MORSi ROAStS IRAN - Kuwait Times

FRIDAY, AUGUST 31, 2012
Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan delivers the keynote address during the third day of the 2012
Republican national Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum Wednesday in Tampa, Florida. — AFP
Ryan picks up bullhorn
By Andy Sullivan
Paul Ryan built his reputation as a
fearless wonk who wasn’t afraid
to put specific numbers on his
small-government ideals. Now that he
is the Republican Party’s vice presidential
nominee, the devil lies in the
details. In a speech that marked his
ascension onto the national stage,
Ryan spelled out his conservative
vision in the broad brush strokes of the
presidential campaign, rather than the
pointillistic data sets of the House of
Representatives Budget Committee.
But the core message at the
Republican National Convention was
the same. Ryan said he and his boss,
Republican presidential nominee Mitt
Romney, must place the federal government
on a crash diet and overhaul
popular benefit programs in order to
avoid a European-style debt crisis.
“The choice is whether to put hard
limits on economic growth or hard
limits on the size of government, and
we choose to limit government,” Ryan
said.
The take-no-prisoners stance has
made Ryan a hero to conservatives,
but it carries risks with a broader electorate.
While Americans may back the
idea of spending cuts in the abstract,
they tend to balk when presented
with specifics. Polls show that more
voters prefer keeping the Medicare
health insurance plan for the elderly in
place, rather than overhauling it as
Ryan proposes. “As rhetoric, it was an
excellent speech in going over those
broad principles. Likewise as rhetoric,
it glossed over the hard realities of
how you would achieve what he was
talking about,” said Charles Franklin, a
professor at Marquette Law School in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then,
that Ryan used personal stories to
illustrate complex economic issues:
the shuttered General Motors plant in
his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin,
the small business his mother started
at age 50, and the importance of
Medicare to his mother, who smiled
from the audience. There were sins of
omission. Ryan slammed Obama for
ignoring a presidential debt panel, but
failed to note that he himself served
on the panel and voted against its
findings. He also failed to mention that
the GM plant closed before Obama
took office.
Left unsaid were the tradeoffs Ryan
and Romney would make in order to
scale back the government to the level
they envision. “He didn’t say what
the tough choices are,” said Steven
Schier, a political science professor at
Carleton College in Northfield,
Minnesota. “You get into that in a convention
speech, you lose the crowd,
you lose the TV audience.” As a vice
presidential candidate, Ryan now
must play second fiddle to a man who
has often been reluctant to provide
details of his own economic policies.
Romney has declined to say which tax
loopholes he would close in order to
lower income tax rates by 20 percent,
and his own proposal for Medicare
reforms lacks the specifics that would
allow independent experts to determine
how much they would cost taxpayers
and beneficiaries.
Democrats, of course, are happy to
fill in the blanks as they argue that
Romney and Ryan would gut programs
that benefit the middle class
and the poor in order to cut taxes for
the wealthy.
With Ryan’s long voting record in
Congress and several years of detailed
budget proposals, they have plenty of
material to work with. Though Ryan is
revered in Washington for his deep
knowledge of fiscal policy, his skills as
a salesman may be underappreciated.
Only eight of his fellow Republicans in
the House of Representatives backed
his plan to overhaul the Medicare prescription
drug program when he
introduced it in 2008.
Within three years, nearly all of
them supported it. He has won reelection
in his Democratic-leaning district
by wide margins. And he sounded
like he was ready for his biggest
sales job yet. “Ladies and gentlemen,
our nation needs this debate,” he said.
“We want this debate. We will win this
debate.” — Reuters
By Lawrence Bartlett
Opinion
Afghanistan insider
attacks roil NATO
The scale of insider attacks by Afghan troops against
their NATO allies is unprecedented in modern warfare
and threatens to derail the West’s carefully laid
withdrawal plans, analysts say. August has been the
worst month for so-called green-on-blue attacks in
Afghanistan in more than 10 years of war, with nearly
one in three international coalition deaths caused by
Afghan allies. Most of the dead are Americans, but the
latest to die were three Australian troops killed by a
member of the Afghan security forces in southern
Uruzgan province on Wednesday.
The assaults have spiked this year, with more than 30
incidents claiming the lives of 45 coalition troops, making
up about 14 percent of the overall death toll in the
war for 2012. Analysts and officers agree that no other
modern war, including those in Vietnam and Iraq, has
seen so many cases of allies turning their weapons on
international troops, but wrestle with the reasons for the
phenomenon. Taleban insurgents claim responsibility
for many of the attacks, saying their fighters have infiltrated
the Afghan army and police, but NATO says the
majority of the incidents are due to cultural differences
and personal animosities.
The spike in attacks has alarmed the US-led NATO
force to the extent that all soldiers have been ordered to
be armed and ready to fire at any time, even within their
tightly protected bases. That level of distrust undermines
NATO’s plans to work increasingly closely with
Afghan forces as they prepare to hand over responsibility
for security ahead of the withdrawal of their 130,000
troops by the end of 2014. “I believe (the scale of the
insider attacks) is unprecedented in the history of war,”
Fabrizio Foschini of the Afghanistan Analysts Network
told AFP. “It is one of the developments that ISAF is most
concerned about because it represents both a military
setback on the ground and it conveys a very negative
perception to home public opinion.”
Foschini agrees with NATO’s assessment that most
attacks are due to cultural differences, and points out
that many Afghans say they got on better with Russian
soldiers during the Soviet Union’s 10-year occupation in
the 1980s. The religious divide is also part of the picture,
Foschini says, and some observers have linked the
increase in attacks to the burning of Qurans at a US military
base in February this year. But “the polarisation
between who is a foreigner and who is an Afghan is
becoming bigger because of the prolonged war and
prolonged foreign presence, which is raising some hostility”,
he says.
Apart from the Quran burning, the image of US
troops has taken a battering this year through pictures
and videos showing soldiers abusing the bodies of the
dead and a massacre of civilians by a rogue American
trooper. Nick Mills, an associate professor of journalism
at Boston University who served as a combat photographer
for the US Army in Vietnam, also said he believed
the green-on-blue attacks “have no parallel in recent
military history”. “The Afghans know that once the
Western troops leave, they are going to have to choose
sides - the Kabul government or the Taleban - and the
Kabul government has little respect or credibility,” he
told AFP. NATO has tried to play down the importance of
the attacks, pointing out that they are carried out by a
tiny proportion of the Afghan forces that work with the
International Security Assistance Force. But US Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta has acknowledged that he is
“very concerned” about the attacks and the impact they
are having on cooperation with Afghan allies. Afghan
opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign
minister and potential presidential candidate in 2014
elections, also pointed to problems within the government
as a reason for the attacks.
Abdullah takes President Hamid Karzai to task for
what he calls his “vague” message in which he regularly
calls the Taleban “brothers”, urging them to talk peace,
and criticises the United States. “Sometimes you don’t
know who he calls the enemy - the Taleban or the
Americans,” Abdullah said. — AFP