Mitt Romney

Finally, Michigan has provided the primary season with its first repeat winners: Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. Clinton took the Democratic primary by default.
A political scab, Hillary broke the boycott of the Democratic primary, making herself the only active candidate (other than Dennis Kucinich, who is desperate to finally break into double digits--in Roman numerals) on the ballot, which, naturally, is how she likes it.
But does anyone care? Not the Michigan voters, apparently, who stayed home in droves.
Michigan used to be one of the power states, where labor organizers and industrial titans squared off face-to-face, a state of energized campuses, militant blacks and backwoods militia-types in the Manistee country.
Now it is an electoral afterthought, given a fraction of the attention devoted to the results from tiny New Hampshire or rural Iowa, even by its own beleaguered residents. When did it shrivel so?
For his desperately-needed win, Romney mined the fading allure of his father, former Governor George Romney, who retains a faint appeal with the aging populace of the state.
But the comparison between father and son didn’t favor Mitt. George possessed a certain Midwestern grit.
In his older years, his weathered face could have passed for a labor titan like John L. Lewis--not to mention a striking resemblance to Leonid Brezhnev.
With his comic book superhero hair and perfect teeth, Mitt Romney seems like a ready-made candidate for a political version of American Idol.
But his political persona surely must have been off-putting to the Michigan electorate. Romney the Younger advertises himself as a political CEO, a kind of efficiency expert to trim down Washington.
Michigan has seen its share of those characters. Every time a new CEO arrived in Detroit, Flint or Grand Rapids, jobs were slashed, tens of thousands put on the streets in the name of a more efficient operation. The mindless pursuit of the bottom line has inflicted a heavy human toll on the people of Michigan.
A vote for Romney reflected a kind of self-abuse in the name of nostalgia.
Of course, Michigan has done that before as well.
The state was a bastion of the Reagan Democrats, working-class men who bolted the Democratic Party and fled the dictates of their union bosses.
Reagan lured them into his camp with promises of muscular militarism, race-baiting and hymns to the fetus. The Gipper repaid them with layoffs, busted strikes and off-shoring of factories.
If the vitality of Michigan’s primary seems diminished, it only reflects the shrinking status of the state itself: factories shuttered, farms on the ropes, homes up for foreclosure, urban centers mired in chronic immiseration.
The state is locked in a deep recession with no end in sight. Michigan’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, while home heating fuel costs in this frozen state are 20 percent higher than last year.
The Great Lakes are dwindling, drained by water-mining and global warming. The Wolverine football team was humiliated at home in front of 100,000 Michigan fans by a small college from the Appalachians. It’s been a bad year in a bad decade.
As for John McCain, he began his primary day in Michigan with a campaign stop at a funeral parlor.
It was a presage of things to come. McCain, briefly reinflated out of New Hampshire, replaced Obama for a week as the press corps’ dark horse candidate.
He won Michigan in 2000, but fell decisively to Romney this time round. With good reason, too.
The senator’s message is grim: 100 years of war, unfettered free trade, belt-tightening and austerity for the poor and working people and tax breaks for the super-rich. And he is an unpleasant messenger, self-righteous, peevish and pedantic.
He crackles with hubris when he wins and oozes self-pity when he loses. The former pilot has also proven to have a quick finger for the ejector seat button when he encounters the faintest signs of incoming flak.
The rough-and-tumble South Carolina primary could once again prove his Waterloo or Khe Sanh, as the case may be.
The only Republican capable of speaking to Michigan’s battered working class was Mike Huckabee.
His campaign has featured a soft-core economic populism that widened his appeal in Iowa beyond the claques of evangelicals. Huckabee is alone among the Republican candidates in attacking the free-trade pacts, such as NAFTA and GATT, that have ravaged the factory towns of the Midwest.
Perhaps unwisely, Huckabee largely bypassed Michigan to concentrate on South Carolina. The man from Arkansas wants to see McCain, Romney and Giuliani locked in fierce battle across the northern primary states, until they rend each other senseless like the deranged combatants in Joseph Conrad’s story “The Duel.“
Jeffrey St. Clair
COUNTERPUNCH.COM

The Pentagon’s announcement on Tuesday (Jan. 15) that it is dispatching about 3,200 US Marine Corps to Afghanistan underlines both Washington’s mounting concern about the strength of the Taliban insurgency and the growing sense that the central front in its nearly six-and-a-half-year-old “war on terror“ has moved back to its South Asian roots.
The deployment, which will take place over the next three months, will bring the total number of US troops in Afghanistan to a record level of about 30,000--still significantly less than the 160,000 in Iraq but nonetheless an implicit admission that US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces have not been able to subdue the largely Pashtun rebels.
Indeed, on the eve of the Pentagon’s announcement, a suicide bomber penetrated a luxury hotel in the capital Kabul, setting off a blast that killed more than half a dozen people, including a US citizen and a Norwegian reporter covering the visit of his country’s foreign minister, in what the New York Times called “one of the most brazen assaults by the Taliban in the heavily protected heart of the Afghan capital ...“
Washington hopes that the additional troops will help both stabilize Afghanistan and shame its reluctant NATO allies into sending more troops to the same end.
Of the 3,200 new troops, about 1,000 will be used for training the Afghan army, and the rest will be deployed to southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban alongside British, Australian, Dutch and Canadian troops, who have taken record casualties during the past year.
Commandant General James Conway first pitched the plan last year after hostilities in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province in Iraq calmed down, saying marines on the ground there could either return home or “stay plugged into the fight“ and head to Afghanistan.
Marines with a “more kinetic bent“, Conway said, are needed to take the fight to the enemy.
But trend lines show that in an Afghan-style counter-insurgency, strength in numbers may not apply.
In fact, successive troop buildups since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001 have been matched by a steady increase in insurgent-related violence.
Overall, attacks increased from nine in 2002 to 103 last year, according to the Rand Corporation, and some 300 foreign troops have died in the past two years.
While north and west of Afghanistan are today relatively safe, the Pashtun-dominated southern and eastern provinces are much worse.
Six years on it’s understood that the crucial window to inject development and win over disillusioned Pasthuns when the Taliban fled was diverted by the Iraq war.
According to the Congressional Research Service, Washington has spent about US$3.4 billion a year on reconstruction, or less than half of what went to Iraq.
The aid that has trickled into Afghanistan has gone almost wholesale towards military expenditures.
But the integrated “light footprint“ strategy used so effectively to topple the Taliban, in which special forces on horseback and small ground units reinforced Northern Alliance irregulars, was replaced by blast-walled compounds and heavy armor vehicles.
Security efforts stood to receive a big shot in the arm from the US Congress’ latest military spending package, which exceeded $10 billion--a massive upgrade from years past. Yet about 80% of the total was earmarked for military purposes versus just 20% for reconstruction.
This makes little sense in an agrarian country where infrastructure has been shattered by 30 years of war.
Instead of punishing the Taliban, Western military technology has often backfired to strengthen their cause.
Errant air strikes have killed hundreds of civilians and poisoned public faith in a weak central government.
The Taliban, meanwhile, never miss a chance to capitalize on the mistakes of the foreign powers they frame as occupiers.
Take Helmand province, home to most of the country’s booming opium industry that accounts for 92% of the global market. Taliban activity was minimal until the British deployed 4,000 troops there last year; now there are 7,000 troops and it has become a hotbed of the insurgency, made worse by increased drug production, street crime and corruption.
ATIMES.COM

Although Turkey’s relationship with the EU is far from ideal, Ankara is at least on the right side of the door.
Ukraine, on the other hand, is on the wrong side trying to get in.
Even with all the ups and downs Ukraine would readily step into Turkey’s shoes--to be a candidate country, negotiating membership and therefore one step closer to joining the EU.
However, the EU continues to pour cold water on Ukraine’s dreams.
For the past 15 years, Ukraine has been at the crossroads of East and West, torn between developing closer ties with the US, NATO and the EU to the West and with strong cultural, historical and economic ties with Russia to the East.
Kiev has seen close neighbors join the EU while it has remained in a sort of limbo. It has endured the corrupt totalitarian tendencies of former President Leonard Kuchma and has faced disappointment over the failure of the Orange Revolution in 2004.
As a result Ukraine has made slow progress with its Euro-Atlantic ambitions.
In particular the EU has always linked Ukraine’s progress to reform and stability.
Now there is a new window of opportunity.
If the recently elected coalition government of Yulia Tymoshenko can maintain political stability and unity for the short term (until the 2009 presidential elections) and medium term (until the next parliamentary elections in 2012), the next five years could constitute an important breakthrough in Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policy, including its integration into the full range of transatlantic and European structures.
Ukraine should have every right to further integrate into the EU--it is a democratic European country and is some way to meeting the EU criteria for aspirant members.
Indeed Ukraine is in many ways more advanced now than Turkey ever was prior to receiving candidate country status.
This is particularly true in respect to human rights, the rule of law, minority rights and freedom of expression.
Nevertheless the EU continues to see Ukraine as “far away“ from being ready. Rather, Ukraine must be content to be part of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). The ENP--which is enlargement neutral--was created in 2003 to prevent those countries which were not included in the 2004 enlargement from feeling the EU had created a new Iron Curtain.
Although originally for the countries of Eastern Europe, the policy evolved to include the countries of North Africa, many from the Middle East and the southern Caucasus.
As an integral part of Europe, Ukraine should not be included in a policy that includes the likes of Morocco, Tunisia and Syria.
Through an ENP “Action Plan,“ Ukraine carries out political and economic reforms to bring it closer to EU standards and values. The reforms are almost identical to those for meeting the Copenhagen criteria--only there are no membership negotiations at the end. Ukraine and the EU are now negotiating an enhanced agreement, but member states are determined that it should not include any type of membership perspective.
There are clearly double standards in the EU’s policy toward Ukraine.
Firstly, the fact that Ukraine was seen as too undemocratic to make progress with the EU even though many neighbors were, even though these countries had deeply entrenched post-communist elites, corruption and weak democratic reformers.
A second double standard was the offer made to the countries of the western Balkans of Stabilization and Association Agreements (SAA) which represent a first step towards membership.
None of the countries concerned had proven their commitment to reform. Rather it was a purely geostrategic move by the EU in
order to prevent more bloodshed and war in its back yard.
TODAYSZAMAN.COM