Life Cycle Of A Democracy
Posted By: Editor
on 7/30/2006 10:54:03 AM in
Road To Rome
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
from bondage to spiritual faith
from spiritual faith to great courage
from courage to liberty
from liberty to abundance
from abundance to selfishness
from selfishness to complacency
from complacency to apathy
from apathy to dependency
from dependency back to bondage.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)
Decline of the Roman Empire (Wikipedia)
Decline of the Roman Empire (Google)
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COMMENTS
America Looks To Government For Daily Bread
Posted
By: 
Caxy
on 6/9/2009 9:19:28 AM
$1 of every $6 of U.S. income is taxpayer funded check or voucher
Americans are becoming increasingly dependent upon the government for the money needed to live, according to a recent Bureau of Economic Analysis report showing $1 of every $6 Americans receive as income arrives in the form of a government check or voucher, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.
Government-funded social welfare benefits, including Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance and health care, accounted for 16.2 percent of personal income in the first quarter of 2009, the highest percentage since the federal government began compiling records, according to USA Today.
Weekly unemployment numbers show the economy continues to lose a net number of approximately 500,000 jobs a month, with government jobs being the only sector of the economy showing significant growth.
Private sector jobs remain under stress, with bankruptcy filings rising to as many as 6,000 a day, a pace that is expected to total 1.5 million this year.
"A massive expansion of government employment may absorb some otherwise unemployed workers, but a plan to end the recession by expanding government jobs faces some inevitable economic barriers," Corsi noted. "Granted, government workers still pay taxes, yet the paychecks for government workers come not from productive private enterprise activity, but from tax revenues."
With the Obama administration planning to run an admitted $1.7 trillion federal budget deficit in 2009, increases in government employment are funded by increases in the federal debt.
Still, Vice President Joe Biden told a forum at Pace University in New York City that the $787 billion economic stimulus bill has created 150,000 jobs around the country, according to Time magazine.
In what Corsi determined was an obvious attempt to promote the Obama administration efforts, Time magazine reported Biden addressed a number of business owners and executives who said they made hundreds of hires in the past few months. The magazine failed to indicate the event was a public relations engineered media opportunity.
Time stressed that the White House predicted the stimulus bill would create about 200,000 jobs a month for the each of the next three months, noting that this number would still be "far less than the roughly 600,000 jobs per month the economy has been shedding over the same period."
At the time the economic stimulus bill was passed, President Obama insisted the $787 billion in government spending would "create or save" jobs.
Earlier this year, President Obama flew to East Peoria, Ill., on Feb. 12 to visit the headquarters of Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment. At a press conference that day, Obama claimed that Caterpillar CEO Jim Owens planned to rehire 20,000 recently laid-off employees.
Yet, when later asked by reporters if these claims were true, Owens replied, "I think, realistically, no. The honest reality is we're going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again."
The Heritage Foundation reported that not only has Caterpillar not rehired as President Obama promised, the company has since been forced to lay off even more workers.
Red Alert's author, whose books "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command" have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, wrote, "At some point continued massive dependence on the government for social welfare benefits and for employment breaks the public piggybank."
Corsi continued, "With the Obama administration determined to continue expanding government welfare programs and government employees needed to manage the Obama welfare state, these trends seem certain to continue." (WorldNetDaily.com 6/8/09)
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Declaration In Dependence
Posted
By:
Professor
on 2/15/2008 9:47:42 AM
"The rumor is, an overworked Democrat consultant was e-mailed the Declaration of Independence under the subject line "Don't forget this was written by a top Democrat!" Too tired to recognize it, too recent a graduate of public education, and too busy going through the motions in the primary that wouldn't end, the consultant diligently set to work.
Granted, this is a mighty strange occurrence, but it has been a weird winter. It's no stranger that the Republicans and the Fed suddenly returning to old Keynesian notions of economic stimulus.
Whatever the case may be, apparently our consultant produced the following revisions:
Hey. I received your speech draft. What is your target audience, a church? At this stage, you need to aim your language to regular voters. This flowery rhetorical stuff is too overblown. It'll be over everyone's heads.
I'm going to go over this with you, adding my comments and suggestions. Let's get started:
1. When in the Course of human events
Comment: See what I mean about overblown?
Suggestion: Look, sometimes
2. it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another
Comment: Snore. Needs to be fresher. Work in the focus-group buzzwords.
Suggestion: people gotta have change, be the agents of change, and vote for someone who is gonna bring change and hope
3. and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,
Comment: Is this for the Christian Right? Way too theocratic. But I like that stuff about the earth and nature.
Suggestion: not just to us, but also to our planet, because we can't think we are above Nature.
4. a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Comment: Wordy, wordy, wordy.
Suggestion: Now is the time for us to work together for hope, for change, and for the future.
5. We hold these truths to be self-evident,
Comment: "Truths" is too strident. Soften this whole passage. You might want to start working in some talking points.
Suggestion: We feel that these things are important values that educated people all agree on, which is why we think college should be for everybody.
6. that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
Comment: Created by a Creator? Did Pat Robertson write this? And surely you don't mean that the Creator is what gives rights. Also, you shouldn't say "unalienable"; it sounds too close to "illegal aliens."
Suggestion: We feel that everyone, after being born, is entitled to some basic human rights
7. that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,
Comment: Too esoteric. Blah, blah, blah. You need to get real. This is the time to be specific.
Suggestion: such as healthcare, a living wage, honest pro sports, and a healthy planet.
8. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Comment: This isn't political science, this is politics.
Suggestion: And we know we cannot provide these things on our own. It takes a village. It takes each of us contributing together to build our national village.
9. — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Comment: Wow. Just ... wow.
Suggestion: But to do that, we need to look forward with hope and bring about change.
10. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
Comment: Delete.
11. and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Comment: That made my head hurt. Why not just talk about boiling the frog again? That's the basic idea, right?
Suggestion: Because we know that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, he will jump out. But if you put him in cool water, and slowly heat it, you can boil him.
12. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Comment: Huh?
Suggestion: And right now, we are all frogs sitting in boiling water. And we need to jump out with hope and dreams and reach for the change we need. This is for the future. This is for the children. This is for the planet itself.
I'm not reading any further. What you have written is way too long, too speechy, and too fundy-christiany.
In glancing over the rest, it seems you've listed several dozen policy disputes. That's the wrong approach. Don't forget all the single-issue voters out there. You don't want to scare off a possible supporter based on one political difference. The more policy positions you take, the greater this risk.
Remember the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid. Don't do anything to stop the voter from feeling that your candidate agrees with him. Elections aren't about policies, they're about feeling safe and happy.
Oh, and don't forget to end with "Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!" The focus groups are eating that up right now." (Jon Sanders/TownHall.com 2/15/08)
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Why Nations Rise And Fall - Part II
Posted
By:
Eagle1
on 9/23/2006 6:12:24 PM
Q & A With Ian Bremmer
Q: Why is it important that we understand what the J curve is?
A: At its heart the J curve explains how national decision makers define their interests and make their choices, and how those choices effect the rest of the world, so it's hardly surprising that you literally can't turn on the news today, or open a newspaper, without seeing something that the J curve can explain. If you really want to understand why our gas prices are so high in the summer when we all try to go on vacation, why there have been layoffs in your home town caused by U.S outsourcing, the real story behind the current conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, or how we could impact what happens next in Cuba with succession looming, you need to understand the J curve, how it works, and what it reveals. The J curve is not just for foreign policy types or business execs. It applies to what is happening on the front pages of our newspapers every day and it affects us all.
Q: Why do you feel America's Cold-War strategies hold the key to winning the war on terror?
A: During the Cold War, Western governments used every means at their disposal--military, diplomatic, cultural, economic, and social--to help open Communist-bloc states and to undermine both the Soviet supply of Communism and the demand for it from within Soviet satellites, the USSR itself, and the developing world. The former Warsaw Pact countries aren't democracies today because America imposed democracy from the outside. In fact, the U.S. never directly attacked the suppliers of Communism by invading a country under Moscow's direct control. The former Warsaw Pact states embraced democracy because they wanted democracy. The West contained the advance of Communism successfully enough and long enough for reformist forces inside the Soviet Union and Communist-bloc countries to unravel the fortress mentality of their closed societies. If such an achievement were possible in the effort to open other authoritarian states from within, the results would bring more global stability than a dozen successful military regime changes, each of which might be prohibitively expensive in terms of money and lives, and each of which might produce terrible unforeseen consequences.
Q: 9/11, and subsequent attacks in Europe, has helped create a bit of a siege mentality. That in turn has provoked calls for limits on immigration--essentially for the establishment of the U.S. and EU as "gated communities," protected by a security perimeter that keeps outsiders out. Why do you consider this an unwise strategy?
A: There's no doubt that Homeland Security needs to continue focusing on keeping terrorists out of America. The same goes for security forces in the European Union. Anyone who could have blocked the entry into the U.S. of the 9/11 hijackers would have done so without hesitation, even if it meant excluding a thousand innocent Saudis or Egyptians or Pakistanis as well. But we also need to recognize that at the end of day one of the few things that creates a stronger level of relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan and the like is that a large number of their sons have been educated in this country. They've lived with average Americans. They have a sense of what life is really like here. And some of them are going to translate those experiences into working at home for political and economic reform. It's going to be a huge problem if those countries end up with a generation of leaders whose only experience of the U.S. is what they see in the media. There are also economic implications to the notion of closing our borders to outsiders. The U.S. has always attracted the best and brightest from around the world--top engineers, software designers, scientists and the like. There's a price to pay--that others such as China will gladly take advantage of--if we allow that to stop in the interest of keeping outsiders out. And finally, if the vast majority of would-be immigrants from Muslim countries are denied access to the U.S., if the European Union demonstrates to the Muslim world that Europe is a Christians-only club, demand in the Muslim world for terrorism and Islamist authoritarianism will surely grow. Left to their own devices, the citizens of states excluded from globalization's benefits will turn to the only widely practiced method of leveling the global playing field available to them: insurgency and terror.
Q: According to the book, if the key to averting disaster in today's world is stability, shouldn't we stop pushing for political reform in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt and other countries on the left side of the J curve that are at least somewhat friendly to U.S. interests?
A: There are a number of authoritarian regimes around the world that are quite stable and yet you wouldn't want them to stay in place in the long-term because they still represent a global threat. There are other authoritarian regimes that are likely to become deeply destabilized because of the process of globalization. This is true of much of the Arab world where regimes at present have been quite stable and friendly to international interests but are not likely to persevere in their present form for another generation. Take Pakistan for example. What happens if Musharraf dies? Consolidated authoritarian regimes typically have stability invested in one leader or a small coterie of leaders. When they destabilize they destabilize very quickly. So in both those cases it behooves the international community to try to prepare for better outcomes. Not taking a decision and ignoring the problem has widespread implications for our national interests, particularly in an age of weapons of mass destruction and transnational terrorism where the damage such states can do on the way down is unprecedented in human history.
Q: What does the J curve have to say about the current situation in Lebanon?
A: As a country moves from left to right on the curve you're going to find entrenched interests that see themselves as losing. What happened in Lebanon is that the radical wing of Hezbollah saw the more moderate integrationist wing becoming part and parcel of governance in Beirut. They knew that if that were to continue Lebanese society would be better off economically but their political careers--their ability to hold sway and influence events--would be finished. After seeing Israel's response to the kidnapping of a single solder in Gaza it was clear to them that the taking of two Israeli soldiers (and the killing of at least eight others) would lead to an overwhelming Israeli military reaction and that's exactly why they did it. They were already on the back foot in Lebanon: the U.N. Security Council had passed resolutions calling for their disarmament and one of their key supporters, Syria, had been kicked out of the country. They're not on the back foot anymore.
Q: How does the J curve explain the success of sanctions in South Africa?
A: I think part of the answer is the South African government did not want to be completely isolated; they didn't want to be an authoritarian state. They were keeping a significant portion of their population out of governance but they recognized they needed international investment to survive. And they recognized if they continued what they were doing they were going to fall apart no matter what. South Africa never made it to totalitarian and was never going to get there. They knew for their survival they needed a certain level of engagement or investment, so cutting off the international community wasn't an option like it was for Cuba, Turkmenistan, Albania or North Korea.
Another interesting point to make here involves China, which has been buffeted by increasing openness. They recognize it causes them instability--and so they're trying to slow it down--but they also want to grow economically. The very same factors that make China more interesting to investors and which are helping their economy to grow are also destabilizing that regime. And they're caught. It's not yet clear whether economic growth or political tensions will eventually win out. But both are growing. China may be a lot like South Africa in that regard. It may be that they'll make it through with fundamental changes to the nature of their regime. But they may also fall apart. Or they could try to go back to being a much more authoritarian state and lose some of their economic growth. The J curve tells you what your options are. If you're on the far left of the curve you have to have isolation to keep it all together. South Africa wasn't on the far left of the curve.
Q: What do you think will most surprise readers of this book?
A: I think they'll be surprised at how global it is, and how consistently its arguments apply over space and time. These are processes that have affected nations and empires throughout history. And although I do a detailed analysis of just twelve countries, I actually write about more than 90 countries in the book.
Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book?
A: I want them to be able to see the world in a new way. When they're reading their newspapers, watching TV, listening to the radio I hope they'll see applications of the J curve around them in the world. I hope they'll say, "I get it! I hadn't thought about it in that way before but it makes sense." That's what a good book does. It shouldn't just confirm what you know it should make you think about the world in new ways. If The J Curve succeeds in doing that then I've done my job. (RealClearPolitics.com 9/15/06)
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The J Curve: A New Way To Understand Why Nations Rise And Fall
Posted
By:
Eagle1
on 9/9/2006 12:54:48 PM
Q&A With Ian Bremmer
Q: One of the central tenets of THE J CURVE is that we're not properly dealing with authoritarian regimes and their leaders because we don't truly understand how they define their interests. Can you elaborate?
A: Any leader of any government has as their first goal the stability and continuity of their own governance--their ability to continue to rule. If you're the leader of a stable democracy that means you're going to want to continue integrating your country into the global order and improving the educational level and economic well-being of your people. And you'd tend to respond to outside incentives to do keep that going. But in authoritarian countries--in the most threatening rogue states--leaders accomplish their goal of remaining in power not by educating their population or improving their country's integration into the broader global community but rather by furthering their country's isolation and keeping it there.
Every week we see headlines about President Bush, Condi Rice, and various European leaders expressing a policy toward rogue states that amounts to a variation of "If these guys don't behave we'll isolate them." Well, that makes sense if you're an adult talking to a child. But what they don't understand is that's precisely what the leaders of authoritarian countries need to stay in power. I'm not saying that the U.S. is wrong in what it's trying to do, or that the goals of the Bush administration (or the Clinton administration before it) are malevolent or wrong-headed. America has long stood for individual rights and freedoms, liberty, openness, and economic prosperity. Those are all great goals. But we're being increasingly challenged all around the globe and it's vitally important we get things right. Unfortunately the policies and incentives that we and the international community have been using to deal with these crises are not working; they're not resolving the conflicts because they're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates the leaders of countries in the developing world with which we have the greatest problems. And these problems will only get bigger as the energy crisis deepens and as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons technology increases. We ignore this misunderstanding at our peril.
Q: Why exactly are sanctions so ineffective?
A: Effective sanctions serve no purpose (and by "effective" I mean sanctions that the U.S. can get the international community to buy into, as opposed to, say, the U.S. sanctions on Iran which the international community essentially ignores.) The end result of these sanctions is that targeted countries have less access to the world. They're closed off from a certain level of economic interaction. In that kind of environment, and particularly in an authoritarian state, what typically happens is that the limited measure of goods and services that do come into the country get controlled by the regime's leader, making that person even more important. At the same time the cross-pollenization of ideas and communication and international standards outside the country have no way of getting in.
Look at Iran today. The U.S. and Europe need to recognize that they have two goals with Iran. One is to prevent them from developing nukes and the other is to change the Iranian regime. The first goal may be impossible to attain. And to the extent that it is possible, limited international inspections as well as constraints--with Russian cooperation--on selling the Iranians nuclear relevant goods and technologies may potentially be effective. As to the second goal, the best way to do that is to globalize the country. Wire it. Invest more in it. Allow more travel to Tehran and more Iranians to travel to other places. Encourage more foreign direct investment into the country. Do everything you can to increase the capacity for the average Iranian to be aware of how the developed world functions. The reason North Korea continues to be run by a ruthless dictator is that he has hermetically sealed his country off. There's essentially no way into that country, no defectors, no information getting in or out. The average North Korean doesn't have a clue as to what things are like in the out side world. Similarly, there's a reason why the world's longest serving head of state (at least until the recent transfer of power) is in Cuba. And a large part of the reason is U.S. sanctions. I want to emphasize, once again, it's not because the U.S. is being malevolent or because our goals are somehow impure. The point is not that the U.S. wants to do the wrong thing with Cuba, but rather that the mechanism we're using to implement our goals is not actually punishing Castro but rather helping him maintain his grip on power.
Q: Why do you say a descent toward instability in Saudi Arabia is virtually inevitable?
A: Saudi Arabia is facing a demographic disaster. With a high birthrate and virtually no family planning its population is growing at a radical rate. And while the country's energy resources are enormous its economy has never really diversified beyond the energy industry. That's not changing anytime soon. The way they've been able to hold the country together so far has been by using that oil money for unprecedented amounts of state sponsored patronage. This ensures the loyalty and dependence of local leaders, creates temporary make-work projects to appease the angry unemployed, and buys off the regime's critics. But over time per capita income has declined and a significant percentage of the population lives below the poverty line.
The country is slowly moving in the direction of becoming a normal developed state. They're trying to join the World Trade Organization, improve education, improve the political process, and bring women into the workplace. But these moves will also sow the seeds of instability. Saudi Arabia has always functioned with an iron hand. Dissent was never tolerated. (You get the benefit but you also don't question it.) The more you provide education and open the country to the global economy--things that will allow the Saudis to survive long term--the more you also free the government's grip on dissent. That's a real problem in a country where per capita income is slipping, where the population of young people is growing, where there are no jobs for them, and where their only opportunities to find a place for themselves are in Wahhabi-controlled schools and mosques run by men well armed with money and influence who are at war with the modern world. It's a sure-fire recipe for instability.
Q: What is the lesson of the J curve as far as Iraq is concerned?
A: U.S. policymakers should never have had to choose between the best of three bad options: counterproductive sanctions, capitulation, or a costly war that left U.S. troops to play a principal role in rebuilding Iraq's stability. The lesson of the J curve is that a process of creating opportunities for ordinary Iraqis to profit from access to the resources of the outside world would have destabilized Saddam at less cost to both the Iraqi people and to the United States. To be fair, it's not realistic to believe George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton could have made an effective political case for punishing Saddam by extending Iraq an invitation to join the WTO. Nonetheless, policies that provided resources and created opportunities for Iraqis to interact as fully as possible with the outside world and with one another might have forced Saddam to contend with pressures for change from within Iraq. U.S. policies designed to isolate North Korea and Cuba have led to the same false choice: capitulation or costly confrontation.
Q: Let's stipulate that national security arguments merited the removal of Saddam Hussein immediately and didn't afford the U.S. the time to engage Iraq in a longer-term approach to destabilize Hussein's regime. What insight does the J Curve give us that would have helped the U.S. manage the post-Saddam Iraq? What should the Bush administration have done differently after Hussein's government fell?
A: Iraq basically fell off the curve once Hussein was removed. There was suddenly a power vacuum, a complete absence of governance. The question for the Bush administration would be how to create the conditions where political institutions, representative of the Iraqi people, could take root. Starting effectively from scratch, in a territory without a single collective sense of nation, that's a Herculean task - but one that clearly was going to take a very long time - a matter of a decade or more. So the Bush administration would have needed to think along that time scale from the beginning, in terms of international funding for reconstruction; responsibility for local and central governance; and security measures. The J curve tells you that the move up the right of the curve, even in propitious conditions, is a long process. The U.S. is learning the lesson of that in Iraq today.
Q: What is the connection you draw in the book between the war on terror and the war on drugs?
A: America's war on drugs has never yielded the hoped-for results because the clear majority of resources devoted to winning it have been focused on combating the supply of drugs--at the expense of efforts to lower demand (through treatment or rehabilitation.) Seventy-five percent of the $40 billion spent on the drug war over the past two decades has gone to destroying crops, capturing or killing cartel members, and locking up dealers. But the suppliers of drugs can always find new vendors to peddle their wares. Why? Because there is demand. And where there's demand there'll always be supply. It is precisely on this supply-side principle that the U.S. risks losing the war on terror. There is demand for terrorism in parts of the Muslim world. Unfortunately there are also plenty of undereducated, underemployed, angry young Muslims willing to supply that demand--willing to surrender their lives in exchange for an outlet for their anger and a sense of pride and purpose. These men have little stake in the success of their nations. They have little hope of lawfully altering their fates. If this or that Al Qaeda captain is captured or killed, a young Muslim looking for a war will find another officer to enlist him. Just as a drug-dealer can always find a new street corner on which to pedal his product, bin Laden moved from Saudi Arabia to Sudan to Afghanistan. And when he's finally captured or killed, those who demand a champion to lead the terrorist jihad will create a new leader. Clearly the real war that has to be fought is the battle to decrease the demand.
Unfortunately the current strategy for both the war on drugs and the war on terror assumes that the devotion of overwhelming resources to a steady stream of high-profile victories over the suppliers of drugs or terrorism is the only way to show tangible, consistent progress: high-profile arrests, infrastructure destroyed, "bad guys" slain. The patient methodical work of reducing demand for drugs and terrorism doesn't make the men who wage the war any more popular with their electorates. Demand-side strategy has therefore been neglected. But it is precisely that effort, combined with the continuation of an aggressive strategy to bring to justice the purveyors of drugs and terrorism that will bring change from within the troubled societies that produce them.
Q: Isn't that change of "troubled societies" exactly what the Bush administration's policy in the Mideast hopes to achieve? And isn't the increase in instability across the region a natural by-product of moving from the left to the right side of the J Curve?
A: The increase of instability in the Middle East is precisely the natural by-product of moving from the left to the right side of the J curve. But that doesn't mean the states will get there.
If the present regimes tumble as a consequence of existing demands and frustrations, unleashed by a combination of political reforms and globalization, but don't have the education or the economic wherewithal to build representative institutions, the regimes that replace them will push their countries right back to the right. This is what came from elections in Algeria. It is what would likely come from free elections, were they held, in Saudi Arabia today.
Q: Does that mean that the "change" we seek always has to come from "within" a society to be successful, and if so, does that rule out aggressive intervention in trying to spur the desired change the U.S. seeks, that in turn will work to reduce the "demand" for terrorism?
A: Shocks to a system can come from anywhere. In today's world, with information and people streaming across borders, it's increasingly difficult to separate out purely domestic from international influences. Radio Free Liberty, among many other organizations, accomplished that in the cold war, for example. The bolder and more obvious the shock comes from outside the system, the more the danger of domestic backlash, and thinking about military intervention should keep that in mind. (RealCleatPolitices.com 9/7/06)
Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy. His new book, "The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall"
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