To: General Petraeus, Langley HQ
From: Operative 650, Kabul office
Re: Memo XE1955
General Petraeus:
First, I would like to introduce myself. I was in close communication with your predecessor, Leon Panetta. My memos on outsourcing targeted killings to the Chinese and producing a new TV program Top Terrorist were well-received. Or, at least, I did not receive any indication that Leon found them objectionable, so I assume that they are still “in process.”
In the absence of genuine democratic institutions, a set of common economic grievances is galvanizing the Arab Street against a diverse host of unaccountable regimes across the Arab world. However, deep and structural economic problems also characterize much of the Middle East, including non-Arab Iran. Recognizing the depth and gravity of the country’s economic challenges, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamanei has declared 2011 as the year of “economic jihad.”
The press, politicians, and pundits have apparently uncovered the driving force behind the current conflict over the debt ceiling: ideology. The New York Times suggests that Republican ideology has doomed any possibility of compromise, that ideology has trumped economics, and Reuters similarly asserts that ideology overshadows the debt talks. Yet no one has asked, let alone described, what precisely is the Republican Party’s anti-tax, small government ideology, an ideology that tumbles over into foreign policy and domestic alike.
The idea that a Middle-Eastern country such as the UAE could be making such progress works against this clash of civilizations rhetoric that characterizes the post-9/11 period.
In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin walks into the office of underperforming salesmen and shakes them to their core. He’s the guy from the head office, and his motivational speech has a whiff of sulfur to it. The top prize for sales that month, he announces, will be a new Cadillac. The second prize: a set of steak knives. As for the third prize, he informs them with a certain twinkling malice, “You’re fired.” One of the salesmen in the audience, Ed Harris, leans back in his chair — he’s not buying it. Baldwin takes off his watch, puts it on Harris’s desk, and says that it costs more than the Hyundai that Harris drove to work. “I made $970,000 last year,” Baldwin practically spits at him. “That’s who I am. And you’re nothing.”
Congress could vote any day now to strike a new blow against already-battered U.S. workers and the unemployed. Committees in the House and Senate recently marked up the Colombia, Panama, and South Korea Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). The Obama administration is urging passage of all three relics of the Bush administration before the summer recess. The full-court press on the FTAs represents a reversal for a president elected on a trade reform platform.
While the headlines go to Greece, Portugal and Spain, Italy has the second highest rate of debt in Europe and one of the lowest growth rates.
A long-standing lenience towards Pakistan under both the Bush and Obama administrations has clearly done nothing to address its blatantly duplicitous nature.
Documents from the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince paint a disturbing picture of American coercion of a struggling Haiti between 2004 and the month following the 2010 earthquake.
The South Sudan government has been pressured to make its oil industry transparent. But will that ensure its oil assets will be used for the good of Sudan?