Cato Daily Dispatch for November 14, 2002
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Greenspan: Keep Bush Tax CutBin Laden Tape Makes Officials Question War with Iraq
War on Drugs Joins War on Terror
Greenspan: Keep Bush Tax Cut
The New York Times reports that Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, weighed in yesterday in favor of President Bush's campaign to make last year's tax cuts permanent, lending a powerful voice to a high priority of the new Republican Congress.
"It would probably be unwise to unwind the long-term tax cut because it is already built into the system," Greenspan told members of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.
Greenspan's support for making the tax cuts permanent is likely to make it even more difficult for those lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who argue that the planned tax cuts should be postponed or scaled back because the government is already facing years of big deficits.
Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Boaz details the president's tax cut in "Bush's Tiny Tax Cut", a 2001 Cato Daily Commentary. "The federal government is proposing to collect $28,600,000,000,000 from us over the next 10 years. That's $5.6 trillion more than the biggest-spending Congress in history proposes to spend," Boaz writes. "We're overtaxed. It's the people's money. Congress should give it back. President Bush's tiny tax cut is a down payment on the tax cut we need."
Bin Laden Tape Makes Officials Question War with Iraq
Evidence that Osama bin Laden may be alive is a reminder that President Bush has not achieved all his goals in the first phase of the war on terrorism as he prepares for a possible second phase, war with Iraq, according to USA Today.
U.S. intelligence officials say an audiotape containing new threats of terrorism, which was broadcast by the Arabic TV network Al-Jazeera, is from bin Laden. If it is, it means that the man Bush swore he wanted "dead or alive" is still at large.
Word of bin Laden's apparent survival renewed questions about unfinished business and the wisdom of the administration's focus on Iraq while al Qaeda remains a threat.
"'All Iraq all the time' is not an adequate foreign policy for the United States," said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) who serves on the Intelligence Committee.
"Our first objective should be to go after bin Laden," said Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.).
Those comments echo those of Charles Pena, Cato's senior defense policy analyst . In a paper published this summer, "Axis of Evil: Threat or Chimera?", Pena asks, "If al Qaeda still represents an immediate and serious threat--including cells in the United States--and the war against al Qaeda...is not yet over, why then has President Bush expanded the war on terrorism to include the axis of evil?"
He goes on to say, "Although it seems obvious, it is worth reminding ourselves that the attacks of September 11 were carried out by the al Qaeda terrorist network under Osama bin Laden's leadership--not North Korea, Iran, or Iraq. None of these countries is proved to be linked to the planning, financing, or execution of those attacks. And they are not known to support or provide safe harbor to al Qaeda as did the Taliban regime in Afghanistan."
War on Drugs Joins War on Terror
The U.S. war on drugs in Colombia is rapidly being subsumed in the war on terror, according to Bush administration officials, as reported in New York Times.
The indictments of three leaders of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, announced yesterday in Washington by Attorney General John Ashcroft, are just the latest in a series of American indictments against Colombians.
Officials said that the indictments are part of a developing strategy of using the tactics of the drug war to help the new Colombian government of President Alvaro Uribe to combat both the right-wing paramilitaries and Marxist guerrillas who have been waging a 38-year civil conflict, fueled primarily with drug money. The indictments are seen by the administration as the best, and perhaps only, way for Washington to put direct pressure on FARC and the Self-Defense Forces, known as the AUC. Both groups are included on the administration's list of terrorist organizations.
"These indictments are a terrible move," says Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's Project on Criminal Justice. "First, they twist the federal criminal law so as to advance a foreign policy objective. Second, that foreign policy objective is to micro-manage Colombian affairs from Washington. This massive intervention is creating many more problems than it is solving."
Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for foreign policy and defense studies, warned against the United States aiding Uribe in "Unsavory Bedfellows: Washington's International Partners in in the War on Drugs", a Cato Foreign Policy Briefing. "One disturbing indicator was that members of the principal right-wing para-military organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), openly backed Uribe's candidacy," said Carpenter. "The AUC is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations, and Colombia's outgoing president, Andres Pastrana, has accused it of being responsible for at least 70 percent of the atrocities committed in his country's complex civil war. In addition to the unsettling reality of the AUC's enthusiasm for Uribe, one of the new president's closest associates -- and probably a high-level appointee in his administration -- has been accused of involvement in the drug trade."
Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org
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