Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Barack Obama’s Middle-East Mess

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Thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

As so often in the past, but catastrophically this time, he found the “sour spot”: the position that angers everyone and pleases none. He moved close enough to the Israelis to infuriate the Palestinians while keeping the Israelis at too great a distance to earn their trust. One can argue (correctly in my view) that US policy must at some level distance itself from the agendas of both parties to help bring peace. But that has to be done carefully, and to make it work one first needs to win their trust. Obama lost the trust of the Israelis early in the administration and never earned it back; he lost the Palestinians when he was unable to deliver Israeli concessions he led them to expect.

The President is now wandering across Europe seeking to mend fences with allies (Britain, France, Poland) he had earlier neglected and/or offended; at home, his authority and credibility have been holed below the waterline. Everyone who followed the events of the last week knows that the President has lost control of the American-Israeli relationship and that he has no near-term prospects of rescuing the peace process. The Israelis, the Palestinians and the US Congress have all rejected his leadership. Peace processes are generally good things even if they seldom bring peace; one hopes the President can find a way to relaunch American diplomacy on this issue but for now he seems to have reached a dead end — and to have allowed himself to be fatally tagged as too pro-Israel to win the affection of the Europeans and Arabs, and too pro-Palestinian to be trusted either by Israel or by many of the Americans who support it.

He was never up to the job. Of course, there was never any reason for a sane person to think he would be.

[Update a few minutes later]

Annals of the Arab Spring:

The Camp David Accords of 1978 ended any Egyptian claim to the Gaza strip. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 still had to involve the Egyptians, because if the Egyptians did not help keep weapons out of Gaza, and instead encouraged terrorist resistance to Israel, Israeli security would be mortally threatened — and the two countries would start drifting back toward the logic of confrontation that existed between them in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel had originally insisted on controlling the Egypt-Gaza border after the unilateral withdrawal, but caved in to the Egyptians’ assurances that they would control it effectively.

The Obama administration should have been keenly sensitive to this, and should have conditioned all U.S. aid on Egypt’s upholding agreements and undertakings made with respect to Gaza in connection with the Israeli withdrawal.

But it wasn’t, and it didn’t. As Mead says, we may not be far from the next intifada, or even the next war.

[Update later morning]

Obama continues to make things worse in the Middle East:

Democrats are loath to admit the president doesn’t know what he is doing, so they are left trying to convince themselves and others that this is a fuss about nothing. The most honest defense I heard from a pro-Israel Democratic staffer was to acknowledge that Obama had made mincemeat out of the “peace process” but to remind me that talks aren’t going anywhere anyway. In essence, “no harm, no foul” and look at all the hardware and military support we’ve given Israel!

The problem with this formulation is three-fold. First, Obama has staked so much of his personal credibility on the peace process that failure (well, more failure) will cement the perception that the president has no influence in the region. Second, there is a very real dilemma: the pending action by the United Nations. It’s far from clear that taking away bargaining leverage from Israel is going to impress the parties, get the Palestinians (which ones? Mahmoud Abbas?) to the table, or persuade the Europeans, who seem bent on throwing Israel to the wolves. If anything, rifts between the United States and Israel tend to encourage Israel’s enemies. And finally, the president underestimated the degree to which fellow Democrats would rebuke him.

Plus, bonus commentary from Alan Dershowitz, who is also pretty appalled.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Yet More Anniversary Thoughts

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Robert Zimmerman has a post, with which I mostly agree. But since I seem to be unable to comment there, I would add a couple corrections.

Gagarin’s launch vehicle had reached escape velocity and orbited the earth.

No, it reached orbital velocity. If it had reached escape velocity, it would never have come back. Escape velocity is about 1.4 (root of two, to be exact) times local circular velocity.

Another point (besides the fact that the two Bushes aren’t Junior and Senior).

In all these declarations, it was assumed that the space vehicles and rockets to get into space would be designed and operated by the federal government.

That actually was not the case for the Vision for Space Exploration. If you go back and read the Aldridge report, it recommends commercial (and international) participation, and doesn’t require or expect NASA to develop any launch systems. It only directs it to build a “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (what eventually became Orion). All of the contractors for the Concept Exploration & Refinement trade studies considered existing commercial launchers, or larger versions of them, for the lunar architecture. No one considered anything resembling what became Ares, because it was universally recognized that a Shuttle-derived system would be unaffordable (not to mention that it was always a nutty idea). It was only when Mike Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe and fired Craig Steidle that a Marshall-developed rocket became the baseline. In fact, other than eliminating the goal of moon first, the new NASA plans (or, at least, the 2011 budget submission) resemble the original VSE much more than Mike Griffin’s Constellation did.

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

So Much For That Excuse

20 Comments

The EPA administrator admits that fracking is not a threat to groundwater.

I think that natural gas is going to get very cheap, and here in California, I expect electricity prices to continue to go crazy, particularly with the batshit new carbon law. Probably time to invest in a gas heater for the spa. I think it would pay for itself in a year. In fact, I might look into a gas generator, and not just for emergencies. I’ll probably have to hide it from the carbon police, though.

Political Commentary, Space, Space History

More Anniversary Posts

3 Comments

Clark Lindsey has a link collection on today’s anniversary. I’ll have a blog post up at the Washington Examiner shortly.

[Update a while later]

Tom Jones has his thoughts, over at Popular Mechanics. I continue to scratch my head over worries like this:

Until roughly 2015, when American companies hope to produce a commercial rocket and spacecraft that can carry NASA’s crews safely and economically, astronauts will be renting rides on the Russian Soyuz vehicle (at $55 million per seat and climbing). The fact that presidents and congresses have seen this gap coming and failed to close it is a significant gamble, and not just because it’s unclear whether commercial spaceflight will be ready to deliver crews by the 2015 target. NASA has no backup: If the new space startups can’t make a profit on flying astronauts and other customers to orbit, they will hang up the out-of-business sign and walk away. We’d be forced to buy Russian seats indefinitely while starting an expensive crash program to regain access to the ISS.

So let me get this straight. He’s afraid that, multiple companies, having developed systems capable of getting people to ISS, won’t be able to make a profit, regardless of how much the government pays them? And when they can’t do so, they will “walk away”? And then what? Destroy the factories and hardware? Why wouldn’t they just sell it to someone else at fire-sale prices, who presumable could then make a profit? Why would we have to develop yet another system to reach the ISS when multiple ones already existed, and could simply be operated under new management? Does this make any sense at all?

[Early afternoon update]

My Washington Examiner piece is up now.

Political Commentary, Space

A “Coast Guard” For Space

14 Comments

As previously discussed, on the eve of the half-century anniversary of the Kennedy speech that set us off on such a wrong course, Jim Bennett has a piece at The New Atlantis on a proposal for a much-needed restructuring of federal space policy and players.

[Update a few minutes later]

A sample, highly relevant to tomorrow’s anniversary:

Space activity in the United States was almost entirely military in origin: During the early years, most space launches were military — initially reconnaissance satellites, and later weather and communications support systems — and until the early 1980s, even non-military payloads were mostly sent into space on rockets based on military missiles. The civilian space agency, NASA (initially standing for National Aeronautics and Space Agency), was created in 1958 by vastly expanding the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), a small research organization that supported the aviation industry. When NASA was started by the Eisenhower administration, it was envisioned primarily as an overtly civilian shell that would take selected spinoffs of military programs and operate them as a visible civilian program for prestige and demonstration purposes. Meanwhile, the real space program, run by the United States military, would continue to operate in secret as it had since its 1954 authorization. Since NASA’s expected role was minimal, the old administrative structure left over from NACA was deemed adequate — even though the organization had almost no significant experience with large systems management.

In 1961-62, NASA (renamed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to reflect its upgrade) was repurposed by the Kennedy administration to take on a massive development task: creating the Apollo system for manned lunar exploration. The agency also began conducting unmanned planetary exploration, prototyping satellite communications and other commercial activities, launching privately-funded commercial satellites on legacy military-derived launch vehicles, and a variety of ancillary aeronautical and space functions. More or less by default, NASA became a space transportation utility, a de facto regulator, and the de facto American interlocutor in any international space activity.

Apollo-era NASA was effectively an emergency governmental mass-mobilization effort, comparable to Germany’s wartime V-2 program and the Cold War “missile race.” (Indeed, veterans of those undertakings played prominent roles in the Apollo program.) In the case of Apollo, as in the other instances, the head of state was committed to the project, time was more of a constraint than was cost, and the effects of success or failure were quickly felt. However, as NASA moved from the era of Apollo to the era of the space shuttle, the agency’s mode of operation changed dramatically. The primary driver for NASA’s work became institutional self-preservation. Political pressure from Congress and the White House made job preservation a priority. Resource constraints consistently trumped schedule and performance. Shifting goals and pressures made clear accountability difficult to attain.

The cumulative legacy of these transformations — from NACA to NASA, followed by the turn to Apollo, followed by the switch to the space shuttle — is an agency that dominates its sphere in a manner unlike any other in the executive branch. The agency also has unusual lacunae in its management capabilities, with a span of responsibilities always outmatching its span of attention and control; ultimately, these lacunae have harmed the agency’s technical capabilities as well. The agency’s bureaucracy is characterized by very powerful entrenched internal fiefdoms with their own external political patrons giving them effective vetoes over administrative decisions, and a strong sense of privileged authority over large areas of national space activity.

Read the whole thing, though it’s appropriately long.

Political Commentary

Two Can Play At That Game

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Harry Reid, who thinks that it would be “foolish” to fulfill his constitutional responsibility and pass a budget (after who knows how many months now), wants to have a show vote to politically embarrass Republican Senators. Well, the House has decided it can do the same thing to the Democrats:

Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he had introduced the necessary legislation on Tuesday.”The legislation I filed today will allow the House to reject a clean increase in the debt limit, proving to the American people, the financial markets and the administration that we are serious about tackling our debt and deficit problems,” he said in a statement.

Turnabout is fair play.