The new FISA Amendments Act of 2008 is not only an affront to privacy, it is a symptom of the leadership deficit currently afflicting the U.S. Congress. The bill, which passed the House last week by a landslide, makes two drastic changes to our current surveillance laws:

1. First, the bill generously grants telecommunications companies a broad immunity against financial and criminal liability for helping the U.S. government spy on domestic communications without a warrant or probable cause. There’s only one string attached: Telcoms must show that the government asked them to spy on Americans. Translation: Telcoms will get off the hook as long as they can rustle up some evidence that the government actually asked them to violate the law.

2. Second, if the bill is passed by the Senate, citizens will have no effective right to privacy in electronic communications because the government will always be able to claim that calls were intercepted in order to ward off a terrorist threat. Translation: As long as the “target” of the surveillance is reasonably believed by the government to be abroad, under this bill the NSA can intercept communications between that target and U.S. citizens without any form of judicial oversight whatsoever.

(Keep in mind that this second change is less extreme than some critics of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (“New Act”) acknowledge. Under the New Act, it is true that a traditional FISA warrant is not required to spy on a foreign person located abroad - even if that individual is communicating with a U.S. citizen. However, a judicial finding of probable cause will still be required to target an American person located abroad, regardless of whether interception occurs within or outside U.S. borders. This means that the New Act (i) expands the governments ability to (indirectly) spy on U.S. citizens if it can reasonably claim that the true target of the surveillance in question is a foreign party located abroad but (ii) actually restricts the government’s ability to target Americans that happen to be living or working overseas.)

What makes these changes so extreme? Consider our current surveillance regime. (more…)

At the Brookings Institution this morning, Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull each presented their findings on public opinion regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

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In a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel spoke eloquently about the challenges that will be faced by the victor of this year’s presidential election. The speech, entitled “Memo to the Candidates”, was essentially Senator Hagel’s laundry list of problems the new president must deal with, and advice on how to do so.

The oration was both clear and comprehensive, addressing most of the major issues of the day and providing unambiguous opinions and recommendations. The speech came across in the way its title would suggest, like a general memo summarizing Hagel’s positions on the main points of the election. The senator from Nebraska renewed his call for phased troop withdrawal from Iraq, insisted that we work in closer consultation with our allies, supported negotiation with Iran, highlighted the potential dangers of climate change, and noted that Doha remains important as well.

On the whole, however, there was little to distinguish Hagel’s speech from those of the many politicians, pundits, and think-tankers who focus on the same issues and advocate similar measures. That lack of originality gave the otherwise interesting and well-delivered address a decidedly mundane aftertaste.

The real breath of fresh air in the speech, and the part making headlines, was Hagel’s insistence that the candidates must avoid intensifying the partisanship of the election. (more…)

Barry Posen has a very insightful and clear analysis of Iraqi politics in today’s Boston Globe.  For me, perhaps the best sentence comes near the end:

Predictions about the likely course of politics and violence in Iraq are difficult; there are too many variables.

Too many proposals for what the U.S. should do in Iraq rely on detailed understanding of the status of the political (and military) strength of various factions. We should be skeptical; even Posen’s astute analysis relies on major simplifications — for example, we know that the frequent division of Iraqi Shiite interests into two groups (the Supreme Council and the Sadrists) is a big simplification, because both of those groups are fractured within on some issues, and other groups also contest power (the most frequently mentioned is the Fadila party, called a splinter from the Sadrists). Perhaps the best way to judge predictions about the future of Iraq — and American policy options — is to think about how much they rely on getting the subtleties of Iraqi politics and the intra-Iraq military balance exactly right.

The Partnership for a Secure America presents

A Bipartisan Foreign Policy

for January 2009

With

Ambassador Tom Pickering

Robert (Bud) McFarlane

Frederick (Rick) Barton

Monday, June 23, 2008, 9 – 10:30 am

1111 19^th St, NW, 12^th Floor, Washington, DC 20036

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Mauro raises some important points in his blog post. In response to rising food prices and the growing hunger crisis, developing countries took steps to promote food security in an uncoordinated way, many by imposing export restrictions on food staples, which ended up contributing further to rising food prices. They did so without thinking how it would affect other countries.

These unilateral trade restrictions had the unintended consequence of hurting other developing countries, especially some of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This is another example of how uncoordinated actions to address global problems can lead to even larger long-term problems. It underscores the importance of multilateral institutions to better coordinate a global response to this crisis (and others). Multilateral approaches would include agreeing to a rules based approach to agricultural trade and assistance with balance of payment problems that countries may experience as a result of continued openness to trade in the face of rising prices.

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The global food crisis of 2008 is unprecedented. Not because of its scale or nature-a global price rise in the 1970s was, if anything, more devastating-but because for the first time, such a crisis is not being “humanitarianized”. From the beginning, the media, experts, and aid agencies have focused on the larger issues at stake.

So I could not agree more with Asma about the structural issues she identifies, and about the need for our policy-makers to craft their response to this crisis with these deeper problems in mind.

To the issues she identifies, I would add trade-distorting policies in developing countries themselves, the need for land rights reform there, and the urgency of combating ideologically-driven hysteria about agricultural biotechnology-a hysteria that is eagerly fanned by European NGOs and corporate concerns alike, because it prevents them from having to compete with American food exports.

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Rapidly rising food prices globally and concern about the impact on hunger and poverty has prompted urgent multilateral discussions at the highest levels, including last week’s summit in Rome. The Rome Summit laid out a short-term and long-term plan of action. The immediate response must be to provide poor people with access to adequate and nutritious food either through food or cash assistance. But the international community will be far more effective if responding to this crisis also provides an opportunity to address the structural issues that are at play-underinvestment in developing country agriculture, trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in rich countries, the impact of biofuels, climate change etc.-and to fix a food aid system that is clearly inefficient and inadequately equipped.

The World Food Program has faced huge shortfalls in light of this crisis, as its budget, which relies on voluntary contributions, has been unable to keep up with the rising cost of food and transportation. The recent disasters in Myanmar and China add to the already daunting humanitarian needs. The United States and other donors have increased their contributions and last week, Saudi Arabia added $500 million in new money (not reprogrammed money). These contributions will allow WFP to continue existing efforts but not expand its programming. The United States and other donors should provide regular and realistic funding for acute food shortages. In recent years, the United States and other donor governments have consistently under funded budgets for emergency food aid.

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Foreign policy experts too often address a real potential threat to international security by simply listing all the things that could go wrong. Carefully parsing the causal relationships between (1) the threat and (2) its potential consequences is less important than simply outlining all of the horrible things that could eventuate. As a result, identifying such threats is much like playing dominos: If X happens, then Y and Z will surely happen (where Y and Z’s occurrence sounds the death knell for international stability). In foreign policy punditry, it seems that far too many of the big players adhere to the Domino Theory.

Let’s begin with the first domino, the “X” here, otherwise known the feared event that could set a number of horribles in motion. In a recent piece entitled “As things look, Israel may well attack Iran soon,” foreign policy guru and former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer falls right into this very trap. The dramatis personae in Fischer’s international yarn almost need no introduction. The United States appears early as the short-sighted buffoon, stumbling across the stage after too many drinks, a well-connected and well-heeled megacountry that just can’t understand the long term effects of its choices. Israel, of course, is depicted – as it sadly so often is – as a mostly-sober but utterly selfish charlatan, a nation beset by internal security problems it cannot quite handle and a history (the Holocaust) that it hasn’t really come to terms with. And then there’s Iran, that thoroughly inebriated beast of a nation, hell bent on destroying Israel no matter the cost. (So that there is no room for confusion, each of these descriptions distort the good and bad tendencies of each of these actors on the international stage.)

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I’m going to pick up on one part of the discussion of organizing for arms control and non-proliferation that my colleague Andy Semmel mentioned in his own piece on this blog as well as in his Senate testimony on May 15: the creation (or recreation) of a separate agency for arms control, disarmament, non-proliferation and related objectives. In my view, those functions have not been adequately performed within the State Department, and a new (or rather restored) independent agency is needed to reinvigorate US arms control and non-proliferation policy. That agency should have the particular goal of restoring our commitment to international rules and treaties as the underpinning of global collective security.

Let me also note that I share Andy’s view that controlling the spread of WMD is, or should be, a bipartisan national priority. To that end, it should be a shared objective among Democrats and Republicans to improve the way we organize our arms control and nonproliferation efforts. I hope that beginning with these two different but not incompatible views on the subject, we can foster a productive bipartisan dialogue, and agreement at least as to best practices, if not on the precise shape of our future arms control and non-proliferation programs.challenge as well.

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