Bernd Debusmann

America’s electorate is sliced, diced and analyzed in minute detail, but there’s one comparative poll yet to be conducted: What is worse in the eyes of voters, having eaten dog meat or having put the family dog in a crate on the roof of a car for 12 hours?

This is not a trifling question in a country with close to 80 million pet dogs, whose owners treat them as family members and might be disinclined to give their votes to a candidate perceived as a dog eater, in the case of President Barack Obama, or a dog abuser, in the case of his presumptive Republican rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney.

The crated dog on the roof, an Irish setter named Seamus, has dogged Romney on and off ever since the story came to light in 2007. Obama’s dog-eating is a recent addition to the ever-growing catalog of anecdotes collected by Republican and Democratic activists and campaign operatives to paint the other side’s candidate in the darkest possible colors.

The dog stories have legs, so to say, and are likely to stay part of the election campaign until it finally ends on November 6. To refresh the memories of those who might have followed the campaign for weightier topics – high unemployment, say, or the war in Afghanistan – here is a recapitulation of what happened so far.

While Seamus rode atop the Romney family station wagon on the way to a vacation in Canada, the dog was struck by a bout of diarrhea that resulted in fecal matter running down the windows. Romney pulled up at a gasoline station, hosed down the car, the crate and the dog, and continued on his way. That was in 1983, but the story was revived in the Republican primary campaign when one of Romney’s rivals said it pointed to character flaws.

President Obama’s involvement in the canine aspects of the campaign stems from a passage in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father (Chapter 2, page 37) that recounted how he was “introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher) and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)” by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetero. Obama lived in Djakarta between the ages of six and 10.

Jim Treacher, a conservative blogger for the website The Daily Caller, came across that passage and published it on April 17 as an antidote to the potentially damaging effect of Romney’s dog-on-the-roof episode. “Say what you want about Romney,” Treacher wrote, “but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you (liberals) bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.”

The dog wars were on.

PIT BULL WITH SOY SAUCE

Aides to Obama and Romney traded jocular tweets about their bosses’ attitudes toward dogs for days until the president himself took up the issue at the April 28 White House Correspondents’ dinner, an occasion presidents traditionally use to mock themselves (and others). Riffing off a famous sound bite from Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, Obama asked: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.” Particularly with soy sauce.

Obama also showed a mock Republican attack contrasting the rivals’ competing vision of an American dog’s life after the November elections. Under Obama: “dogs forced into government-controlled automobiles.” Under Romney: a dog’s “freedom to feel the wind in his fur.” The ad’s final shot shows Romney standing in front of Air Force One, a Boeing 747. Strapped to the aircraft’s roof: a dog kennel.

For some pundits, the whole dog debate shows that the election campaign has sunk to new lows. “One does wonder what the rest of the world must think of us? Is this what happens to old democracies? Are we too silly to be taken seriously anymore?” asked Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist.

Probably not. It’s a safe bet that parts of the world would welcome a dose of politics interlaced with the kind of levity that, now and then, accompanies the political discourse in the United States.

As to the yet-to-be-conducted missing survey on dog-eating vs dog-on-the-roof: there actually is a poll on the relative dog friendliness of Romney and Obama. But it was conducted before the president’s culinary adventures in Indonesia became a topic of such fascination that a Google search for “Obama and dog-eating” yields 43 million hits. (“Romney and dog” yields just 28 million).

In March, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, asked 900 voters who they thought would be a better president for dogs. Thirty-seven percent opted for Obama and 21 percent for Romney. Thirty-five percent said learning of Seamus’ rooftop trip had made them less likely to vote for Romney.

That result practically guarantees that the dog issue will stay alive. Entertainment for some, silliness for others.

Take note of a new phrase in the seemingly endless debate over whether the days of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power are numbered: Those who doubt the country’s economic decline are holding an “intellectual ostrich position.”

The expression was coined by Edward Luce, author of a deeply-researched new book entitled Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. It notes that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the global economy in 2000 and 23.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, he estimates that it will shrink to around 16 percent.

Luce’s diagnosis of descent, published in April, was the latest addition to a steadily growing library of books, academic papers and opinion pieces for or against the idea that the United States can maintain its status as the world’s only superpower. If we adopt Luce’s phrase, it’s a discussion between declinists and ostriches. The latter include President Barack Obama and his presumptive Republican rival in next November’s presidential elections.

“It means that we’re going to have a 2012 election where…both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed,” Luce said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine. “And I’d describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.”

The false premise, in this view, was set out by Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, in a lengthy analysis entitled Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline. One of the points Kagan made to support his argument: the U.S. share of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has held steady over the past four decades. Plain wrong, says Luce.

The Kagan article, now expanded into a book (The World America Made), is reported to have so impressed Obama that it influenced his State of the Union Speech in January, when he said “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

They don’t? Here’s the view of Clyde Prestowitz, a labor economist and veteran declinist, weighing into the debate in April: “You’d have to be blind not to see the deterioration of our infrastructure. We used to have trade surpluses. Now we have chronic deficits. We used to tell ourselves that didn’t matter because we had surpluses in high tech items. But now we have deficits there, too. We used to be the world’s biggest creditor. Now we are its biggest debtor…How can anybody claim we are not suffering decline?”

Washington’s loss of influence has been evident in many regions of the world, most recently at a summit that brought together leaders of North and Latin America in the Colombian city of Cartagena. There, in Uncle Sam’s traditional backyard, Obama’s assertion that U.S. influence had not waned highlighted a particularly wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

BACKYARD NO MORE?

The backyard showed itself so united in opposition to decades-old U.S. policies – the trade embargo on Cuba, the war on drugs – that the summit ended without the usual final communiqué. “There was no consensus,” said the summit’s host, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, an important U.S. ally in the region.

Apart from disagreements over two of Washington’s oldest (50 years of Cuba embargo, 40 years of drug war) and most obviously failed policies, the meeting showed that the United States is no longer seen as the single most dominant force in the region. As an analysis by the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue put it on the eve of the Cartagena meeting:

“U.S.-Latin American relations have grown more distant. The quality and intensity of ties have diminished. Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant for their needs – and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issue that most concern them.”

Why less and less relevant? For one, U.S. economic dominance in Latin America is no longer what it used to be. A decade ago, 55 percent of the region’s imports came from the United States. That has shrunk to less than a third. China’s share of trade with Brazil, Latin America’s economic and political powerhouse, has overtaken that of the United States. The same goes for Chile and Peru.

To what extent U.S. influence in the backyard will continue to slide depends largely on how clear-eyed U.S. leaders see their country’s global position. The ostrich view would hasten the decline.

Long before he was in a position to change his country’s policies, Barack Obama had firm views on a complex problem: “The war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws. We need to rethink how we’re operating the drug war.”

That was in January 2004, during a debate at Northwestern University, when he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. To make sure his student audience understood his position on the controversial issue, Obama added: “Currently, we are not doing a good job.”

To look at a classic flip-flop, forward to April 2012 and a summit of Latin American leaders, several of whom have become vocal critics of the U.S.-driven war on drugs, in the Colombian city of Cartagena. More than three years into his presidency, Obama made clear that he is not in favor of legalizing drugs or of ending policies that treat drug users as criminals.

“I don’t mind a debate around issues like decriminalization,” he said at the Cartagena summit. “I personally don’t agree that’s a solution to the problem.” Decriminalization means scrapping criminal penalties for the use of drugs. It falls short of legalization which, in its purest form, means the abolition of all forms of government control of drugs. Obama is against that, too. “I don’t think that legalization of drugs is going to be the answer,” he said.

So what is the answer? In his first year in office, Obama talked about placing more emphasis on curbing demand – the United States is the world’s richest market for illicit drugs – and less on enforcing punitive laws that filled American prisons with drug offenders and helped turn the country into the world’s chief jailer. It has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

But the rebalancing and the rethinking Obama mentioned before and after becoming president have been largely rhetorical. His administration has not put its money where its mouth is. Those who complain that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reduce demand can point to the proposed National Drug Control Budget for the 2013 fiscal year, which begins in October.

The allocation of funds is pretty much the same as it was in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – roughly 40 percent for programs aimed at curbing demand and treating addicts and 60 percent for enforcing anti-drug laws, throttling the flow of drugs across the long border with Mexico and financing the eradication of drug crops in Latin America and Asia.

The 2013 budget proposal allocates 41.2 percent for demand reduction and 58.2 percent for law enforcement. In other words, more of the same — policies that have been pursued since President Richard Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1970. Obama’s 2004 assessment of those policies – “utter failure” – has come to be shared by many even though he no longer stands by it and even though members of his team such as Homeland Security chiefJanet Napolitano insist the old approach is working.

A TRILLION-DOLLAR WAR

By some estimates, the war on drugs has so far cost close to a trillion dollars. What has that vast expenditure bought? Very little. According to the government’s latest “Survey on Drug Use and Health,” more than 22 million Americans – nearly 9 percent the U.S. population – used illegal drugs in 2010, up from 8 percent in 2008.

That demand and the vast profits derived from it, has prompted violence on a mind-boggling scale south of the U.S. border. In Mexico alone, around 50,000 people have died in the past six years as drug cartels fight each other – for access to supply lines to the U.S. market – and the Mexican state.

Drug-fueled violence is not restricted to Mexico. According to the United Nations, eight of the world’s most violent countries are in Latin America. The small states of Central America, astride trafficking corridors to the north, are particularly vulnerable. Honduras now has the world’s highest murder rate. Guatemala is not far behind.

Which explains why Guatemala’s president, Otto Perez, has emerged as the most outspoken proponent of the need for new ways of tackling an old problem. Perez, a former army general, has impeccable credentials as a hard-line drug warrior. So has the host of the Cartagena summit, Colombian President Juan Manual Santos, a former defense minister.

Their views echo the arguments of a panel of high-profile establishment figures who published a devastating critique of the drug war last June. It made headlines the world over but apparently failed to convince the Obama administration. “Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply and consumption,” said the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

“Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers,” the report added. “The … global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically.” That report was put together by former government leaders, including three former Latin American presidents and a former U.N. secretary-general.

Several prominent advocates of drug policy reforms in the United States and elsewhere see the fact that calls for change now come from sitting (rather than former) presidents as a sign that the end of the drug war as we knew it is in sight. Perhaps. But optimistic drug reformers might do well to remember that there is an entrenched international anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration alone has 10,000 employees and offices in 63 countries.

That establishment has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. As with other conflicts, the war on drugs was easier to start than to end.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during the plenary session of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena April 14, 2012. Obama tried on Saturday to convince skeptical Latin Americans that Washington has not turned its back on them, but ruled out a drug policy U-turn that some in the region want. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American extraction are turning 18, voting age, and add to the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. Almost 22 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in November and how many of them turn out may well decide who will be the next U.S. president.

A series of recent polls show that Latinos favor President Barack Obama over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, with a comfortable 70 percent to 14 percent over Mitt Romney, the man most likely to win the Republican nomination at the end of a primary campaign marked by often shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Obama is so confident that he primary debates have driven Latinos away from the Republican party that  he told the Spanish-language television network Univision last November there was no need for his campaign to run negative ads on the Republican presidential hopefuls. Instead, “we may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them…and people can make up their own minds.”

Among debate highlights that stick in the collective memory was the electrified Mexican-U.S. border fence suggested by Herman Cain, who soon after dropped out of the race, and Mitt Romney’s idea that illegal immigrants would chose “self-deportation…because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.” Newt Gingrich, who is still in the primary contest but whose star is fading, described self-deportation as a fantasy.

The president’s confidence of winning Latino support again – he took 67 percent of their vote in 2008 — is partly based on history: Republicans have lost the Latino vote in every presidential election since 1972. But it would be a mistake for Obama to take that support for granted, not least because he broke an election campaign promise to produce a bill on immigration reform in his first year in office.

This prompted Jorge Ramos, the influential Univision anchor to whom he made the promise in 2008, to write in an essay in Time magazine last month that Latinos faced the difficult choice on November 6 “of voting for either a president who broke a major promise or a Republican candidate who doesn’t respect us.”

If enough Latinos find that choice so difficult that they will sit out the vote, Obama’s confidence may prove mistaken. To hear electoral number crunchers tell it, an Obama victory could hinge on Latin turnout and support in swing states where no candidate can be certain of getting the most votes. These states include Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

POPULAR VOTE  DOESN’T EQUAL VICTORY

Ruy Texeira, an election expert and demographer at the liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, points out that while the Latino support tracked by opinion polls points to Obama  winning  the popular vote, that doesn’t always translate into electoral victory. The presidential elections of 2000, decided after a bitter controversy over Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, are a case in point.

While immigration, for decades a hot-button issue in the United States, has dominated the debate,  it does not top the list of Latino concerns. Surveys show that like other Americans, Latinos care most about jobs, the economy, education and health care. Immigration ranks fifth.

Latino voters don’t have direct immigration problems – they are citizens. But, as Jorge Ramos says in his essay,  “the issues concerning undocumented immigrants are very, very personal. If you attack them, you attack all of us. They are our neighbors and co-workers; their kids go to school with our kids: they serve in battle next to our sons: they take the jobs no one else wants; they pay taxes and overwhelmingly make America a better country.”

Those who attack illegal immigrants are not restricted to Republican presidential hopefuls. Since Obama took office, his administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president in history – an average of  around 400,000 a year. The deportations have resulted in the separation of thousands of parents from children who were born in the U.S. and thus are citizens.

In a campaign twist that carries a whiff of desperation, Romney has begun to try and turn Obama’s record on immigration against him. “He campaigned saying he was going to reform immigration laws and simplify and protect the border,” the Republican front-runner said early in April, “and then he had two years with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and a super majority in each house, and he did nothing.”

“So let the immigrant community not forget that while he uses this as a political weapon, he does not take responsibility for fixing the problems we have.”

This comes from a candidate whose party stalled attempts at immigration reform both under George W. Bush and Obama. Whether his argument sways enough Latinos to make a difference in November remains to be seen.

The prospect of President Barack Obama winning another four-year term in November is swelling the ranks of anti-Muslim activists and groups on the extremist fringe of American society. Their growth has accelerated every year since Obama took office in 2009.

So says a new report by a civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has tracked extremist groups for the past three decades and found that last year alone, the number of anti-Muslim groups tripled, from 10 to 30.

Between 2008 and the end of 2011, according to the center, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of militias and “patriot” groups whose members inhabit a parallel universe where the federal government wants to rob them of their guns and their freedom.

“What groups on the radical right have in common is the belief that Obama wants to destroy America,” Mark Potok, author of the report, said in an interview. “Fears that he will win again are now driving the expansion.”

How many Americans are on the right-wing fringe is not known. The Southern Poverty Law Center gives no estimate and neither does the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also monitors such groups. But it issued a report last September on a sub-set of the far-right scene, “sovereign citizens” who believe that federal, state and local governments operate illegally and therefore have no right to collect taxes. The FBI called them domestic terrorists and “a growing threat.”

Some of the beliefs held by those on the fringe are too outlandish to influence the political discourse – the government is running secret concentration camps, Mexico plans to recapture the American southwest, there are plans for the United Nations to take over America – but others are not.

The notion that Obama is intent on turning the United States into a socialist country is regularly echoed in speeches by Republican presidential hopefuls.

And the myth that Obama is a Muslim lives on. A public opinion poll of Republicans taken a day before the March 13 primary elections in Alabama and Mississippi showed that 45 percent and 51 percent, respectively, thought he was a Muslim. The methodology of the survey, by a polling institute affiliated with the Democratic party, has been questioned. But even if you cut the percentages in half, they are remarkable and show how stubbornly Obama detractors cling to mistaken beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Those who think the president is a Muslim tend to harbor deeper suspicions. In September 2010, at the height of a shrill debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in Manhattan, a poll commissioned by Newsweek found that 52 percent of Republicans surveyed thought it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama sympathized with the goal of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world. Thirty percent thought he favored the interests of Muslim Americans over those of other Americans.

ZEALOTRY GOES MAINSTREAM

The Southern Poverty Law Center traced the rapid growth of anti-Muslim groups to the dispute over the planned Islamic cultural center and mosque, not far from the site of September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Since that controversy, anti-Islam arguments previously confined to little-known web sites run by anti-Muslim zealots have gone mainstream.

The most prominent proponent of the radicals’ theory of “stealth jihad” is Newt Gingrich, one of the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. He has termed Islamic law (Sharia) “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world.” How so? Radical Muslims use political, societal, religious and intellectual tools to sweep away Western civilization and replace it with Sharia law.

The idea that Muslim Americans, who account for less than one percent of the U.S. population, could succeed in replacing federal and state law with Islamic law, strikes many legal scholars as absurd. But that has not prevented conservative legislators in a string of states from introducing bills to ban the use of Islamic law.

Such efforts look like a search for legislative solutions to a non-existent problem and have begun running out of steam, slowed by common sense and the efforts of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In the first half of March, five states withdrew anti-Sharia bills or let them expire.

That doesn’t mean the debate is over, nor is it the end of the right’s portrayal of Obama as a socialist foreign-born Muslim enemy of America as we know it. How persuasive that is to mainstream Americans will be clear on election day, November 6.

Sometime in the next three decades, the U.S. military will be able to field robots that can make life-and-death decisions, operating without human supervision thanks to software and superfast computers.

But the technology to get to that point is running far ahead of considerations of the ethics of robotic warfare.

Or, as Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written widely on military robots has put it — technology grows at an exponential pace, human institutions at a linear, if not glacial, pace. That echoes an observation by the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

The subject merits debate after the January 26 announcement that the Pentagon is planning to trim America’s armed forces by 100,000 while boosting the global fleet of armed drones, America’s most effective tool for the targeted killing of anti-American militants. So far, the drones are remotely operated, by pilots on bases in the United States.

But for a glimpse of how U.S. military thinkers see the future of the drone program, an 82-page report by the Air Force is recommended reading. Entitled “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047“, it says that “advances in AI (Artificial Intelligence) will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.”

Rather than just supporting humans in what the military calls the OODA loop (for observe, orient, decide, and act), drones will be able to “fully participate” in each step of the process. Humans will no longer be “in the loop” but “on the loop” — able to veto decisions taken by the flying robot — if time permits in the split-second environment of combat.

While they make more headlines than other systems, drones are just part of an American inventory that has grown explosively over the past decade and includes ground-based robots whose tasks range from defusing improvised explosives devices and shooting down incoming artillery shells to evacuating wounded soldiers. From virtually zero, the drone fleet grew to more than 7,500 and ground based robots to an estimated 15,000.

“Authorizing a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions,” the paper states. “Ethical decisions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path.”

In other words, let’s sort out ethics and policies before letting the robotics genie fully out of the bottle. It’s a point made with increasing alarm by a number of civilian scientists, robotics experts and ethicists who fear, among other things, that sending more robots and fewer humans into wars will make starting them easier.

REMOVING BARRIERS TO WAR

“We possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war,” Singer, author of Wired for War, wrote in an essay in the New York Times this month. “The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harms way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.”

This is a view shared by the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), a group formed in 2009 to press for an international debate on the regulation and control of armed military robots. ICRAC believes that the robotics revolution of warfare deserves the kind of debate that led to treaties on the use of poison gas or the ban on landmines.

None of the questions that prompted the formation of the group have been answered. For example: who would be accountable if an autonomous robot killed civilians? The manufacturer? The field commander in whose area the robot operates? The programmers who wrote the software? The procurement officer? The president?

The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross has begun looking into the implications of robots in war but those favoring more regulations should not expect support from the administration of Barack Obama, who has presided over a dramatic increase in the number of drone strikes on targets in Pakistan since he took office in 2009.

That campaign, run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than the military, killed dozens of al Qaeda fighters and other militants using the rugged mountains on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan as a safe haven. The strikes also killed civilians and stoked anti-American hatred in a country of 180 million that is of strategic importance to the United States. There has been similar blow-back in Yemen and Somalia.

This is one of the reasons why some prominent experts on military robots favor slowing the pace of development. In December, philosopher Patrick Lin of the California Polytechnic State University ended a briefing to CIA officials with a line robotic warfare enthusiasts might do well to remember:

“Integrating ethics may be more cautious and less agile than a ‘do first, think later’ (or worse ‘do first, apologize later’) approach but it helps us win the moral high ground – perhaps the most strategic of battlefields.”

PHOTO: U.S. Air Force First Lieutenant Zachary Goff (L), and Chris Allen, a student from Ohio State University, operate the control console to run a test flight of a drone at the Micro Air Vehicles lab at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, July 11, 2011. REUTERS/Skip Peterson

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

As the clock ticks towards the end of America’s military presence in Iraq, there are increasingly dire warnings of a humanitarian disaster unless steps are taken to protect more than 3,000 Iranian dissidents living in a camp in Iraq. How closely is Washington listening?

Gloomy forecasts for the fate of the exiles at Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad near the border with Iran, have come from Amnesty International, a long string of prominent former U.S. government officials, retired generals, and members of the European Parliament. One of them, Struan Stevenson, predicts “a Srebrenica-style massacre,” a reference to the 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian War.

Stevenson, who is head of the European Parliament’s delegation on Iraq, issued his warning this week in an op-ed in the conservative Washington Times newspaper. Also this week, Amnesty International said there was a “serious risk of severe human rights violations” if the Iraqi government went ahead with plans to force the closure of the camp by the end of December.

On a more subdued note, the administration of President Barack Obama, long silent on the exiles, is also expressing concern. U.S. officials, according to a State Department spokesman, are impressing on the Iraqi government the importance of treating the residents of Camp Ashraf humanely.

How seriously the Iraqis are taking American exhortations is open to doubt. U.S. influence in Iraq is waning rapidly while that of Iran is rising.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly urged Iraq to expel the exiles. They belong to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq — or the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran (PMOI) — once a powerful armed group that staged raids into Iran between 1986 and 2001, when it renounced violence. The PMOI handed over its weapons to U.S. invasion forces after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

After being vetted for possible involvement in terrorist activities, the PMOI members at Ashraf were granted “Protected Person” status under the Fourth Geneva convention and the U.S. military assumed control of the camp. That was a bizarre twist even by the standards of the Middle East because the PMOI remained on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations.

American protection of the camp ended in January 2009, when the U.S. transferred control to the Iraqi government. According to testimony to a Congressional hearing, that transfer followed an explicit and written assurance by the Iraqi government that it would respect the protected status of Ashraf residents.

Just seven months later, Iraqi security forces stormed into the camp, whose inhabitants include around 1,000 women. In the ensuing clashes, at least nine residents were killed and scores injured. On April 8, 2011, Iraqi security forces moved into the camp again, using what Amnesty International termed “grossly excessive force and live fire.” Thirty-six residents were killed and more than 300 wounded.

So much for respecting assurances to the Americans.

LACK OF RESPECT

That lack of respect, prominent U.S. supporters of the PMOI say, has its roots in a 1997 decision by the Clinton administration to put the PMOI on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the words of Louis Freeh, who was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at the time, the move was part of “a fruitless political ploy to encourage a dialogue with Tehran” without evidence that the group posed a threat to the United States.

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, he added: “Tragically, the State Department’s unjustified terrorist label makes the Mujahedin’s enemies in Tehran and Baghdad feel as if they have license to kill and trample on the written guarantees of protection given to the Ashraf residents by the United States.”

There is an obvious irony in the fact that practically the only thing the American and Iranian governments have in common is their designation of the PMOI as a terrorist organization. But that has done nothing to accelerate a State Department review of the label ordered by a federal court in Washington on July 16, 2010.

(The European Union took the group off its list in 2009. Britain did so in 2008, on a court ruling that called the designation “perverse.”)

Fifteen months later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview with a Voice of America program in Farsi, noted that the EU had taken the PMOI off its terrorist list “after a very thorough assessment” that came to the conclusion there was no evidence of terrorist activity. “We’re still assessing the evidence here in the United States.”

Judging from the snail’s pace of that assessment, there is no sense of urgency about the matter. That’s something the Obama administration might come to regret.

In his inaugural address on January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama promised that “we’ll restore science to its rightful place.” Mark that down as a broken promise, as far as a key element of America’s nuclear energy future is concerned.

Obama’s remark on science was a swipe at his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose administration was frequently criticized, often with good reason, for allowing ideology to trump science on subjects as varied as stem cell research, the morning-after birth control pill and the environment.

In contrast, Obama’s most prominent move to shelve a major scientific project — The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository — has been driven not by ideology but by a toxic combination of Nimbyism (from “not in my backyard”), electoral politics and high-handed leadership of America’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That combination led to the closure of a project that, over its long gestation period, involved more than 2,500 scientists and has so far cost $15 billion.

Power-generation and nuclear waste are not usually subjects of great public interest but they made headlines and sparked renewed debate in the wake of last March’s nuclear accident in Japan, where spent fuel rods (nuclear waste) posed a greater radiation threat than the core of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Those rods were stored in pools of constantly circulating water — the system used at most U.S. nuclear plants — and dangerously overheated when an earthquake interrupted power supply to the pools.

Over the past few weeks, the steadily increasing waste from more than 100 nuclear reactors and the repository once meant to hold most of it deep underground, have been the subject of a string of reports and congressional hearings. They shed light not only on the need for a decision on what best to do with the waste but also on the fact that science on this issue has not been restored to the “rightful place” Obama promised in his eloquent inaugural speech.

According to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), more than 75,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are now held at sites scattered around the country, an amount that is expected to double by 2055. What’s the best option to storing these hazardous substances? “A geologic repository is widely considered the only currently feasible option for permanently disposing nuclear waste,” the GAO’s leading expert on energy matters, Mark Gaffigan, told a Congressional subcommittee.

It was called in response to a report by the GAO, the research arm of Congress, which discussed several options for storing nuclear waste and spelled out the reason the Department of Energy shut down Yucca mountain — not because it was deemed unsafe but because it lacked public support in Nevada. That’s not surprising — Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat, has waged a relentless campaign for more than two decades to kill the project, saying it was unsafe. That’s his opinion, not universally shared by scientists.

HIGH-COST ELECTORAL VOTES

When he was campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Obama came down on the side of Reid, a stand that helped him beat his Republican rival John McCain, the Arizona senator firmly in favor of Yucca, and win the hotly contested state’s five electoral votes. Again, politics trumped science. Those five votes must count among the most expensive in American electoral history. Soon after taking office, Obama pulled the plug on Yucca mountain by writing it out of the budget. The project’s offices in Las Vegas were shut, the staff fired.

Up on the mountain, 4,950 feet from the Mojave desert, on the edge of a former nuclear test site 95 miles from Las Vegas, the gate has been closed to the entry of the five-mile tunnel drilled into the mountain to serve as a graveyard for nuclear waste.

But the project isn’t quite dead, yet. There is a pending lawsuit by the states of South Carolina and Washington against the Obama administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Their argument: Yucca was a congressionally mandated program (the legislation dates back to 1982) and cannot be killed by administrative fiat. While a Washington appeals court ponders the issue, a Blue Ribbon Commission set up last year continues to ponder “recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.”

The commission, which has until next January to complete its work, came up with draft recommendations in May. They include this one: “The United States should proceed expeditiously to develop one or more permanent deep geological facilities for the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste … Geologic disposal in a mined repository is the most promising and technically accepted option available for safely isolating high-level nuclear wastes for very long periods of time.”

In other words: Something just like Yucca as long as it’s not Yucca. The commission did not say in whose backyard they were looking to open such a site.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.