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	Feingold and Kerry on why the US must leave Iraq by Boston Globe / Knight Ridder   October 27, 2005   “Kerry calls for Bush to begin withdrawing U.S. Troops from Iraq”, by James Kuhnhenn. (Knight Ridder)   Sen. John Kerry called Wednesday for President Bush to withdraw 20,000 U.S. troops from Iraq over the Christmas holidays.   Ultimately, Kerry said, as certain benchmarks of progress are attained in coming months, the United States should be able to bring all troops home by the end of next year. He made it clear that he thinks the U.S. troop presence is inflaming the violence.   "The insurgency will not be defeated unless our troop levels are drawn down," Kerry, D-Mass., said in a speech at Georgetown University. "To undermine the insurgency," he said, "we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks. At the first benchmark, the completion of December elections, we can start the process by reducing our forces by 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays."   In advocating troop withdrawal, Kerry appears to be trying to bridge a gulf that"s troubling the Democratic Party on what may be the biggest issue looming before national elections in 2006 and 2008. While many of his party"s base supporters passionately oppose the Iraq war, their leaders in Washington haven"t defined a specific strategy for Iraq that differs noticeably from the Bush administration"s.   Indeed, 29 Senate Democrats - including Kerry and other likely 2008 Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee - voted for the resolution authorizing force against Iraq.   Like most Democrats in Washington, Clinton and Biden have criticized the administration"s execution of policy in Iraq, but they haven"t called for withdrawal or wavered from their votes to authorize the war.   Kerry, who as the Democrats presidential candidate last year refused to commit to an exit plan from Iraq, on Wednesday joined Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., in calling for troop withdrawals. Feingold voted against the war resolution and has argued for a timetable to remove all troops by the end of 2006. He, too, is weighing a bid for the 2008 presidential nomination.   In calling for phased withdrawal, Kerry struck a middle ground between anti-war activists who want an immediate pullout and Bush"s stay-the-course policy.   "We are seeing the Democrats moving toward that position," veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick said. "Senator Kerry will be joined by others. There"s going to be a consensus around phased withdrawal."   Kerry"s speech came one day after the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached 2,000, though it had been scheduled for some time. It also came as polls show public support for Bush at an all-time low and that half of Americans now think the war was a mistake. A slim majority, 55 percent, told a mid-September Gallup poll that it is time to intensify efforts to withdraw from Iraq, while 41 percent said U.S. policy there shouldn"t change.   During his presidential campaign last year, Kerry struggled to define his Iraq policy and was haunted by his vote for the war resolution. On Wednesday, he quit defending that vote.   08 October 2005   “Feingold leads Way on Iraq War”, by Robert Kuttner. (Boston Globe)   President Bush, faced with plummeting support for the war in Iraq, keeps turning to an old standby. In another high-profile speech on Thursday, Bush warned Americans to be terrified of terror, and tried once again to tie Iraq to Al Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11.   The public isn"t buying it. A large majority - 64 to 32 in CBS polls - opposes Bush"s conduct of the war.   Yet the opposition party has been mostly missing in action. Democratic pollsters and political advisers seem to believe that with Bush failing as a war president Democrats should stay out of the way and let him sink.   There is an obsessive worry that Democrats, above all, cannot risk looking weak on defense. If the war keeps going badly and Democrats are seen as opposing it, one strategist told me, they risk getting the blame.   Senior foreign policy Democrats, such as Senators Joseph Biden, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, have been willing to criticize Bush"s decision to take the country to war on false pretenses, as well as his conduct of the war. But they have not offered a serious discussion of how to get us out.   This mentality is the opposite of leadership. The failure of the opposition party to offer a coherent alternative is one reason why support for the Democrats has not been rising as support for Bush sinks. It is why Democrats have become the butt of Jay Leno jokes as not standing for anything.   One Democrat who has offered another course - and he must be feeling very lonely - is Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. He has urged the United States to make a commitment to get all combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2006. As Feingold says, we need a coherent alternative to either "stay the course" or "cut and run." That alternative is phased withdrawal.   Feingold told a Los Angeles audience in late August: "The president and others say that if we leave, it will just be chaos in Iraq. Well, right now when you come to Iraq, you can"t even drive from the airport to the Green Zone" Even inside the supposedly secure Green Zone, Feingold recounted, he was given a helmet and flak jacket.   He added: "The president says if we leave Iraq on some kind of a timetable, our enemies will know that we are weak. I would say that without a plan to finish, our enemies will know that we have fallen into a trap." Feingold further observed that by calling for a timetable for withdrawal, he had broken what had become a disabling "taboo."   Critics of the war should be seriously exploring how a phased withdrawal would actually work. If the United States agreed to pull out, what role might NATO and the UN play? What could be expected of other states in the region?   Among many Democratic policy intellectuals unwilling to embrace a timetable for full withdrawal, the second-best is seen as a large reduction of troop levels. The idea is to pull back troops from forward positions where they are exposed to attack, and keep a smaller force garrisoned in Baghdad and other bases.   In principle, this is clever politics - some troops could come home, and casualties might be reduced. The problem is that the countryside would essentially be ceded to insurgents, who would loudly proclaim their victory over the Great Satan. Iraq would actually be pushed closer to civil war. There would be just enough American troops to continue to be a lightning rod for armed insurgency, but far too few to pacify the place. A full withdrawal would make much more sense.   The dithering Democrats may find that public opinion has passed them by. In the most recent CBS news poll, American adults, by a large margin of 59 to 36, want the United States out of Iraq as soon as possible, even if the country is not stabilized. Among Democrats, the margin rises to 73 to 24, or 3 to 1.   Feingold is no radical. He gets elected in a swing state as a man of integrity and independence. He teamed up with Republican John McCain on campaign finance reform. He voted in favor of John Roberts for chief justice.   If the war is still going on in 2008, an antiwar candidate such as Feingold would be an odds-on favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination over bigger names disabled by their own fatal caution.   (Robert Kuttne is, co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Boston Globe).
	Can China continue to grow at its incredible pace without political reform by PBS Online Newshour China / USA   Broadcast: Oct. 14, 2005. (Transcript)   Paul Solman explores whether China can continue to grow at its incredible pace without political reform.   Chinese Communism saved its greatest abuse for its own people. This was the Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, but as recently as 1989 a protest against government repression and corruption was brutally crushed, leaving a thousand or more dead in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.   And yet on the surface, today's China looks about as menacing as a suburban shopping mall. Behind the scenes, however, there still lurks Big Sibling. As others regularly document, China remains, in many ways, a police state. As for our own experience, we were forced to hire government minders to approve and accompany every shoot: Very friendly; very present.   Our Internet access and emails were monitored. In our hotel, a CNN report about the Microsoft Network censoring Chinese bloggers was - censored -- or at least, the TV went blank.   And just last month China ordered that all Internet news sites must be "directed toward serving the people and socialism." At Tsinghua University the campus intranet is censored.   PAUL SOLMAN: And we ourselves were nearly censored, when we tried to ask about such restrictions without a minder.   BYSTANDER: No, why you ask these questions?   PAUL SOLMAN: We pressed on -- but so did our bystander.   Someone reported us to the authorities and, warned not to stray, we called off a shoot with a pair of student journalists, mainly for fear of getting them into trouble.   Censorship and economics   PAUL SOLMAN: But what does a culture of repression have to do with economics? Well, we Westerners assume that political freedom and technological innovation go hand in hand. And indeed, innovation is essential. For China to keep growing, it has to evolve into a more advanced economy; has to innovate because right now it relies almost entirely on exports, says MIT's Yasheng Huang.   YASHENG HUANG: Japan is usually viewed as a country obsessed with export and foreign trade; the ratio is about 20 percent. The US is a free trading nation; the ratio is about 20 percent. China has 70 percent of its GDP tied up in foreign trade.   PAUL SOLMAN: Trade based on cheap manufacturing, cheap labor. But manufacturing is becoming more and more mechanized -- in China like everywhere else. In fact, between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with a loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in the US   So who makes and designs the machines; comes up with the new products; the intellectual property? Who innovates? Not China. Not yet, anyway. Most factories here are foreign investments, using foreign technology, making foreign-branded goods -- goods not really "made in China," -- try to think of even one Chinese brand -- but "processed in China."   Yes, it's impressive, says Professor Huang --   YASHENG HUANG: But we are not talking about the kind of economic success that we saw in Korea and in Japan.   PAUL SOLMAN: The spirit of innovation is instilled at an early age, says the head of China's biggest microchip company, which built its own more Western school for its employees. Richard Cheng.   RICHARD CHENG: Chinese students, they work hard. But the, their own educating system pretty much emphasize memorizing things, and US society from kindergarten already encourages to be innovative, to be, independent.   PAUL SOLMAN: Jim McGregor, a Wall Street Journal reporter turned businessman who's worked in China for twenty years, says the classroom control never ends.   JIM McGREGOR: It's hard to innovate and create in a society that controls the media, controls, controls thought in many ways at universities. Chinese people perform best out of China when it comes to research and development.   PAUL SOLMAN: And those who stay in China to do R&D, like these employees at the company developing Tsinghua University's technology seem oblivious -- or defensive -- about thought control.   I told them about watching the censored CNN report:   PAUL SOLMAN: So the story started and suddenly the TV was blank.   EMPLOYEE: So your view is?   PAUL SOLMAN: That somebody stopped the story --   EMPLOYEE: Not necessarily; might be a technical problem from your side.   PAUL SOLMAN: Well it was, somebody came --   EMPLOYEE: This is a report you got only from CNN journalist, so the view might not be objective enough. In fact, China is much more open than you can imagine. We are doing fine and we are making progress every single day.   Government corruption   PAUL SOLMAN: Wanting to ask about the effects of repression, I wound up debating its very existence. But why do young Chinese still look the other way?   DAVID MOSER: Sometimes the people who are the youngest, the most well-educated, the most Internet savvy are the ones who are least likely to say anything against the government.   PAUL SOLMAN: American David Moser is something of a celebrity in China, appearing on TV as a commentator, a talent show judge and occasionally, Confucius.   DAVID MOSER: Remember another one of my famous sayings..   PAUL SOLMAN: But it's only when he's off Chinese TV, and on PBS, that Moser can criticize uncritical Confucian authority worship, which also leads to a second economic problem he says: unchecked corruption.   DAVID MOSER: One of the biggest problems with the evolving Chinese economy is corruption and that if you don't have a free flow of information you don't have a free press, you really cannot address the issue of corruption, right. That's one thing.   PAUL SOLMAN: Right, because there's nobody to blow the whistle.   DAVID MOSER: There's nobody to blow the whistle, right. And what you have now is a situation where a very small group of people in the government are making very, very massive and important economic decisions with virtually no public forum for discussion or for dissent.   PAUL SOLMAN: For example, says Moser --   DAVID MOSER: You've had massive social disruption as the one-child policy creates this generation of only children. You have all these parents and grandparents retiring that no longer have the, the guaranteed cradle-to-grave benefits they were suppose to get under, under Marxism. And yet, you don't have the public forum in which this stuff can be talked about.   PAUL SOLMAN: And you can't raise that when you're on one of your shows? You can't kind of work that in, in some clever comedic way?   DAVID MOSER: Let's see. How can I put this? No.   China's younger generation   PAUL SOLMAN: So repression allows for corruption, for poor economic policy-making, and, it stultifies innovation. So why do cosmopolitan young Chinese allow it?   DAVID MOSER: They've made a bargain with the devil here because they, the young people are the ones who are most set up to benefit from the economic modernization itself, right?   It's a little distressing to talk with them sometimes, especially during the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A lot of them are not really aware that, exactly what happened and they don't care. A lot of them really don't care.   HANDEL LEE: A friend of mine described it as the anaconda in the chandelier.   PAUL SOLMAN: Handel Lee is a very successful Chinese-American businessman who's opening a new nightclub in Beijing.   HANDEL LEE: The anaconda may never come out, but it's up there. Sometimes you can feel it, and a lot of people say, oh, it's a communist. It's not communist. It's Chinese. It's authoritarianism that's very, very Chinese or Confucian.   PAUL SOLMAN: Confucian, I thought Confucianism was a good influence on societies like China, Asian societies, with respect for the elders, hard work --   HANDEL LEE: Well in Confucianism, you don't question authority. I mean, that's just unheard of in a Chinese household. Governments demand that same sort of respect.   Future economic development   PAUL SOLMAN: So where is this unique blend of Communist Party dictatorship, Confucian authoritarianism and a free market free-for-all headed? Pessimists like Labor leader Han Dongfang fear that continuing economic growth simply sustain Communist Party oppression.   HAN DONGFANG: We're basically facing the worst marriage in human history which is capitalist and communist; and the workers on one hand they have to deal with this evil critical power that make them cannot open their mouth; on the other hand you face this huge economical giant which is running around the globe.   PAUL SOLMAN: But optimists like Liu Chuanzhi, who managed the Chinese buyout of IBM's personal computer business, claim that as the economics develops, so will the politics.   LIU CHUANZHI: In China we have to first to start with the economic one and I think with that kind of person it will be reform in the political area soon. At the very beginning, it is up to one person, the leader to use his authority and his power and control the situation, but later on, when everything is okay, there's no need for the leader to do everything.   PAUL SOLMAN: There remains a third possibility, however, one that we in the US might find especially hard to swallow: that there won't be political reform in China anytime soon. Yet economic growth will continue, even to the next, more advanced stage of development, in which case, some might read a worrisome moral into the story of China's economic success: Perhaps growth can co-exist with corruption and soft authoritarianism. Maybe successful economic decisions can be made by a few at the top; and just possibly, maybe there can be innovation without representation.   Click on the link below to access further reports from PBS Reporter Paul Solman's recent tour of China. Visit the related web page
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