Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, in the West Bank. Credit: Libertinus/ CC by 2.0

By Mitchell Plitnick
WASHINGTON, Aug 28 2013 (IPS)

Israel and its domestic U.S. lobby are already in the early stages of the next 10-year aid package, which would not go into effect until 2017 and will be the first since Congress passed the Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, which requires in part that U.S. military aid to Israel ensure that Israel maintains its “Qualitative Military Edge” (QME) over any combination of states and non-state actors.

QME has long been an understood negotiating principle between the United States and Israel, but now that it has been made law, the president is required to report to Congress every four years on Israel’s QME.

That requirement could be an important tool in the lobbying effort around renewing U.S. military aid to Israel, for while that aid is as certain as anything can be in Washington, increasing it currently faces some new obstacles.

“We’re looking at a holistic Mideastern picture, which includes growth of missile arsenals in Lebanon and Gaza,” Michael Oren, the outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the United States, told Defense News. He also pointed to the situations in the Sinai and Syria.

Israel does not oppose U.S. arms sales to “moderate” Arab states but insists that these sales be offset by higher quality sales to Israel. “If America doesn’t sell these weapons, others will,” Oren said. “We also understand the fact that each of these sales contributes to hundreds or thousands of American jobs. And we have an interest in a strong and vital American economy.”

Yet the fact that the U.S. economy remains depressed and its recovery slow has already affected aid to Israel. The sequester, or mandatory budget cuts effective earlier this year, sparked debate within pro-Israel lobbying groups about whether to push for Israel’s aid package to be exempted from the cuts.

The debate highlighted the concern American pro-Israel groups feel about balancing their mission to advocate for a foreign country while not wishing to appear more concerned for that country than their own.

Contradictory finances

Historically, aid to Israel has continued apace during difficult economic times in the United States. But this time, other factors could raise some eyebrows.

The 2008 law, for instance, makes no mention of Israel’s own responsibility to ensure its QME. Rather, it places the onus on the United States to balance arms sales to meet Israel’s needs and uphold Israel’s QME."Israel wants the extra aid but doesn't really need it."
-- Stephen Walt

Israel cut its defence budget in 2013, and the reduction of over 820 million dollars, which is more than 25 percent of the annual aid it currently receives, might raise the question of how Israel can request increased aid while reducing its own budget.

That question is bolstered by the fact that an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report issued in May projected 3.9 percent growth in Israeli gross domestic product (GDP) for 2013 and 3.4 percent for 2014. The average for OECD countries for those two years is 1.2 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively.

As Oren indicated, as the United States moves from one financial crisis to another, these conditions could present political problems for lobbyists pushing for more aid. The fact that Israel’s QME is now mandated by law, however, bolsters those lobbyists’ efforts. They no longer have to argue whether the United States should commit additional resources to assure the QME, because the law now demands it.

Settlements

The cuts in defence while Israel’s GDP rises are not the only contradiction Israel needs to overcome in making its case for increased aid. There is also the spectre of settlements in the West Bank.

For years the United States has largely turned a blind eye to ongoing settlement construction in the West Bank, merely criticising them as “obstacles to peace” but taking little action to press Israel to stop their spread.

Secretary of State John Kerry is currently trying to manage ongoing construction, which had been the sticking point preventing the Palestinian Authority from engaging in renewed peace talks, against Palestinian concerns that the spread of settlements moots the peace process.

But the settlements raise another question in the context of the aid request. If the United States objects to settlements and sees them as hurting peace prospects, should it not expect Israel to prioritise its own defence spending, which, given the circumstances Oren described, would seem to be more imperative, over spending on settlements?

The cost of settlements is unclear. In 2005, the Israeli government commissioned an investigation into government funding of so-called “illegal outposts”, settlements established without government authorisation.

The report produced from that investigation concluded that from 2000-2004, the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing officially spent around 20 million dollars on these unauthorised outposts.

The report’s author, Talia Sasson, bemoaned the impossibility of obtaining complete information and suggested that “the actual sum considerably exceeds the one mentioned,” given that “the sum also does not include money the Ministry of Construction and Housing paid for infrastructure, public buildings and planning in unauthorised” outposts.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2011, official spending on Israeli-authorised settlements increased by 38 percent over the previous year, reaching well over 400 million dollars.

That sort of increase in the face of a request for additional aid gives advocates for peace a potentially useful tool, according to Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

“Israel’s demand for a 10-year guarantee gives Obama and Kerry a useful bit of leverage, if they have the political will to use it,” Walt told IPS. “They should make it clear that Israel will get this guarantee if and only if it ends settlement expansion and agrees to the creation of a viable Palestinian state.”

“This is useful leverage because Israel wants the extra aid but doesn’t really need it,” Walt added. “It would retain its military edge for many years even if the U.S. stopped sending any aid at all.  So Obama and Kerry could use this pressure without actually endangering Israel’s security; indeed, by pushing Israel to end the occupation, they would in fact be enhancing it.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was originally established to promote U.S. aid to Israel, a purpose that remains at the heart of its advocacy.

Congress, where AIPAC’s influence is by far the strongest, must ultimately decide whether the president is fulfilling the commitment in the 2008 law to ensure Israel’s QME. That law is likely to play a crucial role in overcoming what appear to be more barriers to increased aid than AIPAC is accustomed to.

A soybean harvest in the state of Michigan. Between 2006 and 2011, U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields. Credit: public domain

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, Feb 23 2013 (IPS)

The rush for biofuels in the United States has seen farmers converting the United States’ prairie lands to farms at rates comparable with deforestation levels in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia – rates not seen here since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

A new study finds that, between 2006 and 2011, U.S. farmers converted more than 1.3 million acres of grassland into corn and soybean fields. Driven by high crop prices, biofuel subsidies and a confluence of other factors, states like Iowa and South Dakota have been turning some five percent of prairie into cropland each year, according to the report’s authors, Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University.

The researchers suggest that farmers are growing crops on increasingly marginal land, in part because the federal government offers subsidised crop insurance in case of failure. In Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, for instance, corn and soy are planted in areas that are especially vulnerable to drought.

Numerous incentives have encouraged the ploughing of grasslands. The federal system of financial payments to grain farmers has long encouraged conversion of grasslands to farms, but in recent years new subsidies for corn ethanol and other biofuel production have significantly stepped up this inducement.

The resulting increase in crop prices encourages the owners of livestock to plough prairieland in order to grow crops in favour of using that land for grazing. This has lead to the growth of industrial farms and industrial confinement methods for meat production, while genetically modified seeds now allow corn and soy production in semiarid regions that before were suitable only for ranching.

According to the new research, farmers are increasingly willing to take that risk because corn and soy have become so lucrative. Further, the study finds evidence that many farmers are no longer enticed by federal conservation programmes that pay for grassland cover.

“The big drivers that are often overlooked are the federally subsidised crop insurance and commodity support programmes in play,” Greg Fogel, policy associate at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“If a lot of farmers didn’t have this support, they wouldn’t choose to produce on this land, because it is quite marginal and risky for them. But when they’re getting a 65 to 80 percent subsidy on their crop insurance premium, the risk is dramatically reduced because it has already a built-in revenue guarantee subsidised by the American taxpayer.”

While recent years have subsequently seen a shifting of risk from producer to taxpayer, Fogel warns that the latter will end up being forced to pay twice, “when we later have to pay for a conservation programme to rehabilitate and protect the destruction done to the environment on the back end.”

The loss of pasture itself could also have significant environmental impacts. According to conservationists in the Midwest, the United States’ prairie lands should be seen as a vast “carbon ocean”, with an enormous capacity to reduce climate change by sequestering heat-trapping carbon from the atmosphere.

“Native grasses are a stable repository of carbon, creating organic carbon below ground, much as trees create it above,” said John Davidson, a professor emeritus of law at the University of South Dakota.

“Grasses store carbon quickly, providing an immediate mitigation against global warming, and the carbon is stored safely underground, secure it from catastrophic events such as fire. However, ploughing releases that carbon, adding significantly to greenhouse gas concentrations while eliminating habitat used by hundreds of species.”

Indeed, an area covering the five northern states of the Midwest contains thousands of shallow wetlands and is one of the continent’s largest breeding grounds for ducks and other ground-nesting birds and waterfowl. But cornfields are now encroaching on this habitat, with wetlands disappearing and bird populations dropping.

Davidson is urging a public discussion on whether it makes sense to spend large amounts of money on attempts to control the release of carbon from coal-fired power plants and the cutting of tropical forests “while simultaneously releasing an immeasurable ocean of carbon by ploughing up our prairie”.

Further, a 2008 paper in the journal Science argued that fuels like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel lose a portion of their carbon advantage over gasoline if farmers are simply digging up virgin grassland to grow the crops.

Sodsaving

Environmental groups and policymakers are currently pushing initiatives to ensure that federal farm and crop insurance subsidies do not exacerbate the loss of these vital natural resources. A bipartisan group of members of the House of Representatives recently introduced legislation that would create a nationwide “sodsaver” law that would slash subsidies that contribute to the destruction of native grassland and prairie.

This would dramatically lower the amount of money the government provides for native grasslands that have been recently ploughed. This doesn’t mean that farmers can’t keep farming, just that they won’t have as much of an incentive to convert prairieland to agricultural land.

The Protect Our Prairies Act, a provision of the 2013 Farm Bill, which was passed by the Senate in June 2012, would prohibit federal payments and reduce crop insurance premium subsidies by 50 percent on newly broken native sod. The bill would also close loopholes by requiring that newly converted prairieland be isolated from other crop acres when calculating insurable yields.

Proponents say these two provisions are crucial to removing the federally subsidised incentive to move agricultural operations into native grasslands. The bill would also save an estimated 200 million dollars over a decade, while ensuring that taxpayer dollars do not continue to facilitate the destruction of prairielands.

Further, proponents say doing so would result in more ranching opportunities, stronger ecosystems, increased hunting opportunities, less soil erosion and net economic gains for rural communities.

“As the House of Representatives begins developing its version of the Farm Bill, we will work to ensure that chamber does not make the same deep cuts to conservation,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement.

“And we will fight to make sure the House also requires farmers who receive subsidies to take appropriate measures to protect our lands, water and wildlife, as the Senate has done. We simply must find a way to provide a crop insurance safety net for farmers that doesn’t also encourage the widespread destruction of wetlands, forests, grasslands and America’s waters.”

While Iran, Russia, and China are all pretty scary, the ominous word “sequestration” is what is keeping right-wing hawks and their friends in the defence industry up at night.

While they have been rallying their forces for most of the past year, their campaign to avoid the “spectre of sequestration”, as they often refer to it, shifted into high gear on Capitol Hill this week, as top industry executives were summoned to testify to the urgency of the threat.

At stake is could be as much as 600 billion dollars in Pentagon funding – much of which would presumably be spent on lucrative procurement contracts for new weapons systems – over the next 10 years, as well as what the hawks see as the further erosion of U.S. global military dominance.

“It is clear that if the process of sequestration is fully implemented,” warned three of the right’s most hawkish think tanks – the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – in a joint statement entitled “Defending Defense” last week, “the U.S. military will lack adequate resources to defend the United States and its global interests.”

“The spectre of sequestration threatens the U.S. defense industrial base at a time when China, Russia, and other military competitors are ramping up their defense industries,” according to the statement, which helped raise the curtain on this week’s mantra from the military-industrial complex: hundreds of thousands of workers could lose their jobs as early as October – one month before the election – unless the sequestration nightmare goes away.

The sequestration spectre arises from a 2011 agreement, codified in the Budget Control Act, between President Barack Obama and Republican Congressional leaders for cutting the yawning U.S. federal deficit over the next decade.

The Act provides that if Congress cannot agree on a specific plan that would cut 1.2 trillion dollars in the budget by the end of this year, then the cuts would take place automatically beginning in 2013, with half of the total taken from the Pentagon and the rest from non-defence programmes.

The Act was designed to spur both parties to compromise, since Republicans have generally been adamantly opposed to cuts in the defence budget, while Democrats have no less vehemently tried to protect favoured social, educational, and health programmes from the budget ax.

A so-called super-committee of lawmakers from both parties was created to forge such a compromise, but their positions proved irreconcilable. Backed by the White House, Democrats demanded that deficit reduction be achieved, at least in part, by raising taxes on the wealthy, while Republicans rejected such an approach out of hand.

While most observers believed that a compromise would eventually be worked out, the approach of the November elections has resulted in both parties digging in, and sequestration now looms as a distinct possibility.

At 645 billion dollars this year, the U.S. defence budget far exceeds those of the 20 next-most-powerful countries and accounts altogether for about 40 percent of global military spending. Despite the lack of a peer competitor, the Pentagon’s budget has nearly doubled over the past decade.

While China’s defence budget has been rising at a faster rate in recent years, it is believed to amount to no more than a third of what Washington spends.

Nonetheless, hawks have long argued for increases in the Pentagon’s budget and last year strongly denounced Obama’s order to cut more than 450 billion dollars in previously planned defence spending over the next decade as part of a larger strategy to reduce the deficit.

Even Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has warned that an additional 600-billion-dollar reduction resulting from sequestration would be “devastating” to Washington’s ability to protect its national interests overseas, although it remains unclear whether he sincerely believes that or whether he is using it to push the Republicans toward compromise. Some Republicans have charged that Obama himself would not be displeased if the sequestration took effect.

Given the importance of the economy and unemployment in the November election, Republicans have increasingly tried to focus attention on the possible job losses resulting from sequestration and enlisted the major arms manufacturers – which increased their spending on lobbying in Washington by an average of nearly 12 percent during the first quarter of this year, according to ‘Defense News’ – in their cause.

Last month, the chief executive of the Pentagon’s biggest contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., warned that additional cuts would be a “blunt force trauma” to the industry. He noted that his company’s workforce was already 18 percent smaller than three years ago due to a slowdown in the rise in the defence budget under Obama.

Earlier this week, the Aerospace Industries Association produced a study that estimated job losses due to the sequestration cuts would result in the loss of nearly 1.1 million jobs in the defence sector next year.

And on Wednesday, the hawkish chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, hosted the CEOs of four major defence contractors in a hearing designed to underline the threat of mass lay-offs, with notices to workers going out as early as Oct. 1.

But both the administration and Congressional Democrats are insisting that the Republicans compromise on taxes. Indeed, one Democratic congressman from Georgia, Rep. Hank Johnson, noted the irony of Republicans “holding hearings to talk about how reduced government spending would hurt jobs and the economy”.

According to Politico, Johnson asked the four whether they would be personally willing to pay more taxes as part of a deal to avoid sequestration but received no answer.

Recent survey data suggest that the public generally favours the Democratic position. According to one detailed poll released here Monday by worldpublicopinion.org, a strong majority of respondents, including those from Congressional districts represented by Republicans, favour substantial cuts to the defence budget – by an average of 18 percent from its current level.

The survey, which was carried out in April, found some partisan differences. Respondents in Republican districts on average favoured cuts by 15 percent, while Democratic districts wanted to cut by 22 percent, according to the survey, which was sponsored by the Programme for Public Consultation, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity.

Particularly remarkable was the finding that respondents living in districts benefiting from the highest level of defence-related spending were just as likely to support cuts as districts which benefited relatively little.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.