Tag Archives: international

Marco Rubio’s Cold War Approach to Cuba Is Losing Him Voters

by MarianPoston Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) probably thought that his hawkish, Cold War foreign policy would endear him to Cuban Americans—but he may be in for an unwelcome surprise. Cuba policy is close to Rubio’s heart—his parents fled the country in 1956—and he has denounced the Obama administration’s détente with the Castro regime as “disgraceful” and “willfully ignorant.” Historically, this kind of rhetoric has earned Republicans support among Cuban Americans. But polls suggest that things have changed, and that Rubio’s strident Cuba outlook could damage his standing among a constituency that has buoyed his political career.

Every year since 1991, Florida International University has surveyed Cuban Americans’ attitudes on US-Cuba policy. The most recent poll, taken in 2014, reveals that those who took to Miami’s streets in December 2014 to protest the US restoring relations with Cuba are in the minority: 52 percent of poll respondents oppose continuing the embargo, and 68 percent favor the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. More than 70 percent say the embargo has worked poorly. How Cuban Americans of different ages responded reveals a stark generational split: A majority of those aged 65 and older still favor the embargo, but two-thirds of those aged 18 to 29 oppose it. Nearly 90 percent of millennial Cuban Americans favor reestablishing ties too.

For the 43-year-old Rubio, who is trying to brand himself as a new generation of Republican, this could be a problem. According to Guillermo Grenier, a Cuban studies expert at FIU, Rubio’s Cuba policy “doesn’t have legs” for the future. “People are changing. Rubio’s position will resonate among a certain percentage of the population—a shrinking percentage.” The younger generation, Grenier says, “say things like, ‘How can Rubio be against the embargo—doesn’t he know it hurts Cubans on the island?'”

Not long ago, candidates of both parties had to reassure Cuban Americans of their anti-Castro bona fides. Obama, as a candidate in 2008, addressed an audience of Cuban Americans and promised to maintain the embargo unless several conditions were met. Now, Grenier says, those days are drawing to a close. Politicians such as Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who built a decades-long career out of antagonizing the regime, did not challenge Obama’s decision to take Cuba off the official list of state sponsors of terror earlier this year. And even though Cuba remains far from being a free democracy, most Cuban Americans believe that US policy has made things worse.

As Cuba continues to play a larger role in foreign policy debates, Rubio may have to tread lightly—strategically “not emphasizing his views” in some situations, Grenier says. But it will be hard to downplay a career of fiery anti-communist Cuba rhetoric. On Fox News, Rubio called the December 2014 prisoner swap that began the recent diplomatic warming “absurd.” He went on to describe it as “part of a long record of coddling dictators and tyrants that this administration has established.” And Rubio is likely to mention recent Cuba developments during his major policy address today at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

But Rubio is unlikely to moderate his position. In December, he said defiantly: “I don’t care if the polls show that 99 percent of people believe we should normalize relations in Cuba.”

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Marco Rubio’s Cold War Approach to Cuba Is Losing Him Voters

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This Supercut of Candidates Singing "Let’s Get It On" Is Why We Love Britain During Elections

by NicholHeavener Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Who could get it on after #GE2015? Watch our #GeneralAffection song to find out.Full election coverage on Sky News, May 7th from 9pm.

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Sky News on Thursday, April 30, 2015

British voters head to the polls tomorrow for what promises to be a very tight election. Latest polling suggests the two major parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are tied near the finish line. The result is likely to be what’s known as a “hung parliament”. Both Labour and the Conservatives will need support from smaller parties across the spectrum to form government—among them the Scottish National Party (SNP) on the left, the Liberal Democrats somewhere around the center, and UKIP, on the right. Whomever can stitch together enough seats in parliament to win a majority will ultimately form government. If no group of parties can get to the magic number of 326 seats, Britain might well be heading back to the polls again soon to sort this whole mess out.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with British politics, the video above from Sky News gives a nice introduction to the main players—David Cameron (the current Conservative PM), Ed Miliband (the current opposition leader, from the Labour party), and Nicola Sturgeon, from the resurgent SNP among them. All set to Marvin Gaye’s classic, “Let’s Get It On”. Enjoy. (And happy voting, friends across the pond.)

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This Supercut of Candidates Singing "Let’s Get It On" Is Why We Love Britain During Elections

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How to Really Think About Major Trade Deals Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

by LachlanMcCready Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Matt Yglesias, currently the executive editor of Vox.

There is almost nothing in the whole wide world that economists like better than recounting David Ricardo’s basic case for free trade. And this is sort of understandable. It’s a really cool idea!

If you don’t believe me, check out Paul Krugman’s 1995 essay on the subject. But for the dime store version, what Ricardo showed—and what economists have been enthusing about ever since—is that Country A benefits (in the sense of what’s nowadays known as Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency) from opening up its domestic producers to competition from imports from Country B, even if Country B is better at producing everything.

It’s a cool result.

But oftentimes enthusiasm for this result seems to lead Ph.D. economists into all kinds of wild irrelevancies like former Council of Economic Advisors Chair Greg Mankiw’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Mankiw focuses on Adam Smith rather than Ricardo, but in both cases the point is the same—18th-century economists showed that the efficiency of an economy can be improved by opening itself up to imports from abroad.

This is very true, but it also tells us very little about the merits of a 21st-century trade agreement.

One huge flaw is that while classical economics has a fair amount to tell us about the wealth of nations, it doesn’t say much at all about the wealth of the individual people inside the nations. A trade deal that enriches Americans who own lots of shares of stock and Central Americans who own lots of plantation land could easily pass the (low) economic bar of efficiency while still making most people worse off.

But an even bigger problem is that many of the biggest barriers to international trade don’t come conveniently labeled as barriers to international trade.

Take the Jones Act here in the United States, which says that if you want to ship goods on a boat from one American port to another American port, you need to do so on boats constructed in the United States and owned by US citizens, staffed by US citizens and legal permanent residents, and crewed by US citizens and US permanent residents. Common sense says that this is protectionism for American ship owners, shipyards, and ship crews.

But the actual text of the Jones Act says otherwise. What the 1920 law says is that a merchant marine “sufficient to carry the waterborne domestic commerce…of the United States” is “necessary for the national defense.” In other words, we dare not let foreign-owned ships outcompete domestic ones as a matter of national security.

Conversely, if you look at Japan’s legendarily protected domestic automobile market you will find essentially nothing in the way of formal barriers to foreign trade. Tariffs on imported automobiles, for example, are currently at zero. The way it works, according to the American Auto Council, is that “Japan has used automotive technical regulations as a means to protect local markets by creating excessively difficult and costly regulatory and certification requirements, with little or no safety or emissions benefits.”

That these regulations are mere protectionism is overwhelming conventional wisdom in the United States. But of course, proponents of the Japanese status quo no more see it that way than do proponents of the Jones Act here at home. These are necessary regulations! This is the dilemma of the modern trade agreement.

Smith and Ricardo never imagined a world in which governments routinely regulated large classes of products to promote consumer safety, workers’ rights, environmental goals, or national security goals. But lurking behind every regulation is potentially a barrier to trade. What the US Food and Drug Administration sees as public health regulation of dangerous cheese bacteria looks like protectionism to French cheesemakers, and what European Union officials see as public health regulation of hormone-treated beef looks like protectionism to American ranchers.

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How to Really Think About Major Trade Deals Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership

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Starbucks Wants You to Feel Good About Drinking Up California’s Precious Water

by Jason05Smtpyej Posted on April 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ethos Water was supposed to help fix the global water crisis: Founded in 2002 in Southern California, the bottled-water company promised that for every unit it sold, it would donate a small amount of money to water charity projects in the developing world.

Other popular bottled water brands like Aquafina and Dasani also source from catastrophically dry regions.

The idea quickly took off. In 2005, Ethos was acquired by Starbucks. Now, for every $1.95 bottle of Ethos water it sells, Starbucks makes a 5-cent donation to the Ethos Water Fund, part of the Starbucks Foundation. “When our customers choose to buy Ethos Water, they’re improving the lives of people who lack vital resources,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in 2008.

Some of the biggest celebrities in Hollywood have lent their names to Starbucks’ Ethos brand. Matt Damon starred in an ad campaign, and Starbucks partnered with a company that drives celebrities to the Oscars and filled the cars with Ethos bottles, “so Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz walked into the awards carrying Ethos Water,” as Ethos cofounder Peter Thum explained. In 2011, Ethos’ other cofounder, Jonathan Greenblatt, became special assistant to the president and head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. Obama himself lauded Greenblatt last fall for his “innovative solutions to America’s challenges.”

Starbucks says that its partnership with Ethos has raised more than $12.3 million for water charity projects to date.

So far, media coverage has focused on Starbucks’ goal to quench the thirst of the world’s parched masses; the story behind the bottled water it sells here in the United States has been a nonissue. But now, as California’s historic drought wears on, Starbucks is facing a water crisis of its own.

The bottling plant that Starbucks uses for its Ethos customers in the western United States is located in Merced, California, which is currently ranked in the “exceptional drought” category by the US Drought Monitor. Its residents face steep water cuts in their homes, and surface water for the region’s many farms is drying up.

On April 16, the Merced Sun-Star reported that residents were complaining about a private water bottler, owned and operated by the grocery chain Safeway, that ships the increasingly scarce groundwater out for profit. In addition to its own bottled water, the plant also produces Starbucks’ Ethos water. No one knows exactly how much water the plant is using—the city of Merced considers that information confidential. (Starbucks uses a water source in Pennsylvania for the Ethos bottles sold in its locations in the eastern United States.)

The Starbucks water bottled at the plant comes from private springs in Baxter, a small unincorporated community in Placer County, a few hours north of Merced in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The spring water comes free of charge—in California, water companies typically don’t have to pay for the groundwater they use.

Like Merced, Baxter is located in “exceptional drought” territory. In a story about the water shortage last year, the New York Times pointed to a community near Baxter, quoting a rancher as saying that the drought was “as bad as I have ever experienced.”

When I asked a Starbucks spokesman about the company’s reaction to concerns about bottlers’ use of increasingly scarce water, he told me that Starbucks uses “a private spring source that is not used for municipal water for any communities.” But Mary Scruggs, a supervising engineering geologist with California’s Department of Water Resources, notes that communities can be affected by the use of surrounding springs “if you capture and pull it out before it ever makes it” to downstream users.

Bottling companies are trusted to monitor the health of their springs and the recharge rate, though in California the regulation and monitoring of bottled water extraction and its environmental impacts is notoriously opaque. Unlike in other states, well logs are kept confidential and reviewing such data requires permission from the well owner.

In addition to the spring water it bottles, Starbucks also uses Merced city water to manufacture its bottled water product. A report commissioned by the International Bottled Water Association found that it takes on average 1.32 liters of water to make a liter of bottled water, though critics argue that it can take several times more than that once all the packaging is accounted for.

In March, Merced County passed an ordinance that will place new permitting restrictions on some groundwater use, though whether this will affect the Starbucks bottling plant remains to be seen. “We’re cautious about setting precedents,” says Ron Rowe, director of the Division of Environmental Health for Merced County, adding that his agency hasn’t yet issued permits for any company under the new ordinance.

Starbucks declined to provide sales figures for Ethos Water, but the company’s estimate of $12.3 million given to charity works out to about 246 million bottles sold. Given the original price of $1.80 a bottle, by my calculation, that’s more than $442 million in sales.

While bottled water accounts for just a small fraction of California’s total water use, some residents are nonetheless fed up with bottling plants that profit off their dwindling water supply. Protesters have begun staging events at Nestlé’s bottling facility in nearby Sacramento.

Starbucks, with its mission to bring water to the world’s thirstiest regions, has so far escaped the kind of scrutiny that Nestlé and others have endured. But as a Merced area resident recently noted during a city council meeting about the bottling plant that Starbucks uses, “You might think that in the midst of a drought emergency, diverting public fresh water supplies to bottle and selling them would be frowned upon.”

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

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Starbucks Wants You to Feel Good About Drinking Up California’s Precious Water

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This Video of the Moment the Avalanche Hit Everest Basecamp Is Terrifying

by CharlaG24w Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

“The ground is shaking,” a man’s voice says, sounding incredulous. “Shit,” he says, amid giggles of disbelief from others. Then, seconds later, the camera swings around to see something truly horrifying: a wall of snow and debris descending from all directions, about to engulf a collection of tents.

The video was uploaded to a YouTube channel operated by Jost Kobusch, a German mountaineer attempting to climb Everest, on Sunday. The title suggests that the footage captures one of the avalanches that struck Mount Everest during the massive quake that hit Nepal on Saturday, killing more than 2,400 people and injuring about 5,900. Kobusch also posted the video to his Twitter account—though it’s still unclear if he took the footage himself; Mother Jones has reached out to him for confirmation. Nepalese officials say that multiple avalanches triggered by the 7.8 magnitude earthquake killed at least 17 climbers and injured at least 37 others, with many still unaccounted for.

Warning: this video contains repeated explicit language, and is simply very scary, as it documents the climbers sheltering in a tent, and the intense panic in the immediate aftermath of the avalanche:

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This Video of the Moment the Avalanche Hit Everest Basecamp Is Terrifying

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

by CarltonDecosta Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just published a deep look into the World Bank’s track record of ensuring that the projects it sponsors don’t end up harming local communities.

Since 2004, more than 3.4 million people have been economically or physically displaced by Bank projects, according to the report’s analysis of the lender’s data. And while the Bank has policies requiring it to reestablish and resettle such communities, the ICIJ’s investigation found that they were falling short, operating under a troubling lack of safeguards, through bank officials too willing to ignore abuses committed by local partners, and with an institutional culture that values closing big deals over following up on human rights.

After being presented with the ICIJ’s findings, the bank quickly promised reforms. But one part of the investigation contains this interesting passage, which suggests an unexpected reason the Bank may not be able to clean up its act: competition has gotten too stiff.

As it enters its eighth decade, the World Bank faces an identity crisis.

It is no longer the only lender willing to venture into struggling nations and finance huge projects. It is being challenged by new competition from other development banks that don’t have the same social standards—and are rapidly drawing support from the World Bank’s traditional backers.

China has launched a new development bank and persuaded Britain, Germany and other American allies to join, despite open U.S. opposition.

These geopolitical shifts have fueled doubts about whether the World Bank still has the clout—or the desire—to impose strong protections for people living in the way of development.

United Nations human rights officials have written World Bank President Kim to say they’re concerned that the growing ability of borrowers to access other financing has spurred the bank to join a “race to the bottom” and push its standards for protecting people even lower.

Today’s package of stories, published with the Huffington Post, is the first installment of a series reported in 14 countries by over 50 journalists. More than 20 news organizations were involved in the effort.

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Even the World Bank Has to Worry About the Competition

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The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

by PreciouKKNV Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Shortly after the participants in the Iranian nuclear talks announced that a double-overtime framework had been crafted, I was on television with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is something of a celebrity rabbi, a failed congressional candidate, and an arch-neoconservative hawk who has been howling about a potential deal with Iran for months. Not surprisingly, he was not pleased by the news of the day. He declared that under these parameters, Iran would give up nothing and would “maintain their entire nuclear apparatus.” Elsewhere, a more serious critic, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who last month had organized the letter to Iran’s leaders signed by 47 GOP senators opposed to a deal, groused that the framework was “only a list of dangerous US concessions that will put Iran on the path to nuclear weapons.”

These criticisms were rhetorical bombs, not statements of fact. Under the framework, Iran would give up two-thirds of its centrifuges used to enrich uranium and would reduce its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (which is the raw material used to develop bomb-quality highly-enriched uranium) from 10,000 kilograms to 300 kilograms. These two developments alone—and the framework has many other provisions—would diminish Tehran’s ability to produce a nuclear weapon. Its nuclear apparatus would be smaller, and under these guidelines, Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons, while certainly not impossible, would be much more difficult. Yet because politics dominates the debate over this deal—as it does so often with important policy matters—foes of the framework could hurl fact-free charges with impunity.

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The Iranian Nuclear Deal: What the Experts Are Saying

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The World’s Worst Climate Villain Just Showed Us Exactly How to Stop Global Warming

by EzekielStolp Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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There was a somewhat surprising announcement this week from a country with one of the world’s worst climate reputations: Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s office declared that his government is committed to signing on to the next major international climate accord, set to be hammered out in Paris later this year.

In a statement, the PM’s office said that “a strong and effective global agreement, that addresses carbon leakage and delivers environmental benefit, is in Australia’s national interest.”

I have no idea what “carbon leakage” is. Presumably it’s something similar to carbon dioxide emissions, which are the leading cause of global warming. Regardless, the announcement is a welcome sign from an administration that was recently ranked as the “worst industrial country in the world” on climate action.

The Paris summit is meant to elicit strong commitments to reduce carbon pollution from all of the world’s leading economies, so it’s a good thing Australia is willing to play ball. The country gets 74 percent of its power from coal (that’s nearly twice coal’s share of US energy generation). Australia has the second-largest carbon footprint per capita of the G20 nations (following Saudi Arabia), according to US government statistics.

But let’s not get too excited. Although Abbott hasn’t yet specified exactly what kind of climate promises he’ll bring to the table in Paris, there’s good reason to be skeptical. Here’s why: In the run-up to the talks, developed countries are keeping a close eye on each others’ domestic climate policies as a guage of how serious they each are about confronting the problem. It’s a process of collectively raising the bar: If major polluters like the United States show they mean business in the fight against climate change, other countries will be more inclined to follow suit. Of course, the reverse is also true—for example, the revelation that Japan is using climate-designated dollars to finance coal-fired power plants weakens the whole negotiating process. That’s one reason why President Barack Obama has been so proactive about initiating major climate policies from within the White House rather than waiting for the GOP-controlled Congress to step up.

So, on that metric, how are Australia’s climate policies shaping up? It looks like they’re going straight down the gurgler.

Almost a year ago, Australia made a very different kind of climate announcement: It became the world’s first country to repeal a price on carbon. Back in 2012, after several years of heated political debate, Australia’s parliament had voted to impose a fixed tax on carbon pollution for the country’s several hundred worst polluters. The basic idea—as with all carbon-pricing systems, from California to the European Union—is that putting a price on carbon emissions encourages power plants, factories, and other major sources to clean up. Most environmental economists agree that a carbon price would be the fastest way to dramatically slash emissions, and that hypothesis is supported by a number of case studies from around the world—British Columbia is a classic success story. (President Obama backed a national carbon price for the US—in the form of a cap-and-trade system—in 2009, but it was quashed in the Senate.)

In Australia, the carbon tax quickly became unpopular with most voters, who blamed it for high energy prices and the country’s sluggish recovery from the 2008 global recession. Abbott rose to power in part based on his pledge to get rid of the law. In July 2014 he succeeded in repealing it.

Now, new data from the Australian Department of the Environment reveal that whether or not you liked the carbon tax, it absolutely worked to slash carbon emissions. And in the first quarter without the tax, emissions jumped for the first time since prior to the global financial crisis.

The new data quantified greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector (which accounts for about a third of total emissions, the largest single share) in the quarter from July to September 2014. As the chart below shows, emissions in that same quarter dropped by about 7.5 percent after the carbon tax was imposed, and jumped 4.7 percent after it was repealed:

Tim McDonnell

It’s especially important to note that the jump came in the context of an overall decline in electricity consumption, as Australian climate economist Frank Jotzo explained to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Frank Jotzo, an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School, said electricity demand was falling in the economy, so any rise in emissions from the sector showed how supply was reverting to dirtier energy sources.

“You had a step down in the emission intensity in power stations from the carbon price—and now you have a step back up,” Professor Jotzo said.

…Jotzo estimated fossil fuel power plants with 4.4 gigawatts of capacity were been taken offline during the carbon tax years. About one third of that total, or 1.5 gigawatts, had since been switched back on.

In other words, we have here a unique case study of what happens when a country bails on climate action. The next question will what all this will mean for the negotiations in Paris.

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The World’s Worst Climate Villain Just Showed Us Exactly How to Stop Global Warming

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America Ranks in the Top 5 Globally—for Putting Its Citizens to Death

by AnnettaGrave Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’re No. 5! We’re No. 5!

America once again ranks among the top five nations in the world—in executions. Sigh. That’s according to a new report from Amnesty International, which also notes that more and more nations have been opting not to kill their convicts.

Amnesty tallies at least 607 known executions in 22 countries in 2014. The good news? That’s a 22 percent decline from 2013. Here at home, states dispatched 35 American citizens last year, a 20-year low—and four less than in 2013. But there’s no accounting for China, which executes more people than all other countries combined but treats the data as a state secret. (Amnesty made its count by looking at a range of sources, including official figures, reports from civil society groups, media accounts, and information from death row convicts and their families.)

Amnesty also reports a drop in the number of countries that carried out executions, from 42 in 1995 to 22 last year, although many more still have the death penalty on the books. The United States is the last country in the Americas that still puts people to death, but US citizens appear to be increasingly opposed to the practice. Only seven states executed convicts in 2014, compared with nine states a year earlier. The overwhelming majority of those executions—nearly 90 percent—took place in four states: Texas, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma. (Georgia had two, and Arizona and Ohio had one execution each.)

Eighteen states have abolished the death penalty, but among those that have not, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming haven’t put anyone to death in at least a decade, Amnesty noted. Oregon and Washington have moratoriums on executions, and federal authorities have not put anyone to death since 2003.

The bad news is, from 2013 to 2014, the number of death sentences jumped nearly 30 percent globally, to at least 2,466. Amnesty points in part to Nigeria, which imposed 659 death sentences last year as military courts punished numerous soldiers for mutiny and other offenses amid armed conflict with Boko Haram militants. Egypt was also to blame for the increase, Amnesty said, as Egyptian courts handed down death sentences against 210 Muslim Brotherhood supporters in April and June.

In all, 55 countries sentenced people to death last year. Here, according to Amnesty, are the most notable:

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America Ranks in the Top 5 Globally—for Putting Its Citizens to Death

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Should We Welcome Saudi Arabia to the Fight in the Middle East?

by SonjaBaynes Posted on March 28, 2015

Mother Jones

I have occasionally griped in this space about the fact that putative Middle East allies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan basically view the American military as a sort of mercenary force to fight their own tribal battles. Sure, they provide us with basing rights, and sometimes money, but they want us to do all the fighting, and they complain bitterly about American naiveté when we don’t fight every war they think we should fight.

Recently this has changed a bit, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan launching independent air attacks against various neighbors, and Saudi Arabia even making noises about launching ground attacks in Yemen. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Josh Marshall makes some useful points:

It is always dangerous when power and accountability are unchained from each other. In recent decades, we’ve had a system in which our clients look to us for protection, ask for military action of various sorts — but privately. And then we act, but always in the process whipping up anti-American sentiment, mixed with extremist religious enthusiasms, which our allies often, paradoxically, stoke or accommodate to secure their own holds on power. This is, to put it mildly, an unstable and politically toxic state of affairs. This does not even get into the costs to the US in blood and treasure.

There are pluses to the old or existing system. We control everything. Wars don’t start until we start them. But the downsides are obvious, as well. And nowhere has this been more clear than with the Saudis. The Saudis sell us oil; and they buy our weapons. We start wars to protect them, the reaction to which curdles in the confines of their domestic repression and breaks out in terrorist attacks against us. I don’t mean to suggest that we are purely victims here. We’re not. But it’s a pernicious arrangement.

This is why I think we should be heartened to see the Saudis acting on their own account, taking action on their own account for which they must create domestic support and stand behind internationally.

There’s more, and Marshall is hardly unaware of the risks in widespread military action among countries that barely even count as coherent states. “Still, the old system bred irresponsibility on many levels, including a lack of responsibility and accountability from the existing governments in the region. For all the dangers and unpredictabilities involved with having the Saudis or in other cases the Egyptians stand up and take actions which they believe are critical to their security on their own account is better for everyone involved.”

Some food for thought this weekend.

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Should We Welcome Saudi Arabia to the Fight in the Middle East?

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