CZYTANIE 4 EN [#12]

Egypt’s authorities accused Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, of setting up espionage cells in Egypt with the aim of overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s regime and bolstering Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that rules in Gaza Strip across Egypt’s border. The row accentuated the rift between Arab and Muslim countries that want to accommodate Israel and those that want to fight it.

1. Arab and Muslim countries ... towards Israel.

Snouts-in-the-trough MPs will finally face an investigation today into their mickey-taking expenses – as the taxman goes gunning for them. It follows claims dozens cheated the exchequer by flogging tarted-up second homes in a dodge called “flipping”.

2. MPs used ... purposes.

Wise words from the Financial Services Authority, the watchdog responsible for consumer education. Its latest wheeze is to publish some helpful advice for people worried about saving in a low interest rate environment. Its tips include: “Shop around”, “Get ahead of inflation” and “Avoid too good too be true offers”. What invaluable pearls of wisdom.

3. The author is ... the tips.

“There’s no place like home,” sighed Dorothy happily in The Wizard of Oz, having eventually returned to Kansas after her adventurous journey to the Emerald City. Sometimes it’s worth pressing the pause button and remembering that grass often grows just as green on our own doorsteps. The very best spring and summer holidays are often those that don’t involve traveling far. Britain may be emotionally battered but physically it’s in great shape, and I had forgotten the joys that come with being a stay-at-home tourist.

4. The author thinks that the British are ... the UK.

Strategically buried in the middle of dirt roads, packed in culverts and attached to trip wires, a heightened hidden danger awaits the thousands of U.S. troops. The U.S. military expects a 50 percent spike this year in roadside and suicide bombings, which surpassed the number of similar strikes in Iraq during the spring.

5. The number of ... produced by terrorists to use against the US troops is expected to go up.

Oh dear, the critics have been terribly sniffy about Calendar Girls. This dazzlingly funny, shamelessly sentimental and utterly captivating tale of middle-aged women posing naked to raise cash for charity should have won plaudits all round. But the reviews have thrown a veil over its brilliance. Why? Well, we critics dislike these schmaltzy populist confections because they deprive us of the chance to flex our intellect in public and serve up a perspicacious and polysyllabic exegesis.

6. According to the author, critics just want ... in their reviews.

On a March morning a family's house exploded as a shell containing white phosphorous started burning away the people inside. 8-year-old Razia suffered burns over 40% of her body and her life will never be the same again. For the US, white phosphorous can be used legally in war to provide light, create smokescreens and burn buildings. It cannot be used to attack humans. The chemical reacts to air and causes the fire to 'stick' to you, causing terrible burns. A spokeswoman for NATO rejected that it was a US shell that hit Razia's house. But the Taliban insurgents have never been observed using white phosphorus in battle.

7. The text implies that ... hurting Razia.

One could well understand the British alarm, given the phantasmagorical display of brilliance that the Chinese team put together under the maniacal direction of Mr Zhang Yimou, whose supreme delicacy and elegance found in his early films such as Raise the Red Lantern gave way to a fevered explosion of bombast and spectacle. The extravaganza was a gargantuan success – every aspect and anticipation satisfied, every ounce of excitement fulfilled – and every skeptic and party-pooper, not to mention terrorists, entirely frustrated. The army of Chinese officials with individual Olympic responsibilities must have felt a huge relief from a reign of many sleepless nights.

8. The British are afraid that they will ... the Chinese opening ceremony.

9. anticipates changes on the international arena that may have far-reaching consequences

10. states that excessive focus on one region resulted in depreciating US position elsewhere

11. cautions that overestimating a hegemonist’s strength has obscured self-perception of his capability

12. suggests that sustaining an asymmetric relationship with Israel might in the long term prove unbeneficial

13. mentions how a superpower has influenced the current situation in a region

14. describes complexity of international relationships in the Middle East stressing its insoluble aspect

15. predicts that changing US position in the world could directly influence the level of aid for an ally

A
Could the Middle East prove to be the United States’ Dien Bien Phu? The latter, you may remember, was where the flower of France’s colonial troops was vanquished by the Viet Minh in 1954. That military defeat in Vietnam came to symbolise the end of France as an imperial power. I exaggerate, of course: apart from Iraq, American troops are not embroiled in the Middle East and there is no great battle vaguely on the horizon. Dien Bien Phu is no more than a metaphor for the problems that can befall an imperial power in decline. The region where a similar process of angst and exhaustion might most obviously face the US today is the Middle East. Washington has long regarded it to be the most important region as far as US interests are concerned.

B
The Bush administration was the exemplar par excellence. The invasion of Iraq mired the US in an expensive and debilitating war, making it deeply unpopular throughout the world and undermining its soft power. Furthermore, it became so preoccupied with the Middle East that it neglected American interests elsewhere, such as in east Asia, which is in fact far more important by most criteria, but where its position is declining rapidly. In contrast to the gung-ho mentality of its predecessor, the Obama administration has been anxious not to overreach itself, employing a rhetoric that emphasises limits to US power and the need to work with other nations. However, even this enlightened administration has greatly increased its military commitment to an unwinnable war in Afghanistan.

C
Declining imperial nations enter into military entanglements shaped by power and ambitions that they previously took for granted, but increasingly can no longer sustain. In other words, they overreach themselves in a manner that often ends in humiliating retreat; the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is a case in point. Iraq, in a less drastic way, serves as a similar warning to the US. Of course, this has been considerably less humiliating than the US defeat in Vietnam, but it occurred at a different point in the arc of the country’s global hegemony. In the mid-1970s, the US was very much the dominant power in the world and it was to remain so for another quarter-century or more. Today US power is palpably on the wane.

D
The Middle East, more than any other region, is likely to ensnare a declining America in a costly and energy-sapping commitment. As we all know, the region is highly unstable, riddled with conflict and fraught with dangerous uncertainties. America’s two closest allies in the region are Saudi Arabia, a deeply dysfunctional state, and Israel, whose future is utterly dependent on the United States. Both are living testimony to the extent to which the Middle East has been shaped by US power since 1945.

E
Obama has been cautiously seeking a way of resolving the seemingly intractable problems of the region. He has sought to find a modus vivendi with Iran and has been pressurising Israel to accept a two-state solution and an end to the expansion of its settlements. But recent events illustrate just how complex and difficult this will be: Iran remains firmly in its bunker, even more so since its disputed presidential election, and Israel is loath to make the slightest concession. If any American president is going to cut the Gordian knot of Palestine – the central impasse of life in the region, linked to so many other political difficulties – he will have to be far bolder and braver than any other leader we have seen.

F
Obama is the obvious candidate; but he cannot ignore the hugely powerful pro-Israeli lobby in the US, nor, in consequence, can he ride roughshod over Israeli opposition. The Palestinian impasse threatens to go on and on, just as it has for so many decades already. It is a quagmire of America’s own making.

G
Israel survives – economically and militarily – only by virtue of a life-support system courtesy of the US. Its contemptuous attitude towards its neighbours would not be sustainable without the unquestioned assumption that it can always depend on US support. It considers itself to be not part of the region, but something quite apart from it, linked by an umbilical cord to Washington. It behaves like the western transplant that it largely was.

H
While US power is globally predominant, and overwhelming in the Middle East, this situation can be prolonged indefinitely. But as America’s power contracts, such a state of affairs will become difficult to sustain. Israel’s neighbours will grow increasingly aware of the country’s weakness. The US will no longer be willing to underwrite Israel in the same way, conscious that it no longer holds the key to securing Washington’s interests in the region and that it also threatens America’s standing elsewhere.

I
There might seem little urgency to the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem and the normalisation of Israel’s position as a Middle Eastern state rather than a western transplant. This is a conflict, after all, and it seems to be interminable and to defy any attempt at resolution.

J
But fast-forward two decades and the world will look very different. China will have overtaken the US to become the largest economy in the world. America’s power will have waned visibly; Washington’s writ will no longer run in large parts of the globe. Taiwan will have recognised Chinese sovereignty, Africa may well have acquiesced in a much closer relationship with China, and Latin America is likely to have grown even more independent of the United States than it is now.

K
Yet none of this implies that the US will see where its longer-term interests lie; politics does not work so simply. If it did, America would never have elected a figure so inimical to the country’s long-term interests as George W Bush. More likely is a bitter, long-term, domestic battle over whether, how and when to cut the umbilical cord between Washington and Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the cost to the United States in resources, diplomatic energy and the neglect of its interests in other parts of the world could be enormous. Just as Dien Bien Phu accelerated France’s imperial decline, so the Middle East – and above all Israel – could well hasten America’s.

Havens No More

For those businessmen who think that Barack Obama is a business-basher at heart, this week brought plenty to fret about. On May 4th Mr Obama unveiled his plans to reform the rules on taxing the foreign earnings of American firms. They came with a fusillade of rhetoric about companies shirking their responsibilities, and the iniquities of a “broken” tax system that rewarded firms for creating jobs in Bangalore rather than Buffalo, New York.

As a “downpayment” on a “simpler and fairer and more efficient” tax system, which would also raise $210 billion over ten years, Mr Obama promised tighter rules on the taxation of businesses’ foreign earnings and a crackdown on the use of tax havens. Not only does he intend to make it harder for multinational firms to shift income to subsidiaries in low-tax countries, but he also considers stiffening the rules on the credits American firms can claim for the foreign taxes they pay, and limiting how much companies can defer tax payments on their foreign earnings. Under today’s rules American firms are exempted from paying tax on profits earned abroad until those profits are repatriated. Mr Obama intends to roll back this “deferral” by allowing firms to deduct the cost of investments abroad from their tax bill only once they have paid taxes on foreign profits. He has also vowed to get tough with individuals who park funds in tax havens to avoid American tax, and proposes an extra 800 inspectors to root out the scofflaws.

If the goal is to improve the tax code, this grab-bag of measures is deeply disappointing. No one doubts that America’s corporate-tax system is a Byzantine mess of high statutory rates and oodles of exemptions. But much of that complexity results from the divergence between America’s system of taxing its firms and citizens on their worldwide income and the territorial system used by most other countries. Mr Obama’s proposals, particularly his partial reversal of firms’ ability to defer taxes, would add yet more complexity. Nor is there any evidence that they would boost domestic job creation, as the administration claims. In fact, by raising the tax bills of American firms and putting them at a disadvantage beside their foreign peers, Mr Obama’s tax changes may reduce domestic job creation and even induce companies to transfer business offshore.

In truth this plan is less an economic downpayment than a political one. Given corporate America’s foreign profits are an appealing pot of cash, the ambiguity of Obama’s intention sticks out a mile. The aim is augmenting tax revenues – particularly since Congress seems set to reject the administration’s other plan to reduce tax deductions for richer folk. This week’s tough line may also be a useful bargaining chip with business but the rhetoric is unconvincing. George Bush confused tax cuts with tax reform. Mr Obama seems to think reform lies in a tax crackdown; he is not on the right track, either.