Bob Schieffer's elegant exit

"Stop smiling," the Bob Fosse character snaps at his dancers during a rehearsal scene in the 1979 film All That Jazz, "It's not the high school play."

Those words were brought to mind by the introductory appearance Thursday on the CBS Evening News of fresh new anchor Katie Couric, who interviewed outgoing anchor Bob Schieffer as if he was her favorite uncle and she just flew in for Thanksgiving especially to see him.

The new CBS anchor has a beautiful, warm smile.

The question is, what is it doing on the CBS Evening News?

That smile would be perfectly at home in so many places -- toothpaste commercials, presidential primaries, charming lost puppy stories on the local news in Los Angeles -- but it's going to look downright manic reporting the nightly news out of Baghdad.

You know where this is going. It won't be long before the CBS Evening News is playing on giant TV screens in crowded conference rooms while focus group participants push red buttons during the war news and green buttons during the lost puppy stories.

In the world of TV research, that means viewers want to see less war news and more lost puppy stories.

And gradually, you can bet on it, the CBS Evening News will get the unpleasant catastrophes out of the way more and more quickly to make time for segments and stories that are more comfortable places for Katie Couric's smile. To the endless frustration of the research department, the Evening News will have to contain at least some of the day's news, and that is where the trouble is going to start.

If CBS tries to turn the broadcast partly into a fluffy and cheerful survey of things people would rather watch, the fluffy and cheerful people still won't like the news and the news audience will run screaming from the room at the first sign of stories about how to spice up your home for the holidays with ginger-scented candles.

Instead of adding new viewers to the current audience, they may lose everybody.

Bob Schieffer was gracious and smiling himself on Thursday's farewell broadcast, but the man who covered the Kennedy assassination took a well-aimed shot of his own before leaving.

"Thank you for inviting me into your homes," he said to the camera, "and thank you for inviting me back into your homes."

He was reminding the CBS executives that the ratings for the CBS Evening News went up during the time he was the anchor. He was pointing out, with well-concealed emphasis, that people sampled his broadcast and then came back again.

It was quite a performance. It looked for all the world like he was welcoming Katie Couric to the CBS anchor desk with grace and warmth and all good wishes. And what he was really saying was,"Top that, honey chops."


Copyright 2006

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Once upon a time at the Lebanese border

Well, nobody wanted Israel to do it, and now nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to take on Hezbollah and its state sponsors, Iran and Syria. Nobody wants the job of taking rockets and rifles away from terrorists who are sworn to the destruction of Israel.

The U.N. says the European Union nations have committed to send 6,900 troops, about half of the 15,000 international troops the U.N. is hoping to deploy as a peacekeeping (but not disarming) force on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Israel says it does not want troops on its border from countries that do not recognize Israel's right to exist, which would knock out the predominantly Muslim nations of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, all of which have volunteered to participate. Israel has diplomatic relations with Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, but those nations have not volunteered any troops.

The U.S. and Britain are not planning to send troops on the theory that Anglo-Saxons with guns just make terrorists mad.

It's going very well, I think. Don't you think so? Good, consensus is so reassuring.

Let's examine the possible outcomes of this exercise in fairy tale diplomacy and see if we can find one that isn't a catastrophe.

Possibility number one: The government of Lebanon, which includes members of Hezbollah in the Cabinet, sends 15,000 troops to the border with Israel where they are joined by international troops. Together they stand in the heat and watch as Hezbollah is resupplied by Iran and Syria and prepares for its next attack on Israel.

Or, two: The Lebanese-international peacekeeping force tries to stop Iran and Syria from resupplying Hezbollah. The troops use force, engage Hezbollah fighters, and arrest Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah grabs hostages from each of the countries involved and threatens to cut their heads off on live television unless their fighters are released. Public opinion in each democratic country participating in the international force moves sharply in the direction of letting Israel drop into the sea. Peace marchers take to the streets in every European capital to demand that the troops come home.

Or, three: Israel refuses to drop into the sea and demands that the international force get out of the way of an attack on Hezbollah strongholds and infrastructure. After a mind-numbing U.N. debate that lasts three weeks, the nations filling out the international force make a completely coincidental simultaneous decision to bring their troops home. Israel attacks Hezbollah and is criticized internationally from the safety of foreign capitals.

Or, four: Hezbollah gets tired of waiting for Israel to drop into the sea and fires rockets over the heads of the international peacekeeping force into northern Israel, perhaps as far as Tel Aviv. The international community urges the Israelis to show restraint. The United States supplies Israel with weapons and intelligence (such as it is) and looks away while Israel launches air attacks on targets well north of the peacekeepers' position.

Or, five: Hezbollah attacks the peacekeeping troops or civilian targets in the countries that sent them. Refer to possibility number three.

Or, six: Previously unknown Palestinian terror groups, perhaps with the help of infiltrators in the peacekeeping force, launch attacks on the peacekeeping troops or civilian targets in the nations that sent them. Refer to possibility number three.

Or, seven: Iran announces that it has a nuclear weapon. The second Cold War begins.

Or, eight: Iran announces that it has a nuclear weapon and intends to use it against Israel. The peacekeeping forces are withdrawn from Lebanon. The third World War begins.

Hmmm. That didn't go very well after all.

As long as we're indulging our imaginations, let's see if we can imagine a Middle East policy that would work better than the one we have now.

How about this: The United States, Britain and the European Union organize an economic advisory panel made up of oil companies and financial institutions. The U.S. puts the State Department's public diplomacy department to work on a campaign to tell the people of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the rest of the dysfunctional oil states the precise dollar amount of cash income that they each would be receiving from their country's oil business as shareholders, if only their governments would privatize the state-owned oil reserves. The advisory panel creates a blueprint for privatization that keeps the ownership of the oil business in the hands of the people of each country and makes it plain that it's not a U.S. takeover of their oil or their country. The State Department reassures the dictators and thugs in each oil state that they will all remain rich as part-owners of a booming private industry, with the bonus of having a population that no longer lives in the desperate, hopeless condition that breeds terrorists like mosquitoes.

Privatization in the Middle East quickly creates private wealth, which is invested and spent to pay salaries and support businesses, which creates more private wealth for more people.

People with private wealth demand protection from the radical fanatics who want to take the world back to the Middle Ages. No longer forced by economic conditions to stay on the good side of whoever is in power, they no longer offer protection to the radical fanatics who want to take the world back to the Middle Ages.

Gradually it transpires that religious and tribal differences, though permanent and nasty, are not enough to persuade people to blow themselves up just when the third-quarter dividend is about to be paid.

Gradually the people with private wealth become numerous enough to force the dictators and thugs to choose between reforming into a real government or taking their Swiss bank accounts and going away to an island somewhere.

And they all lived happily ever after.

If we're going to believe in fairy tales, we should at least pick one that doesn't end with Hansel and Gretel in the oven.


Copyright 2006

Editor's Note: You might be interested to read The God of the Machine, the 1943 book by Isabel Paterson that explains why some societies are death cults while others are engines of economic growth. Click here to find a copy. You might also want to read "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property," an essay that can be found at www.SusanShelley.com.

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Space Station Zero

Officials at Cape Canaveral said Thursday that three NASA science advisers have handed in their resignations.

The three men served on the NASA Advisory Council's science committee, the Associated Press reported. Charles Kennel went willingly. Wesley Huntress and Eugene Levy were asked to leave.

Professor Levy told the AP they thought it was important that "a strong commitment to science be maintained at NASA."

For that, NASA administrator Michael Griffin kicked them out the door.

NASA spokesman Dean Acosta explained, "The administrator is looking for ... members to advise him based on the priority that the agency has and based on what our parameters are."

What does that mean in English?

Well, last month, a top manager in the space station program let it leak that NASA was considering shutting down all science research on the space station for at least a year in order to close a budget shortfall of $100 million.

What, you might well ask, is NASA doing up there on the space station if it's not doing science research?

"Cutting science programs would suggest that it is merely a joy ride to the moon," said a spokeswoman for Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby. "It would mean that we as a nation have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars."

Actually, we have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Cutting science programs would mean that the taxpayers are finally going to get wise to it.

It's a prospect that frightened Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas into sending out a press release to make sure everyone knew she was on the case. The plan to drop science research was "an unacceptable option," the senator wrote to the NASA administrator.

The senator is concerned. If the taxpayers ever find out that the space station is less useful than the Salad Shooter you got for Christmas last year, they might want to stop paying for all those lucrative government contracts that go to all those aerospace companies. And if there are no contracts to hand out, how is a politician supposed to shake down the companies who compete for those contracts?

By the way, Senator Hutchison is the Chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Science and Space. If you want an aerospace contract, you don't want to miss any of her fund-raisers.

Senator Hutchison is not alone in this racket. NASA's budget records show that since 2001, the agency has been required to spend $3 billion on pet projects for lawmakers' home districts.

No doubt that's what's behind last week's weird announcement that two newcomers to aerospace have just been awarded $500 million to dream up a spaceship that can one day take tourists into space. Rocketplane Kistler just emerged from bankruptcy, and SpaceX had a spectacular failure on the launch pad in March when a rocket exploded, and neither has ever sent a spacecraft of any kind into orbit, but never mind. One's in Oklahoma and the other's in California and those senators have to eat, too.

At least we know the truth. The space station is not an orbiting laboratory where courageous scientists strive to cure diseases in zero gravity. It's not a 21st-century bridge to a thrilling future of space travel.

It's a hundred-billion-dollar pork chop.

For that price, you'd think it would come with a salad. The Salad Shooter people must have missed a fund-raiser.


Copyright 2006

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Exodus at the NSA

If I worked for the National Security Agency anywhere near the warrantless surveillance program, I would be uploading my resume to Monster.com just as fast as my fingers could fly.

No matter how much money those people make, it's not enough to pay a Washington D.C. defense attorney for the duration of congressional hearings and perhaps a Justice Department investigation if the Democrats retake control of the House or Senate.

Today in Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program, or terrorist surveillance program, violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, the U.S. Constitution's limitations on the powers of the president, and a federal law requiring a court's approval of national security wiretaps.

"There are no hereditary kings in America," Judge Taylor wrote, an unfortunately snide remark that will only strengthen the Bush administration's resolve to overturn her ruling on appeal. They will point out (wouldn't you, in their shoes?) that Judge Taylor was appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter, a man who this week gave an interview to Der Spiegel defending the right of Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists to take Israeli soldiers hostage because, in essence, Israel had it coming.

"I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon," the former president explained to the German publication, "What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that's justified, no."

See how easy it is? You could almost win an election just by saying Judge Taylor reflects the views of the man who appointed her, the man who put the "soft" in soft on terror, the man who said he'd never use force when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and everybody in it was held hostage for four hundred and forty-four days. These Democratic liberal judges, the argument goes, are putting the United States at risk of a terrorist attack, they want to give terrorists Miranda warnings, we're all gonna die if you don't vote Republican.

This is really unfortunate because, in fact, the U.S. Constitution does limit the power of the president. The commander-in-chief powers do not wipe out those limitations in time of war, not to mention the fact that the president doesn't have the constitutional authority to decide when the country is at war and when it is not.

By the way, Israel did not attack "the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza." Israel retaliated against militants who base their operations in civilian neighborhoods. The Israeli Defense Forces dropped leaflets and even called residents of buildings that were targeted to warn the civilians to get out immediately, for their own safety. And Israel did not engage in "massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon." It targeted roads, bridges and infrastructure used to bring weapons from outside Lebanon into the region north of Israel's border. Israel could have turned the country into a crater if it wasn't trying so hard to preserve the Lebanese government and spare civilian lives.

And this is the thanks they get.

If a heavily-armed militant group took up residence in northern Mexico or southern Canada and started addressing its grievances by coming over the U.S. border and kidnapping people, then firing rockets when we responded, would we focus solely on the civilians endangered by our response? Or would we frame the question this way: Who said a heavily-armed militant group has any right to occupy territory next to the U.S. border?

But back to the NSA wiretappers.

The reason they should quit their jobs and get out is that the Bush administration is not going to obey Judge Taylor's order to halt the warrantless wiretapping program. The administration will argue, successfully, no doubt, that the terrorist threat is severe and imminent and the judge's order must be stayed while the government appeals her decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And all the while, the people who work in the NSA program will be putting their fingerprints on something that might be illegal.

If the Democrats take control of the House or Senate, there will certainly be hearings into the legality of the program. There will be subpoenas. The White House will tell the NSA employees not to comply with the subpoenas while one or another review takes place.

Perhaps the White House will seek a low-level employee to throw to the wolves. "Oh, my goodness," they will tell the New York Times on background, "the president certainly never authorized that."

And then there will be lawsuits against the phone companies that have cooperated with the NSA. There will be discovery. There will be subpoenas.

Perhaps the phone companies will say they were assured by a particular NSA employee that some particular aspect of the program was legal. Perhaps the White House will back that person up. Perhaps not.

Imagine two years of this. Imagine the meter running at five, six, seven hundred dollars an hour. Subpoenas. Depositions. Congressional hearings. Contempt of Congress charges. Leak investigations.

Now that one federal judge has officially ruled the program illegal, the "we thought it was legal" defense is going to become progressively more difficult.

NSA employees have two choices if they want to avoid all this: get out while there's still time, or start listening in on Democrats. If the wiretappers dump enough dirt into enough House and Senate races, the Republicans might be able to hang onto their gavels.

Like they say at the NSA, you heard it here first.


Copyright 2006

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The right way to investigate terrorism

Last week some employees at a Wal-Mart in Michigan alerted police to a suspicious purchase of prepaid cell phones. The employees knew that cell phones can be used by terrorists who need to change their phone numbers constantly in order to avoid detection, and the three customers in the Michigan Wal-Mart store, young men of Middle Eastern descent, were buying eighty of them.

Police found a thousand cell phones in the men's minivan. The phones had been separated from their chargers, possibly indicating that they would be thrown away before the batteries wore down.

The men were arrested by Michigan police on charges of terrorism-related activity. A couple of days later the terrorism charges were dropped. The FBI determined that the men had no known ties to terrorist groups and the prosecutors admitted that buying disposable cell phones in quantity is not a crime. (The men are now being held on federal fraud and money-laundering charges, part of a scheme, the FBI says, to buy up Nokia TracFones and strip the proprietary software so they can be used with any celluar service provider.)

Let's compare this series of events to President Bush's preferred method of investigating terrorism.

First, the Wal-Mart employees would never have known that disposable cell phones were needed by terrorists (unless they watch The Wire) because the New York Times would not have printed the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping. The Bush administration has made the argument that the Times compromised national security by revealing that the secret spy agency is compiling a massive database of phone calls in order to track conversations between terror suspects.

The government's theory, apparently, is that once the Times revealed the existence of the spy program, terrorists were alerted to the need to change their phone numbers often, which may be all it takes to foil a phenomenally intrusive and probably unconstitutional NSA database of telephone calls.

But the Times' story also alerted the clerks at a Wal-Mart in Michigan that the suspicious cell phone purchase might be part of a deadly terrorist plot and not just another cash transaction from the friendly folks at the neighborhood meth lab.

They called the police. Nobody in America wants to take a chance with terrorism.

Would the clerks have called police if the men did not appear to be Middle Eastern? Probably not. Did three men spend a couple of nights in jail on suspicion of terrorist activity even though they were innocent of that charge? Probably.

That's the best we can do.

It's better than taking the word of an informant and picking up a person on the streets of a European city and flying him to a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe. It's better than scooping up suspects on the "battlefield" of a civilian neighborhood in another country and locking them away in Guantanamo without lawyers or charges.

The secrecy that protects "sources and methods" also protects liars and errors. It was secrecy that prevented the U.S. government from stopping the 9/11 attacks, secrecy that kept the FBI and the CIA from sharing information, secrecy that kept the airlines from knowing the names of the known al-Qaeda members that the CIA blithely identified from passenger lists on the afternoon of September 11th.

In addition to being corrosive to democratic government, secrecy may be entirely counterproductive.

Why shouldn't we tell the world what we know and what we've got? Exposing the identities of suspected terrorists gives everyone a chance to straighten out the errors. It increases the chances that people on the streets will spot trouble and call in the authorities before it's too late. It may even break up terror plots if terrorists occasionally find recordings of their private conversations posted on the Internet.

Isn't that the theory of the Amber Alert system? Instead of passing information through secure law enforcement channels, as they once did, authorities now broadcast everything they know about the abduction of a child as soon as they know it. Highway signs flash the description of suspect vehicles so motorists can help in the search.

Secrecy slows the spread of vitally important information when lives are at stake.

Is it worth it?

It's a debate we need to have. Sadly, we can't have it because half of the argument is classified.


Copyright 2006

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How to make the Iraq policy work

"We believe democracy yields peace," President Bush told reporters on Monday.

Well, not so far. Not in the Middle East. Free and fair elections gave Hezbollah two seats in the cabinet of the Lebanese government, gave Hamas control of the Gaza Strip, and gave high government positions to Shiites in Iraq who have supported angry demonstrations climaxing in chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death to America."

Today White House spokesman Tony Snow explained the administration's position on Iraq in response to Senator Joe Lieberman's defeat in the Connecticut Democratic primary. To paraphrase, the United States can't pull out of Iraq because Osama bin Laden predicted that we would and we can't let him win.

That's not a policy. That's the kind of thinking that gave us the Vietnam War.

The good news is, the Iraq policy can still be saved.

President Bush's mistake has been to confuse democracy with freedom.

Democracy is, in Ben Franklin's famous phrase, two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Freedom is a condition that exists under a government of limited power.

The mistake in Iraq was to topple the Saddam Hussein government and replace it with a democratically elected government without addressing the fact that all economic power is held by the government.

Iraq's government owns the oil. It owns all the significant industries. It controls everybody's job and everybody's economic future.

No matter what the Iraqi constitution says, no matter what we say, no matter how many U.S. or international troops patrol the streets of Baghdad, there is going to be a bloody struggle for control of the government.

The administration likes to point to the fact that voter turnout was high in Iraq. But that's not proof that democracy is a success there. It's just more evidence that control of the government is a matter of life and death.

And because control of the government is a matter of life and death, elections are just one battle in the war. Car bombs inevitably follow.

If your economic future -- your job, your family's jobs, your housing, even your safety -- lived or died by the outcome of a U.S. election, would you sit quietly after the votes were counted? Or would you band together with others in similar circumstances and fight for your survival?

Maybe you wouldn't fight. Maybe you'd just look the other way when people who fought for your side took refuge in your neighborhood.

Maybe the United States would collapse into a guerrilla-style civil war.

But in the United States, the government doesn't own the oil, or the industries, or the job-creating enterprises. Your economic survival doesn't depend on being a member of the party in charge of the government. You have an independent path to financial success in private-sector business. In fact, business is so powerful in America that it's widely believed corporate America controls the government no matter who is in power.

Take a look at Iraq and you'll see why that's a good thing.

The solution to the violence in Iraq is to privatize the oil and all the state-owned enterprises.

If we have any leverage with the Iraqi government, we should pressure them to turn their oil industry into a shareholder-owned enterprise and get the dividend checks in the mail to Iraqi citizens as fast as they possibly can. Once the economic power is in private hands, there will be no reason to die for control of the government. Iraqis aren't insane. They are acting rationally under the circumstances. If we ever want to get out of there, we have to change the circumstances.


Copyright 2006

Editor's Note: Read more about it in "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property" at www.SusanShelley.com.


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All right, let's dish

Is the President of the United States sleeping with the Secretary of State?

That's not a question you hear every day, is it?

America Wants to Know doesn't usually descend into the lurid and tawdry world of trysts and moans.

But just this once.

You must have seen the front-page splash in the Globe tabloid -- what, someone else does your grocery shopping for you? -- that the president and the first lady are in marriage counseling, that the first lady is envious of the president's intimate conversations with Condoleezza Rice, that the first couple's daughters were driven from the executive mansion by their parents' fighting.

And perhaps you've noticed, as we have, that the first couple has been a little frosty at public events where political couples usually display a pantomime of affection. Not even a kiss on the cheek at the Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, for instance.

Hmmm.

Maybe you noticed that when CNN's Larry King recently asked the president and the first lady how they keep their marriage healthy, the president changed the subject to the importance of exercise and talked about bicycling.

And you might even remember the story in New York magazine that Condoleezza Rice startled a dinner party of Washington journalists when she referred to President Bush as "my husb..." before quickly correcting herself and substituting, "the president."

Hmmmm.

You can't find a news article about the Secretary of State that doesn't mention her "close relationship" with the president.

And this week we learned that the first lady was spotted by tourists at a national park in Alaska. She was on a personal vacation, a National Parks Service spokesman said.

Without the president.

Meanwhile, back in the lower forty-eight, the president began a ten-day vacation at his Crawford ranch on Thursday, accompanied by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They will be working on the crises in the Middle East, the White House said, you know, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon. There are so many hot spots.

We would like to pause now to apologize for that joke.

Speaking of jokes, comedian Argus Hamilton notes in his upcoming Sunday column that the first lady is vacationing in Alaska while the president is spending his vacation at the ranch with Condi Rice. "Thank goodness his foreign policy is going so well," Argus says, "or this could be a real scandal."

Hmmmm. So it could.


Copyright 2006

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The right call in Lebanon

President Bush deserves a lot of credit for his uncompromising stance in support of Israel's right to respond forcefully to attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas.

Hezbollah and Hamas have vowed to destroy Israel, and they are backed by Iran, which has vowed to destroy Israel, and their efforts to destroy Israel enjoy widespread public support in the Arab world.

Along the same lines, the European Union is carping that Israel has responded with disproportionate force to the rocket attacks on its northern border and to the kidnapping of its soldiers. The Europeans want an "immediate cessation of hostilities," even if that means leaving the armed terrorists of Hezbollah on the border and ready to strike again.

With the exception of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, the whole world is supporting a policy built on the premise that there are worse things than dead Jews.

This sad specter of appeasement has a sickeningly familiar shape. The moderate Arab governments and the Europeans promote a policy of evenhandedness between Hezbollah fighters and their would-be victims in Israel, not wanting to bring the wrath of the terrorists down on their own heads.

Is the whole world unteachable? Do the Nazis have to march into Paris every single time?

Memo to the whole world: People who want to kill the Jews never stop at the Jews. Why? Because killing the Jews never fixes their problem. Killing the Jews will not make a failed economy run, or a failed state succeed, or a failed ideology miraculously deliver on the promises of its proponents.

There are plenty of people in the world who want to give it one more try, but that doesn't mean the United States has to go to the negotiating table and meet them halfway.


Copyright 2006

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