The Doctrine of Fakism

Have you heard the news? The foreign policy realists are here. No more of that silly worldview stuff for us. On Tuesday, during her Senate confirmation hearing, Hillary Clinton set the record straight:

The President-Elect and I believe that foreign policy must be based on a marriage of principles and pragmatism, not rigid ideology. On facts and evidence, not emotion or prejudice. Our security, our vitality, and our ability to lead in today’s world oblige us to recognize the overwhelming fact of our interdependence.

“Interdependence” played a big role in Clinton’s speech. So did diplomacy. Once again, speaking for both herself and Barack Obama, Hillary outlined the new direction of the coming foreign policy:

The President-Elect has made it clear that in the Obama Administration there will be no doubt about the leading role of diplomacy. One need only look to North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, and the Balkans to appreciate the absolute necessity of tough-minded, intelligent diplomacy – and the failures that result when that kind of diplomatic effort is absent. And one need only consider the assortment of problems we must tackle in 2009 – from fighting terrorism to climate change to global financial crises – to understand the importance of cooperative engagement.

But the real star of the show was “smart power”:

We must use what has been called “smart power,” the full range of tools at our disposal -- diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural -- picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy.”

In a planned attack of simultaneous “cooperative engagement,” John Kerry supported Hillary’s new realism with an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Boston Globe. Kerry wrapped up as follows:

The common element in this formula for a new foreign policy is replacing military solutions and unilateral action with diplomacy and multi-national consensus. Clinton's work on the Armed Services Committee, her lifetime of public service, and her global stature have prepared her well to help pave this new road for American leadership.

Interdependence, diplomacy, cooperative engagement, multi-national consensus, “replacing military solutions.” If these are to be the hallmarks of a new foreign policy, how strange that on the very same day that Hillary Clinton spoke to the Senate about the sensible employment of “smart power” against Iran, and John Kerry wrote about enhancing “the ability of US diplomats to play the leading role in solving” global problems, Vice President-elect Joe Biden was in Iraq reassuring leadership in Baghdad that “the new administration will stick to the timetable in the [U.S.- Iraq status of forces] agreement,” and keep American troops in Iraq for at least three more years, if not much longer.

And how un-diplomatic was Joe Biden’s message of the following day. He told Barack Obama that things in Afghanistan will get worse before they get better, as Americans are soon to see an increase in the fighting. All this hardly seems like a new direction designed to highlight the “leading role of diplomacy.”

That’s because the most distinguishing feature of the new mushy realism is that it’s shamelessly fake. Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly believe that, “The best way to advance America’s interest in reducing global threats and seizing global opportunities is to design and implement global solutions,” because she can’t even explain what that means. Barack Obama does not believe (at least not now) that Iran can be talked out of the bomb any more than he intends to “end” the Iraq War, and John Kerry doesn’t think, “we have an opportunity to reshape the way the United States does business with the world.” These fakists have settled on a language to use in public and this is it. Global, interconnected, diplomatic, sustainable, endurable, smart, multilateral, non-ideological. You know -- Obamese. The biggest change Barack Obama has brought to American politics is linguistic. Leaders are now required to create cuddly, meaningless word salads while continuing the implementation of aggressive policies.

The Bush Doctrine is alive and well. This is because George W. Bush was not, as Clinton and Kerry imply, too blinded by ideology to be pragmatic. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said of smart power, “This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence, who was born a slave and rose to become one of the great voices of his time, declared that ‘in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.’” But she didn’t need to reach back to the second century B.C. to make her point. She could have simply adduced the behavior of the current President. Before attacking Afghanistan, President Bush pleaded both directly and through back channels with the Taliban in hopes that they would hand over Osama bin laden. Before going into Iraq, the President got the UN Security Council to pass a cycle of extra resolutions aimed at getting Saddam to disclose his weapons and weapons programs without having to go the military route. In both cases, Bush doggedly sought UN approval for action – something Hillary Clinton’s husband did not secure before launching operations in Haiti, the Balkans, and Iraq.

What’s so bad about the doctrine of Fakism, some might ask. Are Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton not merely speaking softly and carrying big sticks? After all, even most of President Bush’s fans agree that his gunfight slang probably did more harm than good. If bold Bush policy has now been complimented by better PR, hasn’t the one sorely missing piece fallen into place?

Not exactly. If you enter into a contract with your leaders whereby you agree to be lied to, where is the accountability? Signing off on a government whose preferred mode of domestic communication is one big wink leaves you very little room to complain down the line. When can you say, “Alright, knock it off, you did something I don’t like,” if your leaders have already made it clear that what they do need not connect to what they say. And on what grounds would you trust their pledges to change course?

We are about to come under the governance of an administration that promises the end to wars it is simultaneously extending or ramping up, and that pretends it will keep doomsday weapons out of the hands of madmen by persuasion. Words matter. Until they don’t – wink wink.

AIDS and the President--An Inside Account

It will be years, maybe decades, before something resembling a consensus emerges on the Bush presidency. But if there is one area where Bush has already been given credit even by some of his harshest critics, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, it is for his leadership in combating the worldwide devastation inflicted by HIV/AIDS. As the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser when the global AIDS initiative was being developed, I believe the story of this program is eminently worth telling, not only for its intrinsic historical interest but for what it reveals about the character of George W. Bush, who doggedly pursued his vision through a minefield of conflicting interests, despite the absence of any tangible political benefit to himself or his party, and at the risk of a costly break with one of his core constituencies.

Bush’s interest in AIDS as a critical global problem was evident from the very beginning of his presidency. In March 2001 he established a cabinet-level council chaired by his top foreign-policy and health aides, Colin Powell and Tommy Thompson. On May 11, he gathered in the Rose Garden with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo to announce a maiden contribution of $200 million (subsequently increased to $500 million) to a new international AIDS fund now known as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. This represented a 30-percent increase over Bill Clinton’s final budget in total foreign spending on the disease (on top of the $13 billion being spent annually on the domestic crisis).

Although by autumn the President would be consumed with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, his interest in the AIDS issue never wavered. In early 2002, he told Josh Bolten, his deputy chief of staff for policy, that he wanted to do more.

A meeting in Bolten’s office marked the first time I recall any discussion about developing a structured plan. Present were Anthony Fauci, a senior researcher at the National Institutes of Health who was leading its work on an AIDS vaccine; Gary Edson, the President’s deputy national-security adviser, with special responsibility for the developing world; and Bolten’s deputy Kristen Silverberg. Relating the President’s desire to focus on the international AIDS crisis, Bolten turned to Fauci, who had just returned from a trip to Africa with Secretary Thompson and whom we all expected to propose an enormous infusion of funding for his vaccine project.

But we were wrong. Putting more money into research, Fauci said, would not necessarily produce a vaccine any more quickly. Instead, he pointed to one of the most acute problems within the AIDS world: transmission of the virus from mother to child. In Africa, more than two million women with HIV were giving birth each year, resulting in at least 700,000 babies infected during pregnancy, during birth, or through breastfeeding. Because most of these women were unaware of any treatment for AIDS, it was difficult to convince them to seek help. “If you know you have a death sentence,” Fauci summarized, “why bother going to a doctor?”

But the good news was that a new drug, Nevirapine, had come on the market that had already proved effective in reducing the odds that a pregnant woman infected with HIV would transmit the virus to her baby. If we could purchase enough of the drug and develop a system of delivering it to those in need, we might be able to affect significantly the spread of AIDS.

Thus began work on what would become the President’s second major AIDS effort: the Mother and Child Prevention Initiative. The initial objective was to have a policy ready to announce in late June at the G8 summit in Canada. As the President’s chief aide for international development and his “sherpa” for the forthcoming summit, Edson took the lead in working out the details of the new initiative: which countries to target, how to recruit volunteer medical and nursing personnel, and most important, how to identify the obstacles to administering such a program in foreign countries.

The global fund to which President Bush had already promised support was formally launched in January 2002. It received a great deal of attention, quickening public interest in the worldwide dimension of the crisis. Then, in mid-March 2002, Bush invited the rock star Bono, a strong advocate of debt relief for developing nations and a spokesman for AIDS victims in Africa, to a ceremony announcing a $5-billion program called the Millennium Challenge Account to help reduce global poverty through the promotion of sustainable economic growth. Bush’s speech suggested that the scourge of AIDS was still very much on his mind. “In Sierra Leone,” he noted, “nearly one-third of all babies born today will not reach the age of five” because of the disease.

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By now, our Mother and Child initiative had become sufficiently fleshed out to present to Bush. The objective was to increase the availability of preventive care, including drug treatments, and to devise delivery systems that would reach pregnant women and newborn children in two Caribbean nations and eight African ones (with four to be added later). At a detailed briefing in the Roosevelt Room in June, the President embraced the plan, as well as its price tag of $500 million, and announced it the same month.

Together with the $500 million given to the Global Aids Fund, this meant that, only eighteen months into his tenure, Bush had doubled U.S. spending on the international AIDS crisis. But it was only the beginning. Even before announcing the new initiative, Bush had told Bolten that, while “a great start, it’s not nearly enough,” and encouraged him to come back with fresh ideas.

Ironically, in light of the unprecedented generosity already shown by this administration, the President would soon be attacked by AIDS activists for not having done enough. Nor were his motives spared. Almost immediately after the announcement of the Mother and Child program, two leading advocacy groups, ACT UP and the Global AIDS Alliance, issued a statement asserting that “the plan [was] all for show.” They could not have been more off-base. In line with the President’s desire to do more, Bolten once again summoned our group to review possibilities. This time, he said that “the President wants us to think really big about AIDS” and asked Fauci what was the single most consequential thing we could do, adding: “Assume that money is no object.”

As it happened, a transformation was taking place in the medical treatment of AIDS. Beginning in 1996, it had been determined that a “cocktail” combining three or four different drugs could extend life significantly for those infected with HIV. The problem was that, at a cost of $10,000-15,000 per person per year, the treatment, known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, was too expensive to be made available to all the HIV-infected people in the developing world. But in mid-2001, an Indian company had started to offer a generic version of this combination therapy at an annual rate of as little as $295 per person.

There was now a window of opportunity in which to accomplish something truly revolutionary, and Fauci suggested a large expansion of the Mother and Child program. The challenge was essentially the same, but the scale was much larger and the problems commensurately daunting. As we discussed the issue, Edson mapped out on a piece of paper a system—he called it a “network” model—that might work to deliver the drugs to the furthest parts of Africa. We would use primary, secondary, and tertiary medical facilities where they existed and, where transportation systems were unavailable, employ teenagers to deliver the daily regimens by bicycle.

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At the time, the White House was looking for a new director of its AIDS office, and responsibility for the search fell to me. One of the résumés belonged to Joseph O’Neill, an official at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). During the Clinton administration O’Neill had managed the $1.9-billion Ryan White CARE Act, and he was now serving as acting director of HHS’s office of HIV/AIDS policy. He was also a practicing HIV/AIDS physician, a volunteer member of the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, openly gay, and, we assumed, a Democrat. But from the moment we began to discuss the President’s purpose with him, it was evident that on these issues he was a kindred spirit.

Before the July 19 announcement of O’Neill’s appointment, I brought him into the Oval Office for a ten-minute meeting with the President. The get-acquainted session turned into a 45-minute discussion in which Bush questioned O’Neill about his medical practice, discussed antiretroviral treatments, and asked for an honest critique of the government’s various AIDS programs. “We have to start treating this like a public-health issue,” the President said—“like a disease.” To a physician, this was precisely the right attitude, and as we left O’Neill said in a whisper that any doubts he might have had about working with the Bush White House were gone.

As the summer progressed, the working group, now joined by O’Neill and Mark Dybul (one of Fauci’s key staffers, he would later become Bush’s global AIDS coordinator), began sketching the outlines of the gigantic program that would become the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Since whatever we came up with was going to cost a great deal of money, we henceforth included in our meetings another key participant, Robin Cleveland of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Over the next few months, we held countless rump discussions, most often in my office in the West Wing, in the situation room next to Edson’s office, or in unused conference rooms in the Old Executive Office Building across the street. We consulted with non-governmental organizations active in the battle against AIDS, collected data from research institutions around the world, met with doctors, researchers, and AIDS activists, and began to examine the enormous logistical and bureaucratic challenges facing the program we were envisioning. Knowing that a major Bush initiative on AIDS would meet with media skepticism, we kept our meetings secret and told interested outsiders that we were simply studying the issue.

It was during this time that Bono began to show up frequently at the White House, always bringing us some new information or someone involved in AIDS relief work. We also met with and benefited from the expertise of AIDS organizations that were among the President’s toughest critics—groups like the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the Global Health Council. Especially valuable was the opportunity, arranged by the global-health expert Nils Daulaire, to get together with Paul Farmer of Harvard and Jean William Pape of Cornell, both of whom had worked extensively on AIDS in Haiti, and Peter Mugyenyi, the director of the Joint Clinical Research Center in Uganda. The network of clinics established to treat AIDS patients in that country, in tandem with a three-pronged counseling approach stressing what the Ugandans called the ABC’s of abstinence, monogamy, and condoms, had helped to reduce dramatically the prevalence of the virus—from 21 percent of the Ugandan population in 1991 to approximately 5 percent in 2002.

Bush had no objection to the network model that had originated in Edson’s notebook and been refined by our discussions with Mugyenyi, but insisted in each meeting that we establish proper “metrics” for determining whether federal funds were being well utilized and effective. He was also concerned about the task of coordinating activities in far-flung foreign lands. Many members of Congress, as well as advocacy groups, had been pushing for the U.S. to focus its AIDS spending on the Global Fund. About this the President was adamant. Although we should continue contributing to the Fund, developing and administering our own programs seemed to him by far the more effective approach. Any significant new increase in funding should therefore be administered by agencies of our own government and not through multinational organizations. Time and again, Bush insisted that the program be placed under the supervision of a single federal official, accountable to the White House and American taxpayers. Edson and I debated where this “accountable individual” should be placed—we considered both HHS and AID (the Agency for International Development), but eventually, for reasons of prestige and international clout, decided on the State Department.

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In early November, before seeking Bush’s final approval, we held a meeting with Bolten to which we invited Fauci, Daulaire, Farmer, Pape, and Eric Goosby, another leading AIDS clinician who had served in the Clinton administration and done much work in Rwanda. The meeting ran for a couple of hours, with our invited experts responding to dozens of questions from us about implementation and infrastructure. By the time we finished we were convinced that we had been as thorough as we could be. As Edson would later tell the President, speaking as one MBA to another, “We’ve created a model; it’s scalable; and we’ve done our due diligence. But it’s still like making a venture-capital investment. We cannot be sure it will work.”

On the day of the White House Hanukkah party in December 2002, we gave Bush a final overview of the plan and asked for his approval. As I went over the details and outlined the projected cost of the program—$15 billion over five years, with about $2.5 billion to be disbursed in the first year alone—Mitch Daniels, the director of OMB and the person charged with making sure we had sufficient funds for the imminent war in Iraq, questioned whether we really needed the full amount and specifically whether we needed to commit $2.5 billion the first year. Condoleezza Rice, who was present as Bush’s national-security adviser, had a different question. Observing that the AIDS pandemic was spreading well beyond Africa, she asked whether the President might not want to extend the plan’s purview to Russia, China, and India. To this Bush replied that the latter three countries had plenty of resources of their own, and that the focus should remain on sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

By coincidence, immediately before our briefing the President had met with a dozen Jewish leaders who were at the White House for the party that evening. One of them told briefly how his own father had been part of a delegation that President Roosevelt had refused to see in the early 1940’s when it came to plead the cause of the Jews trapped in Nazi Europe. “If,” he said to Bush, “you had been President at the time, with the moral clarity you have displayed in the war against terrorism, there would be millions more Jews alive today.” Visibly moved by this encounter, Bush, I believe, was still registering its effect 30 minutes later as he leaned back in his chair, looked at all of us, and said forcefully: “We are too wealthy a nation, and too compassionate a nation, not to take this step. It’s a chance to save millions of lives. We have to do this.”

The announcement came the next month in the President’s 2003 State of the Union address. Midway through his remarks, he turned to the issue of AIDS, pointing out that nearly 30 million people in Africa were infected, including three million children under the age of fifteen. Yet across the entire continent, observed Bush, only 50,000 AIDS victims were receiving medication. Calling his initiative a “work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa,” he declared his intention to commit to it a full $15 billion over the next five years. This time, the reaction from AIDS activists was a resounding chorus of approval.

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No sooner had the dust settled on the State of the Union speech than the initiative faced its first controversy. Although the heart of the plan lay in the disbursement of funds for prevention, treatment, and care, the President had made clear that he wanted to follow the Ugandan model of counseling. This raised the touchy issue of condom distribution (the C in the ABC). It also raised the issue of whether organizations performing or even promoting abortions as a method of family planning would be eligible for federal funds in violation of the President’s own Mexico City rules—named for the highly controversial position initially taken by the U.S. at a UN conference in that city in 1984.

I was immediately besieged by angry calls from conservative Congressmen vowing to oppose any legislation authorizing the program unless and until we clarified that the Mexico City rules would apply in full. I went to see the President. He listened as I outlined the various options, and then explicitly stated that he viewed the initiative “as a health-care issue, and we should not deny anyone who commits to the objectives of our program the right to participate.” For a man who, only weeks into his presidency, had reinstated the Mexico City rules, originally promulgated under Ronald Reagan but subsequently reversed under Clinton, this was not only a very strong sign of personal resolve but an important decision from a practical perspective. In many of the more remote areas of Africa, there was only one health-care provider, and if that provider was an organization like Doctors Without Borders, which performed abortions, the refusal of AIDS funds might cripple the program and deprive the most needy of care.

But getting from here to there with Congress was altogether turning out to be a challenge. Even as we in the White House set about drafting legislation, the members of Congress with whom we were meeting almost daily were working on their own version of a bill. In the Senate, meanwhile, we had to deal with internal partisan politics. The previous year, William Frist, the majority leader, and John Kerry had proposed AIDS legislation of their own, calling for $4.7 billion in spending on prevention over the next two years and a large new contribution to the Global Fund. Both men felt upstaged by the President’s announcement, which had come as a surprise to them. Kerry, moreover, had already started his own campaign to challenge Bush for the presidency in the following year—another reason for him not to cede a major legislative victory to his rival.

Frustrated, the President suggested to Frist that he use his influence as majority leader to move the White House bill directly to the Senate floor. But Frist was reluctant to buck Senate procedure, and Richard Lugar, chairman of the foreign-relations committee, was especially uncomfortable pushing a bill through his committee that did not enjoy the support of Kerry and Joseph Biden, two of his Democratic members.

Recognizing the challenge in the Senate, we were simultaneously working on a preemptive strategy in the House, coordinating closely with the staffs of the Republican Henry Hyde and the Democrat Tom Lantos. After a couple of weeks of negotiating and re-drafting, we had a bill that we thought could pass. It was not the bill the President ultimately wanted to sign into law, but it was the only one with a chance of getting to the floor of the House, where it could always be improved with amendments.

On April 2, 2003, the bill was voted out of committee, only to be subjected to an assault by conservative advocacy groups upset that the administration had compromised on the Mexico City rules and that the legislation failed to place sufficient emphasis on abstinence education or to allow recipients of federal funds to opt out of condom distribution. (I particularly remember one Wednesday-morning meeting at which, attempting to mobilize support for the program, I was ambushed by a group of conservative organizations that felt betrayed by the President.) Bush, however, persevered, speaking individually with members of Congress and, in a White House speech, declaring that “this cause is rooted in the simplest of moral duties. When we see this kind of preventable suffering, when we see a plague leaving graves and orphans across a continent, we must act.”

Things now moved quickly. On May 2, the House took up the bill. As we had hoped, it was amended in three ways to accommodate the President’s objectives: first, by ensuring that federal monies would not be turned over to the Global AIDS Fund but remain under the control of a coordinator appointed by the President; second, by requiring that at least 33 percent of prevention funding be used on abstinence-until-marriage programs of the kind whose efficacy had been demonstrated in Uganda; and third, by ensuring that organizations with a moral objection to condoms not be disqualified from the program.

With these amendments in place, the full House voted to approve the bill. Two weeks later, not without a fight, it passed the Senate on a night when Frist, by now a strong proponent, kept the Senate in session until 2:00 a.m. to ensure passage. On May 27, the President signed it into law.

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Back in the fall of 2002, Bush had kept reminding us that he wanted a means of measuring the program’s rate of progress. In formally unveiling the initiative, he had articulated three goals in particular: over the next five years, he said, we would “support treatment for two million HIV-infected people; support prevention of seven million new HIV infections; and support care for ten million people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS, including orphans and vulnerable children.”

The five years have passed and enough evidence has been gathered for an initial evaluation. The results so far are extremely positive. By the end of 2008, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief had provided antiretroviral treatment to two million individuals, a dramatic increase from the 50,000 who were receiving treatment in 2002. As of March 2008, the last date for which we have comprehensive government figures, the program had provided transmission-prevention services for women during approximately 13 million pregnancies and given antiretroviral prophylaxis in more than one million pregnancies. Health officials estimate that this has resulted in the prevention of approximately 200,000 infant infections.

Finally, it has supported care for approximately 6.6 million individuals, including 2.7 million orphans and vulnerable children, and offered more than 33 million counseling-and-testing sessions for men, women, and children. Prevention-outreach programs have helped 60 million people. Over 20 million have received condoms.

This is not to say that the program is without problems. As with all government initiatives, there are inefficiencies and duplications of effort, resulting mainly from a lack of coordination among government agencies and non-governmental partners. Adding to the challenge is the weak infrastructure in target countries, as well as the insufficiency of qualified health-care workers. There also continues to be carping about some of the policies embedded in the law—which does not, for example, support needle or syringe exchanges and which prohibits the distribution of funds to any group not explicitly opposing prostitution and sex-trafficking.

Finally, many AIDS activists persist in criticizing the United States for what they believe is its circumvention of the Global Fund, despite the fact that the U.S. contribution to the Fund has increased to $2 billion. The ironical fact is that the President’s commitment to the AIDS issue not only launched the most significant effort the U.S. has ever made to combat the disease but also may have sparked the growth of the Global Fund itself. If, before the AIDS initiative, contributions to the Fund stood at under $1 billion with the U.S. paying half, today the Global Fund has received international pledges of nearly $20 billion with $12 billion paid.

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When George Bush paid a courtesy call on outgoing President Bill Clinton in January 2001, Clinton turned to him with his trademark grin and remarked: “Compassionate conservatism. That’s brilliant. Why didn’t I think of it first?” Now, at the five-year mark, it is safe to say that President Bush’s dream of building the largest humanitarian effort in history to address the global AIDS pandemic is a remarkable success—a success that in itself has turned the phrase “compassionate conservatism” into an incontrovertible reality.

As for Bush’s motives in inspiring, developing, and perpetuating this landmark achievement, they too will no doubt continue to be a subject for debate. But the plain fact is that he himself spelled them out with perfect clarity as long ago as his Inaugural Address of January 2001. Invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, he said: “And I can pledge our nation to a goal. When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass to the other side.”

What Went Right for Bush

THE final word on George W. Bush's foreign policy belongs, perhaps, to his successor, Barack Obama, who will be inaugurated as president of the US next week. In his most wide-ranging television interview on foreign policy, Obama was asked last week whether he stood by a remark he made in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which has been constantly shelled by Hamas rockets from the Gaza Strip. Obama said that if his town, where his daughters slept each night, was constantly being attacked by rockets he would want to do something about it.

In the light of Israel's military campaign in Gaza, the TV interviewer asked if Obama still felt that way?

He replied: "That's a basic principle of any country: that they've got to protect their citizens."

Obama was further asked to differentiate himself as strongly as possible from the Bush administration's policy of supporting Israel. Would he instead be ushering in a bold new policy?

Obama replied: "If you look not just at the Bush administration but what happened under the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach."

Good grief! These words should shock every true Bush hater in the world. But wait, there's more.

Obama's nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the Obama administration would put more emphasis on diplomacy and try to engage Syria and Iran in dialogue. (Just, indeed, as the Bush administration has tried to do.)

But, just like Bush, she and the new administration would not take the military option off the table in dealing with Iran.

On Hamas, she said: "You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements. That is an absolute. That is my position and the president-elect's position." It is also one of the most contentious positions of President Bush, Democrat Obama's Republican predecessor.

Then there is the US prison in Guantanamo for terror suspects. Obama has pledged to shut it. Indeed, Bush wanted to shut it, too. But Obama's people now say that doing so might take a year or more, because, like Bush, Obama will face the dilemma of what to do with intractably dangerous people whose countries of origin either won't have them back under any circumstances or would be likely to torture or kill them if they did take them back.

It would be wrong to suggest there is no difference between Obama and Bush in foreign policy. But from the moment that Obama's hawkish, almost neo-conservative foreign policy essay appeared in the US journal Foreign Affairs in July 2007, it has been clear that the continuity in US foreign policy from Bush under Obama would vastly outweigh the change.

Indeed, Obama is the American Kevin Rudd, though, with no disrespect to our Prime Minister, Obama is more glamorous and better looking.

But, like Rudd, Obama is likely to engage in some powerful symbolic gestures while keeping much of his predecessor's policies in substance.

Obama is even keeping some of Bush's key personnel, most remarkably Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and some key Bush administration figures in the National Security Council.

Obama acknowledges the success of the Bush troop surge in Iraq and wants to imitate it in Afghanistan.

In truth, there is no greater compliment in political life than for a political opponent to adopt his predecessor's policies once he gains office.

All this is the opposite of the popular stereotype - parroted nowhere more faithfully than in the Australian media - of a bumbling, incompetent Bush producing a train wreck of a foreign policy requiring profound remedial action. So great is the emotional prejudice against Bush - on display again in a remarkably silly essay by Don Watson in the January issue of The Monthly magazine - that it is almost impossible to get a serious, rational, dispassionate discussion of the Bush foreign policy legacy.

But it is time to take serious stock of what Bush has meant for foreign policy. From an Australian perspective, it is necessary to distinguish different parts of the Bush time in office.

There is Bush's record on issues of special concern to Australia, such as Asia and trade policy, and Bush's incredible increase in aid for Africa. But there is the big question mark over the Middle East and the lack of action on global warming.

It is necessary to distinguish, too, between Bush before 9/11 from Bush after 9/11, also to distinguish the first George W. Bush term from the second, for they were very different.

None of these complexities normally figures in the celebratory denunciations of Bush constantly emanating from pundits and opinion panjandrums across the world.

One important reality check came from Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger fellow at the US Council for Foreign Relations, in a recent lecture to the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.

Mead is in no sense a Bush partisan or neo-con. He is a non-partisan voice of great elegance and sophistication in US foreign policy. Speaking just after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and in the midst of the global financial crisis, He asserted that he was an optimist about the international scene. He advanced five reasons for his optimism.

One: Financial and banking crises are a regular and perhaps inevitable part of the capitalist system. But the US and the world always recovers from them and life goes on, generally with a better understanding of the way economies work and often, therefore, a better regulatory system.

Two: The failure of Osama bin Laden and his project throughout the Islamic world. This is most evident in Iraq. The Sunni Arabs there saw the US in a sense at its worst - given the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the mismanagement of the early part of the occupation - and al-Qa'ida potentially at its most appealing as the leader of resistance against Western domination. And yet in the Iraqi Sunni awakening, they rejected al-Qa'ida and chose partnership with the West.

Three: The rise of Asia. Mead rejects the intellectually constipated notion that China's rise equals America's decline. Instead he thinks that Asia is producing numerous big powers - China, Japan, India - that will naturally balance each other and always seek the involvement of the US as a further balancing and stabilising force.

Four: The enduring strength of American soft power. But how can this be? Surely Bush's global unpopularity has permanently ruined America's standing in the world? Not at all, Mead argues. One election, the triumph of Obama, and suddenly the world loves the US again.

European magazines recently at the center of anti-Americanism declare that we are all Americans now and that Obama is the president of the world.

But if anti-Americanism is so easily banished, was it really such a powerful force? Another possible explanation (and here I am not quoting Mead) is that much anti-Americanism is exported from the US itself and reflects not much more than the visceral hatred of Bush by The New York Times class.

The New York Times itself is reprinted all over the world and its attitudes and disdains aped by faux sophisticates from Brussels to Balmain.

Five: The enduring dynamism of US society. No candidate ran in the US presidential election in 2008 as the status quo candidate.

I find Mead's arguments pretty convincing. If there is even a glimmer of truth to them, they suggest that the world Bush created was not altogether and entirely as evil as contemporary reviews suggest.

From Australia's point of view, at any rate, the Bush presidency was overwhelmingly successful.

What are the core Australian national interests that Canberra would always want a US administration to protect? Surely three would be: a stable security order in the Asia Pacific; the integrity of the international trading system; and the health of the US-Australian alliance.

On all three, Bush was outstandingly good for Australia. Bush's success in Asia is simply undeniable, and Rudd, among many others, has often acknowledged it. Michael Green, the former Asia director at the NSC under Bush, has in several important articles collated opinion poll data about the US in Asia. It turns out that Asia is the one region in the world where the US's poll ratings are higher at the end of the Bush administration than they were at the beginning.

This was anything but inevitable. When Bush was first elected, the fear du jour of the international know-alls was that Washington and Beijing would find themselves in confrontation.

Then in April 2001 a US reconnaissance aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet collided and the US plane had to make an emergency landing on Hainan Island. The world held its breath. Here was the confrontation all had feared.

In fact, the Bush team handled the ensuing days of tension, while the Chinese temporarily held the American air crew hostage, with great sophistication, calm and restraint.

It was a sign of things to come. The US-China relationship has never been better managed than over the past eight years. China has grown wealthy as a result of the good relationship. At the same time, Washington's management of Taiwan has been masterful. It has maintained its security guarantee for Taiwan but consciously and effectively reined in its independence aspirations and managed downwards its independence vote.

The biggest success for the US was India, where it negotiated a new nuclear co-operation agreement that will help the transformation of Indian industry, and incidentally do more than almost any single act of government policy anywhere to counter greenhouse gas emissions. But most importantly it cements the new strategic partnership between Washington and New Delhi.

The US also reinvigorated its alliances with Japan and South Korea. Both contributed substantial troop contingents to Iraq. At Australian urging the Bush administration also revived its relationship with Indonesia. All of this is of the greatest possible benefit to Australia and is a powerfully positive framework for the Obama administration to inherit.

On trade, it is true that the Bush administration was unable to complete the Doha round of trade liberalization. But it never walked down the path of renewed tariff protectionism. It never played the protectionist card against China; will Obama be as good on this score? And it negotiated free-trade agreements with Australia, South Korea, Singapore and a slew of South American countries.

On the US-Australia alliance, the Howard government got everything it wanted from Washington, from profoundly important new intelligence-sharing arrangements to unrivalled technological access. These arrangements have been institutionalized and act as great force multipliers for Australia. The Rudd Government has sensibly consolidated them and they will be in place for the Obama administration.

Undoubtedly the hinge point of the Bush administration was the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Many of those who now oppose the military aspects of the US's response supported them at the time. Indeed, The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, admittedly the most air-headed of all significant North American columnists, once wrote of then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld that he was sexy and charismatic.

Bush's mainstream opponents agreed with his decision to intervene in Afghanistan, and Obama is pledged to stay the distance there. Iraq remains the great divider of opinion.

This is no place to rehash all the Iraq arguments but what is absolutely clear is that everyone involved in Iraq policy, in every relevant nation, believed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. They believed this partly because Saddam wanted them to, and partly because no other explanation of the facts made sense. But it is legitimate to criticize Bush for a wrong judgment on Iraq; it is not legitimate to say he lied his way into war, as Bush critics have to acknowledge that the WMD beliefs were nearly universally held.

The greatest and most justified criticism of Bush arises from the mismanagement of the early years of the Iraq occupation and the dreadful scandal of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. On the flipside, Bush gets all the credit for the subsequent troop surge, which was opposed by his key advisers and which has given Iraq a chance to emerge independent and semi-democratic.

The other great criticism of Bush is that he failed to wield the brilliant and powerful individuals of his national security team - Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Rich Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice - into a coherent team.

The second Bush administration was much less internally divided than the first and ran a consultative, cautious, centrist policy, concentrating on winning the wars it was involved in.

If you believe that global warming is the surpassing issue of the day, then Bush did not do enough to combat it, though it is clear the Kyoto Protocol was a flawed instrument for attacking this problem and there was never support for it in the US (remember Bill Clinton had recommended against its ratification).

Bush did neither significant harm nor significant good to the UN. That body's impotence and fatal moral confusion long predate him. But consider Africa. In his first term, Bush tripled US aid to sub-Saharan Africa. That's right, the US under Bush was giving three times more to Africa than it was under Clinton. And the increases kept coming during Bush's second term, so that if Obama continues the rate of increase, US aid will again be doubled by 2010.

Now how does that fit into the conspiracy theories about Bush? Was he pandering to the African-American vote? Was there a secret neo-con objective? Does Cheney have relatives there? Or could it be that Bush was trying to do some good?

It's too early to judge the Bush project in Iraq. But I am sure that, overall, history will judge Bush much more kindly than today's commentators do.

Greg Sheridan is foreign editor of The Australian.

Thank You President Bush

Cool Cycling Jerseys

Don't Mess With Texas

The Bush Economy

President Bush is leaving office amid the worst recession in 25 years, and naturally his economic policies are getting the blame. But before we move on to the era of Obamanomics, it's important to understand what really happened during the Bush years -- not least so we don't repeat the same mistakes.

AP

Mr. Bush has tried to explain events with one of his populist aphorisms: "Wall Street got drunk and we got a hangover." The remark is ruefully amusing and has an element of truth. But it also reveals how little the President comprehends about the source of his Administration's economic undoing. To extend his metaphor, Who does Mr. Bush think was serving the liquor?

Democrats like to claim the 1990s were a golden age while the Bush years have been disastrous. But as the nearby chart shows, Mr. Bush inherited a recession. The dot-com bubble had burst in 2000, and the economy was sinking even before the shock of 9/11, the corporate scandals and Sarbanes-Oxley. Mr. Bush's original tax-cut proposal was designed in part as insurance against such a downturn.

However, to win over Senate Democrats, Mr. Bush both phased in the tax rate reductions and settled for politically popular but economically feckless tax rebate checks. Those checks provided a short-term lift to consumer spending but no real boost to risk-taking or business investment, which was still recovering from the tech implosion. By late 2002, the economy was struggling again -- which is when Mr. Bush proposed his second round of tax cuts.

This time the tax rate reductions were immediate, and they included cuts in capital gains and dividends designed to spur business incentives. As the tax cuts became law in late May 2003, the recovery began in earnest. Growth averaged nearly 4% over the next three years, the jobless rate fell from 6.3% in June 2003 to 4.4% in October 2006, and real wages began to grow despite rising food and energy prices. The 2003 tax cut was the high point of Bush economic policy.

Mr. Bush's spending record is less admirable, especially during his first term. He indulged the majority Republicans on Capitol Hill, refusing to veto overspending and giving in to their demand that the Medicare prescription drug benefit include only modest market reforms. Even those reforms have helped to restrain drug costs, but now Democrats are set to repeal them and the main Bush legacy will be the new taxpayer liabilities.

Nonetheless, the budget deficit did fall mid-decade, as tax revenues soared with the expansion. In fiscal 2007, the deficit hit $161 billion, or an economically trivial 1.2% of GDP. That seems like a distant memory after the bailout blowout of the last few months, but the point is that the Bush tax cuts aren't responsible for the deficits. Before the recession hit, federal tax revenues had climbed above their postwar average of 18.3% of GDP.

Which brings us back to Mr. Bush's "hangover." While his Administration was handling the fiscal levers, the Federal Reserve was pushing the monetary accelerator to the floor. In reaction to the dot-com implosion and the collapse in business investment, Alan Greenspan rapidly cut interest rates to spur housing and consumer spending. In June 2003, even as the tax cuts were passing and the economy took off, he cut the fed funds rate to 1% and kept it there for a year.

His stimulus worked -- far too well. The money boom created a commodity price spike as well as a subsidy for credit across the economy. Economist John Taylor of Stanford has analyzed the magnitude of this monetary mistake in a new paper that assesses government's contribution to the financial panic. The second chart compares the actual fed funds rate this decade with what it would have been had the Fed stayed within the policy lanes of the previous 20 years.

"This extra easy policy was responsible for accelerating the housing boom and thereby ultimately leading to the housing bust," writes Mr. Taylor, who worked in the first-term Bush Treasury, though not on monetary affairs, and is known for the "Taylor rule" for determining how central banks should adjust interest rates.

By pushing all of this excess credit into the economy, the Fed created a housing and mortgage mania that Wall Street was only too happy to be part of. Yes, many on the Street abandoned their normal risk standards. But they were goaded by an enormous subsidy for debt. Wall Street did get "drunk" but Washington had set up the open bar.

For that matter, most everyone else was also drinking the free booze: from homebuyers who put nothing down for a loan, to a White House that bragged about record home ownership, to the Democrats who promoted and protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Those two companies helped turbocharge the mania by using a taxpayer subsidy to attract trillions of dollars of foreign capital into U.S. housing.) No one wanted the party to end, though sooner or later it had to.

While the Fed is most to blame, the Administration encouraged the credit excesses. It populated the Fed Board of Governors with Mr. Greenspan's protégés, notably Ben Bernanke and Donald Kohn, who helped to create the mania and even now deny all responsibility. Meantime, Mr. Bush's three Treasury Secretaries knew little about the subject, and if anything were inclined to support easier money and a weaker dollar in the name of reducing the trade deficit. We know because numerous Bush officials sneered at the monetary warnings in these columns going back to 2003.

When the bust finally arrived with a vengeance in 2007, the political timing couldn't have been worse. Mr. Bush tried to rally with one more fiscal "stimulus," but he repeated his 2001 mistake and agreed to another round of tax rebates. They did little good. The Administration might have prevented the worst of the panic had it sought some sort of TARP-like financing for the banking system months or a year earlier than it did last autumn. But neither the Treasury nor the FDIC seemed to appreciate how big the banking system's problems were. Their financial triage was well meaning but came too late and in a frenzy that invited mistakes.

This history is crucial to understand, both for the Democrats who now assume the levers of power and for Republicans who will want to return to power some day. Mr. Bush and his team did many things right after inheriting one bubble. They were ruined by monetary excess that created a second, more dangerous credit mania. They forgot one of the main lessons of Reaganomics, which is the importance of stable money.

Redd Receives National Security Medal from President Bush

On January 16, 2009, President George W. Bush awarded him the National Security Medal for his service as the first Senate-confirmed Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. [23] The decoration is awarded to any citizen of the United States who performs distinguished achievement or outstanding contribution, on or after 26 July 1947, in the field of intelligence relating to the national security of the United States of America. [24] The National Security Medal is authorized to both civilians and personnel of the United States military and is an authorized decoration for display on active duty uniforms of the United States armed forces. In such cases, the National Security Medal is worn after all U.S. military personal decorations and unit awards and before any military campaign/service awards and foreign decorations. Previous recipients include Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS; J. Edgar Hoover, former FBI Director; Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense; Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.[25]

Departing CIA chief Hayden defends interrogations

Outgoing CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said Thursday that the most pressing issues facing his successor include Iran's nuclear ambitions and surging violence in Mexico -- but not the war in Iraq.

Hayden also defended the agency's use of harsh interrogation methods and said he had advised the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama against going too far in dismantling the agency's controversial counter-terrorism programs.

"These techniques worked," Hayden said of the agency's interrogation program during a farewell session with reporters who cover the CIA.

"One needs to be very careful" about eliminating CIA authorities, he said, because "if you create barriers to doing things . . . there's no wink, no nod, no secret handshake. We won't do it."

Hayden's spirited defense of the agency came on the same day that Eric H. Holder Jr., Obama's nominee to serve as the next attorney general, testified on Capitol Hill that waterboarding, an interrogation method used by the CIA, amounted to torture.

Hayden is widely credited with restoring stability and morale during more than two years as CIA director. But his ardent defense of the agency's activities may help explain why he was not asked by Obama to stay in the job.

Hayden is also tied to other Bush administration controversies. As the head of the National Security Agency after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was an architect of the warrantless wiretapping operation.

Hayden won a measure of vindication with the release of a court ruling Thursday that supported the administration's right to compel U.S. telecommunications companies to cooperate with the eavesdropping effort.

"My reaction?" Hayden said Thursday, referring to the ruling. "Duh."

Obama's nominee to serve as the next CIA director, former California lawmaker Leon E. Panetta, is expected to rein in an array of agency activities, including its use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

Hayden noted that the agency had stopped the use of waterboarding more than five years ago, but he argued that the CIA should not be bound by the same restrictive interrogation rules as the U.S. Army.

Responding to critics who contend that harsh interrogation methods produce faulty intelligence, Hayden said that interrogations of key Al Qaeda figures accounted for the bulk of the United States' understanding of the terrorist network and led to a series of successful operations around the globe.

"Do not allow others to say it didn't work," Hayden said. "It worked."

Hayden said the situation in Iraq has improved so much that the war there is no longer a major drain of agency resources or attention. Instead, he said, the most pressing national security threat remains Al Qaeda.

Because of missile strikes by CIA drones, the tribal belt of Pakistan "is neither safe nor a haven" for Al Qaeda leadership, Hayden said. But he cited the failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden as among the chief disappointments of his tenure.

Iran's leaders are "getting close to a decision point" on the country's nuclear program, Hayden said, because the Shiite Muslim nation is paying such a heavy diplomatic and financial cost for its efforts to stockpile enriched uranium. That cost burden has grown with falling oil prices, Hayden said.

The outgoing CIA chief also sounded a new alarm about the growing drug violence in Mexico, and indicated that U.S. intelligence officials have made new efforts to form counter-narcotics partnerships with the Mexican government.

Overall, Hayden said, Panetta will inherit an agency that has made strides in hiring case officers from more diverse backgrounds and expanding the number of employees fluent in Arabic and other crucial languages.

Hayden indicated he has plans to write and speak, but said he would have welcomed a chance to stay at the CIA. "I certainly would have considered [staying] if asked," he said.

In Defense Of Bono: A rock star for post-partisan times

Getty Images

Bono is as passionate about his music as he is the causes he pursues -- in a bipartisan manner. (Photo by Dave Hogan/ Getty Images)

PRWeek awards finalists 2009 - Crisis or Issues Management Campaign of the Year

Crisis or Issues Management Campaign of the Year

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• French | West | Vaughan and GeneralSports Venue: Lead Chromate Controversy
• MS&L and CIT Group: CIT: Navigating the Credit Crunch
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Notes From the Chairman, by Bono

Deirdre O'Callaghan

Bono

Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...

I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.

Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.

•

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across adesert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If.

•

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though — shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

Bono, lead singer of the band U2 and co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

A Great Rock Song. But Is it Catholic?

The return of U2

U2 Preview No Line On The Horizon

Q has had a world exclusive preview of the forthcoming new U2 album, provisionally titled No Line On The Horizon.

Sessions for the long awaited album were completed at a feverish pace at Olympic Studios in West London throughout November. However, recording actually began in October 2006, with U2 teaming up once more with producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois after first exploring the idea of working with Rick Rubin. Between them, Lanois and Eno worked on the key triptych of U2 records - The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

"We learned a lot from Rick," says Bono. "He's head over heels in love with the concept of the song. But our feeling was, you don't go to rock'n'roll just for the songs. We wanted songs that would take us into a different world.

"And because Brian and Dan are experimental in their niches, the opportunity to bring some experimentation into the pop consciousness is so exciting to them. And to us."

By the time U2 arrived at Olympic Studios, Eno was shepherding the album to a conclusion with various other producers being called in to mix specific tracks - long-time cohort Steve Lillywhite and Black Eyed Peas man Will.I.Am among them. As has become customary for U2 records, tracks were being re-worked - and in some cases completely overhauled - right up to the final deadline.

Q initially heard previews of seven tracks at various stages of completion as the band were winding up. First impressions were that, while the two most recent U2 albums (2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind and 2004's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb) marked a return to basics, No Line On The Horizon is more in keeping with the spirit of 1991's Achtung Baby: which is to say, a bolder, more testing collection.

The material itself runs a gamut from the classic U2-isms of Magnificent, which echoes The Unforgettable Fire's opening track A Sort Of Homecoming in its atmospheric sweep, to the straight up pop of Crazy Tonight (the track Will.I.Am was taking a pass at) and the swaggering Stand Up, wherein U2 get in touch with their, hitherto unheard, funky selves - albeit propelled by some coruscating Edge guitar work, a signature feature of a number of the tracks. The latter track is also home to the knowing Bono lyric, "Stand up to rock stars/Napoleon is in high heels/Be careful of small men with big ideas."

Among other instantly striking tracks are Get Your Boots On, a heaving electro-rocker that may mark the destination point the band had been seeking on Pop; Winter, featuring a fine Bono lyric about a soldier in an unspecified war zone, surrounded by a deceptively simple rhythm track and an evocative string arrangement courtesy of Eno; and the stately Unknown Caller, which was recorded in Fez and opens with the sounds of birdsong taped by Eno during a Moroccan dawn.

At Olympic, particular excitement was reserved for two tracks: Moment Of Surrender and Breathe. A strident seven-minute epic recorded in a single take, the first of these sounds like a Great U2 Moment in the spirit of One, while Eno suggests the latter (at the time still a work in progress) is potentially both the best song the band had written and that he had worked on.

A week after the Olympic playback, Bono treated Q to a private audience of two further unfinished tracks - playing both on his car stereo at teeth-rattling volume whilst being piloted through London's rush-hour traffic. Two versions of the title track were extant: the first is another Unforgettable Fire-esque slow burner that builds to a euphoric coda, the second a punk-y Pixies/Buzzcocks homage that proceeds at a breathless pace.

"We recorded the second version just last night," explained the singer whilst enthusiastically air drumming along to it. "I'm very excited by that one,"

Q begged to differ, casting a vote for the more layered earlier version.

One other track, Every Breaking Wave, was beginning to take shape around an emotive Bono vocal and an appropriately grand swell of a climax. "We might be on to something special there," noted Bono.

And within the U2 camp, this is the general consensus around the album as a whole. A clearly excited Eno told Q No Line On The Horizon could be the band's greatest album, a view also echoed by the Edge.

"We've learnt a few things over the years," said the guitarist. "So I think (the album) could be a bringing-to-bear of all those eureka moments from the past."

No Line On The Horizon is set for release on March 2. And you can read more about the album in Q magazine's world exclusive U2 cover feature from December 31.

Bush, Cheney comforted troops privately

GIVING SUPPORT: Vice President Dick Cheney, an avid fly-fisherman, practices his cast with wounded troops from Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital.

For much of the past seven years, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have waged a clandestine operation inside the White House. It has involved thousands of military personnel, private presidential letters and meetings that were kept off their public calendars or sometimes left the news media in the dark.

Their mission: to comfort the families of soldiers who died fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to lift the spirits of those wounded in the service of their country.

On Monday, the president is set to make a more common public trip - with reporters in tow - to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, home to many of the wounded and a symbol of controversy earlier in his presidency over the quality of care the veterans were receiving.

But the size and scope of Mr. Bush's and Mr. Cheney's private endeavors to meet with wounded soliders and families of the fallen far exceed anything that has been witnessed publicly, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials familiar with the effort.

"People say, 'Why would you do that?'" the president said in an Oval Office interview with The Washington Times on Friday. "And the answer is: This is my duty. The president is commander in chief, but the president is often comforter in chief, as well. It is my duty to be - to try to comfort as best as I humanly can a loved one who is in anguish."

Mr. Bush, for instance, has sent personal letters to the families of every one of the more than 4,000 troops who have died in the two wars, an enormous personal effort that consumed hours of his time and escaped public notice. The task, along with meeting family members of troops killed in action, has been so wrenching - balancing the anger, grief and pride of families coping with the loss symbolized by a flag-draped coffin - that the president often leaned on his wife, Laura, for emotional support.

"I lean on the Almighty and Laura," Mr. Bush said in the interview. "She has been very reassuring, very calming."

Mr. Bush also has met privately with more than 500 families of troops killed in action and with more than 950 wounded veterans, according to White House spokesman Carlton Carroll. Many of those meetings were outside the presence of the news media at the White House or at private sessions during official travel stops, officials said.

The first lady said those private visits, many of which she also attended, took a heavy emotional toll, not just on the president, but on her as well.

U2 To Sell Five Versions Of New Album - One With Almost $100 List Price

U2 will release five different versions of their next album, No Line On The Horizon, with one version carrying a list price of almost $100 (USD). That's according to product listings on Amazon.com tonight. All five are listed with a March 3, 2009, release date.

Officially, U2 has only announced the album's name and release date; no details have been shared about different formats. Earlier this year, though, manager Paul McGuinness hinted to BBC radio that the new album's release would be unique: "We will obviously work with whatever technology is available to make the release of the new record as interesting as possible."

The first two formats on Amazon.com are standard CD and vinyl releases:

Audio CD ($13.98 list price)
Description: "This version is the standard album CD in a plastic jewel case w /24 page color booklet."

Vinyl (2 LP) ($17.98 list price)
Description: "This version is 2 vinyl discs in a folding sleeve with 16-page oversized booklet."

There are also three "limited editions" listed, each with unique bonus material:

Digi-pack version (CD/Poster/Film Download) ($35.98 list price)
Description: "This version features the album CD in a cardboard folded sleeve w/ a 36-page color booklet and fold-out poster, as well as a new film from Anton Corbijn featuring the music of U2, available as exclusive downloadable content."

Magazine version (CD/Magazine/Film Download) ($49.98 list price)
Description: "This version features the album CD in a special 60-page soft cover magazine-style book as well as a new film from Anton Corbijn featuring the music of U2, available as exclusive downloadable content."

Box Set version (CD/Poster/Book/DVD) ($95.98 list price)
Description: "This version is a deluxe limited-edition-collectors item: packaged in a special box, album CD in a cardboard folded sleeve w/ 36 page color booklet and fold out poster. Box also includes 60-page hard cover book plus an additional fold-out poster and a DVD of the new film from Anton Corbijn featuring the music of U2 in a slip case cover."

Amazon UK also lists five versions of No Line On The Horizon, but the product descriptions aren't as detailed; one listing, though, does refer to a "Hardback Book" -- likely the same item in the "Box Set" listed on Amazon.com.

The Bono Put

While Warren Buffett watches his investments in Goldman Sachs and Constellation Energy struggle, the savvy investors in this market turn out to have been Bono and Madonna.

When concert promoter Live Nation Inc. inked a 12-year deal with the band U2, they promised to pay part of their deal in stock, and guaranteed U2 $25 million in proceeds. But U2 has now decided to sell the shares — when they’re worth only about $6 million, handing Live Nation a $19 million loss.

The company said in a filing that it would pay for this with cash or borrowing money. The company will be selling 1.56 million shares of stock through Goldman Sachs, but that’s not going to make up what’s needed to pay U2. The company only made this deal with one other star, Madonna, who has the right, come April, to enter into a similar transaction, also for $25 million.

“It points out when you’ve got competition and you’re trying to buy your way into the marketplace,” says Jon Najarian, co-founder of Optionmonster.com.

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For U2, Live Nation Deal Rocks