Economics is the study of how a society uses its resources to satisfy its wants and needs. What does that mean? Consider the following three scenes. First, a household works together to do the chores. They cut wood for the fire place, cook meals, go to the store to buy food, and rent movies at the local video store.
Second, the managers of a large firm are deciding to produce a new product for line of electronics. They are making decisions on their best place to put their advertising dollars, either online or in traditional television commercials.
Third, law makers in Washington D.C. are deciding how to spend federal money. Should they spend money on preschool programs for minority children, or should they invest in a new military weapon system that could make the country safer? Additionally, how much money should the government spend on health care or what controls should be placed on the internet?
All of these questions are about economics.
The first question that comes to mind is why don’t we fund them all? We would if we could. But we cannot. This brings us to our first major term in economics:
Scarcity- all resources are limited and therefore are scarce. Everyone cannot have everything they want. There is not enough stuff to go around.
To decide how funds get allocated we need to look at our wants and needs. These are our next important terms. Needs are our basic needs to survive, food, clothes, and shelter. Wants, put simply, are everything else and they are unlimited. I want a new car, new mp3 player, or a new house. I don’t need any of them to survive.
Economics is the study of how we satisfy our wants and needs with the limited resources we have.
Finally, what are the resources that we have to use to satisfy our wants and needs? There are three basic resources known as the factors of production.
Land- this refers to all natural resources used to produce goods and services. This includes crops that are grown on a land, minerals that are mined from land and rent that is paid to an owner of land for its use.
Goods and services are the things that we buy like mp3 players or hair cuts. A good is a physical thing you can hold; a service is some thing that gets used up right after it is purchased.
Labor- this is the effort that an individual person puts into making a good or service. For this effort the person is paid a wage. Labor includes factory workers, medical personal, and teachers. They all provide their labor for a wage.
Capital- this is anything that is used to produce other goods and services. If you make cars you need machines to make the metal that is used in the cars. It is also the truck that drives the cars to the dealer who sells them, and it is the building that the cars are made in. All of these are the resource known as capital.
Now that we know what economics is, why do we study it?
We study economics for two reasons. First, we want to be good consumers. Since our resources are limited we have to make choices. We can only buy a limited amount of goods and services with our limited income right? So we study economics to be good consumers.
Consumers are the people in an economy that purchase goods and services.
We also study economics to be good citizens.
Citizens are the people in a country. In a Republic Democracy like the United States of America they are also the ones who hold the political power to elect new governments.
Economics affects us as a citizen through our voting decisions. If we are in agreement with government policies then we should support them by voting in their favor. On the other hand, if we do not like how the government is spending money they we have a responsibility to vote them out of office.
Let us now look back at our three scenes from the beginning of the lesson. What factors of production do they have to use? One or more of the family members will work for a wage, which is labor, they are cutting wood to use for heat, that’s land, and anything they use to cut the wood is capital. They are using all of the factors of production.
What about the business? What decisions do they have to make to invest in a new product? Since, like all sectors of society, their resources are scarce, what do they need to do to fund the development of a new product? They need to take resources, land, labor, or capital from something else they make, right? They can use profits to fund their research, or they can spend less on wages to produce other goods.
How do they decide where to advertise? They do not have unlimited resources to advertise so where do they spend their money? It all depends on the product. If they are making a product that can record play digital music on a small device, you would probably want to advertise on the internet. If it is an alarm clock that is really loud for people who take their hearing aide out at night. That is probably an older population that does not use the internet as much, so you need to advertise on television.
Finally, what about government? Where do they get their money to spend? All the money the government spends is from its people in the form of taxes. Like the other parts of our economy their resources are also limited. They make decisions on spending on a larger scale than families or businesses, but they cannot fund everything. The government must decide what programs to fund. Do they spend more money on military projects, or should they spend money on preschool programs for underprivileged children? Both are beneficial to the citizens. But which one gets the money?
The answer to all of the scenes on where do the resources go is, what gives the most benefit to each sector. If it is expensive to heat your house in the winter then spending resources on the production of wood for burning is in your best interest. If you are a business you want to make a profit, so you advertise to the audience that will buy the most products. Finally, the government wants one thing, to stay in power and to do that they must make decisions on spending to have people vote for them in the next election.
We study economics for a variety of reasons. We want to have good information as consumers to make sure we spend our limited resources in a good way. As a citizen we want to make sure the government is spending our money in a way that we agree with. If we don’t agree with them then we can exercise our right as a citizen and vote for change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_2000
ConceptThe concept derives from the biblical idea of the year of Jubilee, the 50th year. In the Jubilee Year as quoted in Leviticus, those enslaved because of debts are freed, lands lost because of debt are returned, and community torn by inequality is restored. It aimed to wipe out $90bn of debt owed by the world's poorest nations, reducing the total to about $37bn.
HOW ABOUT MAKING IT REAL ALABAMA?
What is the year of Jubilee?
The law of use, in terms of money, is an awesome principle. Money, compounded, grows at an astonishing rate. If a person takes $100 and doubles is every year for twenty years, he will have $50 million. If he continues doubling it for thirty more years, he will have $12.8 quadrillion, which is more money than there is in the entire world!
But God is not unaware of the law of compound interest. After all, this is His basic law of personal growth in the kingdom. Therefore He wisely made a provision in Israel to counterbalance the effects of compounding, the year of Jubilee.
Every fifty years during the year of Jubilee the people had to do three basic things. Firsst, they had to cancel debts. Every debt outstanding, by every debtor, was cancelled. Second, they had to release slaves, because slavery is a form of indebtedness. Every person had to be given his freedom, unless he voluntarily and freely acknowledged that he wanted to remain a slave. Third, all agricultural land, what we would term today the means of production, was to be returned to the families who had originally owned it.
There was every fifty years, a redistribution of wealth through the cancellation of debt and a reassignment of land. Then another fifty-year cycle began. For the next fifty years, the people were permitted to accumulate as much as they wanted without any arbitrary limits. At the end of that time, there was another year of Jubilee. Debts were cancelled, slaves were freed, and the basic means of production redistributed.
There is a new, fresh vitality that comes about in society. Society, in a sense, starts over again. Our way of doing it is very painful. The biblical year of Jubilee is something that our society ought to learn. Otherwise, we will be faced very shortly with a major crash and a depression.
If you want God's blessing, give to His work and to other people. "Prove me now in this" and see "if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you such a blessing that there will not be room enough to receive it." If you are generous, open-handed, and open-hearted, you will get back more. That is the law of reciprocity.
The law of use, coupled with reciprocity, makes an unbeatable combination. "Give, and it will be given to you."
TRUTH
When one would build a house to stand,He builds upon the solid rock.He takes the best at his command,He piles the granite, block on block.No soft, shale rock shall have a placeIn inner or in outer face.Well-tested rock shall polished beFor lasting structure -- don't you see?
Build thou for time -- on solid rock,Give thought and care, build broad and deep.Then tempest wild with rudest shockShall harmlessly around thee sweep.With knowledge gained, and purpose grand,The ills of life thou canst command.From all their power thou shalt be free,Thy power the greater -- don't you see?
--J. M. Morse.
Public Statement by State Agricultural Leaders EndorsingBarack Obama for President
September 18, 2008
We the undersigned 22 current and former State Commissioners, Secretaries, andDirectors of Agriculture join together to publicly endorse Senator Barack Obama forPresident of the United States. We believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate toaddress the issues important to farmers, ranchers, and rural communities, and weencourage rural families to vote for Barack Obama.
http://obama.3cdn.net/32302af9a546a31b56_p25mvbd58.pdf
The empirical data clearly demonstrate a double standard between white-collar crimes and so-called street crimes. There are a number of reasons to explain why white-collar criminals are not more rigorously pursued. By virtue of their relative affluence, those accused as white-collar offenders are able to afford the fees of the best lawyers, and may have friends among senior ranks of the political elite (see Cronyism), the judiciary and the law enforcement agencies. These connections often not only ensure favourable treatment on an individual basis, but also enable laws to be drafted or resource allocations to be shifted to ensure that such crimes are not defined or enforced too strictly. It is a fact that virtually no police effort goes into fighting white-collar crime, and the enforcement of many corporate crimes is put into the hands of government agencies like the United States Environmental Protection Agency which can act only as watchdogs and point the finger when an abuse is discovered. This more benign treatment is possible because the true cost of white-collar crime, while high in nationally consolidated accounts, is diffused through the bank balances of millions either by way of share value reductions, or nominal increases in taxation, or increases in the cost of insurance. And because it can be difficult to assign blame, e.g. environmental damage may be serious but corporations cannot be sent to jail and, if those senior officers are removed from their positions, it may be more damaging to the organization itself which employs many ordinary and innocent people, and to the shareholders who had no role to play in taking criminal decision. Different public policies are at work and there are differences in the level of public interest, case complexity, and a lack of white-collar related literature, all of which has a significant effect on the way white-collar offenders are sentenced, punished, and perceived by the public.
Another reason for differential treatment might be the fact that criminal penalties tend to be more related to the degree of physical force or violence involved than to the amount of monetary loss, all other things being equal. Because white-collar crimes are committed by those with opportunities that do not require violence, they are far less likely to garner more severe criminal penalties. For example, someone who mugs a victim on the street by threatening to knife them, and steals their wallet, might very likely be punished with a more severe sentence than an inside trader who cheats shareholders out of a million dollars.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html
The effect of US policy
US policy in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf region has also played a significant part in changing Russians' ideas about good and evil in the sphere of international relations. In the late 1980s- early 1990s the democratic West had a kind of moral authority for many citizens of Russia who supported reforms. That authority has been lost. People associate the invasion of Georgia with the invasion of Iraq and the threats against Iran. They compare our support for the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with the recognition of Kosovo's independence by many western countries.
When explaining his position on an issue, Russia's Prime Minister has recourse more and more often these days to arguments of the ‘it takes one to know one' kind. Take his response in an interview on the ARD television channel after the war when a German journalist criticised the bombing of a residential building in the Georgian city of Gori. He referred with heavy irony to the Americans, who in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan killed hundreds of peaceful civilians. The same goes for Russia's recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The main Russian argument is that western countries behaved exactly the same in Kosovo.
Events in Afghanistan and the Balkans are, of course, objective factors in international politics. But in his speeches, Putin characteristically puts much less emphasis on standing up for Russian interests than on the fact that Russia is not behaving any worse than anyone else.
Today Putin acts on the international stage in more or less the same way that he fought boys in the yard. The desire to fight uncompromisingly, because bad guys only understand force. The desire to take things to their logical conclusion, as boys do in the yard, where a good fight is the norm, where a bad peace is nothing more than a temporary hiatus, an accidental exception to the rule. He acts with flair, trying to achieve personal self-affirmation, rather than a rational, positive result. But at the same time he is extremely good at concealing his aims, at finding an individual approach to everyone he deals with. The leaders of western countries were clearly not able to understand this strategy, and as a result they lost out to Russia.
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (NYSE: LEH), founded in 1850, was a global financial-services firm. It was active in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales, research and trading, investment management, private equity, and private banking. It was a primary dealer in the U.S. Treasury securities market. Its primary subsidiaries included Lehman Brothers Inc., Neuberger Berman Inc., Aurora Loan Services, Inc., SIB Mortgage Corporation, Lehman Brothers Bank, FSB, and the Crossroads Group. The firm's worldwide headquarters were in New York City, with regional headquarters in London and Tokyo, as well as offices located throughout the world. On September 15, 2008, the company announced its intention to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. On the same day, it filed for bankruptcy, listing debts of $613 billion.
Jesus warned us about gambling.
Researchers at Rice University recently conducted a survey of over one thousand Katrina evacuees living in Houston. Ninety-eight percent of the respondents were African American. Nearly three quarters of the respondents indicated they earn less than $15,000 per year. Almost half have no health insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_Inequality
Since Hurricane IKE hit the state of Texas, I wonder if those people who are in trouble now and need assistance are still shouting for smaller government and less interference in their lives now? Also, how is the money distributed? Are those who had more possessions and property to lose going to get more money from the government than those who had very little?
Marshall Field (the late), Merchant, Chicago, Ill.
Riches are of less importance to a man than character, which will enable him to win the respect and honor of his fellow man.
oung man should carefully consider what his natural bent or inclination is, be it business or profession.
The trouble with most young men is that they do not learn anything thoroughly, and are apt to do the work committed to them in a careless manner.
Next to the selection of an occupation is that of companions. To any young man I would say...Seek at the start to cultivate the acquaintance of those only whose contact and influence will kindle high purpose, as I regard the building up of a sterling character one of the fundamental principles of true success.
The ability to restrain appetite, passion, tongue and temper, to be their master and not their slave -- in a word, absolute self-control is also of first importance.
Economy is one of the most essential elements of success, yet most wretchedly disregarded. Too few realize that in order to acquire dollars one must take care of the nickels. Careful saving and careful spending invariably promote success.
As a rule, the young man of high principles and fair ability who saves his money and keeps his habits good, becomes valuable in any concern.
The haste to become rich at the expense of character prevails to an alarming extent and cannot be too severly denounced.
Merchants who keep their business well in hand, sell for cash, and pay for goods at short time, taking advantage of all cash discounts; keep good habits, and give strict attention to business, very rarely fail.
New American Standard Bible (©1995)Now He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness;
GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995)God gives seed to the farmer and food to those who need to eat. God will also give you seed and multiply it. In your lives he will increase the things you do that have his approval.
King James BibleNow he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;)
American King James VersionNow he that ministers seed to the sower both minister bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;)
American Standard VersionAnd he that supplieth seed to the sower and bread for food, shall supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness:
Bible in Basic EnglishAnd he who gives seed for putting into the field and bread for food, will take care of the growth of your seed, at the same time increasing the fruits of your righteousness;
Douay-Rheims BibleAnd he that ministereth seed to the sower, will both give you bread to eat, and will multiply your seed, and increase the growth of the fruits of your justice:
Darby Bible TranslationNow he that supplies seed to the sower and bread for eating shall supply and make abundant your sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness:
English Revised VersionAnd he that supplieth seed to the sower and bread for food, shall supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness:
Webster's Bible TranslationNow may he that ministereth seed to the sower, both minister bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;)
Weymouth New TestamentAnd God who continually supplies seed for the sower and bread for eating, will supply you with seed and multiply it, and will cause your almsgiving to yield a plentiful harvest.
World English BibleNow may he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food, supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;
Young's Literal Translationand may He who is supplying seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of your righteousness,
Hosea 10:12 Sow with a view to righteousness, Reap in accordance with kindness; Break up your fallow ground, For it is time to seek the LORD Until He comes to rain righteousness on you. (NASB ©1995)
Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
he. Ge 1:11,12 47:19,23,24 Isa 55:10
multiply. 6 Pr 11:18 Ec 11:6 Php 4:17
increase. Ho 10:12 Mt 6:1 Eph 5:9 Php 1:11 1Th 3:12 4:10
Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread for your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the {i} fruits of your righteousness;)
(i) There is no inheritance as good to the godly as bountifulness is.
People's New Testament
9:10 He that ministereth seed to the sower. God, who can, and does, bless charitable giving, will do so in the case of the Corinthians.
The fruits of your righteousness will be increased, for your means will be increased.
Wesley's Notes
9:10 And he who supplieth seed - Opportunity and ability to help others. And bread - All things needful for your own souls and bodies. Will continually supply you with that seed, yea, multiply it to you more and more. And increase the fruits of your righteousness - The happy effects of your love to God and man. Isa 55:10
Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary
10. Translate, as in Isa 55:10, "He that ministereth (supplieth) seed to the sower and bread for food" (literally, "bread for eating").
minister-rather future, as the oldest manuscripts, "Shall minister (supply) and multiply."
I have waited patiently for John McCain to state just how he plans to bring economic change. I would like to know his thoughts on creating eonomic vitality in the Black community? What is his exact plan to help any American making less than $5,000,000?
"It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness". --Marie-Therese
Let's stop Abortions by getting at what causes them. Let's get real and admit that abstinence is not a valid, workable solution by itself. It can't be the only weapon used. Let's put aside our differences on choice and focus on what we do agree on. We all agree that the "need" for abortions needs to be reduced. No one is pro-abortion. No one has an abortion for fun.You want to stop 1 million abortions from happening? Stop 1 million unwanted pregnancies. The real moral question is whether or not you are willing to spend the money that is going to be needed to get rid of the root causes of unwanted pregnancies.First off, lets make sure that birth control is available to everybody for free. Access to birth control has to be pervasive. Every man, woman, and child in this country needs to know what are the various forms of birth control and the positives and negatives of each. There must be no barrier preventing access to birth control – not financially or availability or social condemnation.One of the primary reasons given for abortions is the cost associated with having a baby. Free, no questions asked, prenatal care has to be readily available for everybody. A pregnant woman has to have a guarantee of at least 3 months off from work at full pay. And after that, affordable, full day care has to be available to her.Paternity has to be established and child support from the father has to be mandatory. It takes two to tango, it takes two to support a child financially.All children have to have access to free medical care. Again, no questions asked.We are all against abortions. The question is are you willing to spend money to stop the root causes of unwanted pregnancies? You can't be against abortions and against stopping the causes of abortions. It's a package deal.A culture of life starts with stopping the root causes for abortions. By not changing this environment you are, in fact, fostering abortions. You are a contributor whether you like it or not.Be part of the solution ... for a change.
Misconceptions about Negro family life are often compounded by admonitions to Negroes to help themselves "like we did" (the "we" are the Poles, Jews, Irish, Italians, etc.)
Michael Harrington pointed out that the old immigrant groups came to America when an expanding blue-collar economy had work for grade-school dropouts and men who could not even speak English, while the Negro has come to the city as an internal alien in a time of automation, a time when the number of available jobs is decreasing...
For that matter, the white immigrant groups from Europe, which are so often held up as images of the "self-help" process, benefitted from massive government intervention. The great advance made by the first and second generation workers took place, of course, in the 1930's, and the most important new institutions they created were precisely the industrial unions. But this did not happen in a vacuum. There was the Wagner Act, which...put the moral and psychological authority of the government on the side of the labor movement...Some Negroes participated in the process; most were excluded because racism had kept them out of the factories, where the decisive events occurred....
Negroes...should be individually virtuous--and so should whites. But the Negro movement's future does not lie along the line of making over millions of black personalities, one by one. The European immigrants and their children ceased being rude peasants not because they got religion or psychology, but because they got economic opportunity and hope. The Negro movement must now struggle against economic injustices that are more deeply rooted in the management and structure of our technology than anything the immigrants ever faced. And it can win this fight only by way of militant political organization and through national programs.
Race by James J. DiGiacomo, S.J.Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.May 8, 1969
David RoseVanity FairApril 2008
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
“A Dirty War”
There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan insists that abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal.
Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.”
The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With the 1993 Oslo accords, the territories acquired limited autonomy, under a president, who has executive powers, and an elected parliament. Israel retains a large military presence in the West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”
The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.
It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.
According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.
Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.
Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.
Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.
The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”
Bush was not the first American president to form a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan. “Yes, I was close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met Clinton many times with [the late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of diplomatic meetings aimed at reaching a permanent Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the Palestinians’ negotiator on security.
As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, it’s easy to see the qualities that might make him attractive to American presidents. His appearance is immaculate, his English is serviceable, and his manner is charming and forthright. Had he been born into privilege, these qualities might not mean much. But Dahlan was born—on September 29, 1961—in the teeming squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and his education came mostly from the street. In 1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth movement, and he later played a leading role in the first intifada—the five-year revolt that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. In all, Dahlan says, he spent five years in Israeli jails.
From the time of its inception as the Palestinian branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood, in late 1987, Hamas had represented a threatening challenge to Arafat’s secular Fatah party. At Oslo, Fatah made a public commitment to the search for peace, but Hamas continued to practice armed resistance. At the same time, it built an impressive base of support through schooling and social programs.
The rising tensions between the two groups first turned violent in the early 1990s—with Muhammad Dahlan playing a central role. As director of the Palestinian Authority’s most feared paramilitary force, the Preventive Security Service, Dahlan arrested some 2,000 Hamas members in 1996 in the Gaza Strip after the group launched a wave of suicide bombings. “Arafat had decided to arrest Hamas military leaders, because they were working against his interests, against the peace process, against the Israeli withdrawal, against everything,” Dahlan says. “He asked the security services to do their job, and I have done that job.”
It was not, he admits, “popular work.” For many years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles. Dahlan says these stories are exaggerated: “Definitely there were some mistakes here and there. But no one person died in Preventive Security. Prisoners got their rights. Bear in mind that I am an ex-detainee of the Israelis’. No one was personally humiliated, and I never killed anyone the way [Hamas is] killing people on a daily basis now.” Dahlan points out that Arafat maintained a labyrinth of security services—14 in all—and says the Preventive Security Service was blamed for abuses perpetrated by other units.
Dahlan worked closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and he developed a warm relationship with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who stayed on under Bush until July 2004. “He’s simply a great and fair man,” Dahlan says. “I’m still in touch with him from time to time.”
In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction.
Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by launching the second intifada—a renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”
Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.
Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.
“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”
The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.
Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”
“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”
In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side of the Hamas victory. “Unpredictability,” she said, is “the nature of big historic change.” Even as she spoke, however, the Bush administration was rapidly revising its attitude toward Palestinian democracy.
Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable Israelis—such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency—shared this view. But if America paused to consider giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds long,” says a senior State Department official. “The administration spoke with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”
The first step, taken by the Middle East diplomatic “Quartet”—the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations—was to demand that the new Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept the terms of all previous agreements. When Hamas refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of aid to the Palestinian Authority, depriving it of the means to pay salaries and meet its annual budget of roughly $2 billion.
Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, especially into and out of the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 64 Hamas officials, including Legislative Council members and ministers, and even launched a military campaign into Gaza after one of its soldiers was kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and its new government, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient.
Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas in the hope of establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 2006, Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. They met at the Muqata, the new presidential headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.
America’s leverage in Palestinian affairs was much stronger than it had been in Arafat’s time. Abbas had never had a strong, independent base, and he desperately needed to restore the flow of foreign aid—and, with it, his power of patronage. He also knew that he could not stand up to Hamas without Washington’s help.
At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as she expressed her nation’s “great admiration” for Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors, however, Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.
Abbas, one official says, agreed to take action within two weeks. It happened to be Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during daylight hours. With dusk approaching, Abbas asked Rice to join him for iftar—a snack to break the fast.
Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”
“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait until after the Eid,” he said, referring to the three-day celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. (Abbas’s spokesman said via e-mail: “According to our records, this is incorrect.”)
Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the official claims, she told an American colleague, “That damned iftar has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government.”
“We Will Be There to Support You”
Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready to do America’s bidding. Finally, another official was sent to Ramallah. Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service officer with many years’ experience in the Middle East. His purpose was to deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.
We know what Walles said because a copy was left behind, apparently by accident, of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State Department. The document has been authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian officials.
“We need to understand your plans regarding a new [Palestinian Authority] government,” Walles’s script said. “You told Secretary Rice you would be prepared to move ahead within two to four weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively.”
The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: ... they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”
Walles and Abbas both knew what to expect from Hamas if these instructions were followed: rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the memo states, the U.S. was already working to strengthen Fatah’s security forces. “If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically,” the script said. “We will be there to support you.”
Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] team” to include “credible figures of strong standing in the international community.” Among those the U.S. wanted brought in, says an official who knew of the policy, was Muhammad Dahlan.
On paper, the forces at Fatah’s disposal looked stronger than those of Hamas. There were some 70,000 men in the tangle of 14 Palestinian security services that Arafat had built up, at least half of those in Gaza. After the legislative elections, Hamas had expected to assume command of these forces, but Fatah maneuvered to keep them under its control. Hamas, which already had 6,000 or so irregulars in its militant al-Qassam Brigade, responded by forming the 6,000-troop Executive Force in Gaza, but that still left it with far fewer fighters than Fatah.
In reality, however, Hamas had several advantages. To begin with, Fatah’s security forces had never really recovered from Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s massive 2002 re-invasion of the West Bank in response to the second intifada. “Most of the security apparatus had been destroyed,” says Youssef Issa, who led the Preventive Security Service under Abbas.
The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers. “We are the ones who were not getting paid,” Issa says, “whereas they were not affected by the siege.” Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas Legislative Council member in the West Bank, agrees. He puts the amount of Iranian aid to Hamas in 2007 alone at $120 million. “This is only a fraction of what it should give,” he insists. In Gaza, another Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.
The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not control Gaza’s streets—or even protect its own personnel.
At about 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 2006, Samira Tayeh sent a text message to her husband, Jad Tayeh, the director of foreign relations for the Palestinian intelligence service and a member of Fatah. “He didn’t reply,” she says. “I tried to call his mobile [phone], but it was switched off. So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didn’t know where he was. That’s when I decided to go to the hospital.”
Samira, a slim, elegant 40-year-old dressed from head to toe in black, tells me the story in a Ramallah café in December 2007. Arriving at the Al Shifa hospital, “I went through the morgue door. Not for any reason—I just didn’t know the place. I saw there were all these intelligence guards there. There was one I knew. He saw me and he said, ‘Put her in the car.’ That’s when I knew something had happened to Jad.”
Tayeh had left his office in a car with four aides. Moments later, they found themselves being pursued by an S.U.V. full of armed, masked men. About 200 yards from the home of Prime Minister Haniyeh, the S.U.V. cornered the car. The masked men opened fire, killing Tayeh and all four of his colleagues.
Hamas said it had nothing to do with the murders, but Samira had reason to believe otherwise. At three a.m. on June 16, 2007, during the Gaza takeover, six Hamas gunmen forced their way into her home and fired bullets into every photo of Jad they could find. The next day, they returned and demanded the keys to the car in which he had died, claiming that it belonged to the Palestinian Authority.
Fearing for her life, she fled across the border and then into the West Bank, with only the clothes she was wearing and her passport, driver’s license, and credit card.
Fatah’s vulnerability was a source of grave concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of activities to give Hamas the impression that we were still strong and we had the capacity to face them,” he says. “But I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.” He had no official security position at the time, but he belonged to parliament and retained the loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza. “I used my image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that “Gaza needs only a decision for Hamas to take over.” To prevent that from happening, Dahlan waged “very clever warfare” for many months.
According to several alleged victims, one of the tactics this “warfare” entailed was to kidnap and torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force. (Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but admits “mistakes” were made.)
The dirty war between Fatah and Hamas continued to gather momentum throughout the autumn, with both sides committing atrocities. By the end of 2006, dozens were dying each month. Some of the victims were noncombatants. In December, gunmen opened fire on the car of a Fatah intelligence official, killing his three young children and their driver.
There was still no sign that Abbas was ready to bring matters to a head by dissolving the Hamas government. Against this darkening background, the U.S. began direct security talks with Dahlan.
In 2001, President Bush famously said that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be “trustworthy.” According to three U.S. officials, Bush made a similar judgment about Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three officials recall hearing Bush say, “He’s our guy.”
They say this assessment was echoed by other key figures in the administration, including Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, the man in charge of Middle East policy at the State Department. “David Welch didn’t fundamentally care about Fatah,” one of his colleagues says. “He cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a bitch you had to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.”
Avi Dichter, Israel’s internal-security minister and the former head of its Shin Bet security service, was taken aback when he heard senior American officials refer to Dahlan as “our guy.” “I thought to myself, The president of the United States is making a strange judgment here,” says Dichter.
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who had been appointed the U.S. security coordinator for the Palestinians in November 2005, was in no position to question the president’s judgment of Dahlan. His only prior experience with the Middle East was as director of the Iraq Survey Group, the body that looked for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.
In November 2006, Dayton met Dahlan for the first of a long series of talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Both men were accompanied by aides. From the outset, says an official who took notes at the meeting, Dayton was pushing two overlapping agendas.
“We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus,” Dayton said, according to the notes. “But we also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”
Dahlan replied that, in the long run, Hamas could be defeated only by political means. “But if I am going to confront them,” he added, “I need substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”
The two men agreed that they would work toward a new Palestinian security plan. The idea was to simplify the confusing web of Palestinian security forces and have Dahlan assume responsibility for all of them in the newly created role of Palestinian national-security adviser. The Americans would help supply weapons and training.
As part of the reform program, according to the official who was present at the meetings, Dayton said he wanted to disband the Preventive Security Service, which was widely known to be engaged in kidnapping and torture. At a meeting in Dayton’s Jerusalem office in early December, Dahlan ridiculed the idea. “The only institution now protecting Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza is the one you want removed,” he said.
Dayton softened a little. “We want to help you,” he said. “What do you need?”
Under Bill Clinton, Dahlan says, commitments of security assistance “were always delivered, absolutely.” Under Bush, he was about to discover, things were different. At the end of 2006, Dayton promised an immediate package worth $86.4 million—money that, according to a U.S. document published by Reuters on January 5, 2007, would be used to “dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.” U.S. officials even told reporters the money would be transferred “in the coming days.”
The cash never arrived. “Nothing was disbursed,” Dahlan says. “It was approved and it was in the news. But we received not a single penny.”
Any notion that the money could be transferred quickly and easily had died on Capitol Hill, where the payment was blocked by the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. Its members feared that military aid to the Palestinians might end up being turned against Israel.
Dahlan did not hesitate to voice his exasperation. “I spoke to Condoleezza Rice on several occasions,” he says. “I spoke to Dayton, to the consul general, to everyone in the administration I knew. They said, ‘You have a convincing argument.’ We were sitting in Abbas’s office in Ramallah, and I explained the whole thing to Condi. And she said, ‘Yes, we have to make an effort to do this. There’s no other way.’” At some of these meetings, Dahlan says, Assistant Secretary Welch and Deputy National-Security Adviser Abrams were also present.
The administration went back to Congress, and a reduced, $59 million package for nonlethal aid was approved in April 2007. But as Dahlan knew, the Bush team had already spent the past months exploring alternative, covert means of getting him the funds and weapons he wanted. The reluctance of Congress meant that “you had to look for different pots, different sources of money,” says a Pentagon official.
A State Department official adds, “Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up—with a military showdown.” There were, this official says, two “parallel programs”—the overt one, which the administration took to Congress, “and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel.”
In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.
The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.
But there are also important differences—starting with the fact that Congress never passed a measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid to Fatah and Dahlan. “It was close to the margins,” says a former intelligence official with experience in covert programs. “But it probably wasn’t illegal.”
Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations which are trying to ruin everything”—namely, Hamas.
Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments had to be approved by Israel, which was understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art arms into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t talking about heavy weapons,” says a State Department official. “It was small arms, light machine guns, ammunition.”
Perhaps the Israelis held the Americans back. Perhaps Elliott Abrams himself held back, unwilling to run afoul of U.S. law for a second time. One of his associates says Abrams, who declined to comment for this article, felt conflicted over the policy—torn between the disdain he felt for Dahlan and his overriding loyalty to the administration. He wasn’t the only one: “There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over this,” says Cheney’s former adviser David Wurmser. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”
During a trip to the Middle East in January 2007, Rice found it difficult to get her partners to honor their pledges. “The Arabs felt the U.S. was not serious,” one official says. “They knew that if the Americans were serious they would put their own money where their mouth was. They didn’t have faith in America’s ability to raise a real force. There was no follow-through. Paying was different than pledging, and there was no plan.”
This official estimates that the program raised “a few payments of $30 million”—most of it, as other sources agree, from the United Arab Emirates. Dahlan himself says the total was only $20 million, and confirms that “the Arabs made many more pledges than they ever paid.” Whatever the exact amount, it was not enough.
