Viktor Kotsev, in Asia Times Online, has an excellent article on the economic factors in the Syrian unrest. Besides being hit hard by rising food prices, the Syrian people have been enduring water rationing far more rigorous than California’s. Residents of Damascus are often denied water service for more than half of each day. In the rural areas water service is limited to 3 days a week; tens of thousands have left their ancestral homes for cities like Daraa, where the Assad regime has now killed dozens of protesters.

Kotsev quotes a Syrian dissident framing his nation’s economic woes in these terms:

The coming Syrian revolution will be led by two million young Syrian women unable to find economically independent husbands and forced to embrace celibacy (Ansa’a) because of rampant unemployment and economic deprivation … Read More

On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – when asked about why we’re involving ourselves in Libya but not Syria – said this about Bashar Assad: “Many of the Members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” For understandable reasons – more about that in a moment– those comments didn’t fly very well. So it was time for a retake.

Yesterday, when asked about her statement at a press conference, Secretary Clinton said, “Well, first, Jay [Solomon], as you rightly pointed out, I referenced opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.” Read More

Maybe not, according to Sen. Harry Reid’s logic. Citing to a new CNN poll out today showing that 47 percent of Americans have a negative opinion of the Tea Party, Reid announced that the movement has lost its influence. ”The country doesn’t care much about the Tea Party,” he said on the Senate floor today. “There is a new CNN poll out today that says this very directly.”

“The people who care about the tea party are a very small number who care about them positively,” he added. “Those who care about them negatively is very high.”

So based on that criteria, Reid must be truly despondent to also learn that the country doesn’t care about President Obama. As Peter noted, a Quinnipiac poll out today showed that 48 percent of American voters disapprove of the president.

Of course, the comparison isn’t perfect, since the CNN poll surveyed all Americans, while the Quinnipiac one surveyed only likely voters. But the Quinnipiac poll should still have Democrats worried. Not only did it show Obama’s lowest approval rating ever for that polling service, but it also found that voters say 50-41 that he shouldn’t be reelected – which is also his lowest reelection score ever.

In addition, the poll found that voters oppose the war in Libya 47-41 percent. Since Americans tend to be more supportive of military interventions at the beginning, this isn’t a good sign.

As John noted earlier, the latest Gallup survey, shows the country is split down the middle on President Obama’s handling of the situation in Libya, with 44 percent approving, 44 percent disapproving, and 12 percent undecided. These are very low numbers for a president near the outset of a military campaign. These numbers should be seen in the context of a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that showed that only 17 percent of Americans see President Obama as a strong and decisive military leader. And those number, in turn, should be seen in the context of today’s release of a Quinnipiac University poll showing that fully one-half of the registered voters it surveyed believe that the president does not deserve a second term in office, while only 41 percent say he does. Both are all-time lows.

These numbers are related to one another. Perceived weakness in a president can be acidic. I would be surprised if the president’s speech on Monday helped reassure the public. What will matter, though, isn’t the effect of Obama’s speech (which will soon be forgotten) but the results of his policies. That is what he will be judged on. For now, if I were a member of the president’s political team, these numbers would concern me. A lot.

Commentators here and elsewhere have dissected the belated strengths and considerable weaknesses of the president’s speech on Libya. But no one has noted that the speech is yet another piece of evidence that this administration regards foreign policy as a problem to be overcome as rapidly as possible, not as an enduring challenge with serious consequences.  Barack Obama remains eager to get to the serious business of domestic policy.

Before he was elected, Obama displayed no serious interest in foreign policy.  Nor – except for his childhood travels – did he have any substantive experience abroad.  The only post-World War II presidents who could compete with him in this regard are Carter (hardly an encouraging comparison) and Clinton (who had the good fortune to be elected in the supposedly placid 1990s). The foreign policy lesson he learned from his predecessor was very simple: if you want to keep your presidency alive politically, avoid Iraq. The frequency which with he harps on that lesson testifies to its power. Read More

Another request has gone out about whether professors on a state payroll used their offices to play partisan politics; and the political left is again screaming about the end of academic freedom. In the wake of the controversy over inquiries into whether a University of Wisconsin professor who has been a vocal participant in the union/GOP squabbles in that state used his taxpayer funded perch to do so, a Michigan think tank is asking the same question about academics at a number of state-supported institutions in that state.

The Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy about professors at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State Universities is drawing predictable screams of horror from those who think these probes are intended to silence critics of Republicans who have advocated for changes in collective bargaining by public employee unions. The New York Times quotes Greg Scholtz, the director of academic freedom for the American Association of University Professors as saying that this “will have a chilling effect on academic freedom. We’ve never seen FOIA requests used like this before.” Read More

Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad was expected to announce the lifting of the country’s 50-year old emergency law late last night, but he didn’t even give up that one token concession during his speech:

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad defied expectations and dashed widespread hopes Wednesday when he made no mention of lifting a state of emergency in a national address.He acknowledged that Syrians want reform and that the government has not met their needs in a rambling 45-minute speech to the National Assembly, but he made few concrete promises after weeks of anti-government demonstrations that have left 73 people dead, according to Human Rights Watch.

The fact that Assad is digging in his heels on this issue will probably only further enflame the mass demonstrations across the country. The lifting of the law wouldn’t have been more than a symbolic victory for the protesters, but Assad’s rigidity suggests that he may be readying for a fight with the opposition.

The Obama administration needs to condemn Assad strongly on this. Over the weekend, Hillary Clinton spoke of the Syrian leader’s reputation as a “reformer” – those sort of statements need to end immediately. Lifting the emergency law would have been a simple (and not especially impactful) step for Assad to take. That he didn’t even do this shows that he’s completely unwilling to make even the smallest concession of his power, and it’s a troubling sign that a more violent government crackdown may be looming.

Last night Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart turned his comic genius on Barack Obama’s Libya speech. The critique works because the points he makes are both funny and true. Take a look. You’ll enjoy it.

With the recent events across the Muslim world, a serious task force on the Iranian threat couldn’t be more needed. The Iran Strategy Task Force, a new collaboration between Freedom House and the Progressive Policy Institute, says it will push the Obama administration to “rethink its Middle East strategy” and look “beyond sanctions.”

When some Iranian lobbying groups –NIAC, for example – say that the administration needs to look “beyond sanctions,” they are really arguing for the U.S. to drop them entirely. In comparison, the ISTF is supportive of sanctions, and maintains that more may even be necessary. But the group will also look for other ways to pressure the Iranian regime for reform.

The ISTF’s first step will be to meet with experts in academia, government, intelligence and the Iran democracy movement, in order to come up with a report of policy recommendations that it can present to lawmakers. “The point is, we’re going to help people make sense of this puzzle,” said Freedom House’s Andrew Apostolou, who is co-chairing the ISTF along with PPI’s Josh Block.

Other members of the task force include Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution, Steve Beckerman of AIPAC, Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Michael Adler of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

With NIAC’s focus shifting to human rights issues recently, it’s important to have a group in Washington that will push for reforms while also supporting crucial sanctions.

Thirty years ago today I was doing research in the Local History and Genealogy Room of the New York Public Library when Tim Beard, the director, came up to me. I looked up, hoping he had found something I’d been looking for. Instead he said, “Reagan’s been shot.” For a moment we just stared at each other, processing the enormity of the news.

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“At least at the moment. He’s been taken to the hospital.”

I packed up my stuff and raced home, where I, like much of the nation, was glued to the television for the rest of the day and much of the night.

He survived, of course, the first president to have been shot and do so. (Theodore Roosevelt was shot and survived while campaigning in 1912, but that was after his presidency.) Reagan’s survival, however, was a very, very near-run thing, and only some very fancy doctoring within minutes of the event saw him through. It was months before he was fully recovered.

Only millimeters and minutes separated what became the most significant presidency of the last half of the 20th century from being instead a footnote in American history, a presidency that lasted only twice as long as William Henry Harrison’s in 1841.

History, of course, is full of such contingencies, which support a whole genre of historical writing called counterfactual history. What if Catherine of Aragon had borne Henry VIII a healthy son? What if the Royal Navy hadn’t let Washington’s army escape across the East River from Brooklyn? What if Britain and France had resisted the military reoccupation of the Rhineland?

Equally, how George H. W. Bush would have handled the opportunities and perils that Reagan lived to face we will never know.

As the House of Representatives prepares to vote today on Speaker Boehner’s bill to revive the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program that gives disadvantaged children a chance to escape failing public schools and to get a quality private education, the administration continued to advocate its defeat.

Among the arguments put forward by the White House yesterday was the claim that scholarship recipients don’t do any better than other students. But, as the Washington Post pointed out in a trenchant editorial, the evidence points in a different direction. There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence that students who take advantage of voucher programs do better in reading and have better graduation rates than other low-income inner city students. Read More

Funny, last time I checked, Sarah Palin was in trouble for being too comfortable with the language of combat. Today, it’s a disgrace that she’s not more fluent in it.

As far as slips of the tongue go, I’ll take a commentator’s “squirmish” over a commander in chief’s “corpsemen,” any day. In fact, there is something unwittingly brilliant about the latest Palinism. Try to find a term better than squirmish for a military effort the great superpower was shamed into by the French and the Arab League, one whose leadership the American president has repeatedly refused, one whose description has brought about the most pusillanimous linguistic contortions imaginable, and one we may very well wriggle out of before accomplishing our goal. A war against Qaddafi’s regime was a noble prospect. But I fear Sarah Palin is right. What we have on our hands is a squirmish.

The eye-opening poll of the week comes from Gallup, which shows Barack Obama with the worst numbers of his presidency when it comes to “leadership.” Only 52 percent of Americans describe him as a “strong and decisive leader,” compared to 47 percent who say he’s not. That may not sound bad, but this is how Gallup puts it: “Americans have grown increasingly less likely to view President Obama as a strong and decisive leader since he took office. Roughly half now believe this aptly describes him compared with 60% a year ago and 73% in April 2009.”

This is especially striking because it comes at a moment when one would have expected a “rally round the flag” feeling in the body politic due to the fact that the United States has undertaken a new military effort. Even when Americans are unhappy about American involvement abroad—as they were, for example, when Ronald Reagan sought the overthrow of the Communist regime in Nicaragua—they usually recognize that a president’s decision to commit forces and spend political capital on something controversial marks him as a leader to be reckoned with.

But that has not happened here, and the reason is simple: Obama undertook the Libya mission with the bizarre promise to the American people and the world that he and we would not be leading it, even though we were. The day he decided to act, he said we were doing so at the behest of the United Nations. Hillary Clinton said it was France and Britain who talked us into it. And he went ten days without offering a comprehensive explanation of what we were doing in Libya. The Gallup poll was done before the president’s speech, but it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind in this regard since it seemed in part designed to reassure people that NATO was taking charge and that our task in Libya was largely completed.

Who would think such a leader was a strong leader when he is practically shouting from the rafters that he doesn’t want to be a strong leader?

The potential presence of al Qaeda and Hezbollah isn’t the only concern about the makeup of the Libyan rebel forces. Former jihadist Noman Benotman, who used to lead Libya’s al Qaeda affiliate, told the Washington Times today that the unaffiliated “freelance jihadists” have joined the fight to oust Qaddafi:

“We have freelance jihadists,” he said. “But everything is still under control of the interim national council. There is no other organization that says, ‘We are leaders of the revolution with this emir,’ like al Qaeda would. Everyone is afraid to do this; they would be labeled as undermining the people.”

Benotman told the Washington Times that he estimates there are “around a thousand” unaffiliated jihadists in Libya, though he didn’t say how many were involved in the fight. He also made it clear that the leaders of the opposition are seeking democracy.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that Washington is in a heated debate over whether to supply arms – and the necessary training – to the rebels, who badly need it. According to the paper, the French government is “mounting pressure on the United States to provide greater assistance to the rebels.”

While American officials who have met with the opposition forces say that they’re largely democratic, nobody has been able to give a clear picture of the composition yet. If the U.S. decides against giving arms to the rebels, it may still be able to provide important assistance in the form of humanitarian and financial aid.

Yuval Levin, the indispensible editor of an indispensible magazine, National Affairs, has written a newly published essay, “Beyond the Welfare State.”

Yuval writes that the vision of social democracy that has dominated our political life for many decades is now failing us. Moreover, he says, the economic crisis of 2008 might well be seen as having marked the beginning of the end of the social democratic welfare state by “making suddenly urgent what was otherwise a gradually oncoming problem” (our crushing deficit and debt).

Democratic capitalism, Levin argues, is the ideal that must guide the work for American domestic policy in the coming years. If the Republican Party is to be a truly conservative party, my Ethics and Public Policy center colleague writes, “it will need to think its way to an agenda of conservative reform.” He lays out his thoughts on the tax system, discretionary and entitlement spending, our health care system, and the administrative state. But there’s one part of the essay I want to tease out a bit. Among the major failings of the modern welfare state is what Yuval calls “a kind of spiritual failing.” Read More