Bernd Debusmann

The West worries too much about the prospect of Iran going nuclear. If it did get the bomb, the Middle East would probably become a more stable region. So says Kenneth Waltz, a veteran scholar, in an essay in one of America’s most influential magazines.

“Why Iran Should get the Bomb,” says the headline in Foreign Affairs, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York think tank. “Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability.”

The author is a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. His contrarian essay coincides with yet another unsuccessful round of negotiations between Iran and the so-called P5+1 group of countries who insist the government in Tehran must do more to prove that its nuclear program is peaceful, as it claims, rather than intended to build weapons.

The talks this week in Moscow brought Iranian negotiators together with officials from the United States, China, Russia, France, Britain and Germany. The negotiations produced no breakthrough and no sign of compromise. New U.S. and European sanctions, including a ban on Iranian oil imports, are coming into force next month. Whether they will be more likely to make Iran bow to Western demands than previous turns of the sanctions screw is open to doubt. What next?

“Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff,” Waltz writes. “In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability in the Middle East.”

He dismisses U.S. and Israeli warnings that a nuclear Iran would be a uniquely terrifying prospect. “Such language is typical of major powers, which have historically gotten riled up whenever another country has begun to develop a nuclear weapon of its own. Yet so far, every time another country has managed to shoulder its way into the nuclear club, the other members…decided to live with it.”

What’s more, “by reducing imbalances in military power, new nuclear states generally produce more regional and international stability, not less.” Cases in point: China, which became less bellicose after becoming a nuclear power in 1964; Pakistan and India, which signed a treaty agreeing not to target each other’s nuclear facilities and have kept the peace since then.

In the Middle East, according to this view, Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal has produced an imbalance in power that is “unsustainable in the long term What is surprising in the Israeli case is that it has taken so long for a potential balancer to emerge.”

If Iran eventually went nuclear, the argument goes, Israel and Iran would deter each other the same way nuclear powers elsewhere have deterred each other – viz the United States and the Soviet Union or India and Pakistan.

Since 1945, when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, no country with nuclear weapons has used them.

NUCLEAR IRAN INEVITABLE?

It’s not difficult to find officials in Washington who think that a nuclear Iran is inevitable but decline to say so on the record because President Barack Obama has declared, repeatedly, that an Iranian bomb would be unacceptable and that containment of a nuclear Iran was not an option for his administration.

While views such as Waltz’s are not often aired in public in the U.S., experts both inside and outside the government have long pondered what would happen “the day after.” That could mean the day after Iran reached nuclear “breakout” – the ability to make a bomb at short notice – or the day after it tested a bomb.

All this is based on an unproven assumption: that Iran’s theocratic rulers have decided to build nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence agencies admit they don’t know.

Think tanks both in the United States and Israel have run “day after” simulations that assumed what both countries have pledged to prevent – Iran succeeding in making a bomb despite ever tighter sanctions, sabotage of nuclear installations and assassinations of scientists. One of the questions addressed in such war games is the extent to which nuclear weapons would shield Iran from attack.

A recent simulation run by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies had the following scenario: Iran conducts an underground nuclear test in January 2013, after expelling inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and after a series of provocative maneouvres by Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval vessels and aircraft against forces of the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

“In our assessment,” wrote the authors of the report on the exercise, Yoel Guzanski and Yonathan Lerner, ” the actual likelihood of an attack on Iran once Iran is in possession of proven nuclear capability decreases dramatically, although (it is) not entirely eliminated.”

That sounds in synch with Waltz’s thesis that Israel and Iran would deter each other. Whether that would bring stability to the perpetually unstable Middle East is another matter.

The 2012 global performance scorecard is in and the grade for Barack Obama is “failed to meet expectations.”

To varying degrees, that’s the view in each and every of 20 foreign countries — some close U.S. allies, some not – whose citizens were polled for the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a widely-respected survey that has tracked the standing of the United States, its president, and assorted foreign leaders every year for the past decade. The Washington-based Pew Research Center polled more than 26,000 people.

Though views of Obama are not as rosy as they were in 2009, when he took office after a campaign that promised “hope and change,” the U.S. president’s star is still shining so bright in 11 countries that sizeable majorities in seven and pluralities in another four would like to see him re-elected for a second term in November.

So where did Obama fall short of expectations so high that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize just nine months into office?

A comparison of the 2009 and 2012 Pew surveys provides answers: In 2009, millions around the world thought the president was intent on making a decisive break with the policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose penchant for unilateral actions made him deeply unpopular in large parts of the world.

Obama was expected to open a new chapter of multilateralism, take a fair approach on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and energetically push policies addressing climate change. His soaring pre-election rhetoric obviously raised expectations to lofty levels, both abroad and at home. For example, his assertion, in the summer of 2008, that his nomination as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party would be remembered as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

As for the rising oceans and the healing earth, the 2012 Pew survey reports that 56 percent of those polled in 2009 expected Obama “to take significant steps to deal with climate change. Today, a median of just 22 percent think he has actually done this.” There are similar declines in expectations on other key issues. In 2009, 45 percent of those surveyed thought Obama would seek international approval for the use of military force. Now, 29 percent say he failed to do so.

“While many around the world still have a positive image of Obama,” wrote the authors of the Pew report, “he has nonetheless failed to meet expectations on specific policies. For instance, in 2009, many public anticipated that the U.S. leader would consider their country’s interests when making foreign policy decisions. Today, relatively few believe Obama has done either.”

MILITARILY AGGRESSIVE LEADER

Part of the reason for that view is the ever-increasing use of drones to kill adversaries in countries such asPakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and Yemen. Dealing high-tech death from above, without risking American lives, has become Obama’s favorite kind of warfare. He has embraced it much more enthusiastically than Bush, part of a gradual transformation into “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades,” in the words ofPeter Bergen, a national security expert at the New American Foundation, a liberal think tank.

Drone strikes are popular in the United States (62 percent in favor) and unpopular everywhere else, even in countries whose citizens want to see him re-elected and even in countries where his 2009 rock-star image has not been significantly dented. In Germany, for example, he outshines the popular chancellor, Angela Merkel. Eighty-seven percent expressed confidence in “Obama to do the right thing in world affairs.” Merkel polled 77 percent on that question.

The confidence to do the right thing does not extend to drone warfare. Almost two out of three Germans disapprove of it.

At home, Obama’s job approval never reached the heights it did in much of Western Europe. A Gallup poll taken in his first week of office gave him 69 percent approval. This month, it stood at 47 percent, two percentage points lower than Bush at the same point in the election cycle in 2004. Bush won, by the slimmest of margins.

All of which probably shows that the way an American president is seen abroad makes no difference to his electoral fortunes at home.

PHOTO: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (L) meets with U.S. President Barack Obama (R) during before the G20 summit in Los Cabos June 18, 2012.  REUTERS/Aleksey Nikolskyi/RIA Novosti/Pool

Will Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad be allowed to get away with mass murder, like his father 30 years ago? Some of the ideas now under discussion could mean precisely that — a golden parachute into exile. No war crimes charges, no prosecution, no trial.

Unlike Egypt’s ousted dictator, Hosni Mubarak, who was sentenced to life in prison on June 2, and unlike Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi, who was killed at the hand of anti-government rebels, Assad would “transfer power and depart Syria.” That’s how U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it after a meeting of foreign ministers of Arab and Western nations in Istanbul.

That idea is known as the Yemeni Solution and was floated by U.S. President Barack Obama at a meeting of the Group of Eight in May. It refers to a deal under which Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was granted immunity from prosecution for the killing of protesters. In return, he handed power over to his deputy and announced he planned to go into exile in Ethiopia.

No such deal would be possible in Syria without the involvement of Russia, the Assad regime’s chief armorer, and the two other pillars of his support – China and Iran. This is why Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary General who is now peace envoy on behalf of the U.N. and the Arab League, has come up with the idea of a “contact group” to work out an end to a conflict that has claimed at least 10,000 lives so far.

The group would include the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council — where Russia and China have blocked tough measures against Syria — as well as “countries with real influence on the situation, countries that can influence either side — the government of Syria and the opposition,” Annan said at the United Nations. “Iran, as an important country in the region, I hope will be part of the solution.”

Clinton has poured cold water on that idea, saying Iran was helping to keep the Assad regime in power and therefore part of the problem. That, of course, also goes for Russia and China but involving Iran would take Washington on a collision course with its close ally Israel and open Obama to charges of being “weak on Iran,” a damaging label in his campaign for re-election.

If the contact group idea would eventually lead to Assad’s departure — and that is a very big if — where would he go? According to David Ignatius, a well-connected columnist for the Washington Post, Russia has offered him exile and there are rumors that Assad has already transferred $6 billion in Syrian reserves to Moscow.

RUSSIA HOLDS THE KEY

Russia, not the U.S., holds the key here. As Middle East expert Volker Perthes, head of the German Institute for International Security in Berlin, put it: “Until such time as Assad is told by Moscow that the game is up and only a negotiated exit will guarantee him and his supporters safety, he is unlikely to feel genuinely isolated.”

The idea that the Syrian leader would leave with impunity is hard to swallow after 15 months of brutal crackdown on dissidents and a series of massacres that prompted outrage and a chorus of condemnation in terms that ranged from “despicable” and “vile” to “unspeakable barbarity.” But verbal outrage doesn’t topple dictators, economic sanctions have limited behavior-changing impact as the case of Iran shows, and there is no appetite in Washington and elsewhere for military intervention.

If Bashar did get away with murder, he would complete a family tradition. His father Hafez, from whom he inherited his power, enforced his rule with mass murder on a much larger scale. Even in a Middle East dotted with massacre sites, the way Hafez al-Assad dealt with Moslem Brotherhood dissidents in the city of Hama stands out.

On February 2, 1982, an army raid on a hide-out of the outlawed Brotherhood sparked fighting throughout the city. The government responded by surrounding Hama with tanks and artillery and blasted the densely-populated centre in a 27-day assault that killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people, depending whose estimate you believe.

The carnage went largely unnoticed, out of sight in an era before cell phone videos uploaded to the internet provide shocking evidence for all the world to see. In 1982, Syria’s Arab neighbors remained silent, reaction from the West was muted. His country pacified and cowed, Hafez ruled for another 18 years. He died peacefully in bed, of pulmonary disease. His brother Rifaat, who ran the Hama operation, lives in comfortable retirement in London.

By contrast a flurry of statements this week on two massacres in Syria as many weeks included calls for those responsible to be held to account. Their wording suggested punishment for the men who went from house-to-house, shooting and stabbing entire families, not the leadership in Damascus on whose behalf they committed murder.

Bashar al-Assad has many things to fear in a country steadily sliding towards all-out sectarian war but it seems theInternational Criminal Court in the Hague is not one of them.

PHOTO: Syrian Zaher Al Hariri watches a television broadcast of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad speaking in parliament in Damascus, at his temporary home in Amman June 3, 2012. Assad said on Sunday his country was facing a war waged from outside the country and that terrorism was escalating despite political steps including last month’s parliamentary election. Zaher said his right hand was cut off by Syrian security forces after he went to a state hospital in Syria’s Deraa city to receive treatment after a bullet penetrated his fingers when security forces fired shots at a pro-democracy rally he participated in.  REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

Profits from arms deals tend to trump human rights. The United Nations Security Council, whose five veto-wielding permanent members count among the world’s biggest arms dealers, is falling down on its job. Hypocrisy is rampant as governments pay lip service to human rights.

So says Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, in its latest annual report, published this week. It deplores an “endemic failure of leadership” and says 2011 – the year of the Arab Spring – had made clear that “opportunistic alliances and financial interests have trumped human rights as global powers jockey for influence…”

That reference covers Russia, chief armorer of the government of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the United States, which recently resumed arms shipments to the royal rulers of tiny Bahrain, whose crackdown on dissidents has been brutal, though not nearly on the same scale as the campaign to wipe out the opposition in Syria.  The death toll there now stands at around 10,000.

To hear Amnesty Secretary General Salil Shetty tell it, the leaders who have so far failed to match human rights rhetoric with arms export deed have a chance to redeem themselves at a United Nations conference next July to work out a global Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), an idea first put forward in 2003 by a group of Nobel laureates who argued that existing arms control regulations are full of loopholes.

Campaigning for an arms treaty has gathered momentum over the past few years and in a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama timed to coincide with the Amnesty International report, representatives of 51 non-governmental organizations described the July conference as an historic opportunity to prevent weapons from ending up in the hands of human rights violators. “We urge you and your administration to play a strong leadership role,” the letter said.

According to arms control experts, there are more rules and regulations governing the trade in bananas than in the trade in tanks, machine guns, sniper rifles and bullets. The lack of common international standards, the argument goes, results in the deaths of  thousands of  civilians every year at the hand of dictatorial governments, criminals and terrorists.

The existing framework of arms embargoes is not bullet-proof, so to say. According to the relief organization Oxfam, which has taken a prominent role in advocating for the ATT, countries under arms embargoes imported more than $2.2 billion worth of arms and ammunition since the year 2000. Case in point: Darfur. It has been under an arms embargo imposed by the U.N. Security Council in 2004 but weapons from Belarus, China and Russia continue to flow despite large-scale human rights violations.

NATIONAL INTERESTS

Given the long history of questionable arms deals, a dose of skepticism is in order about the prospect of a treaty that would change a world in which one man’s rights-trampling government is another man’s valuable ally. Case in point: Bahrain.

On May 11, the U.S. State Department said it would end a freeze on military sales to the island state – imposed in September in response to a violent crackdown on dissidents – because of “a determination that it is in the U.S. national interest to let these things go forward,” in the words of an official who briefed reporters. He did not need to explain the nature of the national interest — Bahrain is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, there to guard shipping lanes that carry around 40 percent of the world’s tanker-born oil.

National interest trumps human rights concerns. That is as true for the United States, the world’s largest arms manufacturer and exporter, as it is for other arms exporters. Russia, number two in  the arms exporters’ ranking, does not cite “national interest” for shipping weapons to Syria, it just refers to compliance with commercial contracts. But its naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, Moscow’s only outpost in the Mediterranean, clearly plays a role.

While proponents of a treaty sound optimistic about the possibility of all 193 members of the United Nations agreeing on new regulations, they also say there are different approaches that have yet to be reconciled. One would require that countries “shall not” transfer weapons to recipients who might use them to violate human rights or humanitarian law.

“Without that ‘shall not’ requirement, the treaty would be ineffective,” says Oxfam’s Scott Stedjan. The second approach under discussion as experts prepare for the July conference would require signatories to “take into account” potential risks associated with an arms deal. That’s a loophole big enough to drive a tank through.

In April, the State Department’s point man on the proposed treaty, Thomas Countryman, put things into perspective at a panel discussion arranged by a Washington think tank. Even an effective treaty, he said, “will not fundamentally change the nature of international politics nor can it by itself bring an end to the festering international and civil conflicts around the world.”

PHOTO: An Ardha (Bahraini folk dance) dancer rests with his gold gun as he chats with his colleagues at the Bahrain Heritage Festival inaguratedin Manama, April 30, 2003. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

When U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of  Germany, France, Britain, Canada and the European Union first issued public calls for President Bashar al-Assad to step down, the death toll in Syria stood at 2,000. That was in August 18 last year.

When Obama repeated the call on May 19, as host of a summit meeting of the Group of Eight, the body count had reached 10,000, according to United Nations estimates. The two figures highlight the lack of success of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure on a ruthless leader who learned lessons in unrestrained brutality from his father, Hafez al-Assad, whom he succeeded in office.

A peaceful solution to Syria’s protracted crisis now looks remote enough to wonder whether Bashar al-Assad might outlast Obama in power. The U.S. president is not assured of winning another term in office next November. But the odds of the Assad regime surviving into 2013 look better with every passing day, even though one of the U.S. government’s top experts on Syria has labeled the Syrian president a “dead man walking.”

There are several reasons for skepticism about a resolution to the Syrian crisis in the near future. One is the government’s military superiority over fractured and lightly-equipped opposition forces. More importantly, there is no international consensus on how to deal with what began 14 months ago as peaceful demonstrations against a 40-year family dictatorship and now includes huge suicide bombings of government targets that have raised suspicions of al-Qaeda involvement.

At the summit of the G8 – the United States, Germany, France,  Italy, Japan, Russia, Canada and Japan – an  aide to Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev made clear, again, that Moscow, unlike the West, does not see Assad’s departure as a necessary step towards ending the bloodshed.  “Some may like or dislike the Syrian government…but one cannot avoid a question – if Assad goes, who will replace him?” said Mikhail Margelov.

That’s a question to which there is no  answer in Washington or the European and Arab capitals whose leaders say that Assad must go. Doubts over what would happen “the day after” explain why the U.S. and its allies have been reluctant to consider arming the opposition and why they rule out military intervention on the model of Libya.

Where Russia is concerned, some critics see motives that go beyond opposition to regime change, the prospect of losing a major client for arms exports, and fears of  losing the Soviet-era naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only outpost in the Mediterranean. Said Gary Kasparov, a vocal Putin critic, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal:

“The Kremlin is desperate to keep Bashar al-Assad in place…since any conflict in the region sustains the high oil prices  Mr. Putin and his cronies need to maintain power.”

ASSAD’S FRIENDS

Whatever the motive, it’s difficult to see Assad leaving as long as he enjoys arms supplies and backing from Russia, diplomatic support from China, military and intelligence advice from Iran, and shipments of diesel fuel from Venezuela. After a flurry of wrong predictions of Assad’s imminent exit late last year, political crustal-gazers have been wary of forecasts.

But punters on an online exchange that allows bets on political events, rate Assad’s chance of being in office by the end of the year at 68 percent, up from 42 in February, when China and Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy.

The two countries voted in favor, two months later, of a Security Council resolution that backed a six-point peace plan drawn up by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Its provisions included an end to all violence by the government and the rebels, talks aimed at a “political transition” and the dispatch of an unarmed U.N. force to monitor a truce that both sides are ignoring. .

There’s a Catch-22 in the Annan initiative. It specifies a “Syrian-led, inclusive political transition “which perversely makes al-Assad part of the negotiations (if ever they begin). There is no good reason to think he would be inclined to make concessions on the negotiating table after making none in months of bloody crackdowns on the opposition.

Administration officials have made clear that U.S. patience with Assad, and with the slow progress of the Annan plan, is running out. Some of the bluntest language from Obama aides has come from his ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice. She has pointed out that the mandate of the truce supervision mission runs out at the end of July.

“No one should assume that the United States will renew this mission,” she has said. “If there is not a sustained cessation of violence, full freedom of movement of UN personnel and rapid meaningful progress on all other aspects of the six-point plan, then we must all conclude that the mission has run its course.”

And then what? Obama wading deeper into yet another Middle East conflict four months before the elections?

PHOTO: REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri (SYRIA)

File this under the rubric Only in America – sticks, poles and water guns will be banned from the centre of Tampa at the Republican Party’s national convention next August. Guns, however, will be allowed. The logic behind that is drawn from the U.S. constitution. How so?

The constitution’s second amendment protects the right of citizens to “keep and bear arms”  and that is taken to mean firearms. Sticks, poles and water guns do not enjoy constitutional protection. That, in a nutshell, is the argument the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, used to turn down a request by the mayor of Tampa for guns to be kept away, just for four days, from an event forecast by the organizers to draw at least 50,000 people to the city.

They will include thousands bent on demonstrating against the policies of Mitt Romney, who will be formally nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential elections in November. Political conventions and protests make for a volatile mix, which is why Mayor Bob Buckhorn thought the downtown area near the convention center should be a gun-free zone.

That may strike a good many people as plain common sense but Scott is not one of them. The exchange of letters between him and Buckhorn speaks volumes about American attitudes towards guns  much of the rest of the world finds baffling and many Americans consider absurd. Said the New York Times in an editorial: “If this situation weren’t so shameful, and so dangerous, it would be absurd.”

To place the matter into context: the mayor, a Democrat, is no anti-gun crusader. He owns one himself and numbers among the estimated 900,000 Florida residents (out of a population of 19 million) who have a state license allowing them to carry a concealed weapon. The governor, a Republican, was elected in 2010 with the support of the Tea Party movement and the endorsement of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Buckhorn to Scott:

In anticipation of the many thousands of Florida residents and visitors to the State that will attend the Republican National Convention and its related events, the Department of Homeland Security has already designated the RNC as a National Special Security Event (NSSE). This designation is reserved for nationally significant events   involving the potential for major disruptions…including possibly violent ant-government protests and other civil unrest.

Part of the City’s preparations to respond to threats includes the passage of a temporary ordinance for the downtown area. The temporary ordinance regulates certain items that are usually benign in nature, but have been historically used as dangerous weapons during a NSSE. Some of the benign items that have been used as dangerous weapons include sticks, poles and water guns.

“SACRED TRADITION”

“One noticeable item missing from the City’s temporary ordinance is firearms,” the letter continues. “Normally, licensed firearms…do not pose a significant threat to the public; however in the potentially contentious environment surrounding the RNC, a firearm unnecessarily increases the threat of imminent harm and injury to the residents and visitors of the City.”

Florida state law bars municipalities from passing their own gun regulations but the governor has the power to override restrictions with an executive order. That is what Buckhorn asked Scott to do. His reply:

The short answer to your request is found in the 2^nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution…You note that the City’s temporary ordinance regulates ‘sticks, poles and water guns’ but that firearms are a ‘noticeable item missing’…Firearms are noticeably included, however, in the 2^nd Amendment.

While he shared concern that there might be violent anti-government protests, Scott said, “it is just at such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach.”

That reflects the philosophy of the NRA, the powerful lobby which helped draft Florida’s 2005 Stand Your Ground law. It allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” that their life and safety is in danger. The law is at the heart of a case that made international headlines in February – the  killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old student. The man who shot him, George Zimmerman, said he had acted in self-defense. Initially, he was not arrested.

Protest demonstrations by tens of thousands eventually prompted his arrest and a review of the case. He is now charged with second-degree murder, free on bail and awaiting trial. Meanwhile,  a public safety task force on May 1 began a review of the Stand Your Ground law. Twenty-three states have adopted similar laws and in several, Democratic lawmakers are now trying to roll back the legislation.

Among their arguments:  the number of “justifiable homicides” has risen sharply in the states that adopted such laws. Will that impress those who view the 2^nd Amendment as “a sacred constitutional tradition,” as Governor Scott put it in his letter to the Tampa mayor?  Don’t bet on it.

America’s electorate is sliced, diced and analyzed in minute detail, but there’s one comparative poll yet to be conducted: What is worse in the eyes of voters, having eaten dog meat or having put the family dog in a crate on the roof of a car for 12 hours?

This is not a trifling question in a country with close to 80 million pet dogs, whose owners treat them as family members and might be disinclined to give their votes to a candidate perceived as a dog eater, in the case of President Barack Obama, or a dog abuser, in the case of his presumptive Republican rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney.

The crated dog on the roof, an Irish setter named Seamus, has dogged Romney on and off ever since the story came to light in 2007. Obama’s dog-eating is a recent addition to the ever-growing catalog of anecdotes collected by Republican and Democratic activists and campaign operatives to paint the other side’s candidate in the darkest possible colors.

The dog stories have legs, so to say, and are likely to stay part of the election campaign until it finally ends on November 6. To refresh the memories of those who might have followed the campaign for weightier topics – high unemployment, say, or the war in Afghanistan – here is a recapitulation of what happened so far.

While Seamus rode atop the Romney family station wagon on the way to a vacation in Canada, the dog was struck by a bout of diarrhea that resulted in fecal matter running down the windows. Romney pulled up at a gasoline station, hosed down the car, the crate and the dog, and continued on his way. That was in 1983, but the story was revived in the Republican primary campaign when one of Romney’s rivals said it pointed to character flaws.

President Obama’s involvement in the canine aspects of the campaign stems from a passage in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father (Chapter 2, page 37) that recounted how he was “introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher) and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)” by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetero. Obama lived in Djakarta between the ages of six and 10.

Jim Treacher, a conservative blogger for the website The Daily Caller, came across that passage and published it on April 17 as an antidote to the potentially damaging effect of Romney’s dog-on-the-roof episode. “Say what you want about Romney,” Treacher wrote, “but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you (liberals) bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.”

The dog wars were on.

PIT BULL WITH SOY SAUCE

Aides to Obama and Romney traded jocular tweets about their bosses’ attitudes toward dogs for days until the president himself took up the issue at the April 28 White House Correspondents’ dinner, an occasion presidents traditionally use to mock themselves (and others). Riffing off a famous sound bite from Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, Obama asked: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.” Particularly with soy sauce.

Obama also showed a mock Republican attack contrasting the rivals’ competing vision of an American dog’s life after the November elections. Under Obama: “dogs forced into government-controlled automobiles.” Under Romney: a dog’s “freedom to feel the wind in his fur.” The ad’s final shot shows Romney standing in front of Air Force One, a Boeing 747. Strapped to the aircraft’s roof: a dog kennel.

For some pundits, the whole dog debate shows that the election campaign has sunk to new lows. “One does wonder what the rest of the world must think of us? Is this what happens to old democracies? Are we too silly to be taken seriously anymore?” asked Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist.

Probably not. It’s a safe bet that parts of the world would welcome a dose of politics interlaced with the kind of levity that, now and then, accompanies the political discourse in the United States.

As to the yet-to-be-conducted missing survey on dog-eating vs dog-on-the-roof: there actually is a poll on the relative dog friendliness of Romney and Obama. But it was conducted before the president’s culinary adventures in Indonesia became a topic of such fascination that a Google search for “Obama and dog-eating” yields 43 million hits. (“Romney and dog” yields just 28 million).

In March, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, asked 900 voters who they thought would be a better president for dogs. Thirty-seven percent opted for Obama and 21 percent for Romney. Thirty-five percent said learning of Seamus’ rooftop trip had made them less likely to vote for Romney.

That result practically guarantees that the dog issue will stay alive. Entertainment for some, silliness for others.

Take note of a new phrase in the seemingly endless debate over whether the days of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power are numbered: Those who doubt the country’s economic decline are holding an “intellectual ostrich position.”

The expression was coined by Edward Luce, author of a deeply-researched new book entitled Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. It notes that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the global economy in 2000 and 23.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, he estimates that it will shrink to around 16 percent.

Luce’s diagnosis of descent, published in April, was the latest addition to a steadily growing library of books, academic papers and opinion pieces for or against the idea that the United States can maintain its status as the world’s only superpower. If we adopt Luce’s phrase, it’s a discussion between declinists and ostriches. The latter include President Barack Obama and his presumptive Republican rival in next November’s presidential elections.

“It means that we’re going to have a 2012 election where…both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed,” Luce said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine. “And I’d describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.”

The false premise, in this view, was set out by Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, in a lengthy analysis entitled Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline. One of the points Kagan made to support his argument: the U.S. share of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has held steady over the past four decades. Plain wrong, says Luce.

The Kagan article, now expanded into a book (The World America Made), is reported to have so impressed Obama that it influenced his State of the Union Speech in January, when he said “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

They don’t? Here’s the view of Clyde Prestowitz, a labor economist and veteran declinist, weighing into the debate in April: “You’d have to be blind not to see the deterioration of our infrastructure. We used to have trade surpluses. Now we have chronic deficits. We used to tell ourselves that didn’t matter because we had surpluses in high tech items. But now we have deficits there, too. We used to be the world’s biggest creditor. Now we are its biggest debtor…How can anybody claim we are not suffering decline?”

Washington’s loss of influence has been evident in many regions of the world, most recently at a summit that brought together leaders of North and Latin America in the Colombian city of Cartagena. There, in Uncle Sam’s traditional backyard, Obama’s assertion that U.S. influence had not waned highlighted a particularly wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

BACKYARD NO MORE?

The backyard showed itself so united in opposition to decades-old U.S. policies – the trade embargo on Cuba, the war on drugs – that the summit ended without the usual final communiqué. “There was no consensus,” said the summit’s host, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, an important U.S. ally in the region.

Apart from disagreements over two of Washington’s oldest (50 years of Cuba embargo, 40 years of drug war) and most obviously failed policies, the meeting showed that the United States is no longer seen as the single most dominant force in the region. As an analysis by the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue put it on the eve of the Cartagena meeting:

“U.S.-Latin American relations have grown more distant. The quality and intensity of ties have diminished. Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant for their needs – and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issue that most concern them.”

Why less and less relevant? For one, U.S. economic dominance in Latin America is no longer what it used to be. A decade ago, 55 percent of the region’s imports came from the United States. That has shrunk to less than a third. China’s share of trade with Brazil, Latin America’s economic and political powerhouse, has overtaken that of the United States. The same goes for Chile and Peru.

To what extent U.S. influence in the backyard will continue to slide depends largely on how clear-eyed U.S. leaders see their country’s global position. The ostrich view would hasten the decline.

Long before he was in a position to change his country’s policies, Barack Obama had firm views on a complex problem: “The war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws. We need to rethink how we’re operating the drug war.”

That was in January 2004, during a debate at Northwestern University, when he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. To make sure his student audience understood his position on the controversial issue, Obama added: “Currently, we are not doing a good job.”

To look at a classic flip-flop, forward to April 2012 and a summit of Latin American leaders, several of whom have become vocal critics of the U.S.-driven war on drugs, in the Colombian city of Cartagena. More than three years into his presidency, Obama made clear that he is not in favor of legalizing drugs or of ending policies that treat drug users as criminals.

“I don’t mind a debate around issues like decriminalization,” he said at the Cartagena summit. “I personally don’t agree that’s a solution to the problem.” Decriminalization means scrapping criminal penalties for the use of drugs. It falls short of legalization which, in its purest form, means the abolition of all forms of government control of drugs. Obama is against that, too. “I don’t think that legalization of drugs is going to be the answer,” he said.

So what is the answer? In his first year in office, Obama talked about placing more emphasis on curbing demand – the United States is the world’s richest market for illicit drugs – and less on enforcing punitive laws that filled American prisons with drug offenders and helped turn the country into the world’s chief jailer. It has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

But the rebalancing and the rethinking Obama mentioned before and after becoming president have been largely rhetorical. His administration has not put its money where its mouth is. Those who complain that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reduce demand can point to the proposed National Drug Control Budget for the 2013 fiscal year, which begins in October.

The allocation of funds is pretty much the same as it was in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – roughly 40 percent for programs aimed at curbing demand and treating addicts and 60 percent for enforcing anti-drug laws, throttling the flow of drugs across the long border with Mexico and financing the eradication of drug crops in Latin America and Asia.

The 2013 budget proposal allocates 41.2 percent for demand reduction and 58.2 percent for law enforcement. In other words, more of the same — policies that have been pursued since President Richard Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1970. Obama’s 2004 assessment of those policies – “utter failure” – has come to be shared by many even though he no longer stands by it and even though members of his team such as Homeland Security chiefJanet Napolitano insist the old approach is working.

A TRILLION-DOLLAR WAR

By some estimates, the war on drugs has so far cost close to a trillion dollars. What has that vast expenditure bought? Very little. According to the government’s latest “Survey on Drug Use and Health,” more than 22 million Americans – nearly 9 percent the U.S. population – used illegal drugs in 2010, up from 8 percent in 2008.

That demand and the vast profits derived from it, has prompted violence on a mind-boggling scale south of the U.S. border. In Mexico alone, around 50,000 people have died in the past six years as drug cartels fight each other – for access to supply lines to the U.S. market – and the Mexican state.

Drug-fueled violence is not restricted to Mexico. According to the United Nations, eight of the world’s most violent countries are in Latin America. The small states of Central America, astride trafficking corridors to the north, are particularly vulnerable. Honduras now has the world’s highest murder rate. Guatemala is not far behind.

Which explains why Guatemala’s president, Otto Perez, has emerged as the most outspoken proponent of the need for new ways of tackling an old problem. Perez, a former army general, has impeccable credentials as a hard-line drug warrior. So has the host of the Cartagena summit, Colombian President Juan Manual Santos, a former defense minister.

Their views echo the arguments of a panel of high-profile establishment figures who published a devastating critique of the drug war last June. It made headlines the world over but apparently failed to convince the Obama administration. “Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply and consumption,” said the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

“Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers,” the report added. “The … global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically.” That report was put together by former government leaders, including three former Latin American presidents and a former U.N. secretary-general.

Several prominent advocates of drug policy reforms in the United States and elsewhere see the fact that calls for change now come from sitting (rather than former) presidents as a sign that the end of the drug war as we knew it is in sight. Perhaps. But optimistic drug reformers might do well to remember that there is an entrenched international anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration alone has 10,000 employees and offices in 63 countries.

That establishment has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. As with other conflicts, the war on drugs was easier to start than to end.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during the plenary session of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena April 14, 2012. Obama tried on Saturday to convince skeptical Latin Americans that Washington has not turned its back on them, but ruled out a drug policy U-turn that some in the region want. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American extraction are turning 18, voting age, and add to the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. Almost 22 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in November and how many of them turn out may well decide who will be the next U.S. president.

A series of recent polls show that Latinos favor President Barack Obama over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, with a comfortable 70 percent to 14 percent over Mitt Romney, the man most likely to win the Republican nomination at the end of a primary campaign marked by often shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Obama is so confident that he primary debates have driven Latinos away from the Republican party that  he told the Spanish-language television network Univision last November there was no need for his campaign to run negative ads on the Republican presidential hopefuls. Instead, “we may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them…and people can make up their own minds.”

Among debate highlights that stick in the collective memory was the electrified Mexican-U.S. border fence suggested by Herman Cain, who soon after dropped out of the race, and Mitt Romney’s idea that illegal immigrants would chose “self-deportation…because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.” Newt Gingrich, who is still in the primary contest but whose star is fading, described self-deportation as a fantasy.

The president’s confidence of winning Latino support again – he took 67 percent of their vote in 2008 — is partly based on history: Republicans have lost the Latino vote in every presidential election since 1972. But it would be a mistake for Obama to take that support for granted, not least because he broke an election campaign promise to produce a bill on immigration reform in his first year in office.

This prompted Jorge Ramos, the influential Univision anchor to whom he made the promise in 2008, to write in an essay in Time magazine last month that Latinos faced the difficult choice on November 6 “of voting for either a president who broke a major promise or a Republican candidate who doesn’t respect us.”

If enough Latinos find that choice so difficult that they will sit out the vote, Obama’s confidence may prove mistaken. To hear electoral number crunchers tell it, an Obama victory could hinge on Latin turnout and support in swing states where no candidate can be certain of getting the most votes. These states include Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

POPULAR VOTE  DOESN’T EQUAL VICTORY

Ruy Texeira, an election expert and demographer at the liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, points out that while the Latino support tracked by opinion polls points to Obama  winning  the popular vote, that doesn’t always translate into electoral victory. The presidential elections of 2000, decided after a bitter controversy over Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, are a case in point.

While immigration, for decades a hot-button issue in the United States, has dominated the debate,  it does not top the list of Latino concerns. Surveys show that like other Americans, Latinos care most about jobs, the economy, education and health care. Immigration ranks fifth.

Latino voters don’t have direct immigration problems – they are citizens. But, as Jorge Ramos says in his essay,  “the issues concerning undocumented immigrants are very, very personal. If you attack them, you attack all of us. They are our neighbors and co-workers; their kids go to school with our kids: they serve in battle next to our sons: they take the jobs no one else wants; they pay taxes and overwhelmingly make America a better country.”

Those who attack illegal immigrants are not restricted to Republican presidential hopefuls. Since Obama took office, his administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president in history – an average of  around 400,000 a year. The deportations have resulted in the separation of thousands of parents from children who were born in the U.S. and thus are citizens.

In a campaign twist that carries a whiff of desperation, Romney has begun to try and turn Obama’s record on immigration against him. “He campaigned saying he was going to reform immigration laws and simplify and protect the border,” the Republican front-runner said early in April, “and then he had two years with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and a super majority in each house, and he did nothing.”

“So let the immigrant community not forget that while he uses this as a political weapon, he does not take responsibility for fixing the problems we have.”

This comes from a candidate whose party stalled attempts at immigration reform both under George W. Bush and Obama. Whether his argument sways enough Latinos to make a difference in November remains to be seen.