MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2010


KLMNO


A seat in Oslo that shouldn’t be empty D


BY YANG JIANLI


ear PresidentHu Jintao, Hope dims that you will join peace-loving governments around


theworld by allowing LiuXia to travel to Oslo thisweek to receive theNobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, LiuXiao- bo. Instead, for some unfathomable rea- son, your government, even under the cleargazeof theworld,appears toclingto the myths and denials that can only further alienate it from the people of China and the community of nations. There is still time, however, for you to


seize this opportunity. A seat on the ceremony stage Friday will be reserved for Liu Xia. Her presence would be re- ceived with joy by people across the world.Your governmentwill be the bene- ficiary of that joy. The criticism you are


receiving now for Liu’s imprisonment and his wife’s house arrest will dissi- pate. Her presence would send a strong message that the government of China is ready, willing and able to move toward the political and human rights reforms thatwe all recognize are necessary for maintainingthehar- monyandstabilityof Chinese society and peace in theworld. Liu Xiaobo has


China, show the world that you don’t fear critics: Let Liu Xiaobo’s wife accept his Nobel Peace Prize.


said, “I have no enemies.” We are all interestedinimproving the quality of life in China. By allowing LiuXia to take her seat in Oslo, you would show the world that your government embraces those who want to improve China. You would show the world that the Chinese govern- ment is strong and that it does not fear criticismbut embraces it asnecessary for


EZ RE


A23 ROBERTJ.SAMUELSON


improving society. Onthe otherhand, a vacant seat onthe


stage will speak of weakness and fear. It will raise the specter of a government that clings to the past and is unwilling or unable to accept change based on the realities of life and the desires of its people. I do not want the


image of an empty seat at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to become the symbol


of China in the 21st century. I do not believe you want that, either — an icon that says China is out of touch with the world community and international norms of behavior. More and more Chi- nese have come to realize that it is time for China to transcend its centuries of blood-stained politics and incorporate itself into the civilized world. Chinese


How to end child marriage D


BY MARY ROBINSON AND DESMOND TUTU


haki is from the southern region of Ethiopia. At age 13, instead of going to school, Dhaki was marrried and tended


cattle for her family. Her husband, 11 years older than she, regularly forced himselfonher. Her nightly cries were ignored by her neigh- bors, and she was shunned by her community for not respecting the wishes of her husband. Sadly, millions of girls worldwide have little


or no choice about when and whom they marry. One in three girls in the developing world is married before she is 18 — one in seven before she is 15. The reasons for child marriage vary: Custom, poverty and lack of education all play a part. Boys are married young, too, but a far greater number of girls are affected and it has a much more devastat- ing impact on their lives. Because they are young, child brides are


relatively powerless in their families and often lack access to health information. This makes them more vulnerable to serious injury and death in childbirth — the leading cause of death in girls in the developing world ages 15 to 19. Child brides are also more likely to experience domestic violence and to live in poverty than women who marry later. Child marriage is just one factor in the lives


ofmany girlsandwomen,but it affects not just their health, education and employment op- tions but also the welfare of their communi- ties.We know that empowering girls is one of the most effective ways to improve the health and prosperity of societies. Child marriage perpetuates poverty by keeping girls, their children and their communities poor. To realize change, we first need to provide


greater options for girls by investing in them and supporting their families. Changing na- tional laws is not enough.Most countries with high rates of child marriage have outlawed it. Lasting change requires local leaders and communities to agree that child marriage is harmful and make a collective decision to end the practice. Innovative grass-roots programs to end


child marriage already exist. From Cameroon to India,communities,humanitarianaid orga-


E.J.DIONNEJR.


Can Democrats step it up? F


romOhio, Rep.Mary Jo Kilroy describes “the worry, the anguish and sometimes despair” among her constituents and


urges President Obama to spend more time with people who don’t make “six-figure in- comes.” From Pennsylvania, Rep. Joe Sestak says


Americans are angry at a government that failed to guard them against economic catas- trophe. And from Virginia, Rep. Tom Perriello


suggests that voters are less interested in “bipartisanship” than “postpartisanship.” He explains: “What they’re looking for is some- onewho solves the problem, not for a solution that happens to be halfway between the two parties.” Lastweek, I sat downwith theseDemocrats


who were defeated in November to get their sense of what the election means for the future and howthe president should respond. Their observations were more revealing than the abstractions that conventional punditry typically invokes to explain what “the people” supposedly said. They spoke just off the floor of the House


shortly after it approved an extension of the Bush tax cuts only for families earning less than $250,000 a year. This vote of principle was unfairly dismissed as “symbolic,” but Perriello said something that pointed to the opportunity Obama and the Democrats had kicked away. “Why not up the game,” he asked, “instead


of playing the same old game?” Perriello was in no mood to criticize his already belea- guered party. But his comment pointed to how it might have avoided a debilitating tax-cut endgame. Rather than allowthe debate to focus on an


old tax measure from the beginning of the decade, Obama and the Democrats should have sought early on to replace the Bush tax cut. Their proposal could have shifted the tax burden away from middle-income taxpayers toward the wealthy while providing strong incentives for job creation and innovation along lines suggested by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). Being the party of “new and improved”


surely beats getting trapped in a fight whose terms were set entirely by Republicans. Improvement iswhat Kilroy’s constituents,


bludgeoned by long-term economic difficul- ties, are desperately seeking. The party’s heavy losses this year among white working- class voters, she said, should not have come as a shock.


politicians must shed the attitude of ig- norance and hatred, the ideology of sus- picion and opposition. They must ap- proachourworldfromanewperspective. This is why Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel glory


will play an important role in China’s future.We are all called upon to face the difficult challenges of today and tomor- row. China’s leaders should not exclude themselves from the process. Giving up ruling by pure force is a compulsory politicalcoursethatyouandyourgovern- ment should opt to take now.


Thewriter is president of Initiatives for China and aHarvard fellow.He served a five-year prison termin China, from2002 to 2007, for attempting to observe labor unrest.He is the liaison to theNobel Peace Prize Committee on behalf of Liu Xia.Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is serving 11 years in prison for hiswritings.


What the debt panel missed


P


eople who wonder what America’s budget problem is ultimately about should look to Europe. In the


streets of Dublin, Athens and London, angry citizens are protestinggovernment plans to cut programs and raise taxes. The social contract is being broken. People are furious; they feel betrayed. Modern democracies have created a


nizations and women’s rights groups are pio- neering efforts to encourage investment in girls and discourage child marriage. As a starting point, they are fostering community conversations about the health risks for very young mothers and the benefits of education. Over time, communities are beginning to question traditional practices and ask what can be done to improve the lives of their daughters. This change, however, is taking place on a


small scale, very slowly. We can all play our part in encouraging change on a larger scale. TheUnited States is stepping up: The Interna- tional Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act, legislation that has bipartisan support, was passed unanimously by the Sen- ate last week. This act illustrates how support for securing a just and healthy life for every woman and girl transcends politics. As members of an independent group of


leaders who were asked byNelsonMandela to use our influence to address major causes of humansuffering,wehave never been involved in supporting a specific piece of legislation before, but we believe that investing in efforts to prevent child marriage is critical to global development and the achievement of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. We applaud the Senate for passing this forward-looking legislation and urge theHouse of Representa- tives to follow suit. We know that these efforts can have real


impact. We are pleased to report that Dhaki received support from a local development program that enabled her to leave her hus- band and continue her education. She now teaches others about the risks of early mar- riage and the benefits of going to school. The United States has the opportunity to help millions of girls like Dhaki realize a different future for themselvesandtheir daughters and, in the process, transform entire communities worldwide.


Mary Robinson is a former president of Ireland. Desmond Tutu, the recipient of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, is archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. Both are members of The Elders, a group of global leaders focusing on conflict and humanitarian issues.


newmorality.Government benefits, once conferred, cannot be revoked. People expect them and consider them property rights. Just as government cannot ran- domly confiscate property, it cannot withdraw benefits without violating a moral code. The old-fashioned idea that government policies should serve the “national interest” has given way to inertia and squatters’ rights. One task of the National Commission


on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson—wasto discredit this self-serv- ing morality. Otherwise, changing the budget will be hard,maybe impossible. If everyone feels morally entitled to exist- ing benefits and tax breaks, public opin- ion will remain hopelessly muddled: desirous in the abstract of curbing bud- get deficits but adamant about keeping all of Social Security,Medicareandevery- thing else. Politicians will be scared to make tough decisions for fear of voter reprisals. Unfortunately, Bowles and Simpson


URIEL SINAI/REUTERS


Israeli forces approach a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza inMay. JACKSONDIEHL


‘The Turkish 9/11’ WikiLeaks captures the essence of a volatile ally


T


urkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu smiled cheerfully as he reiterat-


ed: Yes, the clash between Israe- li commandos and Turkish Is- lamic activists off the coast of the Gaza Strip in May can be fairly comparedwith al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York andWash- ington. “It was the Turkish 9/11 — I


repeat it!” he exclaimed during a visit toWashington last week. “I don’t mean the numbers,” he added when it was pointed out that 2,900 people died on Sept. 11 and nine in the flotilla fight. “I amtrying to express the psychological shock in Turkey. Our citizens were killed by a foreign army.” Actually, it wasn’t quite that


“I watched them in the last four years go


from being anxious about the future to being worried, but also hopeful during the 2008 campaign, to being very angry.” To explain, she invoked the world as seen by a person “who worked at Siemens for 25 years.” “You have a son who is a high school


basketball player andwants to go to college— and then your factory goes off toMexico,” she says, “And you’re a man of a certain age and another factory or another employer won’t give you a second look. Think of the despair felt by that person.” Such voters see Washington as “a place


where their interests get sold out.”What they want, she says, is “to feel they’re being treated as well as the bankers who get bailed out.” Sestak, who narrowly lost a U.S. Senate


race, argues that the electorate was moved less by a generalized hatred of government than by fury over its failure to prevent the financial crisis. “Government hadn’t protect- ed themfromthis calamity—and they hadn’t done anything wrong,” he says. The election outcome, he said, “was a vote


to neutralize government because no one has beenmaking a case for what government can do or should do.” A starting point might be fleshing out Sestak’s vision of American society — “a nation of individual opportunity alliedwith the common enterprise”—that is a rather inspired alternative to both collectiv- ismand social indifference. For his part, Perriello sees an opening for


politicians who set their minds to offering answers to the dejected Americans Kilroy describes. “There’s a great opportunity here,” he says. “Somebody has to come up with an agenda tomake and build and grow things in this country. We have to say to that person that we haven’t broken faith with you.” Democrats, he says, need to see the quest


for social justice “as an entrepreneurial chal- lenge as opposed to a compassion challenge,” the idea being that government and business need to be inventive enough to create a new economy that fulfills the promises of the old. Yes, and there’s a certain presidentwho got


elected by sketching such a vision,wrapped in the words “hope” and “change.” Kilroy, Sestak and Perriello are all telling himthat’swhat the voters are still looking for. l


I offered a tribute to Steve Solarz, the


former House member from Brooklyn who died last week, on the PostPartisan blog (www.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan). ejdionne@washpost.com


simple. The Turks were not innocent civilians but militants who sought a confrontation; they were killed not by suicidal terrorists but by professional soldiers whose first weapons weremace and paintballs. So it’s a little jarring to hear


Davutoglu make his main point: that there is no real reason for discord between his government and the Obama administration. “For more than 20 months we had excellent relations,” he said. “And as stra- tegic allies we have to protect those relations.” Turkey is amember ofNATO,


a host of U.S. military bases vital to operations in Afghani- stan and Iraq, and a major purchaser of American weap- ons. But is it still really an ally? As some of themore interesting of theWikiLeaked StateDepart- ment documents show, that is a question that two consecutive U.S. administrations have struggled with. During eight years of rule by the mildly Islamist Justice and Develop- ment Party, Turkey has become something of a model of the tricky 21st-century relation- ships the United States will have tomanage. Turkey used to be an authori-


tarian state that reliably lined up with the West. Now it is a democracy with a booming economy—and big geopolitical ambitions. The power of popu- lar support has given Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the confidence to un- dercut U.S. policy in Iran, culti- vate anti-AmericanMuslimdic- tators in Sudan and Syria, and make Israel a near-enemy — all while deploying Turkish troops in Kabul and counting on the United States to help his army fight Kurdish insurgents. The Middle East still has


rulers such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a sullen strongman who quietly supports U.S. stra- tegic interests but refuses to modernize his rotting autocra- cy. Erdogan sees that as an opportunity to become the re- gion’s power broker. “Turkey, building on the alleged admira- tion among Middle Eastern


populations for its economic success and power and willing to stand up for the interests of the people, reaches over the [undemocratic] regimes to the ‘Arab street,’ ” explains one ca- ble dispatched by the U.S. Em- bassy in Ankara this year. Thus the overheated rhetoric about Israel, delivered with calcula- tion as well as passion. Davutoglu is something of an


antihero of the WikiLeaks ca- bles, described as “exceptional- ly dangerous” and “lost in neo- Ottoman Islamist fantasies.” Having arrived inWashington a few hours after those descrip- tionswere released, he accepted an apology from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, played down the damage—and embraced at least part of the embassy’s analysis. “Britain has a commonwealth” with its for- mer colonies, he reminded me. Why shouldn’t Turkey rebuild its leadership in former Otto- man lands in the Balkans, Mid- dle East and Central Asia? It’s fascinating to follow the


emotional swings in U.S. analy- sis of this rapidly changing partner. Erdogan is acidly de- scribed by former ambassador Eric Edelman as having “an authoritarian loner streak”; Edelman’s successor, James F. Jeffrey, concludes that Erdogan “simply hates Israel” and that his drive for regional authority “has not achieved any single success of note.” Yet the dis- patches also include admira- tion for Erdogan’s political skills and for Turkey’s role in Lebanon, Pakistan and even Syria. In fact, as a would-be leader


of the “Arab street,” Erdogan looks much more attractive than competitors such as Hez- bollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. In the end Turkey depends on European trade and invest- ment; it wants a democratic Iraq, a non-nuclear Iran and NATO’s success in Afghanistan. It still recognizes Israel. It is, in essence, a genuine Muslim de- mocracy — whichmeans that it is both more difficult and, in a way,more of an ally than it used to be. “At the end of the day we will


have to livewith a Turkeywhose population is propelling much ofwhatwe see,” Jeffreywrote in a penetrating dispatch. “This calls for an issue-by-issue ap- proach and recognition that Turkey will often go its own way.” “The current cast of politi- cal leaders,” he noted, have a “special yen for destructive dra- ma and rhetoric. But we see no one better on the horizon, and Turkeywill remain a complicat- ed blend of world class ‘West- ern’ institutions, competencies and orientation, and Middle Eastern culture and religion.” No wonder Davutoglu was


grinning. In the end, State’s reporting had captured the new Turkey rather well.


ducked this political challenge. They performed an accounting exercise to shrink thedeficit without trying todefine what government should do and why. Their package of spending cuts and tax increases claimed to reduce budget defi- cits by $3.9 trillion between 2012 and 2020. Many of their proposals make sense: for example, simplifying the in- come tax by decreasing tax breaks and lowering rates. With a broader tax base, lower rates could raise more money; work and investment incentives would remain, because taxpayers would still keep a large share of any extra earnings. But what was missing was a moral


rationale for change, except for some familiar platitudes: “American cannot be great if we go broke”; or, “We have a patriotic duty . . . to give our children and grandchildren a better life.” The trouble with these pleasing lines is that they don’t address the practical question of why existing recipients of government support — farmers, the elderly, local governments, for example—should lose it.


Answers exist. It’s not in the national


interest to subsidize farmers, because food would be produced at low cost without subsidies. It’s not in the national interest to subsidize Americans, through Social Security andMedicare, for the last 20 or 25 years of their lives because healthier people live longer and the huge costs make the budget unmanageable. It’s not in the national interest to subsi- dize mass transit, because most benefits are enjoyed locally: If the locals want mass transit, they should pay for it. As we debate these questions, groups


will inevitably promote their self-inter- est. But in doing so, they should have to meet exacting standards that their self- interest also serves the broader national interest. Having received or been prom- ised benefits does not create a right to them. At most, it justifies a pragmatic claim for gradual termination. Bowles and Simpson provided few guideposts. They mainly wanted their numbers to add up. The biggest blunder of their approach


involved huge proposed cuts in defense, about a fifth of federal spending.Nation- al security is government’s first job. Bowles and Simpson reduced it propor- tionately with all other discretionary spending as if there’s no difference be- tweena dollar for defenseanda dollar for art subsidies. Nor was there much effort to identify programs that should be eliminated because they fail the national need test. Good programs would have been cut along with the bad. Finally, spending on the elderly, now about two- fifths of the budget, was treated too gently. Social Security’s full eligibility age would have increased slowly to 69 years around 2075. These programs are essen- tial, but eligibility ages should be raised faster and, for wealthier recipients, bene- fits cut more. This was a formula for changing gov- ernment without a philosophy of govern- ment. For years, it was assumed that a rapidly growing economy could pay for added programs. The result was the careless use of government for almost anything that made a good slogan or could support a lobby. The underlying economic assumptions were overly opti- mistic.Now, an aging society and uncon- trolled health costs will automatically expand the size of government well be- yond today’s tax base. Demographics mean government will become super- sized unless we trim its responsibilities. We need a new public philosophy that acknowledges these realities. Perhaps Bowles-Simpson will start the needed conversation. Government will be big, offending conservatives. But it also should be limited, offending liberals.The social contract will be rewritten either by design or, as in Europe, under outside pressures. If we keep the expedient mo- rality of perpetual programs — so that nothing fundamental can ever be aban- doned — then Europe’s social unrest could be a prelude to our own.


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