Friedman: Shame on Egypt's president

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN c.2012 New York Times News Service
Published 11:33 p.m., Tuesday, August 28, 2012

I find it very disturbing that one of the first trips by Egypt's newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, will be to attend the Nonaligned Movement's summit meeting in Tehran this week. Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran's people that the world approves of their country's clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.

In 2009, this Iranian regime literally killed the Green Revolution. It gunned down hundreds and jailed thousands of Iranians who wanted the one thing that Egyptians got: to have their votes counted honestly and the results respected. Morsi, who was brought to power by a courageous democracy revolution that neither he nor his Muslim Brotherhood party started — but who benefited from the free and fair election that followed — is lending his legitimacy to an Iranian regime that brutally crushed just such a movement in Tehran. This does not auger well for Morsi's presidency. In fact, he should be ashamed of himself.

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"The Iranian regime has offered Morsi a sanitized tour of its nuclear facilities" noted Karim Sadjadpour, the Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. "As a former political prisoner in Mubarak's Egypt, Morsi should also request a visit to Tehran's notorious Evin prison. It will remind him of his own past and offer him a glimpse of Iran's future."

Egyptian officials say Morsi is only stopping in Tehran for a few hours to hand over the presidency of the Nonaligned Movement to Iran from Egypt. Really? He could have done that by mail. It would have sent a powerful democratic message. By the way, what is the Nonaligned Movement anymore?

"Nonaligned against what and between whom?" asked Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy specialist at Johns Hopkins.

The Nonaligned Movement was conceived at the Bandung summit in 1955, but there was a logic to it then. The world was divided between Western democratic capitalists and Eastern Communists, and developing states like Egypt, Yugoslavia and Indonesia declared themselves "nonaligned" with these two blocs. But "there is no Communist bloc today," Mandelbaum said. "The main division in the world is between democratic and undemocratic countries."

Is Morsi nonaligned in that choice? Is he nonaligned when it comes to choosing between democracies and dictatorships — especially the one that is so complicit in crushing the Syrian rebellion as well? And by the way, why is Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, lending his hand to this Iranian whitewashing festival?

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This has nothing to do with Israel or Iran's nukes. If Morsi wants to maintain a cold peace with Israel, that is his business. As for Morsi himself, I'd like to see him succeed in turning Egypt around. It would be a huge boost to democracy in the Arab world. But what Egypt needs most will not be found in Tehran. Morsi's first big trip shouldn't have been to just China and Iran. It should have been all across Europe and Asia to reassure investors and tourists that Egypt is open for business again — and maybe on to Silicon Valley and then Caltech to meet with Egypt's Nobel Prize-winning chemist, Ahmed Zewail, to signal a commitment to reviving education in Egypt, where half the women are illiterate.

If Morsi needs a primer on the democracy movement in Iran (whose Islamic regime broke relations with Egypt in 1979 to protest the peace treaty with Israel) he can read the one offered by Stanford's Iran expert, Abbas Milani, on the U.S. Institute of Peace website: "The Green Movement reached its height when up to 3 million peaceful demonstrators turned out on Tehran streets to protest official claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the 2009 presidential election in a landslide. Their simple slogan was: 'Where is my vote?' ...

But by early 2010, the regime had quashed all public opposition. That is the regime that Morsi will be helping to sanitize. An Iranian democracy group, Green Messengers of Hope, has urged Morsi to remind his Iranian hosts "of the fates of the leaders who kept turning their backs on the votes of their people" Morsi might want to even remind himself of that.

Thomas Friedman writes for The New York Times.

Republican National Convention: The one graph you need to see before watching

Ezra Klein on August 28, 2012
WP

On the Republican convention stage tonight, you’re going to see a really large clock. But the clock isn’t for keeping time. The idea isn’t to stop speakers from going over their allotted time, or the convention from running late. It’s a debt clock. And the idea is to blame President Obama and the Democrats for the national debt.
But in doing so, the Republicans will end up blaming Obama for the policies they pushed in the Bush years, and the recession that began on a Republican president’s watch, and a continuation of tax cuts that they supported. They’ll have to. Because if they took all that off the debt clock, there wouldn’t be much debt there to blame him for at all.
The single thing you should look at to understand the debt clock and what it is — or isn’t — telling you is this graph from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It does something very simple. It takes public debt since 2001 — which is when we last saw surpluses — and breaks it into its component parts.

You can see it kind of looks like a layer cake. In fact, the folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities call it “the parfait graph.”
The top layer, the orange one, that’s the Bush tax cuts. There is no single policy we have passed that has added as much to the debt, or that is projected to add as much to the debt in the future, as the Bush tax cuts, which Republicans passed in 2001 and 2003 and Obama and the Republicans extended in 2010. To my knowledge, all elected Republicans want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Democrats, by and large, want to end them for income over $250,000.
In second place is the economic crisis. That’s the medium blue. Recessions drive tax revenue down because people lose their jobs, and when you lose your job, you lose your income, and when you lose your income, you can’t pay taxes. Tax revenues in recent years have been 15.4 percent of GDP — the lowest level since the 1950s. Meanwhile, they drive social spending up, because programs like unemployment insurance and Medicaid automatically begin spending more to help the people who have been laid off.
Then comes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s the red. And then recovery measures like the stimulus. That’s the light blue, and the part for which you can really blame Obama and the Democrats– though it’s worth remembering that the stimulus had to happen because of a recession that began before Obama entered office, and that the Senate Republicans proposed and voted for a $3 trillion tax cut stimulus that would have added almost four times what Obama’s stimulus added to the debt.
Then there’s the financial rescue measures like TARP, which is the dark blue line. That’s almost nothing, as much of that money has been paid back.
If we didn’t have all that? If there’d been no Bush tax cuts, no wars, no financial crisis and everything else had been the same? Debt would be between 20 and 30 percent of GDP today, rather than almost 100 percent.
Now, the response you sometimes get to this graph is yes, that’s true, but Obama should have done more about the debt. But Obama has proposed a multi-trillion dollar deficit reduction plan. Republicans just refused to pass it. And, to be fair, he refused to sign their plan, too. So the question then is less about what led to the debt and more about who has the right plan to get rid of it. I’ll get into that in a subsequent post.

Court Rules Israel Is Not at Fault in Death of American Activist

August 28, 2012
NYT
By JODI RUDOREN and DANIELLE ZIRI

JERUSALEM — An Israeli judge ruled on Tuesday that the state bore no responsibility for the death of Rachel Corrie, the young American woman who was run over by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip.

The lengthy verdict in the civil case, read in part to a courtroom in Haifa packed with supporters of Ms. Corrie’s family, called the death a “regrettable accident” — a characterization that Ms. Corrie’s allies strongly disputed.

“She chose to put herself in danger,” said the judge, Oded Gershon. “She could have easily distanced herself from the danger like any reasonable person would.”

Since her death, Ms. Corrie has become an international symbol of the Palestinian resistance. A play based on her writings has been performed in 10 countries, and a ship in an attempted aid flotilla to Gaza bore her name. Books, documentaries and songs have recounted how Ms. Corrie, a 23-year-old student, dressed in an orange vest and wielding a bullhorn stood between a bulldozer and the home of a Palestinian family in March 2003 during the height of the second intifada, or uprising.

Hussein Abu Hussein, the lawyer who brought the wrongful-death suit on the Corrie family’s behalf, said he would appeal the ruling within 45 days to Israel’s Supreme Court. At a news conference after the verdict, he showed pictures of Ms. Corrie taken the day of her death, saying “anyone could have seen” her bright garb.

“It’s a black day for activists of human rights and people who believe in values of dignity,” Mr. Hussein said. “We believe this decision is a bad decision for all of us — civilians first of all, and peace activists.”

In his ruling, Judge Gershon said the military’s mission that day “was not, in any way, to destroy homes,” but to clear brush and explosives “to prevent acts of hatred and terror.” He said the bulldozer was moving slowly, about 1 kilometer per hour, and that the driver could not have seen Ms. Corrie, finding “no base to the plaintiff’s claim that the bulldozer hit her on purpose.”

Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, called the verdict a “vindication” of the nation’s military and court systems.

“I empathize for the family, they’ve lost a loved one, who as the judge said was killed in a tragic accident,” Mr. Regev said. He dismissed as “simply without foundation” accusations that the Israeli courts are not independent, impartial and do not hold the highest professional standards.

Ms. Corrie, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., joined the International Solidarity Movement in January, 2003, and spent the last weeks of her life in Rafah, the Gaza town that borders Egypt. In a Feb. 27, 2003, e-mail home, she wrote that 600 homes had been destroyed there since the start of the intifada. On March 16 she and seven other American and British activists acted as human shields, dropping to their knees between the bulldozers and a home they believed were marked for destruction. The verdict came more than a year after the last of 15 sessions of oral testimony, which began in March 2010. Some of the witnesses, including the drivers and commanders of two bulldozers that were operating in the area that day, testified from behind a screen to protect their identities. Ms. Corrie’s parents or sister attended every session of the trial, spending about $200,000 on travel, translating about 2,000 pages of documents, and other expenses.

“A lawsuit is not a substitute for a legal investigation, which we never had,” Ms. Corrie’s mother, Cindy Corrie, said at Tuesday’s news conference. “The diplomatic process between the United States and Israel failed us.” The United States Embassy, which sent a representative to the oral-testimony sessions, declined to comment on the verdict. In June 2004, a representative of the secretary of state wrote to the Corrie family saying the United States agreed with them that the military’s investigation was not “thorough, credible and transparent.”

In Washington, the State Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said, “We understand the family’s disappointment with the outcome of the trial,” and noted that American diplomats “have worked with the family all through this process” and that they would continue to do so. She declined to discuss the remarks that Ms. Corrie’s family attributed to the American ambassador that the Israeli investigation had not been transparent. But on Tuesday, Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said in a statement that the United States government “has been noticeably absent, and its silence is deafening,” calling Washington “complicit in compounding the crime.” She also said that the trial had revealed “overwhelming proof that Rachel was deliberately murdered” and said that “Palestinians as a whole will continue to love Rachel and cherish her memory.”

Sarah Corrie Simpson, who has met with more than 200 Congressional offices in Washington about the case, said she remained convinced that the driver of the bulldozer saw her younger sister. “I hope someday he will have the courage to sit down in front of me and tell me what he saw and what he feels,” Ms. Simpson said.

In an interview before the verdict, Ms. Corrie’s father, Craig Corrie, said, “You don’t really close a wound like this, but it certainly is a big milestone.” At meetings across Israel over the past week, Mr. Corrie carried with him a picture not of his daughter but of the Palestinian girl, then 6, whose family’s house was behind Ms. Corrie when she was killed.

“I think this one in some ways is more hopeful,” he said of the picture. “She deserves a future that we all want for our children.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Jerusalem, and Danielle Ziri from Haifa, Israel. Reporting was contributed by Irit Pazner-Garshowtiz from Jerusalem and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 28, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the proportion of witnesses in the case who testified from behind screens to protect their identities. Some did, but most did not.