Everybody has a plan to save the Middle East. That guy with the bumper sticker does. Most of your friends do. Neocons have a plan. Peaceniks have a plan. Likudniks have a plan. The Bush Administration certainly thinks it has one, and we’re told the Democrats are working on theirs. Tom Clancy imagined deploying the Vatican’s Swiss Guards to keep peace on the Temple Mount. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis told the Contra Costa Times in July that he knew how to fix the situation—but he kept the details to himself. The policy debate resembles my family’s Thanksgiving dinner conversation after I knock a glass of red wine onto my mother’s white tablecloth: everybody has an idea about how to fix it, everybody is eager to share their thoughts, many ideas sound superficially plausible, and it’s difficult to distinguish among competing solutions.

What we lack in the Middle East are not policy alternatives. The region lacks a policy process—a security framework that helps regional powers eliminate bad policy alternatives and guides them toward shared goals.

Experts here, in Europe, and in the region generally agree on the rough outlines of a durable regional peace: American redeployment from Iraq sooner rather than later, a “two-state solution” between Israel and a democratic and developing Palestine, the persistent disruption of terrorist groups, a commitment to Iraq’s current borders with increased federalism and oil revenue sharing among its factions, the implementation of the agenda set forth in the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, improved governance, allowing Iran nuclear energy but prohibiting nuclear weapons, negotiated settlement of the many border disputes, peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, and the eventual integration of Arab states into global economic structures.

But how do we get there from here? And how do we get there with extremists on all sides working to prevent such a pragmatic arrangement?

The 30-year political transformation in eastern Europe may offer some lessons. In the mid-1970s, mutually suspicious and hostile adversaries agreed on a security framework that set in motion events that helped end the Cold War. The so-called Helsinki Process began as a series of negotiations over several years that eased the tension between the Soviet bloc and the west, and enshrined certain fundamental principals: the inviolability of borders, the principle of non-violent resolution of disputes, non-interference in domestic affairs, and—most importantly—a commitment to human rights. At the time, neoconservatives blasted this framework as capitulation to Soviet interests and sanction of the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Yet by building this basic security framework into East-West dealings, the Helsinki Process achieved significant results:

First, negotiations over the Helsinki Accords got the Soviet Bloc on record supporting human rights. Their flagrant hypocrisy immediately mobilized dissident movements in Eastern Europe.

Second, engaging the Soviets and addressing our shared security concerns eased pressure on the arms race, added stability to the balance of power, and gave the American military needed time to recover from the Vietnam War and the end of the draft.

Third, restoring America’s image as a pragmatic defender of human rights in the 1970s gave the US and President Reagan far greater moral authority to challenge Soviet policy in the 1980s.

Finally, the Helsinki Process established a little-known organization that was ready and able to help former communist regimes consolidate their incipient democracies in the 1990s: the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE has a long and important menu of responsibilities, or one whose competencies are so desperately needed in the Middle East: managing state disintegration, disarming and demobilizing militias, helping prevent nuclear proliferation, settling border disputes, cooling ethnic strife. The OSCE also provides election monitors and training for media, public administration, democratic policing, and the rule of law.

Despite some high profile setbacks, the Helsinki Process established a security framework—from Kosovo to Estonia, and Warsaw to Baku—that is trending toward peace, democracy, stability, and prosperity.

We need a similar policy framework in the Middle East today. Commencing a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Helsinki Process will not solve terrorism, democratize the region, end the Iraqi civil war, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or prevent Iran from obtaining the bomb. Bargains would have to be struck with authoritarian regimes we find dangerous (Iran, for instance) in order to get them to the negotiating table, just as we did with the Soviets in the 1970s. Worse yet, this process may take 20 years to bear fruit.

But such a process will empower democrats working to reform their governments. It will undermine the jihadist, anti-Western rhetoric, and could siphon away potential recruits. It may ease the tension between Israel and its Arab neighbors. This process will certainly build some inertia toward our long-term objectives in the Middle East. We could do a lot worse.

Ford announced yesterday that they would offer buyouts to many of their employees, as part of a massive restructuring to get the company back to profitability.  Malcolm Gladwell and others have argued that private health care and pension costs are hamstringing Big Business and Big Manufacturing here in the US, compared to foreign companies who benefit from their home countries' public systems.

It looks like the UAW has signed off on Ford's buyout program, as they did with GM's earlier.  This approval is probably necessary for Ford to move forward with its reform.

My question is (for Chris Finn perhaps):  why don't the unions demand an unequivocal statement from Ford that they would support a more robust public health care system?  The details probably wouldn't be too important:
"Ford and other flagship American companies are under great financial stress from the lack of a public health care and pension systems.  We compete with foreign firms that enjoy the freedom to focus on their core business, rather than benefit management.  Ford and the UAW stand together and urge Washington to take this incredible burden off of American business and help make American firms competetive in the globalized economy."  Yadda Yadda.

Just getting them on the record (even if Ford didn't back it with campaign contributions or political support) might change the health care debate's frame to "business competetiveness" or "pro-business".  Frames which probably increase the liklihood of enactment of a comprehensive reform program.

So, why don't the UAW and other unions make this a plank in any buyout (and, perhaps, collective bargaining) agreements?  Would they have to trade that much for such a statement?

If we’re lucky, the death of Slobodan Milosevic will bring renewed American and European focus on the fate of the western Balkans, which is still recovering from the dictator’s deadly legacy. After 10 years of battlefield defeats, genocide, repression, and warlordism, Serbians overthrew the Butcher of the Balkans amid street protests in 2001. Milosevic died humiliated in a Dutch prison, on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The region faces still lingering ethnic and religious tension; and any final resolution of the region’s political conflict is still some ways off.

Cuts to student aid passed by Congress in February has created a storm of backlash. The Budget Reconciliation Act of 2005 barely passed due to concerns about how it achieved $39 billion in federal savings. In addition to cutting Medicaid and Medicare, students and parents will face $12 billion more in student aid costs.

Stafford Student loans will go from variable rates to a 6.8% fixed rate, the highest rate since 2001. PLUS Parent loans will go to 8.5%. The Act also reduces incentives for lenders.

Perhaps most unpopular is that the federal savings from the Act will go to deficit reduction. With the tax cuts on the books, it lends the appearance of students and parents being asked to pay for tax cuts to the rrich. Not usually a winning proposition.

Attempts to operate intelligence gathering and sharing systems in obscurity put the entire homeland security mission at risk. Since 9/11, several scandals have suggested that public backlash can scotch programs. The solution is not to tighten the secrecy around these programs: almost nothing the government does is kept secret for long. Rather, federal and state officials must bring legislators, civil liberties groups, and the public into a wide-ranging political discourse on the appropriate level of domestic surveillance in a time of terrorism. Robust public debate, legislative oversight, and checks on agents will give our domestic intelligence efforts—which most observers consider necessary—a certain level of trust and resiliency to weather the snafus inevitable with new or newly-tasked bureaucracies.

The Iraqi election results were released yesterday, more than a month after the election itself, and with early objections from Sunni groups unaddressed (at least publicly). While the Shia bloc did not obtain an outright majority, and will therefore have to govern in a coalition government or poach Assemblymembers from other parties, the Prime Minister will almost surely be a religiously leaning Shiite. Sunni slates won 55 seats; Kurdish parties 58. Two semi-surprises: former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's secular coalition won only 25 seats. Allawi, you will remember, was the most clearly American-backed candidate.

The second semi-surprise is that Ahmed Chalabi, whom some administration figures proposed as the "strongman" Iraq needed after the US invasion, and his list received exactly ZERO seats in the new Iraqi assembly.

The New York Times has one of their neat interactive graphics here.

Why confusing?