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111 -The Foreign Exchange Report- Friday, February 6th,2009 Rates at Mid-morning European Time Euro/Dollar 1.2800 Sterling/Dollar 1.4670 Dollar/Swiss 1.1725 Dollar/Yen 91.20 The resurgence of the pound has caused other major currencies to ease, most noticeably the yen and, to a lesser extent,the euro and the U.S. dollar. Trading has been fairly quiet overnight and the ranges have been narrow. The market is focusing on the U.S. employment numbers and on the Senate debate over the stimulus bill. Former Vice President Cheney made news a couple days ago warning Washington that if the Bush poli- cies against terror groups are watered down, it is only a matter of time until the country finds itself under attack again. For those people who are only too happy to see him go into retirement, the remarks were no more than self-serving arguments to try and justify what many consider the excesses of the Bush admini- stration. Yet, there is probably more uncomfortable truth in what he had to say than his political enemies are willing to acknowledge. War is an extremely dirty business. That statement may sound like a truism, but it apparently has not *dawned on a lot of people who believe that our country can conduct wars without violating conventions and laws, and that because our cause is just, we hold the high moral ground (most Israelis have long aban- doned those ideas). Yet, we should have learned from the past that putting ordinary young people into extreme situations often ends in catastrophic results. The difference between our adversaries and us is that more often than not we do admit our failures and try to avoid them as a policy. They do not. Only historians may be able to eventually tell whether the Bush administration did protect the country effectively after the September 2001 attacks. There are hints that some attacks were thwarted while close to fruition, and that a number of plots were nipped in the bud, so to speak, but the public has no hard evi- dence beyond the fact that to date there have not been any new terror attacks on U.S. soil. Quite possibly, harsh interrogation of captured suspects helped prevent such attacks (on the other hand, it should be noted that it took eight years between the two attacks on the World Trade Center). Because Al Qaeda and other groups still exist and continue to try new ways to harm this country, the intelligence on those organiza- tions cannot be made public. Consequently, both supporters and critics of the Bush policies can expound on their views without much fear of being effectively contradicted. If there is one fairly obvious failure, it is the Guantanamo detention camp. Its creation was a rather clumsy attempt to circumvent the U.S. legal system, but the very fact that its existence was made public doomed its purpose from the start. Quite a number of former prisoners who were released ended up re- joining Al Qaeda, and one could even claim that the prison was, like most such jails, a school for future jihadis. The Obama administration has pledged to shut it down, but the question remains as to what will happen to current internees. Some should never be set free, for evident reasons. Others should never have been sent there in the first place. Hopefully, the judicial process will be able to correctly decide who Wits into what category. How the new administration will continue the fight against terror organizations remains to be seen, but it is quite certain that if it wants to be effective, it will have to take actions that many will find objec- tionable. The nature of the enemy and of the conflict makes this unavoidable.