WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the first of three wrap-ups for Feb. 27.
The Cato Institute
WASHINGTON -- Bush speech underestimates difficulty of achieving a free Iraq
In a speech Wednesday night in Washington, President Bush said "rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own. We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more."
The Cato Institute's Director of Foreign Policy Studies Christopher Preble made the following statement regarding Bush's speech:
"President Bush's address to the American Enterprise Institute shows once again his unwavering commitment to a regime change in Iraq. Diplomatic wrangling in the United Nations will not deter him. Military victory will be achieved, regardless of the potential costs in lives and treasure. The broader message -- that the war on Iraq is a first step in a long march toward promoting democracy throughout the Middle East -- suggests a new phase in American involvement abroad that will threaten U.S. security, harm economic prosperity, and impinge on individual liberties.
"The president and his supporters have underestimated how difficult it will be to create a free and prosperous Iraq out of the ashes left behind by Saddam Hussein. Promoters of nation-building in Iraq point to nation-building successes in Germany and Japan following World War II. But there are still more than 70,000 U.S. troops in Germany and 50,000 in Japan, and this lingering troop presence has given rise to a virulent anti-Americanism. If these so-called success stories are the model for post-war Iraq, then we should expect that American troops would remain in this troubled region for many years.
"In the case of Iraq, the American people must recognize that a benign mission of liberation may become an obligation of occupation, and we should expect that those who already hate us will use the excuse of a U.S. troop presence in the Middle East as a vehicle to promote their mission of violence against Americans around the globe."
WASHINGTON -- You can fight city hall
by Gene Healy
The framers of our Constitution believed that people had a natural right to protect themselves from aggression. The government of Washington has a different view.
Here in the nation's capital, our city council believes that everyone -- criminals and victims alike -- should be disarmed. Since 1976 Washington has maintained one of the most draconian gun bans in the nation. No handgun can be registered in Washington, pistols registered prior to city's 1976 law may not be carried -- even from room to room in the home -- without a license, and all firearms in the home must be unloaded and either disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. In effect, no one in Washington can possess a functional firearm in his own residence.
Well, if you've spent any time in Washington you know how well that policy's working out. The murder rate is over 55 percent higher than it was before the ban went into effect. Violent criminals continue to carry guns, and the law-abiding citizens that the Washington has disarmed are at their mercy.
But all that may soon change. On Monday, Feb. 10, three other local attorneys and I filed suit in federal court to force the Washington government to end the gun ban. (Note: though two of us work at the Cato Institute, this lawsuit is not a Cato project. It is being privately funded and litigated pro bono.)
Our suit is based on the right of responsible adult citizens to keep and bear arms for self-defense in the home -- a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment. On behalf of six Washington residents, we're asking the federal court for the District of Columbia to prevent the city from barring the registration of handguns, banning the possession of functional firearms within the home, and forbidding firearms from being carried from room to room without a license.
Our plaintiffs, like many other Washington residents, have been left defenseless by the city council's quixotic quest to make the nation's capital a gun-free zone. Shelly Parker, our lead plaintiff, lives in a high-crime neighborhood and is active in community affairs. As a result of trying to make her neighborhood a better place to live, she's been threatened by drug dealers.
Understandably, she'd like to own a functional handgun to protect herself in her home. But she can't own one without risking arrest, prosecution, incarceration, and fine because of Washington's unconstitutional gun ban.
Another plaintiff, Rich Heller, is a private security guard who is licensed to carry a gun while on the job protecting federal judges and employees at the Thurgood Marshall Judicial Center. But Heller is barred by Washington law from having a gun at home. As he puts it, "I'm able to protect people's lives at work, but I'm not allowed to go home, where there are open-air drug markets, and defend myself."
The Washington government has done a marvelous job of disarming people like our plaintiffs: peaceful, law-abiding folks who, as President Clinton used to put it, "work hard and play by the rules." It's done little or nothing to disarm violent criminals. And the Washington government has fought very hard to establish the principle that it does not have any legally enforceable duty to defend the citizens it's disarmed from the criminals it hasn't disarmed.
This is outrageous. It's also unconstitutional. That's why we're going to court to vindicate our plaintiffs' Second Amendment rights. We're convinced that the time is right for such a challenge, and that the Washington statute is vulnerable. For decades, that amendment had been consigned to the status of a constitutional inkblot. But legal scholars, executive branch officials, and the courts are starting to recognize that the amendment means what it says.
In October 2001 in United States vs. Emerson, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Constitution "protects the right of individuals, including those not then actually a member of any militia ... to privately possess and bear their own firearms ... that are suitable as personal individual weapons."
Soon thereafter, Attorney General Ashcroft endorsed the Fifth Circuit's reading, and the Justice Department filed two friend-of-the-court briefs reaffirming that the Second Amendment protects Americans' right "to possess and bear their own firearms." That's what we're fighting to establish. There is no right more fundamental than the right to self-defense; no government should be allowed to take that right away.
(Gene Healy is an attorney and a senior editor at the Cato Institute.)
The Nixon Center/The National Interest
(The Nixon Center is a public policy institution that is a substantively and programmatically independent division of The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, Calif. The National Interest magazine is published quarterly by The National Interest Inc., a non-profit partnership of Hollinger International Inc. and The Nixon Center.)
WASHINGTON -- Europe's weaknesses, America's opportunities: the future of the transatlantic alliance
by John C. Hulsman
Rhetoric should not replace reality as to Europe's capabilities to emerge as a major power. While the desire to successfully compete with America may be ensconced in many European chanceries, the ability to do so appears to be well beyond Europe's collective means.
Militarily, despite a collective market that is slightly larger than that of the United States, Europe presently spends only two-thirds of what the United States does on defense and produces less than one-quarter of America's deployable fighting strength. German defense spending has dropped from 1.5 percent to a laughable 1.1 percent. Other than the United Kingdom and France, all other European countries are presently incapable of mounting an expeditionary force of any size anywhere in the world without resorting to borrowing American lift capabilities.
Economically, the latter part of the 1990s has not led Europe into the "promised land" so confidently predicted by many. Rather, massive and largely ignored, structural problems -- labor rigidities, a demographic/pensions time-bomb, a safety net that precludes significant cuts in unemployment, too large a state role in the economy stifling growth -- have led Europe into a cul-de-sac. Staggeringly, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the euro-zone area has not created any net private sector jobs since 1970.
Europe, therefore, is not a collective "equal partner" with the United States in the Atlantic Alliance. At best, the United States can expect a multi-tiered NATO, where, beyond the British and the French, individual European member states will, optimally, fill niche roles in the overall American strategic conception. American decision-makers used to positive spins on the alliance must acknowledge that not all the allies are equal -- that real differences exist between European capitals over how often to militarily side with the United States, and how much capability individual countries can bring to bear.
In a recent essay, Bruno Tertrais correctly drew the distinction between alignment and solidarity. He must recognize, however, that the principal disagreements are not simply between Washington and "Europe," but among Europeans themselves.
This is extremely apparent in the political realm. Contrary to any number of soothing and misleading commission communiqués, the Europeans are light years away from developing a common foreign and security policy, or CFSP. One has only to look at the seminal issue of war and peace today -- what to do about Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- to see a complete lack of coordination at the European level. Presently, the United Kingdom stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States, Germany's militant pacifists are against any type of military involvement, be it sanctioned by the United Nations or not; with France holding a wary middle position, stressing that any military force must emanate from U.N. Security Council deliberations.
It is hard to imagine starker and more disparate foreign policy positions being staked out by the three major powers of Europe.
Given these realities, "Europe" simply does not exist. Yet, the very lack of European unity that hamstrings European Gaullist efforts to challenge the United States presents America with a unique opportunity. If Europe is more about diversity than uniformity, if the concept of a unified "Europe" has yet to really come into being, then a general American trans-Atlantic foreign policy based on cherry-picking -- engaging coalitions of willing European allies on a case-by-case basis -- becomes entirely possible.
This strategy works both politically and economically (for example, in the creation of a Global Free Trade Association) as well as militarily. Such a stance is palpably in America's interests, as it provides a method of managing trans-Atlantic drift while remaining engaged with a continent that will rarely be wholly for, or wholly against, specific, American, foreign policy initiatives.
Ironically, the success of such a policy requires the United States to abandon the notion of dealing with "Europe" as a single, concrete entity in favor of re-engaging Europe's nation-states. Brussels needs to be taken less seriously as the voice of a "united" continent. America has to be constantly engaged in noting differences within Europe in order to be able to exploit them, bringing along a coalition of the willing on any given policy initiative.
Europe, such as it presently exists, suits general American interests -- its member states are capable of assisting the United States when their interests coincide with America, yet it is feeble enough that it cannot easily block America over fundamental issues of national security. Cherry picking as a general strategy ensures the endurance of this favorable status quo.
Militarily, such an approach explains present efforts at NATO reform. Beyond the sacrosanct Article V commitment, the future of NATO consists of coalitions-of-the-willing acting out-of-area. Here, a realist cherry-picking strategy confounds the impulses of both unilateralist neo-conservatives and strictly multilateralist Wilsonians.
Disregarding neo-conservative attitudes towards coalitions as often not worth the bother, cherry pickers call for full NATO consultation on almost every significant military issue of the day. As is the case with Iraq, if full NATO support is not forthcoming, realist cherry pickers would doggedly continue the diplomatic dance, rather than seeing such a rebuff as the end of the process.
A Combined Joint Task Force, or CTJF, where a subset of the alliance forms a coalition of the willing to carry out a specific mission using common NATO resources would be a cherry picker's second preference. If this too proved impossible, due to a general veto of such an initiative, a coalition of the willing outside of NATO -- composed of states around the globe committed to a specific initiative based on shared immediate interests -- would be the third best option. Only then, if fundamental national interests were at stake, should America act alone.
While agreeing with neo-conservatives (and disagreeing with Wilsonians) that full, unqualified approval of specific missions may prove difficult to diplomatically achieve with NATO in the new era, cherry-pickers disagree with them about continuing to engage others at the broadest level. For, as the missile defense example illustrates, there are almost always some allies who will go along with any specific American policy initiative. That is, if they are genuinely asked.
By championing initiatives such as the CJTF and the new NATO rapid deployment force, the Bush administration is fashioning NATO as a toolbox that can further American interests around the globe by constructing ad hoc coalitions of the willing that can bolster U.S. efforts in specific cases.
Politically, America must stop giving generally sympathetic countries like Britain and Poland such bad geopolitical advice. By pushing the United Kingdom into "Europe," the United States hoped to make the project more pro-American, more pro-free market, and pro-trans-Atlantic alliance. After 50 years, it is time to look the results squarely in the eye -- the EU is simply no more pro-American, pro-free market or pro-trans-Atlantic alliance than it was at the time of its inception.
Only a Europe that widens, rather than deepens, a Europe a la carte, where efforts at increased centralization and homogenization are kept to a minimum, suits both American national interests and the interests of individual citizens on the continent. Any hint of further significant centralization -- the United Kingdom joining the euro, CFSP becoming a reality, the closer harmonization of tax or fiscal policy across the continent -- must be seen by America for what it is: a Gaullist effort to construct a pole in opposition to the United States. That will be the point at which the trans-Atlantic tie genuinely begins to break.
Such an outcome is, however, entirely avoidable. A strategy of cherry picking will preserve a status quo, where the trans-Atlantic relationship, despite fraying a bit at the edges, continues to provide common goods to both sides of the Atlantic. Such an overall policy acknowledges an awkward current truth of the trans-Atlantic relationship: the United States neither wants Europe to be too successful or to fail.
As such, the Europe of today suits America's long-term strategic interests. Cherry picking will allow the United States to make the appearance of a Gaullist, centralized, European rival far less likely, while distributing enough shared benefits that the overall trans-Atlantic relationship will continue to provide Europeans, as well as Americans, with more benefits than problems.
Such an accurate assessment, fitting the realities of the world we now live in -- where the United States behaves multilaterally where possible and unilaterally where necessary -- is likely to endure.
(John C. Hulsman is a research fellow for European Affairs at the Davis Institute for International Studies of the Heritage Foundation.)
