Bush Disarms, Unilaterally (Friedman)

April 15, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Bush Disarms, Unilaterally

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

One of the things that I can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength. At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before - this administration is off on an ideological jag. It is trying to take apart the New Deal by privatizing Social Security, when what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs.

We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry. We have an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

When the National Innovation Initiative, a bipartisan study by the country's leading technologists and industrialists about how to re-energize U.S. competitiveness, was unveiled last December, it was virtually ignored by the White House. Did you hear about it? Probably not, because the president preferred to focus all attention on privatizing Social Security.

It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era.

Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer in Japan, has a fascinating piece in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs that begins like this: "In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only 'basic' broadband, among the slowest, most expensive and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband."

Since it took over in 2001, the Bush team has made it clear that its priorities are tax cuts, missile defense and the war on terrorism - not keeping the U.S. at the forefront of Internet innovation. In the administration's first three years, President Bush barely uttered the word "broadband," Mr. Bleha notes, but when America "dropped the Internet leadership baton, Japan picked it up. In 2001, Japan was well behind the United States in the broadband race. But thanks to top-level political leadership and ambitious goals, it soon began to move ahead.

"By May 2003, a higher percentage of homes in Japan than the United States had broadband. ...

"Today, nearly all Japanese have access to 'high-speed' broadband, with an average connection time 16 times faster than in the United States - for only about $22 a month. ... And that is to say nothing of Internet access through mobile phones, an area in which Japan is even further ahead of the United States. It is now clear that Japan and its neighbors will lead the charge in high-speed broadband over the next several years."

South Korea, which has the world's greatest percentage of broadband users, and urban China, which last year surpassed the U.S. in the number of broadband users, are keeping pace with Japan - not us. By investing heavily in these new technologies, Mr. Bleha notes, these nations will be the first to reap their benefits - from increased productivity to stronger platforms for technological innovation; new kinds of jobs, services and content; and rising standards of living.

Economics is not like war. It can be win-win. But you need to be at a certain level to be able to claim your share of a global pie that is both expanding and becoming more complex. Tax cuts can't solve every problem. This administration - which often seems more interested in indulging creationism than spurring creativity - is doing a very poor job of preparing the country for that next level.

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The Tiger is coming (NYT)

April 13, 2005

Apple to Start Selling New Macintosh Operating System

By JOHN MARKOFF

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 12 - Apple Computer said on Tuesday that it would begin selling the fifth version of its Macintosh OS X operating system later this month.

The program, which is named Macintosh OS X 10.4 Tiger and will sell for $129, has a variety of new features and some new internal technologies, as well as improved compatibility with Microsoft's Windows.

Steven P. Jobs, the company's chief executive, has at earlier events given brief demonstrations of some of the new features. On Tuesday, the company described the software's new capabilities, including a file search feature called Spotlight; four-way videoconferencing and 10-way audio conferences; and a system called Dashboard that will display on the screen small functions like calculators, currency converters and airline flight schedule trackers.

Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., plans to make the Tiger software available at retail stores on Friday, April 29. The company first announced Tiger last June, and said Tuesday that it had met its self-imposed deadline of making the software commercially available in the first half of 2005.

The new software is expected to have an immediate impact on Apple's revenue, according to Wall Street analysts.

"I think Tiger is going to be a far more important upgrade than previous versions," said Charles Wolf, a financial analyst with Needham & Company in New York, who holds shares of Apple. He estimated that there were about 20 million Macintosh computer users and that as many as 2 million to 3 million might be expected to upgrade their operating systems to Tiger within the next two quarters.

That would generate more than $200 million in revenue for Apple and would easily cover the software's development costs, he said.

Tiger adds pressure on Microsoft, which is developing a new version of its Windows operating system called Longhorn. The Microsoft software is reported to have many of the same features as Tiger, but will not be available until next year.

Apple executives said on Tuesday that they believed the new program gave them a significant technical lead on Microsoft, the world's dominant software publisher.

"This has created even more distance between us and Microsoft," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide product marketing. "We're becoming a tiny dim red light in their headlights."

David Caulton, group product manager in for Microsoft's Windows client division, said "Apple is obviously doing interesting stuff within a closed solution." By contrast, Microsoft, he said, prefers "to take on the problem of platform solutions with a lot of different partners."

Both Apple and Microsoft have focused on adding file retrieval and graphics technologies to their operating systems. Analysts have said that this is partly a response to the growth of Internet search, which has transformed the way computer users hunt for information.

Apple's new Spotlight retrieval feature automatically indexes information without regard to whether the information is in a word-processing document, spreadsheet, digital image or any other file type. Microsoft has a similar feature available with its MSN service and has said it plans to integrate it into Longhorn.

الهدوء الذي يسبق العاصفة - فريدمان

April 13, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Calm Before the Storm?

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

ٍSo here's a question that I've been wrestling with lately: With all these reports about the bungling of U.S. intelligence, and the C.I.A.'s relying on bogus informants with names like "Curveball" or "Knucklehead" or whatever, why have there been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? I've got my own pet theory about what's produced this period of calm - and, more important, why it may be coming to an end.

Let's start with the facts. Despite all the code reds and code oranges we've been subjected to by the Department of Homeland Security, and despite the mountain of newspaper articles about how underprotected our ports and borders are, the fact is that not only has there not been another 9/11, but there has not even been a serious failed attempt that we know of.

I'm not complaining - I'm just wondering why. It still seems to me ridiculously easy to blow up a car in the heart of Chicago. And anyone who has flown on a private jet since 9/11 can tell you that security at these private terminals is still so lax that if you showed up in a Saudi headdress with a West Virginia driver's license under the name of "Billy Bob bin Laden" and asked for flight directions for your chartered Learjet to Lower Manhattan, there's a good chance no one would stop you.

So, how then do we explain the calm? To begin with, I'd give a tip o' the hat to the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. I have no doubt that their increased vigilance - and coordination with European and Arab intelligence services - has made it much harder for terrorists to organize. Moreover, thanks to Gen. John Abizaid's Centcom forces in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda no longer has a whole country from which to plan, train and coordinate terrorist attacks with impunity. The fact that Al Qaeda effectively controlled a country is what made it unique. Also, new U.S. visa policies have made it much harder for bad guys to get into America.

If your name is Muhammad and you are a 21-year-old single Arab man and you have not visited Disney World yet, well, you may want to consider Euro Disney, because your chances of getting a U.S. tourist visa are very low. Frankly, I wish this were not the case because we're keeping a lot of good, talented Arab men and women from getting educated in America, which is the best way of building friends. This is one of the sad byproducts of 9/11 - but it has undoubtedly made it more difficult for the few bad apples to get in as well.

Despite all of that, I fear that we may now be entering the most dangerous period since 9/11. Why? Because I've always believed that one of the most important reasons there has been no new terrorist attack in America has to do with the U.S. invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not only that the Bush administration has taken the fight to the enemy, but that the enemy has welcomed that fight.

To the extent that the Baathists and Jihadists have a coordinated strategy, their first priority, I think, is to defeat American forces in the heart of their world. Because if they can defeat America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, it will have so much more resonance than setting off a car bomb in Las Vegas - especially now that 9/11 has set the terrorism bar so high in terms of effect.

If the Jihadists can defeat us in the heart of their world, and force us from Iraq, it will have a huge impact on the Arab street and shake every pro-American Arab regime. The Jihadists have always understood that Iraq is the ballgame. Iraq is the big one. Winning there is what really advances their agendas.

The reason things may be getting more dangerous now is that the formation of a freely elected government in Iraq may signal that the Baathist-Jihadist insurgency is being gradually defeated. The U.S. may even be able to withdraw some troops. And there is nothing worse for the Baathists and Jihadists than to be defeated in the heart of their world - and, even more so, to be defeated in the heart of their world by other Arabs and Muslims who are repudiating the Jihadists' vision and tactics.

I fear that when and if the Jihadists conclude that they have been defeated in the heart of their world, they will be sorely tempted to throw a Hail Mary pass. That is, they may want to launch a spectacular, headline-grabbing act of terrorism in America that tries to mask, and compensate for, just how defeated they have become at home.

In short, the more the Jihadists lose in Iraq, the more likely they are to use their rump forces to try something really crazy in America to make up for it. So let's stay the course in Iraq, but stay extra-vigilant at home.