Bernd Debusmann

America’s electorate is sliced, diced and analyzed in minute detail, but there’s one comparative poll yet to be conducted: What is worse in the eyes of voters, having eaten dog meat or having put the family dog in a crate on the roof of a car for 12 hours?

This is not a trifling question in a country with close to 80 million pet dogs, whose owners treat them as family members and might be disinclined to give their votes to a candidate perceived as a dog eater, in the case of President Barack Obama, or a dog abuser, in the case of his presumptive Republican rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney.

The crated dog on the roof, an Irish setter named Seamus, has dogged Romney on and off ever since the story came to light in 2007. Obama’s dog-eating is a recent addition to the ever-growing catalog of anecdotes collected by Republican and Democratic activists and campaign operatives to paint the other side’s candidate in the darkest possible colors.

The dog stories have legs, so to say, and are likely to stay part of the election campaign until it finally ends on November 6. To refresh the memories of those who might have followed the campaign for weightier topics – high unemployment, say, or the war in Afghanistan – here is a recapitulation of what happened so far.

While Seamus rode atop the Romney family station wagon on the way to a vacation in Canada, the dog was struck by a bout of diarrhea that resulted in fecal matter running down the windows. Romney pulled up at a gasoline station, hosed down the car, the crate and the dog, and continued on his way. That was in 1983, but the story was revived in the Republican primary campaign when one of Romney’s rivals said it pointed to character flaws.

President Obama’s involvement in the canine aspects of the campaign stems from a passage in his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father (Chapter 2, page 37) that recounted how he was “introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher) and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)” by his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetero. Obama lived in Djakarta between the ages of six and 10.

Jim Treacher, a conservative blogger for the website The Daily Caller, came across that passage and published it on April 17 as an antidote to the potentially damaging effect of Romney’s dog-on-the-roof episode. “Say what you want about Romney,” Treacher wrote, “but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you (liberals) bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.”

The dog wars were on.

PIT BULL WITH SOY SAUCE

Aides to Obama and Romney traded jocular tweets about their bosses’ attitudes toward dogs for days until the president himself took up the issue at the April 28 White House Correspondents’ dinner, an occasion presidents traditionally use to mock themselves (and others). Riffing off a famous sound bite from Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for vice president in 2008, Obama asked: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.” Particularly with soy sauce.

Obama also showed a mock Republican attack contrasting the rivals’ competing vision of an American dog’s life after the November elections. Under Obama: “dogs forced into government-controlled automobiles.” Under Romney: a dog’s “freedom to feel the wind in his fur.” The ad’s final shot shows Romney standing in front of Air Force One, a Boeing 747. Strapped to the aircraft’s roof: a dog kennel.

For some pundits, the whole dog debate shows that the election campaign has sunk to new lows. “One does wonder what the rest of the world must think of us? Is this what happens to old democracies? Are we too silly to be taken seriously anymore?” asked Kathleen Parker, a conservative columnist.

Probably not. It’s a safe bet that parts of the world would welcome a dose of politics interlaced with the kind of levity that, now and then, accompanies the political discourse in the United States.

As to the yet-to-be-conducted missing survey on dog-eating vs dog-on-the-roof: there actually is a poll on the relative dog friendliness of Romney and Obama. But it was conducted before the president’s culinary adventures in Indonesia became a topic of such fascination that a Google search for “Obama and dog-eating” yields 43 million hits. (“Romney and dog” yields just 28 million).

In March, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling company, asked 900 voters who they thought would be a better president for dogs. Thirty-seven percent opted for Obama and 21 percent for Romney. Thirty-five percent said learning of Seamus’ rooftop trip had made them less likely to vote for Romney.

That result practically guarantees that the dog issue will stay alive. Entertainment for some, silliness for others.

Take note of a new phrase in the seemingly endless debate over whether the days of the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power are numbered: Those who doubt the country’s economic decline are holding an “intellectual ostrich position.”

The expression was coined by Edward Luce, author of a deeply-researched new book entitled Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. It notes that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the global economy in 2000 and 23.5 percent in 2010. By 2020, he estimates that it will shrink to around 16 percent.

Luce’s diagnosis of descent, published in April, was the latest addition to a steadily growing library of books, academic papers and opinion pieces for or against the idea that the United States can maintain its status as the world’s only superpower. If we adopt Luce’s phrase, it’s a discussion between declinists and ostriches. The latter include President Barack Obama and his presumptive Republican rival in next November’s presidential elections.

“It means that we’re going to have a 2012 election where…both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed,” Luce said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine. “And I’d describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.”

The false premise, in this view, was set out by Robert Kagan, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, in a lengthy analysis entitled Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline. One of the points Kagan made to support his argument: the U.S. share of world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has held steady over the past four decades. Plain wrong, says Luce.

The Kagan article, now expanded into a book (The World America Made), is reported to have so impressed Obama that it influenced his State of the Union Speech in January, when he said “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

They don’t? Here’s the view of Clyde Prestowitz, a labor economist and veteran declinist, weighing into the debate in April: “You’d have to be blind not to see the deterioration of our infrastructure. We used to have trade surpluses. Now we have chronic deficits. We used to tell ourselves that didn’t matter because we had surpluses in high tech items. But now we have deficits there, too. We used to be the world’s biggest creditor. Now we are its biggest debtor…How can anybody claim we are not suffering decline?”

Washington’s loss of influence has been evident in many regions of the world, most recently at a summit that brought together leaders of North and Latin America in the Colombian city of Cartagena. There, in Uncle Sam’s traditional backyard, Obama’s assertion that U.S. influence had not waned highlighted a particularly wide gap between rhetoric and reality.

BACKYARD NO MORE?

The backyard showed itself so united in opposition to decades-old U.S. policies – the trade embargo on Cuba, the war on drugs – that the summit ended without the usual final communiqué. “There was no consensus,” said the summit’s host, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, an important U.S. ally in the region.

Apart from disagreements over two of Washington’s oldest (50 years of Cuba embargo, 40 years of drug war) and most obviously failed policies, the meeting showed that the United States is no longer seen as the single most dominant force in the region. As an analysis by the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue put it on the eve of the Cartagena meeting:

“U.S.-Latin American relations have grown more distant. The quality and intensity of ties have diminished. Most countries of the region view the United States as less and less relevant for their needs – and with declining capacity to propose and carry out strategies to deal with the issue that most concern them.”

Why less and less relevant? For one, U.S. economic dominance in Latin America is no longer what it used to be. A decade ago, 55 percent of the region’s imports came from the United States. That has shrunk to less than a third. China’s share of trade with Brazil, Latin America’s economic and political powerhouse, has overtaken that of the United States. The same goes for Chile and Peru.

To what extent U.S. influence in the backyard will continue to slide depends largely on how clear-eyed U.S. leaders see their country’s global position. The ostrich view would hasten the decline.

Long before he was in a position to change his country’s policies, Barack Obama had firm views on a complex problem: “The war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws. We need to rethink how we’re operating the drug war.”

That was in January 2004, during a debate at Northwestern University, when he was running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. To make sure his student audience understood his position on the controversial issue, Obama added: “Currently, we are not doing a good job.”

To look at a classic flip-flop, forward to April 2012 and a summit of Latin American leaders, several of whom have become vocal critics of the U.S.-driven war on drugs, in the Colombian city of Cartagena. More than three years into his presidency, Obama made clear that he is not in favor of legalizing drugs or of ending policies that treat drug users as criminals.

“I don’t mind a debate around issues like decriminalization,” he said at the Cartagena summit. “I personally don’t agree that’s a solution to the problem.” Decriminalization means scrapping criminal penalties for the use of drugs. It falls short of legalization which, in its purest form, means the abolition of all forms of government control of drugs. Obama is against that, too. “I don’t think that legalization of drugs is going to be the answer,” he said.

So what is the answer? In his first year in office, Obama talked about placing more emphasis on curbing demand – the United States is the world’s richest market for illicit drugs – and less on enforcing punitive laws that filled American prisons with drug offenders and helped turn the country into the world’s chief jailer. It has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

But the rebalancing and the rethinking Obama mentioned before and after becoming president have been largely rhetorical. His administration has not put its money where its mouth is. Those who complain that the Obama administration is not doing enough to reduce demand can point to the proposed National Drug Control Budget for the 2013 fiscal year, which begins in October.

The allocation of funds is pretty much the same as it was in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton – roughly 40 percent for programs aimed at curbing demand and treating addicts and 60 percent for enforcing anti-drug laws, throttling the flow of drugs across the long border with Mexico and financing the eradication of drug crops in Latin America and Asia.

The 2013 budget proposal allocates 41.2 percent for demand reduction and 58.2 percent for law enforcement. In other words, more of the same — policies that have been pursued since President Richard Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1970. Obama’s 2004 assessment of those policies – “utter failure” – has come to be shared by many even though he no longer stands by it and even though members of his team such as Homeland Security chiefJanet Napolitano insist the old approach is working.

A TRILLION-DOLLAR WAR

By some estimates, the war on drugs has so far cost close to a trillion dollars. What has that vast expenditure bought? Very little. According to the government’s latest “Survey on Drug Use and Health,” more than 22 million Americans – nearly 9 percent the U.S. population – used illegal drugs in 2010, up from 8 percent in 2008.

That demand and the vast profits derived from it, has prompted violence on a mind-boggling scale south of the U.S. border. In Mexico alone, around 50,000 people have died in the past six years as drug cartels fight each other – for access to supply lines to the U.S. market – and the Mexican state.

Drug-fueled violence is not restricted to Mexico. According to the United Nations, eight of the world’s most violent countries are in Latin America. The small states of Central America, astride trafficking corridors to the north, are particularly vulnerable. Honduras now has the world’s highest murder rate. Guatemala is not far behind.

Which explains why Guatemala’s president, Otto Perez, has emerged as the most outspoken proponent of the need for new ways of tackling an old problem. Perez, a former army general, has impeccable credentials as a hard-line drug warrior. So has the host of the Cartagena summit, Colombian President Juan Manual Santos, a former defense minister.

Their views echo the arguments of a panel of high-profile establishment figures who published a devastating critique of the drug war last June. It made headlines the world over but apparently failed to convince the Obama administration. “Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply and consumption,” said the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

“Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers,” the report added. “The … global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically.” That report was put together by former government leaders, including three former Latin American presidents and a former U.N. secretary-general.

Several prominent advocates of drug policy reforms in the United States and elsewhere see the fact that calls for change now come from sitting (rather than former) presidents as a sign that the end of the drug war as we knew it is in sight. Perhaps. But optimistic drug reformers might do well to remember that there is an entrenched international anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration alone has 10,000 employees and offices in 63 countries.

That establishment has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. As with other conflicts, the war on drugs was easier to start than to end.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talk during the plenary session of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena April 14, 2012. Obama tried on Saturday to convince skeptical Latin Americans that Washington has not turned its back on them, but ruled out a drug policy U-turn that some in the region want. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Every day, around 1,600 U.S. citizens of Latin American extraction are turning 18, voting age, and add to the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. Almost 22 million Latinos will be eligible to vote in November and how many of them turn out may well decide who will be the next U.S. president.

A series of recent polls show that Latinos favor President Barack Obama over any of the Republican presidential hopefuls, with a comfortable 70 percent to 14 percent over Mitt Romney, the man most likely to win the Republican nomination at the end of a primary campaign marked by often shrill anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Obama is so confident that he primary debates have driven Latinos away from the Republican party that  he told the Spanish-language television network Univision last November there was no need for his campaign to run negative ads on the Republican presidential hopefuls. Instead, “we may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them…and people can make up their own minds.”

Among debate highlights that stick in the collective memory was the electrified Mexican-U.S. border fence suggested by Herman Cain, who soon after dropped out of the race, and Mitt Romney’s idea that illegal immigrants would chose “self-deportation…because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.” Newt Gingrich, who is still in the primary contest but whose star is fading, described self-deportation as a fantasy.

The president’s confidence of winning Latino support again – he took 67 percent of their vote in 2008 — is partly based on history: Republicans have lost the Latino vote in every presidential election since 1972. But it would be a mistake for Obama to take that support for granted, not least because he broke an election campaign promise to produce a bill on immigration reform in his first year in office.

This prompted Jorge Ramos, the influential Univision anchor to whom he made the promise in 2008, to write in an essay in Time magazine last month that Latinos faced the difficult choice on November 6 “of voting for either a president who broke a major promise or a Republican candidate who doesn’t respect us.”

If enough Latinos find that choice so difficult that they will sit out the vote, Obama’s confidence may prove mistaken. To hear electoral number crunchers tell it, an Obama victory could hinge on Latin turnout and support in swing states where no candidate can be certain of getting the most votes. These states include Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico.

POPULAR VOTE  DOESN’T EQUAL VICTORY

Ruy Texeira, an election expert and demographer at the liberal Center For American Progress Action Fund, points out that while the Latino support tracked by opinion polls points to Obama  winning  the popular vote, that doesn’t always translate into electoral victory. The presidential elections of 2000, decided after a bitter controversy over Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes, are a case in point.

While immigration, for decades a hot-button issue in the United States, has dominated the debate,  it does not top the list of Latino concerns. Surveys show that like other Americans, Latinos care most about jobs, the economy, education and health care. Immigration ranks fifth.

Latino voters don’t have direct immigration problems – they are citizens. But, as Jorge Ramos says in his essay,  “the issues concerning undocumented immigrants are very, very personal. If you attack them, you attack all of us. They are our neighbors and co-workers; their kids go to school with our kids: they serve in battle next to our sons: they take the jobs no one else wants; they pay taxes and overwhelmingly make America a better country.”

Those who attack illegal immigrants are not restricted to Republican presidential hopefuls. Since Obama took office, his administration has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president in history – an average of  around 400,000 a year. The deportations have resulted in the separation of thousands of parents from children who were born in the U.S. and thus are citizens.

In a campaign twist that carries a whiff of desperation, Romney has begun to try and turn Obama’s record on immigration against him. “He campaigned saying he was going to reform immigration laws and simplify and protect the border,” the Republican front-runner said early in April, “and then he had two years with a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate and a super majority in each house, and he did nothing.”

“So let the immigrant community not forget that while he uses this as a political weapon, he does not take responsibility for fixing the problems we have.”

This comes from a candidate whose party stalled attempts at immigration reform both under George W. Bush and Obama. Whether his argument sways enough Latinos to make a difference in November remains to be seen.

The killing of a black teenager by a self-appointed vigilante in Florida has trained a spotlight on gun laws reminiscent of the Wild West in 24 U.S. states. Despite widespread outrage over the Florida case, gun-friendly senators in Washington want to make it easier to extend those laws to most of the country.

That would set the United States, where there are more firearms in private hands than in any other country, even farther apart from the rest of the industrialized world as far as guns are concerned. And it would mark yet another success for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in its long campaign against gun controls.

Before getting into the details of the planned legislation, a brief recapitulation of what happened in the Orlandosuburb of Sanford on February 26: Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old high school student, walked to a family member’s home at night when George Zimmerman, a self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” spotted him, deemed the teenager suspicious, pursued him and shot him dead with a 9 mm pistol after what he told police was an altercation that made him fear for his life.

Police questioned Zimmerman, a white Hispanic, accepted his account of the incident, and let him go, following the letter or a 2005 Florida state law that allows citizens to use deadly force if they “reasonably believe” they face harm. Unlike previous such cases, the teenager’s killing caught national attention, largely because social media served as a vehicle to carry charges of racism and unequal justice to a huge audience.

On March 8, Martin’s parents posted a “petition to prosecute the killer of our son” on the website change.org.

By March 23, after thousands of demonstrators in New York, Miami and Sanford demanded Zimmerman’s arrest, the parents’ petition had gathered close to 1.5 million signatures. Sanford’s police chief, Bill Lee, stepped down “temporarily” to let tempers cool, as he put it. In Washington, the Congressional Black Caucus, an informal group of African-American legislators, termed the teenager’s death a “hate crime.”

One might be tempted to think that the wave of indignation, steadily gathering momentum since February 26, might have tempered the enthusiasm of gun-loving Washington legislators for expanding controversial laws. But one would be wrong. And one would underestimate the clout of the NRA, considered one of the three most influential lobbies in the United States.

On March 13, less than two weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, a Democratic senator from gun-friendly Alaska, Mark Begich, introduced the “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2012.” Just another week later, SenatorJohn Thune from South Dakota introduced a bill “to allow reciprocity for the carrying of certain concealed firearms.” The differences between the two are minor and due to an arcane dispute between the NRA and the smaller and more radical Gun Owners of America. The NRA has asked its members to contact their senators and ask them to co-sponsor the Begich bill.

HAVE GUN, CAN TRAVEL

Both bills would force all states that issue permits to carry concealed weapons to recognize permits obtained elsewhere. States such as California and New York that have stringent regulations on who can carry a gun would be obliged to allow people with permits obtained from states with lax gun laws, such as Florida. Gun control advocates say that it is laws allowing citizens to carry loaded handguns in public that form the basis of additional legislation, Such as the Florida Stand Your Ground law that barred police from arresting Zimmerman.

As Alcee Hastings, a Democratic congressman from Florida put it: “This misguided law does not make our streets safer, rather it turns our streets into a showdown at the OK Corral. But this is not the Wild West. We are supposed to be a civilized society. Let Trayvon’s death not be for naught. Let us honor his life by righting this wrong.” Hastings, who is African American, called for a repeal of the law.

That is not likely to happen, and less so in an election year. President Barack Obama has stayed out of the debate on gun laws, which flares every time there is a headline-making shooting, and with few exceptions, lawmakers seek the gun lobby’s favor and the resulting votes. This is the chief reason why advocates of tighter gun regulations have had little success over the past two decades.

Another reason, according to Kristen Rand of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, is that most Americans are unaware of the number of people killed in incidents similar to the shooting of Trayvor Martin. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) does not compile statistics on such cases and most of them are never known outside the place where they happened.

“The average person has no idea of the scale of the problem,” said Rand. “If they had, things might be different.”

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather to call for justice in the murder of Trayvon Martin at Leimert Park in Los Angeles, March 22, 2012. Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force on Thursday to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Also, the state prosecutor who had been handling the investigation will step aside from the probe, Scott said in a statement.  REUTERS/Jonathan Alcorn

The prospect of President Barack Obama winning another four-year term in November is swelling the ranks of anti-Muslim activists and groups on the extremist fringe of American society. Their growth has accelerated every year since Obama took office in 2009.

So says a new report by a civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, that has tracked extremist groups for the past three decades and found that last year alone, the number of anti-Muslim groups tripled, from 10 to 30.

Between 2008 and the end of 2011, according to the center, there was an eight-fold increase in the number of militias and “patriot” groups whose members inhabit a parallel universe where the federal government wants to rob them of their guns and their freedom.

“What groups on the radical right have in common is the belief that Obama wants to destroy America,” Mark Potok, author of the report, said in an interview. “Fears that he will win again are now driving the expansion.”

How many Americans are on the right-wing fringe is not known. The Southern Poverty Law Center gives no estimate and neither does the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also monitors such groups. But it issued a report last September on a sub-set of the far-right scene, “sovereign citizens” who believe that federal, state and local governments operate illegally and therefore have no right to collect taxes. The FBI called them domestic terrorists and “a growing threat.”

Some of the beliefs held by those on the fringe are too outlandish to influence the political discourse – the government is running secret concentration camps, Mexico plans to recapture the American southwest, there are plans for the United Nations to take over America – but others are not.

The notion that Obama is intent on turning the United States into a socialist country is regularly echoed in speeches by Republican presidential hopefuls.

And the myth that Obama is a Muslim lives on. A public opinion poll of Republicans taken a day before the March 13 primary elections in Alabama and Mississippi showed that 45 percent and 51 percent, respectively, thought he was a Muslim. The methodology of the survey, by a polling institute affiliated with the Democratic party, has been questioned. But even if you cut the percentages in half, they are remarkable and show how stubbornly Obama detractors cling to mistaken beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Those who think the president is a Muslim tend to harbor deeper suspicions. In September 2010, at the height of a shrill debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque in Manhattan, a poll commissioned by Newsweek found that 52 percent of Republicans surveyed thought it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama sympathized with the goal of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world. Thirty percent thought he favored the interests of Muslim Americans over those of other Americans.

ZEALOTRY GOES MAINSTREAM

The Southern Poverty Law Center traced the rapid growth of anti-Muslim groups to the dispute over the planned Islamic cultural center and mosque, not far from the site of September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. Since that controversy, anti-Islam arguments previously confined to little-known web sites run by anti-Muslim zealots have gone mainstream.

The most prominent proponent of the radicals’ theory of “stealth jihad” is Newt Gingrich, one of the four remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. He has termed Islamic law (Sharia) “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world.” How so? Radical Muslims use political, societal, religious and intellectual tools to sweep away Western civilization and replace it with Sharia law.

The idea that Muslim Americans, who account for less than one percent of the U.S. population, could succeed in replacing federal and state law with Islamic law, strikes many legal scholars as absurd. But that has not prevented conservative legislators in a string of states from introducing bills to ban the use of Islamic law.

Such efforts look like a search for legislative solutions to a non-existent problem and have begun running out of steam, slowed by common sense and the efforts of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In the first half of March, five states withdrew anti-Sharia bills or let them expire.

That doesn’t mean the debate is over, nor is it the end of the right’s portrayal of Obama as a socialist foreign-born Muslim enemy of America as we know it. How persuasive that is to mainstream Americans will be clear on election day, November 6.

The world is becoming ever more dangerous. Threats to the United States are multiple and complex. Just think of terrorists, rogue states, dangers arising from Middle East revolutions, cyber attacks, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the rising power of China. The list goes on.

It makes for a world “more unpredictable, more volatile and more dangerous,” as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has put it. According to polls, most of America’s foreign policy elite thinks the world is as dangerous, or more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.

This belief, write the foreign policy analysts Micah Zenko and Michael Cohen, shapes debates on U.S. foreign policy and frames the public’s understanding of international affairs.

“There is just one problem,” they write in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “it is simply wrong. The world that the United States inhabits today is a remarkably safe and secure place. It is a world with fewer violent conflicts than at virtually any other point in history.”

They add: “The United States faces no plausible existential threats, no great power rival, and no near-term competition for the role of global hegemon. The U.S. military is the world’s most powerful.” And though there are a variety of international challenges, they pose little risk to the overwhelming majority of American citizens, say the two scholars.

Take terrorism: Of the 13,816 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2010, only 15 (or 0.1 percent were U.S. citizens, according to the two scholars. Between 2006 and 2010, terrorist attacks world-wide declined by almost 20 percent and the number of deaths by 35 percent.

Zenko and Cohen argue that there is a disparity between foreign threats and domestic threat-mongering that America’s political and policy elites are unwilling to recognize and even more unwilling to integrate into national security decision-making.

Why? Hyping threats serves the interests of both political parties, and more so in an election year. Republicans turn up the volume of warnings to better attack Democrats’ alleged weakness in dealing with threats. Democrats exaggerate threats as a protection against Republican attacks.

The chronic exaggeration of threats, argue Zenko and Cohen, also serves as a justification for huge budgets for the military and America’s intelligence agencies.

Result: the militarization of foreign policy, a skewed allocation of funds and not enough emphasis on non-military national security tools.

Challenging what has become conventional wisdom, the two write that “American foreign policy needs fewer people who can jump out of airplanes and more who can convene round-table discussions and lead negotiations.”

Yet, the budgets of the two principal agencies of “soft,” rather than military power, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Department of State, pale in comparison with the Pentagon. Its enormous budget “not only wastes previous resources; it also warps national security thinking and policy-making.”

THE ONE-PERCENT DOCTRINE

Will the two scholars’ thought-provoking arguments prompt policy-makers to rethink? Probably not, but the fact that their piece appears in the house organ of America’s foreign policy establishment will spark debate – and no doubt criticism from defenders of the so-called 1.0-percent doctrine, the notion that no effort must be spared to counter a threat even if there is only a 1.0-percent chance that it will materialise.

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, given a daily diet of news on bloodshed from places around the world, Zenko and Cohen are not alone in insisting that the world has become a safer place.

Last year, Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, published an influential book, “The Better Angels of our Nature,” that traces the decline of violence over the centuries.

“Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time,” Pinker writes. “And today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” That decline is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, he says.

Pinker admits that his assertion may strike some as “between hallucinatory and obscene”, given that the new century began with more than 3,000 people killed in the attacks on New York and Washington and that wars inIraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur killed thousands more.

But relatively speaking, the beginning of the 21st century and all of the 20th (despite two world wars and the holocaust) featured less bloodletting than earlier eras. In the 17th century, for example, the Thirty Years’ War reduced the population of Germany by a third.

Do such numeral comparisons change perceptions? Not according to Pinker. “Our cognitive faculties predispose us to believe that we live in violent times,” he writes in the preface to his book, “especially when they are stoked by media that follow the watchword ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’”

For decade after decade, diplomats at the United Nations have had on-again, off-again talks on how to reform the Security Council, the supreme decision-making panel on international security. The crisis in Syria shows that progress has been minimal and that power politics often trump human rights.

At issue is the composition of a body “frozen in amber since the end of World War II,” in the words of Stewart Patrick, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based foreign policy think tank. The biggest difficulty in unfreezing it is the veto power wielded by the five permanent members of the 15-nation council – the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

A veto by one permanent member is enough to sink a resolution. On February 4, two veto-wielders, Russia and China, banded together to vote against a resolution that provided for Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, to step aside, halt a ruthless crackdown on dissidents, and begin a transition to democracy. Assad saw the veto as a green light to crack down even harder. A week before the vetoes, the U.N. estimated the death toll at 5,400.

On February 28, it was revised to more than 7,500, the result of a merciless artillery and tank bombardment of the central city of Homs, an opposition stronghold. In the weeks between those body counts, there has been a growing chorus of condemnation of the Assad government, including a United Nations General Assembly vote (by 137 to 12) criticizing “widespread and systematic human rights violations by Syrian authorities.” Russia, China and 10 other countries voted against that resolution. It has no legal force, unlike council resolutions.

More international condemnation came from a “Friends of Syria” meeting that brought together Western and Arab foreign ministers whose calls for ending the violence and allowing access for humanitarian aid fell on deaf ears in Damascus.

Russia and China stayed away from the Tunis gathering and were showered with blistering criticism from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for their “despicable” Security Council vetoes.

Why the make-up of the council and the way it operates has remained unchanged since 1945 is a question that merits more vigorous public debate than there has been in the past. The case for re-thinking the system becomes stronger every time a veto frustrates the will of the majority. Clinton complained that the council had been “neutered” by the vetoes on Syria but the neutering is a logical consequence of the power wielded by the permanent five.

NEVER SAY NEVER

They have the privilege to ignore the rest, push their own interests and protect their allies, as Russia did on Syria and as the United States (the most active veto-wielder in the past four decades) has done often to shield Israel from censure. None of the five have shown eagerness to change the veto system but that doesn’t mean it will never happen.

Ideas on what to change and how to do it have been tossed around since 1993 in the bureaucratic obscurity of the bureaucratically-named “Open ended Working Group to consider all aspects of the question of an increase in the membership of the Security Council and other matters related to the Council.”

An expansion of the top UN decision making body is more likely in the foreseeable future than “other matters”, a phrase that embraces abolishing the veto. In February, the four countries that have lobbied most energetically to become veto-wielding Security Council members (Germany, Japan, India, Brazil) issued a statement urging tangible progress before September, when the current session of the U.N. General Assembly ends.

Japan and Germany are the second and third-biggest financial contributors to the U.N., India is a nuclear power and the world’s second-most populous country, and Brazil is becoming a regional superpower in Latin America. Their inclusion would be a big step towards a Security Council that reflects the world as it is now, not as it was in 1945.

Skeptics tend to argue that expansion of the council would result in a decision-making process even more difficult and time-consuming than it is now. Perhaps. But adding four stable, liberal democracies to the lineup would probably also result in better decisions.

PHOTO: Members of the United Nations General Assembly vote to endorse the Arab League’s plan for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to step aside, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York February 16, 2012. The 193-nation U.N. General Assembly on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution endorsing an Arab League plan that urges Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

As Syrian government forces bombard Homs and other cities with merciless brutality, day after day, calls for arming the opposition are becoming louder. But there is a powerful case for caution, and for thinking twice before good intentions pave the road to even worse hell in Syria.

Most importantly, potential armourers of the opposition need to find answers to a number of key questions. The following exchange at a hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Armed Services Committee in mid-February helps explain what is at stake.

Question: “What is the nature of the Syrian opposition? Who are they? How much of this is domestic? How much of it is foreign? What is the regional dynamic? Is al Qaeda involved?”

Answer: “The Free Syrian Army … is not unified. There’s an internal feud about who’s going to lead it. Complicating this … are neighborhood dynamics. We believe that al Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria.”

The question came from Jim Webb, a Democratic Senator with a military background. The answer was from America’s spy chief, James Clapper, who added that extremists had infiltrated Syria’s motley opposition groups which, in many cases, may not be aware of the infiltration.

Bombings in Damascus and in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, against government security and intelligence buildings bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda, he said.

In other words,  what began as peaceful mass demonstrations against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad almost a year ago (the Arab Spring came to Syria later than to other countries in the region) has morphed into parallel movements of mass protests and an armed insurgency whose composition is not entirely clear. It’s clear, though, that anti-Assad forces are outgunned and outmanned. To significantly increase their firepower would require arms supplies on a scale that would virtually guarantee some of the weapons falling into the wrong hands.

U.S. hawks arguing for arms aid, such as John McCain, the Republican senator, might do well to remember that sizable quantities of the military hardware America supplied to anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan ended up in the hands of the Taliban. That conflict appears to have faded from the hawks’ memories and American interventionists now feel the urge to “plunge in with no plans, with half-baked plans, with demands to supply arms to rebels they know nothing about,” Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, wrote in a column in The Daily Beast.

“Their good intentions could pave the road to hell to Syrians – preserving lives today, but sacrificing many more later.”

“FRIENDS OF SYRIA”

The number of lives being lost has increased sharply after Russia, the Syrian government’s main arms supplier, and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to step down, hand over power to a deputy, stop killing dissidents and begin a transition to democracy.

The vetoes prompted the formation of a “Friends of Syria” group including the United States, European and Arab countries plus Turkey. They will try to succeed where the Security Council failed – stop Syria from sliding deeper into civil war.

Syria unraveling would not be in the interests of anyone except for al Qaeda, argues Kamran Bokhari, an analyst with the private intelligence company Stratfor, except for.

Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri has cheered the anti-Assad opposition and urged Muslims in Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan to join the fight. The violent overthrow of “apostate” regimes is the main plank of al Qaeda’s ideology.

Its lack of appeal for the vast majority of Arabs became obvious in the Arab Spring, when people power rather than martyrdom-seeking jihadis brought down authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. In Libya, where the Gaddafi dictatorship ended in violence, it was thanks to the help of the United States and NATO, not al Qaeda followers.

Such acts as the Damascus and Aleppo bombings, if indeed they were carried out by al Qaeda militants, serve to keep the conflict going and give Assad, who insists that his government is fighting terrorists, an excuse to crack down even harder. In doing so, he emulates his late father, Hafez. Young Bashar was 17 when Hafez deployed tanks and artillery to flatten the center of the city of Hama to crush a revolt by Sunni Muslims against his Alawite minority regime.

That was in February 1982 and it took 27 days to bomb and shell the city into submission. Estimates of the death toll range from 10,000 to 40,000. No-one was ever held accountable. Hafez al-Assad died in bed, age 69, of pulmonary disease.

His son, 30 years later, is trying to bomb the city of Homs into submission. On Feb. 22 alone, two days before the “Friends of Syria” meeting in Tunis, activists inside the beleaguered city reported 80 people killed, including two Western journalists. Grim video clips of hollow-eyed, fear-stricken women and children huddling in shelters touch even the hardest heart.

But whether shipping more arms to the opposition is the best way out of the crisis remains open to debate.

PHOTO: A Syrian opposition member shouts slogans as he holds posters against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and to express solidarity with Syria’s anti-government people in Homs, during a sit-in organized by the March 14 allies in Beirut, February 22, 2012. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi

In mid-December, the U.S. State Department’s point man on Syria, Frederic Hof, described the government of President Bashar al-Assad as ‘the equivalent of a dead man walking.” On February 6, President Barack Obama followed up by saying the fall of the regime was not a matter of if but of when.

He gave no timeline, unlike Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak who predicted months ago that the Assad regime would fall “within weeks.” Since that wishful thought, hundreds have died in ruthless government crackdowns on dissidents and the death toll in the 11-month uprising climbed past 5,000, according to the United Nations. Politicians now shy away from the risky business of predicting dates for an end to the widening conflict.

Not all bets are off, though. There are punters wagering money on the fall of the house of Assad on Intrade.com, a Dublin-based online exchange that allows traders to bet on politics and other current events. Like other markets, the exchange’s odds are based on the collective opinion of traders. On February 9, Intrade gave a 31% chance to Assad being out of office by the end of June and a 58% chance that he would be out by December 31, 2012.

Before you scoff on prediction markets, it’s worth noting that the Intrade market favorites, according to the company, won the electoral vote in all states in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections and market participants correctly anticipated the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003. That year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced plans to set up an online market where investors would have traded futures in Middle East developments including coups, assassinations and terrorist attacks. Congressional opposition sank the idea.

Some experts on Syria expressed deep pessimism over an early end to the Syrian bloodshed even before the Chinese and Russian vetoes of a United Nations Security Council resolution that provided for Assad to hand over power to a deputy, withdraw troops from towns, stop the killing of dissidents and begin a transition to democracy.

Joshua Landis, a Middle East scholar at the University of Oklahoma who runs the blog Syria Comment, wrote a week before the  February 4 Security Council vote that the Assad government was likely to last well into 2013. He argued that there was no sign that the Syrian army, most of whose officers belong to Assad’s Alawi sect, was turning against the president. The regime had a good chance of surviving as long as the Syrian military leadership remained united, the opposition fragmented, and foreign powers stayed on the sidelines.

Assad clearly saw the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light for ever bloodier crackdowns. Syrian government forces swiftly stepped up artillery barrages of the city of Homs, an opposition stronghold. Bashar follows in the footsteps of his late father, Hafez, who ordered the centre of the city of Hama flattened 30 years ago this month to crush a revolt against Alawi minority rule. Estimates of the number of people who died in tank and artillery bombardments range from 10,000 to 40,000.

GILDED EXILE?

Hafez’s brother Rifaat, who oversaw the massacre and earned the nickname “butcher of Hama,”  lives in comfortable retirement in London. In the unlikely case that Bashar would agree to step down, the prospect of him following his uncle into gilded exile is very remote. Who would take him?

While there has been a chorus of condemnation of the Syrian government’s replay of history, the United States and its Western and Arab allies have ruled out military intervention and some of the options now being discussed sound like prescriptions for the kind of long and bloody civil war that wrecked Lebanon in 16 years of fighting between factions armed and financed by outside sponsors.

As Uzi Rabi, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Middle East department, put it during a recent visit to Washington: “Syria is going through a process of ‘Lebanization.’”

The Assad government is backed by Iran and armed by Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov,  in a splendid display of hypocrisy, has complained that weapons from NATO countries were being smuggled to anti-Assad forces across the borders with Turkey and Iraq. In Lavrov’s version of events, the weapons go to “armed extremists who are using peaceful demonstrations to provoke Syrian government violence.”

The government vastly outnumbers and outguns the motley band of army defectors and civilians-turned-insurgents known as the Free Syrian Army. Judging from reports of its hit-and-run raids and attacks on military checkpoints, it lacks coordination and is no serious threat to the Syrian armed forces. But the armed dissidents give Assad a pretext to hang tough.

Which brings us back to online future contracts. Intrade offers one on Assad being out of power “by midnight ET, June 30.”  The other is by midnight Dec. 31.  Perhaps it’s time to bet on December 2014.

PHOTO: Demonstrators gather during a protest against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, in Hula, near Homs, in this handout picture received February 13, 2012. Syrian forces resumed their bombardment of the city of Homs on Monday after Arab countries called for U.N. peacekeepers and pledged their firm support for the opposition battling President Bashar al-Assad.  REUTERS/Handout