Bernd Debusmann

Here we go again. That shape-shifting entity known as “the international community” has moved once more to try and stop Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. In the process, the community shrank by two countries, Turkey and Brazil.

That is the conclusion one can draw from President Barack Obama’s statements on the U.N. Security Council’s vote on June 9 to sanction Iran for failing to halt its production of nuclear fuel. The vote, Obama said, was “an unmistakable message” by the international community and showed its united view on Iran and nuclear arms.

That doesn’t quite square with the fact that Turkey and Brazil, two increasingly important players on the world scene, voted against the 15-member council’s resolution. (Lebanon abstained). But it confirmed an apparent tendency by Western leaders to draw inspiration from Alice in Wonderland (where Iran is concerned).

They echo Humpty Dumpty’s famous assertion on the use of words: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” The modern, Iran-related version: “When I talk about the international community, I mean those who are with me. Neither more nor less.”

The June 9 resolution vote was the fourth on sanctions and the first with “no” votes. In 2006 and 2007 sanctions resolutions passed unanimously. In 2008, one council member, Indonesia, abstained.

Obama termed the new sanctions the most comprehensive the Iranian government had faced but said they did not close the door to diplomacy. If that were to happen, he would serve the cause of international diplomacy by setting an example and burying the over-used and empty phrase “international community” with its misleading implication of global consensus.

The question now is whether the latest set of sanctions will have any more effect on the Iranian nuclear programme than the preceding ones and even Obama expressed doubts: “We know that the Iranian government will not change its behaviour overnight.”

If history is a guide, not overnight and perhaps not ever. According to a landmark study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics first published in 1983 and updated twice, the last time in 2007, economic sanctions through history have much more often failed than succeeded.

SANCTIONS-RESISTANT AUTOCRATS

The authors of the study, led by Gary Hufbauer, looked at 174 sanctions efforts beginning in World War I and found that only 30 percent succeeded in changing the targeted country’s policy in a major way. Autocratic regimes were particularly resistant to sanctions, the study found.

“In Iran, you have a highly autocratic regime with a very effective secret police,” Hufbauer, one of the world’s leading authorities on sanctions, said in an interview.

That means a government that can crush internal dissent, as it did after hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets after presidential elections a year ago (June 12) in protest against what they said were elections stolen by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad through massive fraud. Brutal government repression ended months of tumultuous unrest.

The 2007 edition of the Peterson Institute’s study, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, found that turning the sanctions screw rather than using a hammer is not the most effective method. Turning the screw is what the U.S. and its allies have been doing after Iran’s until-then secret nuclear projects at Natanz and Arak came to light in 2002, courtesy of an Iranian resistance group.

“Political leaders value an incremental approach toward deploying sanctions to avoid immediate confrontation and to justify the subsequent use of force, if all fails. Our analysis continues to stress the opposite. There is a better chance to avoid military escalation if sanctions are deployed with maximum impact,” the study says in reference to the confrontation with Iran.

The latest package of sanctions falls short of maximum impact, largely because Russia and China managed to water down the June 9 resolution, the result of five months of negotiations between them and the United States, Britain and France. As it stands, the compromise sanctions spare Iran’s all-important oil and gasoline imports and barely touch the financial system.

According to Hufbauer, an observation by the Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke is as valid today as it was when he made it in the 19th century: “A coalition is excellent as long as all interests of each member are the same. But in all coalitions the interests of the allies coincide only up to a certain point. As soon as one of the allies has to make sacrifices for the attainment of a large common objective, one cannot usually count on the coalition’s efficacy.”

That applies to the 12 security council members who voted for the sanctions. It applies even more to the chimerical “international community” evoked by Barack Obama.

In the waning days of his presidency, George W. Bush listed the failure of immigration reform as one of his biggest disappointments and deplored the tone of the immigration debate. It had, he said in December 2008, undermined “the true greatness of America which is that we welcome people who want to work”.

The way things look a year and a half into the administration of Barack Obama, he too may end his presidency deploring the failure to fix America’s dysfunctional immigration system. The tone of the debate is even more rancorous now than it was when Bush pushed reform and it features the same arguments, including the fantasy that you can fully control the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, the world’s busiest border.

That illusory target was set in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by George W. Bush on October 26 of that year. It provided a definition of the term “operational control”, one of the most frequently used buzz phrases of the debate. (The other is “securing the border”). Under the letter of the law, operational control means “the prevention of all unlawful U.S. entries, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

Note the word “all”. Then contrast it with what is at stake: almost 7,500 miles of land borders (with Mexico and Canada), 12,300 miles of coastline and a vast network of airports, seaports and land crossings. In the long-running debate, sound bites alone could fill a library and one of the best came from Janet Napolitano when she was governor of Arizona: “Show me a 50-foot wall and I show you a 51-foot ladder.”

That quote has history on its side. There has never been an impenetrable border. Not the Great Wall of China, the 5,500-mile mother of all walls, not the Berlin Wall, not the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences, minefields and watch towers manned by guards with shoot-to-kill orders that sliced 2,500 miles through Europe.

Napolitano, now head of the Department of Homeland Security, the 160,000-strong bureaucratic behemoth charged with ensuring “operational control”, no longer uses the wall-and-ladder simile. Instead, she talks of the need for “comprehensive immigration reform”, as does her boss, Barack Obama, and as did George W. Bush.

Bush’s attempt to push through a reform addressing all aspects of the complex, emotion-laden issue fell through because he could not convince legislators in his own Republican party that there should be a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States. Obama does not have enough votes in the Senate for a reform bill.

And leading Republicans insist that there must be a sequence in any changes to what everybody agrees is a broken system. “First…we have to secure the border. If you want to enact other reforms, how can that be effective when you have a porous border,” says John McCain, the Arizona senator who once championed an all-encompassing package.

OBAMA IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BUSH
He and others have not explained what exactly they mean by “secure border”. If that stands for keeping “all” illegal crossers out, it’s difficult to see how there could ever be reform. Largely symbolic gestures, such as Obama’s decision in May to send 1,200 National Guard troops to the border with Mexico, will make little difference on the ground.

By ordering the troops’ deployment, Obama trod in the footsteps of Bush, who dispatched 6,000 National Guard troops to the border in 2006 to back up the Border Patrol and help build several hundred miles of walls and fences. In both cases, the measures were meant to win bi-partisan support for overall reform.

That would need to include figuring out a way to keep track of people who enter the U.S. on valid visas and stay behind when they expire. With attention focused on the border, visa overstayers rarely figure in the debate but they are estimated to make up around 40 percent of the population of illegal immigrants.

How to handle them has been the thorniest problem of all, with conservatives decrying as “amnesty” proposals to work out a way to legal status. Public attitudes are somewhat schizophrenic, judging from opinion polls.

A poll late in May by the Opinion Research Corporation, for example, showed 80 percent in favor of a program that would allow illegal immigrants who have already lived in the U.S. for several years to apply for legal status if they had a job and paid any taxes owed. But in response to a differently-phrased question, 60 percent supported deporting illegal immigrants already in the country.

Last year, according to government figures, the U.S. deported 387,790 illegal immigrants — an average of more than 1,000 a day and a tiny fraction of the undocumented population. Wholesale deportation of all of it belongs as much in the world of fantasy as the idea that “all unlawful entries” could be stopped.

To show how unrealistic the notion of mass deportation is, the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, crunched some numbers in a recent report on immigration. Assuming that they could all be tracked down, how many buses would it take to ferry out all illegal immigrants?

Around 200,000. Placed bumper-to-bumper, the buses would stretch 1,800 miles.

It is time to kill the annual performance review, for decades a feature of corporate life around the globe, dreaded both by those who do the reviewing and those who are reviewed.

It is a corporate sham and one of the most insidious, most damaging and yet most prevalent of corporate activities. It is a pretentious, bogus practice that produces nothing that could be called a corporate plus. It is universally despised yet few people do anything to kill it.

So says Samuel A. Culbert, a consultant and professor of management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in a just-published book entitled, Get Rid of the Performance Review! The book grew from a 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal which, Culbert says, prompted a thousand letters to the editor and a flood of online comments, mostly in favour of his argument.

It is not new, but presented in particularly blunt language. A decade ago, a book by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins entitled Abolishing Performance Appraisals made similar arguments, based on a study of 26 companies where morale, effectiveness and profitability had improved after they abolished appraisals.

Doubts about the process emerged as far back as 1957, with an article in the Harvard Business Review by Douglas McGregor, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who suggested replacing the conventional boss-subordinate meeting with an approach allowing the employee to set personal short-term goals and evaluating himself.

An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisal, the headline said. There has been a lot more unease since then, so why does the practice persist? And why would a date on a calendar be relevant to determining when someone’s performance needs reviewing?

Culbert zeroes in on two culprits. The first is a management theory – Management by Objectives – which came into vogue after the end of the World War II and provided for managers to set goals for their departments and then figure out what individual employees need to do to achieve department goals.

The performance review that went with the theory judged an individual’s performance rather than that of the department or organization. In that kind of system, where is the incentive for the individual employee to improve the corporation as a whole?

And the second culprit? Human Resources departments: they insist on performance reviews “to ensure themselves a secret-police-like power base they can use to secure themselves with managers.” Lest there be any doubt about his dim view of HR, they strive for “keeper-of-dirty-little-secret/KGB-like status.”

“BULL—-” AS ETIQUETTE OF CHOICE

As Culbert sees it, performance reviews, as conducted by most companies, are based on a myth – that supervisors can come up with a scorecard free of bias, sentiment and the personality of the manager. In other words, that they can be objective.

If that were the case, wouldn’t employees get the same rankings when they change bosses? Culbert cites a study (by the consulting firm PDI Ninth House) that looked at 6,000 employees reporting to two bosses. The rankings ran from “outstanding” to “very weak.” Of the employees deemed outstanding by the first boss, 62 percent received a lower ranking by the second.

And how can reviews be objective when managers are forced to sort employees into the infamous bell-shaped curve – 20 percent classed as outstanding, 70 percent as average and 10 percent as poor performers. That is a recipe, Culbert says, for guaranteeing duplicity and making sure employees won’t cooperate with each other.

“Employee No. 1 asks Employee No. 2 for some numbers. No way will he get them, because Employee No. 2 has no incentive to make Employee No. 1 look too good. Because if No. 1 looks good, No. 2 looks worse, relatively. You have a system where nobody wins.”

Contrary to corporate spin, the chances of a frank and open-minded discussion in the traditional once-a-year performance review session are remote because people are reluctant to speak their mind to their bosses and focus instead on saying what will earn points and make a good impression.

Pretense is more important than fact which is, says Culbert, why “bull—-, not straight talk, becomes the etiquette of choice in any corporate relationship where the only opinion that is listened to is the boss’s.”

That observation and choice of words is inspired by Harry Frankfurt, the Princeton University professor who published a slim philosophical treatise entitled On Bull—- in 2005. It took issue with “bull—-ters…who are attempting by what they say to manipulate the opinions of those to whom they speak.”

That obviously applies to more than corporate life and performance review sessions and the book’s phenomenal success (translation into 25 languages, a place on the New York Times bestseller list for months) points to widespread distaste for fakery and phoniness.

Does Culbert have a cure for the ills he diagnoses? Yes. He calls it “performance preview”, a system where managers mentor and coach employees to succeed. They have conversations when either feel they are necessary — not in a formal session once a year.

Here is a short history of Mexico’s drug war, as told to a joint session of the U.S. Congress by President Felipe Calderon on May 20.

In 2004, a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons to civilians was lifted. High-powered firearms started flowing south across the 2,000-mile border. Violence increased. “One day criminals in Mexico, having gained access to these weapons, decided to challenge the authorities in my country,” he said.

Calderon did not say what happened on that “one day,” by implication the day the president had no choice but to fight back.

There is another version of history, which goes as follows: Calderon won elections in 2006 with a margin so thin (0.58 percent) that it prompted cries of fraud, persuaded his left-wing opponent Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to declare himself the real winner, and gave Mexico the unusual and embarrassing spectacle, for weeks on end, of two men claiming they were the legitimate president.

So, ten days after eventually being sworn in, Calderon announced that he had ordered the army into his home state of Michoacan to make war on Mexico’s drug cartels.

One of Calderon’s most vocal critics, former foreign minister Jorge Castaneda, loses no opportunity to say this was a war of choice, not prompted by any specific outrage but by a perceived need to legitimize a contested presidency.
Calderon badly misjudged the strength of the criminal mafias, the alternative version goes, and now is stuck with a war he cannot win, not even with U.S. support. The death toll in the wars the cartels are fighting against the state and against each other stands at around 23,000 and is rising by the day.

To staunch the bloodshed, Congress should consider reinstating the assault weapons ban, Calderon told Congress.
“If…you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States, with access to the same weapons, will not in turn decide to point them at U.S. authorities and citizens.”

Calderon’s remarks all but guarantee that the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States, will redouble its efforts to prevent the ban from being reinstated. While the Obama administration is in favour of doing so, the chances of that happening in an American mid-term election year are remote.

The NRA launched a pre-emptive counter-attack weeks before Calderon’s arrival on a two-day state visit, with an essay on its website saying that Mexico’s crisis was being used as a pretext for restrictions on gun ownership. Whatever one might think of America’s lax gun laws, it’s probably safe to assume that Mexican drug criminals by now have enough weapons to keep murdering each other and the forces of law and order for a long time before needing resupplies from the north.

FAST-GROWING ARMY OF CRIMINALS?

Unless, of course, the Mexican army of criminals is growing very fast, which would be evidence that Calderon’s frontal assault is failing and help explain why a majority of Mexicans, according to opinion polls, think the traffickers are winning.

Nobody knows just how many people are involved in the drug trade — as foot soldiers, runners, lookouts, accountants, money launderers, communications experts and a wide variety of other functions. Cartel recruiters have a deep pool to draw from — Mexican unemployment stands at around 2.5 million and at least 15 million people work in the “informal sector” made up of street vendors and other casual workers.

Add family members of cartel criminals and officials lured by the generous bribes the cartels can offer and the number thrown out by Ismael Zambada, a fugitive leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, begins to look more than a mere figure of speech.

Zambada, for whose capture the U.S. has offered a $5 million reward, said in a rare interview with the Mexican news magazine Proceso in April that there was no way the cartels could be defeated.

“Millions of people are involved in the narco problem,” he said. “How can they be overcome…this is a lost war.” The interviewer asked, “Why lost?” Zambada: “The narco has roots in society (just) like corruption.”

Another estimate on the strength of the trafficking organizations has come from the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper with good contacts in the military that last year quoted an unnamed senior defense official as saying the Pentagon believed the number of cartel foot soldiers matched that of the Mexican army – about 130,000.

In Washington, policymakers have begun to wonder aloud how vigorously the war against the cartels will be fought once the conservative Calderon, who has been a close U.S. ally, leaves office (Mexican law provides for a single six-year term).

Judging from present polls, the left-wing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has a good chance of winning back the presidency in 2012.

And then what? Possibly an end to the extradition to the U.S. of wanted drug lords, considered an affront to national sovereignty under the rule of PRI presidents. Even worse, from a U.S. point of view, would be a return to greater tolerance of moving drugs into the United States as long as the cartels keep the peace at home.

Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world’s second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.

According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.

On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai’s visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a “widespread paramilitary shadow government…in a majority of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.”

The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai’s visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.

“The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year,” the Pentagon said. “The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks.” As to corruption: “Real…change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful.”

In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that’s not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai’s visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. “We are steadily making progress,” Obama said. “Progress in Afghanistan is real,” echoed Clinton.

Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the “we see light at the end of the tunnel” assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?

Karzai’s visit was almost cancelled after he responded to public rebukes from American leaders with anti-American and anti-Western tirades so over the top that one of his most prominent detractors, the former United Nations deputy chief in Afghanistan Peter Galbraith, raised questions over the Afghan president’s stability. “He’s prone to tirades, he can be very emotional, act impulsively,” Galbraith told the U.S. TV network MSNBC.

OPPOSITION TO WAR
That prompted a flurry of international headlines on the Afghan leader’s mental state that did little to win support for the war. Polls show that slightly more than half the American public think the war is not worth fighting for. In Britain, Canada, Australia, France and Germany, the biggest contributors to the 43-member coalition, poll after poll has shown majority opposition to the war.

One of the problems in convincing reluctant partners to spend blood and treasure in Afghanistan is the lack of a clear answer to the question “what is success?”

Even a Washington think tank friendly to Obama, the Center for American Progress, singled out the absence of “clarity of purpose” in a report on the future of Afghanistan. “The Obama administration remains vague about what progress looks like in Afghanistan and what our objectives are over the next two to five years,” the Center said.

There has been no vagueness about the cost of the enterprise. It has been rising steadily as forces in Afghanistan were built up and troops in Iraq drawn down. In February, Pentagon monthly spending on Afghanistan exceeded spending on Iraq for the first time, $6.7 billion ($233 million a day) compared with $5.5 billion. Congress is almost certain to approve an additional $33 billion in the current fiscal year to fund the troop increase Obama announced last December.

It was his second escalation of what he calls a war of necessity. He ordered the first, of 21,000 troops, a few weeks after taking office. His rationale then: they were needed to secure the Afghan presidential election which, in the end, were so massively rigged that a U.N.-backed complaints committee threw out about a million Karzai votes.

That’s past history and no longer a subject, now that the Obama team has decided they need to live with Karzai, warts and all. What will be a subject is a promise, made halfway through his visit, that he would work for better government. It’s not the first such pledge.

Will word match deed better than in the past? That will be watched closely both in Washington and in Afghanistan. There, in the words of General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander, people “believe more of what they see than what they hear. Only when they experience security…and only when they benefit from better governance, will they begin to believe in the possibilities of the future.”

The chances of that happening by July next year, the date Obama has set for the beginning of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, are close to zero.

(Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own)

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) – What do the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, American Airlines pilot Kiernan O’Dwyer, Democratic congressman John Lewis and Sam Adams, aged 5, have in common? They have all been on one of America’s terrorist watch lists and found it easier to get on the list than off it.

That’s a trend almost certain to continue as the database grows relentlessly, resulting in a huge haystack of suspects in which to find the terrorist needle. There are no up-to-date figures on the size of that haystack but according to a report a year ago by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the “consolidated watch list” contained more than 1.1 million “known or suspected terrorist identities” by the end of 2008.

That corresponded to around 400,000 people, plus various aliases and ways of spelling names. If the growth rate of previous years is anything to go by, the database may well reach two million entries sometime before the end of this year. The government’s approach to the watch lists has fluctuated from rapidly expanding it after September 11 2001, to trying to trim it, as happened in the final year of the Bush administration.

The course changed after the abortive Christmas Day plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian student, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who was on a catch-all list called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) but not on the smaller “no fly” list. President Barack Obama called for a thorough review of the watch list system.
At a congressional hearing in January, the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, said the Bush policy change had responded to complaints about bloated lists and extra scrutiny of innocent travelers. An oft-heard question, Blair said, was “Why are you searching grandmothers? … I should not have given in to that pressure, but it was a factor.”

That, for the time being, was the end of tighter regulations on putting suspects on watch lists. But it was not the end to lapses in security procedures –  Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American charged with trying to explode a car  bomb in New York’s Times Square, was allowed to board a Dubai-bound airliner despite having been placed on the no-fly list the day of his flight.

An alert Border Protection officer spotted his name on the list as the aircraft was taxiing out. It was ordered to stop and Shahzad was taken off.

“One really has to wonder where was the failing here,” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said in a congressional hearing. “What happened with this watch list. It makes you wonder whether there was a lapse in communication … between law enforcement agencies working at the airport.”

WATCH LISTS TO GROW
What will be happening with the watch lists seems clear: they will grow because of the nature of Washington bureaucracies whose mode of operation include the principle of CYA (Cover Your Ass). In other words, there is little downside for officials who err on the side of adding too many names but there is a lot for letting an Abdulmutallab slip through.

Who is being placed on the list under current regulations? “In general, individuals who are ‘reasonably suspected’ of having possible links to terrorism – in addition to individuals with known links – are to be nominated for inclusion in the consolidated watch list by the FBI and other members of the intelligence community,” according to the Government Accountability Office, or GAO.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a flexible term and a red flag for civil liberties advocates. An Arizona state law that requires police officers to question a person’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is in the country illegally prompted a chorus of condemnation.

In an odd twist in American politics, “reasonable suspicion” is also raising the hackles of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), a group enraged by pending legislation that would give the U.S. Department of Justice authority to block the sale of firearms to people on the terrorist watch list. The issue came up in a congressional hearing just two days after the abortive Times Square bomb attack.

Police found a rifle in the car Shahzad left behind at the airport. He had bought it three months earlier, when he was beginning to assemble material for his abortive bomb plot.     Shahzad was not on a terrorist watch list at the time but if he had been, he still could have bought the gun. Why?

“Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law,” says the GAO, the research arm of Congress. Neither does inclusion in a terrorist watch list. Over the past six years, according to a GAO report read at the hearing, sales of guns and explosives to people on terrorist watch lists totaled 1,119. These included several on the “no fly” list “because the background checks revealed no prohibiting information under current law.”

Under current law, the background checks licensed gun dealers must perform are designed to stop sales to nine categories of people, including “felons, fugitives, unlawful drug users and aliens illegally in the United States.”
The categories do not include “suspicion” and the NRA argues that suspicion is not enough for Congress to curb or take away the constitutional right, enshrined in the second amendment, to own and bear arms. Given the lobby’s enormous influence on Congress, the argument is probably strong enough to block, or at least delay, legislation that would close what is known as the “terror gap.”

(Editing by Kieran Murray)

The United States owes Latin American immigrants a debt of gratitude. And Latin American immigrants owe a debt of gratitude to lawmakers in Arizona. How so?

Thanks largely to immigration from Latin America (both legal and illegal) and the higher birth rates of Latin immigrants, the population of the U.S. has kept growing, a demographic trend that sets it apart from the rest of the industrialized world, where numbers are shrinking. That threatens economic growth and in the case of Russia (U.N. projections see a decline from 143 million now to 112 million by 2050) undermines Moscow’s claim to Great Power status.

A country’s population starts shrinking when fertility falls below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. births over the lifetime of a woman. For white American women, that rate is around 1.8 now. For Latin American immigrants, the rate is 2.8. According to the U.S. census bureau, nearly one in six people living in the U.S. are Hispanics. By 2050, they are projected to make up almost a third of the population.

That translates into the biggest minority group of consumers. Their spending is expected to exceed $1 trillion by next year despite the recession. A point worth noting but rarely mentioned in the often overheated debate about immigration: illegal immigrants in effect subsidize social security payments to Americans over 62.

This is because people working with false papers have their social security taxes withheld from wages but are not entitled to receive benefits. The sums involved are substantial — the Social Security administration has an “earnings suspense file” of payments under names that do not match social security numbers. The file has been growing by around $7 billion a year which goes to pay benefits to legal workers.

And the benefit to immigrants of the Arizona law?

“It may finally wake up the whole country to the consequences of the current approach to illegal immigration in which ever tougher border enforcement is seen as the only solution to the problem,” says Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. “That approach is gravely flawed.”

So is the argument that the federal government has done so little to secure the U.S.-Mexican border that states need to take things into their own hands? The number of Border Patrol agents along the 2,000-mile frontier has doubled in the past five years, to 20,000. Arrests of border crossers have dropped 60 percent since 2000, evidence that tighter controls are discouraging illegal crossings (as does a shortage of jobs at a time of high U.S. unemployment).

A MESS THAT NEEDS FIXING
Under the law, the toughest of its kind in the country, state and local police are required to “determine the immigration status” of anyone “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is illegally present in the United States.” Failure to carry identification documents at all times would be grounds for arrest. Critics say “reasonable suspicion” opens the door to racial profiling.

Despite the acrimonious debate sparked by the Arizona law — which faces legal challenges and might never take effect — there is common ground on the issue between a good number of politicians on both sides of the aisle: the present system is a mess that needs fixing.

The last serious attempt to fix it was in 2006, when the U.S. Senate failed to agree on a bill that would have paved the way to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants — the most widely used estimate is around 11 million, most of them Mexicans — and introduce a guest worker program to meet demand for unskilled and low-skilled workers.

At the time, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, the Democrats’ most vocal champion of immigration reform, asked its opponents what they were planning to do with the millions already in the country. “Send them back …? Develop a kind of Gestapo here to seek out these people that are in the shadows?” Critics of the Arizona bill think that prediction has come true.

Much of the immigration argument has glossed over the fact that for decades both the authorities and employers turned a blind eye to illegal immigration because the country has been deeply dependent on cheap labor — in effect one of America’s ways of competing with the low-paid workers of the Third World.

The link between demographics and economic growth has rarely featured in the discussion but this week former president Bill Clinton took it up and added a frank interpretation of the anti-immigrant anger reflected by a nationwide poll that showed 60 percent of voters nation-wide favoring Arizona-type laws.

The real reason for anti-immigrant sentiment, he said, was the fact that the economic downturn in the last few years disproportionally fell on white males without college degrees, such as factory workers. “But they’ll get more jobs if the economy grows. Their taxes will be lower if we’ve got more taxpayers. The pressures on Social Security … will be less if we have more people contributing to the system.

“So I don’t think there’s any alternative but for us to increase immigration,” he said, adding that bringing in more immigrants must be part of the overall strategy.

So far it is not.

During a visit to Mexico a year ago, President Barack Obama promised he would urge the U.S. Senate to ratify an international treaty designed to curb  the flow of weapons to Latin American drug cartels. It remains just that – a promise. Prospects for ratification are virtually zero.

Top officials in the Obama administration have called the cartels, and the extreme violence tearing apart Mexican cities on the U.S. border, threats to U.S. national security. Joining 30 other countries in the Western Hemisphere in an anti-arms smuggling accord would therefore seem a perfectly sane and logical thing to do. But logic often ends where American gun ownership begins.

The treaty in question is called the Inter-American Convention Against Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials. Known as CIFTA for its Spanish acronym, it was adopted by the Organization of American States in 1997. All but four of its 35 members have ratified it. Bill Clinton signed the convention but did not get the Senate to bless it.

The treaty has run into fierce opposition from groups representing America’s huge army of gun owners, many of whom see CIFTA as a plot against their right, enshrined in the second amendment of the U.S. constitution, to own and bear arms. Reflecting such fears, an essay on the website of the National Rifle Association (NRA), the most powerful of the gun lobbies, terms the treaty “a blueprint for dismantling the second amendment” and part of an Obama strategy “to create the foundation for repressive and extreme gun control.”

Faced with such opposition, American lawmakers are no more inclined to tangle with the NRA and other gun lobbies now than they have been in the 12 preceding years. Which really boils down to gun owners and their impact on the ballot box having more weight than national security concerns.

There is no provision in the convention that would allow restrictions on legal gun sales in the United States. It stipulates information-sharing among the signatories that would make it easier to track guns used by criminals back to their last legal sale. That might end a protracted dispute over the origin and the number of weapons in the hands of the Mexican drug cartels whose wars against each other and against the state have killed more than 22,000 people since late 2006.

Nobody knows how many guns are smuggled across the border, how many come from the more than 9,000 licensed arms dealers in the four U.S. states bordering Mexico, or from gun shows and private sales. A widely-used assertion that 90 percent of the guns used by Mexican organized crime come from the U.S. does not stand up to scrutiny but there’s no doubt there’s a steady stream of weapons across the border.

ARMED CORPORATIONS FIGHTING FOR PROFIT

There is, however, some good news on American efforts to throttle the flow of arms to violence-wracked Mexico: stepped up controls of south-bound traffic have resulted in a 25.6 percent increase in the seizure of weapons in 2009 compared with 2008, according to statistics from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The bad news: that translates into 1,428 firearms, an average of four a day.

Contrast that with the millions of people and cars that cross into Mexico every day – 82,000 at one border point alone (San Ysidro, between San Diego and Tijuana) – and it’s easy to see why there’s a rule of thumb along the border that for every one confiscated weapon, seven to nine make it through. Add to that weapons smuggled from Central America, still awash with arms from its civil wars in the 1980s, and it’s obvious why the cartels have so much firepower.

And why it is unlikely that force alone can end the bloodshed or wipe out the criminal Mexican organizations – think of them as armed corporations fighting for market share and access – whose members are doing business in more than 230 American cities, according to the DHS.

A study published in the last week of April by the Vancouver-based International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, an international network of scientists, academics and public health practitioners, reviewed English-language scientific literature dating back more than 20 years to track the impact of drug law enforcement on drug market violence.

Among its findings: “Most…studies found that increasing drug law enforcement intensity resulted in increased rates of drug market violence.” And: ” Research…has shown that by removing key players from the lucrative illegal drug market, drug law enforcement may have the perverse effect of creating significant financial incentives for other individuals to fill this vacuum by entering the market.”

That happened, for example, in Colombia in the 1990s when the combined efforts of the Colombian and U.S. governments succeeded in dismantling the powerful Cali and Medellin cartels. They were replaced by smaller groups. Drug production and exports continued.

The study made no mention of Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande river from the Texan city of El Paso, which could serve as exhibit A to back up the contention that violence begets violence begets violence.

When Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, ordered 2,500 troops and federal agents into border city Ciudad Juarez in 2006 to tamp down drug violence, the monthly murder rate ran at an average of 66. By 2009, the military presence had reached 7,500 and the monthly death toll ran at an average of more than 200.

How much difference American participation in an international arms trafficking treaty might have made we will never know, thanks to the gun lobbies and legislators cowed by them.

In June 1980, when an American president, Jimmy Carter, objected to Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied territories, the Israeli government responded by announcing plans for new settlements. At the time, settlers numbered fewer than 50,000.

In 2010, another American president, Barack Obama, is calling for an end to settlements he considers obstacles to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Israeli authorities responded by announcing new ones, illegal under international law. Settlers now number close to half a million.

In the three decades between 1980 and 2010, there have been multiple U.S.-Israeli spats over the issue and they often fell into something of a pattern, spelt out in 1991 by James Baker, President George H W Bush’s secretary of state: “Every time I have gone to Israel in connection with the peace process … I have been met with an announcement of new settlement activities. It substantially weakens our hand in trying to bring about a peace process.” That is as true now as it was then.

Also part of the routine: suggestions from critics of Israeli policy that the United States uses its vast aid program to Israel as a lever to change its behavior. “Cut off the Cash and Israel Might Behave” said a headline at the height of the latest U.S.-Israeli spat over settlements. The headline ran over an essay in a British newspaper, The Independent, by Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford who served in the Israeli army.
The folder in which to file that idea might be labeled Wishful Thinking.

Since the end of the Second World War, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. Since 1985, aid to Israel has run at around $3 billion a year, a sizable sum for a country with a population roughly equal to that of New York City.

Attempts to use aid as a lever have been few and far between. In 1991, the elder Bush asked Congress to delay $10 billion in loan guarantees to get Israel to stop building new settlements. This sparked a determined lobbying effort by the American Israeli Political Action Committee, the biggest pro-Israel advocacy group, and prompted Bush to describe himself as “one lonely guy” facing powerful political forces in the shape of “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.”

The quip illustrated both the limits of presidential power and solid congressional support for Israel. It runs across partisan divides and was highlighted once again during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington in March, when President Barack Obama made known his displeasure over yet more settlements by dispensing with standard protocol. No joint declaration, no dinner, no photo opportunity, exit through the back door.

NO SPACE BETWEEN U.S. AND ISRAEL

That contrasted markedly with warm remarks from the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the leader of the House Republicans, John Boehner. “We in Congress stand by Israel. In Congress we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel,” said Pelosi. “We have no stronger ally anywhere in the world,” said Boehner.

Vice President Joseph Biden, a staunch defender of Israel in his 36 years in the Senate, even after he was blindsided during a Jerusalem visit by an announcement of 1,600 new  Jewish settlements, said “there is no space absolutely no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to security, none. No space.”

Such joined-at-the-hip thinking is the reason why U.S. military aid to Israel has been designed to give the recipient a “qualitative military edge” (QME) over its potential adversaries. The QME dates back to President Lyndon Johnson and is not connected to the ups and downs of the relationship – a day after Netanyahu’s tense meeting with Obama, the Pentagon announced an agreement to supply Israel with three new tactical transport aircraft, part of an order worth up to $1.9 billion.

Providing Israel with generous economic and military aid made sense, from an American point of view, during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was propping up its client states in the Middle East and the United States needed a reliably pro-American outpost. As the late Secretary of State Alexander Haig once put it: “Israel is the largest, most battle-tested and cost-effective U.S. aircraft carrier that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one U.S. soldier, and is located in a most critical region for U.S. national security. ” In short, a strategic asset.

Is it still? Or is lack of progress on making peace with the Palestinians turning Israel into a liability for its long-term benefactor. In March, in written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Central Command chief General David Petraeus, listed “insufficient progress towards a comprehensive Middle East peace” as number five on a list of 15 threats to U.S. national security.

Petraeus, whose Central Command covers 20 countries in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, assigned no blame for the lack of progress but said the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fomented anti-American sentiment “due to a perception of U.S. favoritism to Israel. ” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, he said, exploited Arab anger over the Palestinian issue to mobilize support.

That places Israel and foot-dragging over settlements in the liability column of the ledger. But that won’t affect continued U.S. military aid. Under a ten-year agreement signed in 2007, military aid will reach $3.15 billion a year by 2013 and will stay at that level until 2018. Progress towards peace or not.

Freedom in America will soon be a fading memory. American exceptionalism died on March 23, 2010. On that day, the United States started becoming just like any other country. Worse still, like a West European country. Socialism in the land of the free and the home of the brave!

In a nutshell, that’s how many conservatives see the health reform bill President Barack Obama signed into law on March 23, after a year of acrimonious debate. The language has been shrill and the superheated political temperature is reflected by worried headlines such as “The heat is on. We may get burned” (Wall Street Journal) or “Putting out the flames” (Washington Post).

Verbal venom is not restricted to radio talk shows or Internet rants that draw parallels between Obama and Hitler or Stalin. John Boehner, the leader of the Republican party in the House of Representatives, described the reform as Armageddon and a Republican congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann, voiced fears on national television for her country’s future because of the president’s “anti-American views.”

Today’s end-of-freedom arguments sound very much like the ideas set out in a 1961 speech by the late Ronald Reagan, then an actor working as a corporate spokesman, now venerated as a secular saint by many Republicans. “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” he said, “has been by way of medicine.”

Reagan was raising the alarm against an early version of what became Medicare, the government-run health care programme for people over 65 which now has 45 million beneficiaries, most of whom rate it more highly than private health insurance, according to surveys. If the program were passed, Reagan warned, “behind it will come other federal programmes that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until one day… we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

Medicare was passed in 1965. Dark warnings notwithstanding, the United States remained the engine of global capitalism. It is also the world’s only advanced industrial country without universal health care (except for the elderly), with more than 40 million uninsured for whom illness can mean financial ruin or early death.

In the hubbub, which is growing rather than subsiding, it’s worth noting that people arguing from opposite ends are coming to the same conclusion — health care reform is not the underlying reason for the anger vented against the government.

CHANGING AMERICA

Example from the right, from radio host Monica Crowley: “Health care ‘reform’ was never about health care. It was about expanding government into every part of your life as an excuse to confiscate more and more of your private property, strip you of your constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and remake America into a two-bit, second-rate, debt-laden European socialist backwater.”

Example from the left, from New York Times columnist Frank Rich: “The… health care debate is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled American in 1964.”

That’s when the Civil Rights Bill ended segregation and black Americans were no longer required to sit in the back of the bus, drink from separate water fountains, or go to separate schools. It was, said Rich,”an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance”.

Another inexorable and immutable change has been underway for decades: demographics. Because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and the higher birth rate of immigrants, white Americans are projected to be a minority in the United States by 2042. According to the 2000 census (the 2010 count is under way now), white Americans have shrunk to a minority in 52 of the 100 biggest cities, including Los Angeles and Washington.

That demographic shift was paralleled by a rise in extremist groups on the right. Their number rose by more than 50 percent from 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks radicals. Most groups on the lunatic fringe are small in number and big on conspiracy theories but then, how many people does it take to blow up a building?

Late in March, FBI agents arrested nine members of a far-right group in raids in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio to scotch what a government indictment called a plot to kill a police officer and then bomb his funeral. In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they stand accused of conspiring to “levy war against the United States.”

The appeal of such groups is limited but some of their anti-government rhetoric is echoed at rallies of the fast-growing Tea Party movement. Named after the 1773 act of anti-British sabotage in Boston that hastened the American revolution, it is a diffuse, predominantly white grassroots movement whose followers range from fiscal conservatives and libertarians to people hoisting posters depicting Obama as Hitler.

The star speaker at the movement’s first convention, in February, was Sarah Palin, the darling of the Republican right. The movement hopes to draw a million followers to a protest rally in Washington on April 15, the day Americans have to file tax returns.

Outlook for the political temperature: high and rising.