton White House staffer. Mr Dingell, who hails from Michigan, is trusted by the big carbon-emitting industries. Mr Waxman is not. So a deal next year may be more likely under Mr Dingell.

More immediately, congressional Democrats are urging Mr Bush to find as much as $50 billion to rescue the Big Three carmakers. Mr Dingell strongly supports this idea. So do most Democrats. If the government can bail out greedy bankers, they reason, surely it can help horny-handed workers keep their jobs. Plus, they see the cash infusion as an opportunity to insist on greener cars.

Many Republicans are aghast. If the financial system had collapsed, it would have devastated the entire economy. That is not true of carmakers. If the Treasury props them up, every badly-run company in America will beat a path to its door. But a bail-out looks likely. And if Republicans in the Senate lose their power to filibuster, the Democrats will abolish workers’ right to a secret ballot before unionising. That, warn Republicans, will let unions do to other firms what they did to General Motors.

From The Times

December 4, 2008

Immigrants must learn English to qualify for a British passport

Richard Ford

Immigrants who make little effort to integrate into society will wait longer before they can become British citizens under changes to citizenship rules.

As part of the Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Bill, they will have to “earn” the right to a passport rather than simply achieving it through five years’ residence. The latest measure will end the automatic right to stay and replace it with a new system of “earned citizenship” and temporary residence.

Arrivals will have to demonstrate a good ability in English and a knowledge of life in Britain before becoming citizens. Immigrants who do no voluntary work will qualify only after eight years and those who become unemployed will be asked to leave.

The Bill will deny full access to social benefits, including social housing, to those who have not completed a new period of probationary citizenship of between one and five years. The aim is to link the gaining of a British passport to a greater commitment to the British way of life. Immigrants convicted of serious criminal offences could be barred from citizenship and those found guilty of minor crimes may face delays in having their applications processed.

The Bill will also reduce the restrictions on people from overseas, but who have a British-born mother, applying to become a citizen. Children born to British mothers before 1961 will be able to apply for citizenship. Previously it was passed on through fathers.

The Government proposes to levy a top-up fee on immigrants to create a fund expected to run to £20 million. Cash from the fund will be distributed to local authorities facing short-term pressure because of an influx of migrants.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “These proposed reforms are a tacit admission that the Government has failed in its seven previous immigration Bills. We need to re-establish controls over our borders so we can count people in and out.”

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, will also unveil reforms to the police service, including plans for directly elected police authorities. Although the issue does not generate much public interest, it is generating concern within political parties and threatens to put local councillors at loggerheads with Westminster frontbenchers.

Fears have been expressed by Labour local government leaders that direct votes for police authorities might lead to right-wing groups gaining political control of the police in ballots where the turnout was low.

There is wider concern among the police that this is part of a trend towards politicians obtaining power over the direction of policing.

Others parts of the proposals are less controversial and include laying down minimum national standards for neighbourhood policing teams and a new structure for police pay.

Officers will be given powers to take fingerprints while they are out on the beat and to use hand-held computers and other devices to cut down on paperwork. Under the Coroners and Justice Bill, the Government plans to introduce new “investigative witness anonymity” to protect witnesses to gang-related killings. It will also reform murder law, including the abolition of the partial defence of provocation, and modernise the law on assisted suicide.

The Bill also includes establishing a sentencing council for England and Wales to make sentencing more consistent and introduces a scheme to stop criminals selling their stories. The Bill applies to England and Wales, with some elements extending to Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Proposals to hold some inquests in private on the ground of national security appear to have been put on hold after criticism from MPs and justice campaigners.

May 25, 2007

From the New York Times

Barack Obama’s American Exceptionalism

Christopher A. Preble

Senator Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity to presidential contender has been aided by the debate over the war in Iraq. Obama, who was not a U.S. Senator when Congress voted to go to war in 2002, has worn his opposition to the war as a badge of honor. But as Christopher Preble argues, that will only carry him so far, ecognizing the need to lay out a foreign policy agenda defined by more than opposition to the war in Iraq, Senator Obama set out to explain his broader vision for U.S. foreign policy in an April 2007 speech before the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.

The speech contained a healthy helping of high-minded rhetoric about the need “to stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar,” of leading a global effort “to keep the world’s deadliest weapons out of the world’s most dangerous hands,” of the need to build “stronger alliances,” and of leading “a stronger push to defeat the terrorists’ message of hate with an agenda for hope around the world.”

The few concrete recommendations, including his proposal to increase U.S. foreign aid spending to $50 billion by 2012, are conventional in the sense that they are designed to appeal to his party’s liberal base.

The underlying message implies a willingness to use force abroad that might be nearly indistinguishable from that of the current occupant of the White House.

Equally conventional is his invocation of Franklin Roosevelt. Obama, channeling FDR, explains that the United States leads “the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” And so we must. “We must lead by building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” (Emphasis added)

This expansive vision for what the United States can and should do is consistent with Obama’s endorsement of a permanent increase in the size of the military, an additional “65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 Marines.”

Many of the other candidates aspiring for the nomination have embraced the idea of growing the military, and the logic is consistent with Obama’s accurate observation that “the war in Afghanistan and the ill-advised invasion of Iraq have clearly demonstrated the consequences of underestimating the number of troops required to fight two wars and defend our homeland.”

But there are two ways to solve this problem — by either restraining the impulse to intervene militarily or by increasing the military. Obama conceded as much. “Of course,” he explained, “how we use our armed forces matters just as much as how they are prepared.”

Would President Obama have sent troops to Panama? To Somalia? To Haiti? Would he have declared, as George H.W. Bush did, that Saddam's aggression against Kuwait would not stand?

However, the underlying message of his speech, and of his specific proposals, implies a willingness to use force abroad that might be nearly indistinguishable from that of the current occupant of the White House.

Perhaps that explains why the junior senator from Illinois won praise from Robert Kagan, the Washington Post columnist. He seemed genuinely excited about Obama’s embrace of a highly activist foreign policy.

Kagan had a hand in shaping that policy in the mid-1990s, when he (along with William Kristol) called for the United States to play the role of “benevolent global hegemon” — i.e. “world’s policeman.”

The Iraq war and other global misadventures have revealed that being the world’s cop is a costly undertaking.

And although 76% of Americans, according to a recent poll taken by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org, say that the United States is “playing the role of world policeman more than it should be,” Kagan believes that he has found yet another politician who believes the United States doesn't play the role often enough — hence his praise for “Obama the Interventionist.”

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