#pressure washing Doral

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4 Reasons to Have Your Home Pressure Washed

Please meet Kleanway Pressure Cleaning of Coral Gables, Florida. If you live in or own a business in this beautiful city, you know how important it is to maintain a spotless establishment. However, we must remember that the tropical climate of South Florida may often wreak havoc on our outdoor spaces. High humidity, regular rain showers, and continuous sunshine can cause surfaces to become drab, dusty, and even coated with ugly mold or mildew. Here's where high-pressure cleaning and power washing come in!

This in-depth blog post is all about power washing and pressure cleaning in Coral Gables. We'll talk about why these services are so crucial to retaining your property's value and curb appeal. You can rely on us whether you're a business owner trying to make a good first impression, or a homeowner looking to repair your siding.

Knowledge is power (washing), so buckle up as we walk you through the ins and outs of pressure cleaning and power washing services in Coral Gables so you can keep your property sparkling under the Florida sun.

When is the usage of a power washer or pressure washer essential?

When it comes to keeping your Coral Gables property looking its best, a pressure washer or power washer is a game-changer. But why would you need such gadgets in the first place? Start right now!

Let's talk about efficiency first. Scrubbing with a brush or using chemical cleaners are two examples of labor- and time-intensive traditional cleaning methods. A pressure washer, often known as a power washer, makes short work of cleaning large surfaces.

Doing so ensures that every crevice is thoroughly cleaned, and it also saves you a lot of time. The powerful water jets produced by these devices may flush out years' worth of dirt, grime, mold, and mildew that have settled into crevices.

The ability to get rid of tough stains is yet another perk. If you have oil spills on your driveway or stubborn algae growth on your exterior, a pressure washer or power washer can blast them away with ease. You'll be improving your home's curb appeal and reducing the potential for further damage if you ignore these issues any longer.

Pressure washing, often known as power washing, is more eco-friendly than other common cleaning methods. Instead of relying extensively on harsh chemicals that could harm the local vegetation and wildlife, just using high-pressure water alone can efficiently finish the operation.

For the time being, regular use of a pressure washer or power washer can actually boost the durability of many surfaces around your home. By removing the layers of dirt and filth that build up over time, you can protect your investment from the weather for longer.

Last but not least, employing a pressure washer or power washer for regular maintenance helps save time, guarantees a thorough cleaning, and is better for the environment. Take advantage of this efficient tool for all your exterior pressure washing in Coral Gables.

Pinecrest, FL Roof Cleaning: How to Bargain for the Best Rates?

When comparing bids for roof cleaning services in Pinecrest, Florida, there are a few key factors to keep in mind. Research and requesting price quotes from multiple service providers should be your top priority. You can get a better idea of what a roof cleaning typically costs in the area.

The next step is to be ready to discuss your roof's specific needs. Size, pitch, and level of dirt or debris will all play a role in determining final costs. It's helpful to be as detailed as possible when discussing costs with potential contractors.

Roof cleaning is important, but it's also important to think about whether or not any supplementary services are required. If, for example, your gutters also need cleaning or if there are any repairs that need to be made, the total price may change.

Haggling is nothing to be afraid of. Many service providers are flexible with budgets and can help you save money by bundling many orders. Use kindness and firmness while discussing your financial situation and your demands.

If you do your homework and are clear about your demands and budget before talking to potential pros, you'll be in a better position to negotiate a fair price for roof or Pressure cleaning in Pinecrest, FL.

Pressure washing your house: the best time of year to do it

Planning is essential for a successful pressure cleaning. The success of this activity may be highly influenced by the time of year. When would you recommend having a power washing done?

This usually occurs during the spring. Before you can use your property again in the spring, you may need to clean off the dirt, filth, and mildew that accumulated during the winter. In the spring, the weather improves to the point where going outside is a pleasure again. Another potential timeframe is late summer/early fall. Now is a good time to clean up any mess that summer storms or hurricanes may have left behind on your property. It's also a wonderful opportunity to undertake some interior decoration in anticipation of the coming fall and winter. It's important to remember that pressure washing may not yield optimal results in excessively hot or cold temperatures. Choose days with moderate temps to get the most done.

When to pressure wash your home depends on factors such as personal choice and the weather. If you want your property to always appear its best, routine maintenance should be performed consistently throughout the year.

Learn More About Commercial Pressure Washing

A thorough pressure washing may remove unsightly filth, grime, mold, and mildew from your business's external walls, as well as concrete sidewalks, parking lots, and roads. High-pressure water jets blast away the built-up grime, leaving behind surfaces that are both clean and refreshed.

Commercial pressure washing improves the building's appearance and extends the life of its many surfaces. By preventing dust and other potential dangers, you are taking good care of your investment.

Professional pressure washing services should be contracted on a frequent basis if you care about your company's image and want to maintain it appearing clean and inviting to customers and employees. It shows that you value the visual appeal of your establishment and are dedicated to giving your customers a positive experience.

Whether you own a restaurant with grease stains on the patio or an office building with dirty windows, there are distinct methods for each situation when it comes to commercial pressure washing. Professional power washing services can safely and effectively clean your surfaces, even if they have been stained.

Pressure washing is useful for more than just exterior building maintenance. Other places where accidents are more likely to occur can benefit from it as well, such as dumpster pads and loading docks.

Keeping these places clean on a regular basis not only keeps them sanitary but also reduces the possibility of slips and falls.

If you want to save time and energy while still getting great results for your business, hire a professional pressure cleaning service. Prevent dirt from building up on your commercial property by giving it a good power cleaning on a regular basis.

All-In-One Helping Hands

Depending on your needs, you may pick from a wide range of pressure cleaning and power washing options in Coral Gables, Florida. Professional pressure washing services are ideal for anyone who wants to improve the appearance of their home or company.

A pressure washer is an effective tool for removing dirt, grime, mold, and mildew from various surfaces around the house. Any surface, from roads and sidewalks to decks and patios, may seem brand new after a good pressure washing. Pools and other outdoor elements that have faded or gotten discolored over time can be brought back to their former glory with the help of a good power washing.

The benefits of employing a professional pressure cleaning service are not limited to residential property owners. Keeping the exterior of a building immaculate attracts customers. Pressure washing is a great way to get rid of unsightly stains in parking lots and on sidewalks, giving them a like-new appearance.

If you are in need of pressure cleaning or power washing in Coral Gables, Florida, Kleanway Pressure Cleaning is here to help. We have trained professionals standing by to provide you with high-quality service that is specifically tailored to your individual requirements.

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Doral's the best Pressure cleaning company offers the best Soft wash roof cleaning in Miami, South Florida, Coral Gables, Homestead & Doral. Call Us (305) 900-6488.

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Why One Should Hire Disinfection Cleaning Company in Doral and Kendall, Florida

To keep the professional environment happy and healthy, it's crucial to perform regular cleaning and disinfection of environmental surfaces in the commercial space. A clean and healthy working environment is simply one of the most vital requirements for employees to perform at an optimum level. A poor and drab office environment might be discouraging and dispiriting. The filth and dirt scattered all over the space are sure to dampen the employees' professional mood. Regular cleaning and polishing keep the environment healthy and bright and helps retain staff in the business. ​ The cleanliness around them motivates them and makes them want to thrive and become more productive. An office can be a breeding ground for germs and other contaminants. Keeping the environment clean and bright allows employees to maintain excellent health and significantly reduces absenteeism and attrition. Daily cleaning and disinfection will keep the office areas in good hygienic condition. Many disinfection cleaning companies in Doral and Kendall, Florida, are offering impressive cleaning and disinfection services. Choosing the right company is essential. With the right experts handling the cleaning process, the spread of germs and other bacteria will be limited. A clean and well-cleaned office heightens the spirit and motivates employees to work with passion and enthusiasm. Be it a shared office system or floating office, or open space, regular cleaning is necessary. Maintenance of the premises must be a priority for all companies to ensure the employees' well-being and avoid contamination. A clean office environment helps create a fantastic impression among the employees, partners, or suppliers. Hence, regular cleaning of the common areas is necessary to raise the company's reputation. However, given the risks of contamination, handling such a job can be challenging and stressful. It requires a certain level of expertise as it involves cleaning grime in the toiler, trash piling up in the corner, or polishing the floor and other common areas. Sometimes, it could be difficult to remove some stubborn grime from the surface. An advanced pressure washer might be required to get the job done. Therefore, it would be best to hire a professional office cleaning company uniquely situated to serve clients in the most sedulous manner. From window washing to floor polishing in Aventura and Miami, Florida, they can do anything and everything to make the office space shine. A clean and bright commercial space reflects a positive image of the company. It gives a business an edge over other competitors in the market. The clients will feel relieved and relaxed as they step into the office premises. The calm and comfortable ambiance will make them feel good, and they might be pleased to hire employees for their valued projects. Professionally cleaning commercial space is a challenging job. It requires time and expertise. If anything goes wrong with the cleaning, it may only add unnecessary headaches. To avoid any such discrepancy, it is advisable to leave the task for professionals. A good and trusted company will send representatives to the commercial unit that works best for the employers. They will inspect and assess the situation and recommend solutions accordingly.

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Impeachment Just Became Inevitable

The testimony of William Taylor confirmed that what seemed improbable just a few weeks ago is now all but certain.

David A. Graham | Published October 23, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 24, 2019 |

Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony to House investigators on Tuesday didn’t answer every question about the Ukraine scandal, but it answered the big one: Will President Donald Trump be impeached?

Impeachment is now effectively inevitable. Taylor’s testimony fleshed out the biggest open questions, including whether there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine (there was), what it involved (military aid), and what Trump wanted (investigations of the Biden family and the 2016 election.) Congress has now heard from career civil servants and from political appointees, all telling a similar story, and Taylor removed the last scintilla of doubt. With that, it’s all but impossible to imagine a scenario in which House Democrats don’t vote to impeach the president.

The remaining questions are how much broader the scandal gets, how much worse the details become, and how many—if any—Republicans get on board with impeachment. All of these in turn bear on the ultimate question: whether the Senate might vote to remove Trump.

Though Taylor’s account aligned closely with what was already known, he offered more damning detail than had been available in any previous publicly revealed testimony. Taylor, whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appointed as America’s top diplomat in Kiev earlier this year, offered an account of how the administration held up military aid while pressuring Ukraine’s president to mount investigations of a natural-gas company on whose board Vice President Joe Biden’s son sat, and of alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

With that, Trump’s defenses have failed on every side. Though the president was reportedly adamant that the exchange not be called a quid pro quo, it doesn’t matter what it was labeled, since it apparently was, in fact, a quid pro quo. Nor does the excuse that Trump was simply trying to use American leverage to fight corruption stand up. The president was seeking to aid his own personal reelection prospects using American statecraft as leverage—a clear abuse of power. (It’s also still possible that the administration broke the law by trying to hold up the funds.) Nor can the president claim ignorance of the scheme, since multiple witnesses have attested to his personal involvement.

“The president used the machinery of government to advance his private interests instead of his own administration’s public policy,” Daniel Fried, a former State Department official in Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote in an email. “Taylor’s statement outlines in devastating detail that there was indeed a presidential-mandated ‘quid pro quo,’ that the substance of the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship was to be made conditional on the Ukrainians acting on behalf of the president’s partisan interests.”

With this information in hand, Democrats have little choice but to vote to impeach. They just have to decide, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey reports, when and on what specific issues.

Any impeachment of a president is an epochal event. Yet this realization is especially surprising because of how quickly it has come. As the drip of evidence has turned into a steady stream over the past two weeks, it’s easy to lose sight of how much the ground has shifted.

Less than one month ago, on September 24, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was launching an “official impeachment inquiry.” At the time, that seemed like a potentially risky move. What led Pelosi to act was that a group of moderate Democratic representatives who had been reluctant to impeach announced that they supported an impeachment inquiry—not necessarily articles of impeachment, or a vote to impeach, but a simple inquiry.

A probe made sense, since the public, and Congress, knew very little about the matter in question. There was a whistle-blower complaint about the president’s behavior, and the White House had been refusing to release it, but the substance of the complaint was still mostly unknown. The White House had not yet released the transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had been relatively open about his muckraking in Ukraine, but the extent of his hijacking of U.S. foreign policy was unknown. More than half the country opposed impeachment (51.2 percent on average, per FiveThirtyEight), and less than 39 percent of the country backed it.

Since then there’s been a vast shift in both knowledge and opinion. It came slowly at first, and then snowballed. First, the White House released the partial transcript of the July 25 Zelensky call, apparently as a last-ditch effort to forestall the impeachment inquiry. Then came the whistle-blower complaint, packed with incriminating details—yet by the writer’s own acknowledgment, based entirely on second-hand knowledge (though the complaint’s substance was remarkably consistent with the call transcript).

Over the next few days, Trump flailed—threatening the investigators and promising to obstruct the investigation, even as he openly committed the same sin of which he had been accused. But it turned out Trump couldn’t hold the line, and a procession of current and former officials opted to testify to Congress, many under subpoena. Meanwhile, Trump was making it hard for his allies to defend him on other fronts too, from his green light for a Turkish invasion of Syria to his announcement that he would host the Group of Seven summit at his own Trump National Doral resort.

Amid the tumult, public opinion shifted quickly. Within five days of Pelosi’s announcement, support was in the black; it now sits at an even 50 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s average, with some polls showing higher support. Only 43.1 percent oppose impeachment.

David A. Graham: Trump never learns

Taylor’s testimony offers several leads for House investigators to pursue, and  interviews with other officials have already been scheduled or requested. But there’s no longer a question of whether the House has sufficient material to impeach. Given what they’ve found, Democrats probably couldn’t avoid a vote to impeach even if they wanted to—which some still might.

Republicans are in an even tighter vise. With a few exceptions, elected GOP officials have found it very hard to defend Trump’s behavior substantively. Instead, they have complained about the process, saying that Democrats are too secretive, or attacking Representative Adam Schiff, the most prominent Democrat leading the inquiry. A Daily Caller canvass found that only seven of the 53 Republican senators were willing to rule out voting to remove Trump from office.

That caginess might be wise. Neither side knows how much more worse the Ukraine story will get with more testimony, or whether evidence of Trump improperly pressuring other countries might emerge. As the past month demonstrates, a lot can change in a few short weeks. One month ago, it wasn’t clear there’d even be an impeachment inquiry. Today, impeachment itself is a near-certainty.

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The Consequences of Donald Trump Washing His Hands of the Middle East

The short-term costs have been brutal, but the longer-term ones could be far more significant.

Uri Friedman | Published October 23, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 24, 2019 |

Today Donald Trump stood in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room before a portrait of George Washington, who 223 years ago warned of the danger of foreign entanglements, and declared the United States disentangled from the Middle East—a region America’s leaders have for decades considered vital to national security.

Yet ever since he announced the precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from northeastern Syria this month, giving way to a brutal Turkish military offensive against Kurdish forces there, Trump has witnessed the grave consequences of this disengagement. Just in the short term, recent days have brought the slaughter and mass displacement of Kurds, whom the United States relied on to cripple the Islamic State in Syria; the collective shudder of U.S. allies around the world at America’s rank betrayal of its battlefield partners; and the springing loose of at least 100 ISIS fighters from prisons operated by overwhelmed Kurdish-led militias.

In the longer term, the withering of U.S. influence as Turkish, Russian, and Iranian-backed Syrian forces rush into the vacuum, and the radiating security threats that these shifting dynamics pose, could be even more consequential—to American allies in the region and beyond, and to the United States itself.

Trump’s core message in announcing a U.S.-mediated halt to fighting between the Turks and Kurds was that in his calculation, these costs are eclipsed by the benefits of extracting the United States from the Middle East, at least militarily. Yes, the Trump administration will for now keep a small number of forces in Syria around oil facilities in the north and at a base in the south, has yet to pull U.S. troops from conflict zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recently deployed thousands of American soldiers to Saudi Arabia after Iranian attacks on oil facilities there.

But what should be obvious to allies and adversaries alike from Trump’s comments today, if it wasn’t evident already, is that his heart isn’t in these deployments and in involving the United States in any regional conflicts. The president’s goal “is to have all American troops out of Syria, and that’s something that we believe will ultimately happen,” a senior Trump-administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters after the president’s speech.

In remarks that America’s enemies, from ISIS to the Taliban to Iran will no doubt heed, Trump made clear that while he is willing to make some modest diplomatic and economic investments in molding developments, he has little appetite for expending military resources to secure U.S. interests—even when it comes to something as central to the defense of the homeland as preventing the resurgence of the world’s most virulent terrorist groups with, relative to the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a small deployment of U.S. troops.

“Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” Trump said today, regarding territory on which more than 11,000 Kurdish fighters perished in the fight against ISIS so U.S. troops didn’t have to. (The president thanked these fighters for their “sacrifices” and said they’d “been terrific.”) The United States has done a “great service” and “great job” for Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds by engineering a pause in their perpetual fighting, he argued, “and now we’re getting out.”

Even as he denounced Barack Obama for not retaliating militarily against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2013, Trump expressed the very same fatalism about the Middle East that had prevented his predecessor from pulling the trigger to enforce his infamous “red line.”

“We have avoided another costly military intervention that could’ve led to disastrous, far-reaching consequences,” Trump said of his decision not to oppose the incursion by Turkey. “We have spent $8 trillion on wars in the Middle East … But after all that money was spent and all of those lives lost, the young men and women gravely wounded—so many—the Middle East is less safe, less stable, and less secure than before these conflicts began.”

The president limited his ambitions in Syria to securing “the oil” and deterring Turkey through the threat of economic sanctions from persecuting religious and ethnic minorities, an issue prioritized by his evangelical Christian supporters in the United States. He outsourced efforts to defeat ISIS, which now has a new lease on life, to the embattled Kurds, nominating Turkey as a “backup” that could “grab them” if need be. And he signaled that extending a five-day cease-fire, even though it’s liable to collapse at any moment, was sufficient for him to proclaim victory, lift all the sanctions he imposed on Turkey for its offensive, and leave behind the precarious situation on the ground.

Apparently viewing his scripted remarks as mere suggestions, Trump repeatedly ad-libbed comments that undercut his claims of success. Noting Turkey’s assurance that the cease-fire would be permanent, he added, “You would also define the word permanent in that part of the world as somewhat questionable.” He stated that peace and stability had come to the border between Turkey and Syria in the form of a “safe zone”—an “interesting term,” he observed, denoting a strip of land that had seen all manner of atrocities but that “hopefully … will become safe.” He accepted congratulations for his diplomatic endeavor, and congratulated himself, but acknowledged that “it’s too early, to me, to be congratulated.” His boasts about brokering a resolution among the warring parties in a matter of days was belied by something he said with far more conviction: that it was futile to intervene in “ancient sectarian and tribal conflicts.”

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Trump Has Achieved a ‘Sloppy’ Success in Syria—For Now

Whatever the agreement was, it left the status quo in place, at least for the time being.

Kathy Gilsinan | Published October 23, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 24, 2019 |

Was it was a cease-fire, a pause, or something else? Whatever the agreement was between the United States and Turkey—each described it differently, and the Syrian Kurdish leadership said they only recognized the American version—it expired yesterday and, for the time being, left the status quo in place.

The five-day period of the agreement did include clashes, which U.S. officials downplayed, but it also stanched a chaotic period following President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was pulling American forces out of Syria, in which scores were killed and thousands were displaced.

So maybe it didn’t matter what you called it—it more or less worked.

That is, in the very narrow sense of stopping the worst of the Turkish onslaught against the Syrian Kurds for a time. Now there’s a different kind of order in place of the fighting: Syrian Kurdish forces have withdrawn from a chunk of territory near Syria’s border with Turkey; Russia has vowed to help Turkey push them from an area twice as large. The new status quo, as Trump’s Syria envoy testified, “has scrambled the entire northeast, undercut our efforts against [the Islamic State], and brought in the Russians and the Syrian-regime forces in a way that is really tragic for everybody involved.”

The U.S.-brokered semi-reprieve from the fighting was fundamentally a bargain between Turkey and the United States, in which the U.S. message was: Stop attacking the Syrian Kurds, who helped us beat ISIS; they’ll get away from a piece of your border; and we won’t come after your economy.

Yet in the days since, it’s only become clearer that each of the key players—the U.S., Turkey, and the Syrian Kurdish leadership—all believe they agreed to different things. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan vowed to “crush the heads of the terrorists” if they didn’t withdraw from an unspecified safe zone within the cease-fire period. Redur Khalil, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, told the Associated Press that the SDF had agreed only to the American agreement, not the Turkish one.

Besides, there was no geographic limit to the “safe zone” spelled out in the U.S.-Turkey deal; if the Kurds withdrew from the 75-mile strip between the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad, where the Turks had concentrated their assault in mid-October, Erdoğan could still claim there were terrorists who needed crushing elsewhere on his border; he has previously said he wanted the Kurds out of a 260-mile stretch of that frontier, more than three times the length the Americans had in mind.

“We never used a map,” said James Jeffrey, the Trump administration’s Syria and counter-ISIS envoy, in congressional testimony yesterday. “This sounds like a sloppy way to do things; it actually worked.” The Turks hadn’t launched a new offensive; the commander of the SDF wrote to Vice President Mike Pence to say that his forces had left “the relevant area of operations.”

Meanwhile, the Kurds and the Turks were also maneuvering for support from their international backers. Despite accusations that the United States had abandoned the Kurds, they seemed to have no intention of abandoning the United States. “We want peace … And we will stick to the United States forever,” the Syrian Kurdish leader Ilham Ahmed, a co-president of the Syrian Democratic Council, told reporters through a translator on Capitol Hill this week. She had come on an emergency visit to push for support for the Syrian Kurds, as a bipartisan group of lawmakers readied sanctions against Turkey and Senator Lindsey Graham hinted that policy changes might be coming from the White House. Graham, who is close to Trump, had condemned his Syria pullout; Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters there was a chance some troops could stay in the country to protect oil fields.

The Turkish government, for its part, was courting Russia, having been roundly condemned by American and European officials whom Erdoğan duly dismissed as backing terrorists. The end of the cease-fire coincided almost exactly with a planned meeting between Erdoğan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose forces are already patrolling some areas in northern Syria that the Americans have left. (A video posted by a Russian journalist purportedly showed him entering a recently vacated American base.)

That’s what Erdoğan tried to get from Putin, who committed to joint patrols along the border with the Turks “to facilitate the removal of” Kurdish militias. There was no immediate reaction from Kurdish representatives. Once again, they were not party to the agreement.

Erdoğan may have received enough guarantees, from enough international backers, to maintain the cease-fire—or whatever it is—for now. He has managed to pull both Russia and the United States into effectively guaranteeing Turkish security along its border with Syria. He has, through three separate incursions into northern Syria since 2016, chopped up a stretch of contiguous Kurdish-held territory they had hoped to keep autonomous.

That autonomy may ultimately have been the real threat to Erdoğan, argues Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert and the Cohen Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. The Syrian Kurdish militias, despite their ties to Kurdish insurgents in Turkey, had never attacked Turkey themselves before the launch of the Turkish offensive more than a week ago. But their U.S.-backed statelet—the second the U.S. had helped bring about in the region, after Iraqi Kurdistan—could have been seen as a model by Turkey’s own Kurds.

“It’s a political threat, not a military threat,” Barkey said of the now-disintegrating Kurdish zone in northern Syria. “But [Turkey] couldn’t say that, so they sold it as a military threat.”

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Trump’s Character Betrays Him

In foreign policy, reputation means everything.

Eliot A. Cohen | Published October 24, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 24, 2019 |

In the spring and again the summer of 2016, a large chunk of the Republican foreign-policy and national-security establishment publicly denounced then-candidate Donald Trump as unfit to serve as president. In the months and years that followed, those of us who took that stand have attracted a fair amount of reproach: We were a gang of unrepentant neocons; we were simply wrong about how much danger he posed; some, although not all, of us were morally suspect for having been in favor of the Iraq War.

However, we were right. And we were right because at the heart of our critique was a view of Donald Trump’s character, not his policy preferences. “He is fundamentally dishonest,” we wrote in March. “Mr. Trump lacks the character, values and experience to be president,” we wrote in August. Those who signed those letters have been accused of prissiness, a fastidiousness about the rough game of politics that calls into question our understanding of the world.

And indeed, this focus on character more than policy may baffle some who have heard the remark, attributed to the 17th-century English diplomatist Henry Wotton, “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Surely students of international affairs, whose preoccupation is the study of a world in which law is often weak and common norms of behavior absent, should not worry too much about dishonesty, lechery, and cheating.

Actually, they do—and recent events show why they are right to do so. The Ukraine quid pro quo crisis, in which it becomes increasingly clear that the president attempted to withhold desperately needed military aid from Kiev in order to extract political hit jobs on his opponents, shows why character matters. In the world as it is, it’s very simple for foreign policy to ease the path to the corruption of domestic politics. Indeed, that was one of the great fears of the Founders of the United States, and with reason. In 1797, Talleyrand, that consummate cynic, indirectly demanded a £50,000 bribe to ease Franco-American relations. Half a dozen years later, the vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr, put out feelers to the British about splitting off part of the United States in return for half a million dollars.

The self-inflicted wound of the administration’s Syria policy—its wrenching and unnecessary abandonment of Kurdish allies who spilled their blood waging war on our behalf—is another example of bad character leading to disaster. Much of any country’s power in international affairs comes from its reliability and predictability: The “madman” thesis supposedly espoused by President Richard Nixon has its limits. Because international affairs is not ruled by contract and law the way domestic politics often is, one’s consistency matters. It is like the diamond business, famously conducted less by documents than by a handshake. Reputation matters, and those who think otherwise are themselves naive.

By abandoning the Kurds on a caprice, the United States has ceded predominant influence in the Middle East to Russia and Iran; it has paved the way for the resurgence of the Islamic State; it has impaired its ability to shape Iraqi politics; and it has put its principal ally in the region, Israel, in a worse situation. Above all, it has shown that its word is meaningless.

Good diplomats do not lie. Rather, they are trained to be exquisitely precise, both in their record-keeping and in their articulation of their own country’s views. They may be too nuanced at times, too keen to find the formula that is just ambiguous enough to satisfy (or lull) all parties. But, by and large, they are allergic to lying, partly because of their own values, and partly because they know how dangerous it can be.

And they are patriots. The diplomats of the Department of State are a disciplined, hierarchical body; they will, when necessary, don flak jackets and helmets in dangerous places, but for the most part they simply want to go out and represent their country. And unless you have worked there, you may not realize how committed they are to what the United States stands for, to its values and its founding principles. In this, they resemble the leadership of the United States military, which, to a remarkable degree, shares this values-driven, or at least values-informed, approach to foreign policy.

In recent weeks, we have seen diplomats—the former ambassador and acting ambassador to Ukraine, most notably—take the uncomfortable road of telling truths that are mortifying to the administration. It is not surprising. They know what happens abroad when the most powerful country in the world, the one that has done most to create international norms that keep the peace, behaves duplicitously, dishonestly, and purely out of a shortsighted conception of self-interest. They know, too, that the American alliance system is the country’s greatest international asset, and that the system rests above all on American reliability, predictability, and honesty.

The Russians and the Chinese understand this as well. It is no coincidence that the rhetorical attacks of the Russian government on the United States and its campaign of covert political warfare play to the most cynical themes of a disillusioned age. Russia’s internet operatives, like its snarling representatives in the physical world, favor “whataboutism.” They have as their most successful target the president of the United States, who prefers the company of dictators—who shut down the press, who bribe and steal and repress—to that of democratic leaders, who have some lines they cannot or will not cross.

The president presents his cynicism, and that of his acting chief of staff and his erratic personal lawyer, as tough-guy street smarts. It’s not. Their cynicism is the product of a peculiar and not particularly savory business microclimate in New York, and his own disordered personality. It has yielded nothing in foreign affairs beyond embarrassingly failed negotiations with North Korea, a trade war with China, betrayal of allies in the Middle East, and a cold war with Iran in which the United States looks to be unable to protect Saudi Arabia. It will get worse as the president becomes more erratic and more incapable of attracting competent subordinates.

Sir Henry Wotton was a poet as well as an emissary of King James I. He described in “The Character of a Happy Life” the satisfaction of one

Who hath his life from rumours freed;

Whose conscience is his strong retreat;

Whose state can neither flatterers feed,

Nor ruins make accusers great;

The drama unfolding before us is of a president who is, in foreign affairs at least, powerful and boastful, but whose life, measured by the standard of that wise diplomat, is thoroughly unhappy. How this ends has always been clear to those who cared to see.

Elliott A. Cohen Contributing writer at The Atlantic and Dean of SAIS at Johns Hopkins University

*********

Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan’s Astounding Hypocrisy

When we were investigating Benghazi, we would have moved to impeach if armed with such clear evidence.

Kurt Bardella | Published October 23, 2019 | The Atlantic | Posted October 24, 2019 |

For eight years, House Republicans searched for a “smoking gun” that could unravel the presidency of Barack Obama. They presided over hundreds of oversight hearings, issued more than 100 subpoenas, held the attorney general in contempt of Congress, and even formed a special select committee devoted exclusively to one investigation, on Benghazi. As someone who spent five years working alongside Republicans on the Oversight Committee, I can tell you that we never found a “smoking gun” like the testimony that was provided yesterday from the senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor.

Ambassador Taylor delivered a 15-page opening statement that detailed the “confusing and unusual arrangement” involving the nongovernment employee Rudy Giuliani’s “irregular” role in making aid to Ukraine conditioned on the promise to investigate the family of one of President Donald Trump’s political rivals, Joe Biden. Taylor testified that Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney had ordered an Office of Management and Budget staff member to “hold security assistance to Ukraine,” even though the Defense Department had determined that the “assistance was effective and should be resumed.”

Taylor also testified that Ambassador Gordon Sondland told him that “President Trump had told him that he wants President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma [the company on whose board Hunter Biden sat] and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.” Taylor further said that following Trump’s September 7 phone call with President Zelensky, a National Security Council aide told him that Trump insisted that “President Zelensky go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of Biden and 2016 election interference.”

As I read through Taylor’s statement, which was given under oath, I couldn’t help but think to myself how my former Republican colleagues would have reacted if similar testimony had been given by a career diplomat during the Obama administration, especially during the Benghazi investigation, which produced 33 hearings in two years.

In June 2016, Representatives Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo—yes, the same Jim Jordan who is now the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee and the same Mike Pompeo who is now the secretary of state—declared that “it is our belief that many of [the Benghazi] failures were the result of the administration’s obsession with preserving a political narrative.”

The reality is that if Pompeo, Jordan, and House Republicans had received the kind of bombshell testimony we heard from Taylor yesterday, they would have immediately moved to impeach the president.

In a blatant display of hypocrisy, Pompeo has refused to cooperate with Congress’s impeachment investigation and has blocked other State Department officials from testifying. Jordan has spent his time attacking the impeachment proceedings, bizarrely suggesting that the Democrats have something to hide.

Of course, when they were investigating Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Pompeo and Jordan made “note of the disappointing fact that the administration did not cooperate with our committee’s investigation from the very beginning. In fact, they obstructed our work from day one.”

During the Obama years, obstruction of Congress was a great concern among House Republicans, many of whom have become Trump’s chief public defenders. Representative Doug Collins is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, but when he was a member of the Oversight Committee in 2014, he defended congressional investigations as being “not about partisan politics, it’s not about witch hunts, this is about the people.”

Another one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, Representative Mark Meadows, was singing a very different tune in 2014, when Republicans opened a barrage of investigations targeting the Obama administration in the run-up to the midterm elections, by saying, “Really what most Americans want is that justice is served.”

Five years later, a top diplomat was testifying that the president saw aid to Ukraine as a mechanism to extract a promise from a foreign leader to investigate one of his top political opponents. The acting head of the Office of Management and Budget is refusing to testify about why the White House chief of staff blocked the release of the aid. And Pompeo, Jordan, Meadows, and Collins aren’t saying a word about obstructing Congress. They aren’t on cable news defending our constitutionally protected system of checks and balances. They aren’t demanding that members of the executive branch who ignore Congress’s oversight authority be held in contempt. They aren’t calling for the creation of a special select committee to investigate aid to Ukraine. Instead, they are burying their heads in the sand, hoping to avoid the smoke.

Kurt Bardella: Senior adviser for the House Oversight and Reform Committee from 2009 to 2013

*********

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In rose beds, money blooms

By Damian Paletta, Washington Post, February 10, 2018

MADRID, COLOMBIA--The majority of roses Americans give one another on Valentine’s Day, roughly 200 million in all, grow here, the savanna outside Bogota, summoned from the soil by 12 hours of natural sunlight, the 8,400-foot altitude and an abundance of cheap labor.

Thousands of acres of white-tarped greenhouses, some the size of several football fields, are crammed with seven-foot stems topped with rich red crowns. Many are pulled into warehouses by horses, chilled to sleep in refrigeration rooms, and then packed with other flowers onto planes--1.1 million at a time--to be sold in the United States.

It’s peak season for a massive Colombian industry that shipped more than 4 billion flowers to the United States last year--or about a dozen for every U.S. resident.

The Colombian industry has bloomed thanks to a U.S. effort to disrupt cocaine trafficking, the expansion of free-trade agreements--and the relentless demand by American consumers for cheap roses.

The transformation demonstrates the barreling, often brutal, efficiency of globalization: In 27 years, market forces and decisions made in Washington have reshaped the rose business on two continents. The American flower industry has seen its production of roses drop roughly 95 percent, falling from 545 million to less than 30 million.

It’s just the kind of decline that President Trump has railed against. Trump, who recently took action against foreign sellers of solar panels and washing machines, is now considering tariffs on steel and aluminum as well as a withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement, changes that would reach deep into the American economy. He has promised an unapologetic “America First” agenda that some U.S. flower growers hope could bring them back into the Valentine’s Day rush.

But the rose industry offers a striking reminder of why it is so hard to roll back the economic relationships between countries. Where it used to face horrific violence and corruption, Colombia has nurtured an industry that produces roses faster and cheaper than anywhere in the United States--and can even get them to many U.S. retailers faster than domestic growers.

And in the United States, corporate giants such as Walmart and its competitors have replaced florists as the top seller of roses, ordering flowers in huge masses for consumers who have little interest in paying for the cost of a domestically grown rose.

Colombians don’t even celebrate Valentine’s Day, but among flower growers, the foreign holiday can account for close to 20 percent of annual revenue.

The volume of the rose trade is breathtaking. In the three weeks leading up to Feb. 14, 30 cargo jets make the trip from Colombia to Miami each day, with each plane toting more than a million flowers.

From Miami’s airport, the flowers are loaded into refrigerated trucks--200 are needed each day--and from there many go to warehouses in South Florida, where they are repackaged, assembled into bouquets, and then shipped all over the country.

A rose is both a symbol of love and a commodity, and American buyers want them to be simultaneously stunning and produced en masse. Colombia found a way to meet these demands.

Walmart alone is purchasing 24 million Colombian roses to sell for Valentine’s Day. One of its senior associates, Deborah Zoellick, is so well known in Colombia and South Florida that her travels are closely tracked. That’s because any buying decision by the United States’ largest retailer can single-handedly change the flow of roses on two continents.

This year promised to be especially busy. Valentine’s Day falls on a Wednesday, a boon for Colombian growers, as they believe Americans are more likely to splurge on midweek sales and still count on extra purchases on the weekend before and after.

Andres Osorio, managing director of Bogota-based Avianca Cargo, said he expects business to be up 7 percent from 2017, and the airline he works for added new warehouse space in Miami to make room for 12 daily flower flights.

But long before they are loaded onto Osorio’s planes or sold in Walmart’s stores, they are “pinched” from their stems by someone like Romulo Castro, who uses a two-second snip to set the whole process in motion.

Inside a steamy greenhouse here on the outskirts of Bogota, Castro, 57, was dwarfed inside a giant rose bed, surrounded by tens of thousands of bright red roses. He is wearing two hats: a baseball cap to hold his hair tight against his head and a wide-brimmed floppy hat to protect his neck from the near-equatorial sun.

He eyeballs a stem, cuts it 25 inches below its red top, and places the flower in a basket. Step left, scissors open, snip again.

He’s one of 850 workers at the Flores de Serrezuela farm, roughly 20 miles west of Bogota.

Every time Castro places a rose in his basket, it enters an integrated supply chain that, through a mix of high-end technology and a few anachronistic touches, gets the flowers from beds outside Bogota to U.S. retailers in a matter of days--often faster than flower growers in California can get their products to East Coast markets.

Bunches destined for Miami are wrapped in clear plastic. Flowers going to Canada are boxed in blue cardboard. White cardboard for the flowers going to Japan, and green-and-yellow cardboard containers for the flowers going to Russia.

Once they are boxed, they are moved into a giant refrigeration room. They will probably stay in below-40-degree temperatures until they are sold in their final destination.

Here at Serrezuela, the women wear green uniforms, and on the back it says “Nuestra Gente Florece,” which means “Our People Flourish.” There are 130,000 Colombians working in floriculture, and it exports more than 6 billion stems each year to a total of 90 countries.

The process is overseen by Ricardo Samper, 38, a second-generation flower grower who graduated from Boston University and has an MBA from Northwestern University.

He made the decision several years ago to diversify the client base beyond just the United States and to target buyers in Japan and elsewhere, where profit margins are higher, but Valentine’s Day is still his peak.

“I’m sold out,” he said, standing in the post-harvest room and surveying his holiday rose and carnation inventory. “I’ve been sold out since December.”

When Samper’s father founded the family flower farm on about five acres of land in 1985, Colombia was a much more dangerous place.

Colombian drug cartels used coca plants to produce cocaine in the South American jungle. Through corruption, guile and murder, they muscled these drugs by the ton into the United States.

President George H.W. Bush and other officials sought incentives that would push Colombians away from cocaine production and toward more legitimate parts of their economy, promising to open up access to U.S. consumers.

So in 1991, Congress passed the Andean Trade Preference Act, a law that would lift duties on numerous exports from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru. The roughly 6 percent import duty on Colombian roses disappeared.

Still, the reminders of darker days are everywhere, both in Colombia and in Miami, where the incoming flowers are met by agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

When flowers leave farms outside Bogota, they are sealed in the back of trucks to prevent anyone from tampering with the delivery. Once they reach Miami, they are X-rayed for cocaine and other contraband.

Today, the vast majority of Colombian flowers come in clean, but that wasn’t always the case.

Almost all the flowers brought to Miami by Avianca are unloaded in Cargo Terminal 708, where a team of Customs and Border Protection agents is waiting around the clock to inspect a portion of each shipment. Standing beside a white table, with a magnifying glass on a chain around his neck, inspector Robert Skafidas remembers seeing much different types of flower shipments from Colombia. He said growers would sometimes use garden weeds to fill out bouquets. And many inspectors remember seeing cocaine stuffed into boxes of roses.

“They would just tuck it in the bouquet,” Skafidas said. “But that doesn’t happen anymore.”

Many U.S. government and industry officials say the 1991 law helped grow legitimate Colombian businesses, particularly flower farms, by connecting them with the global economy.

“You can employ people who would otherwise not have jobs, and have to find something else to do,” said Mario Vicente, general manager at Fresca Farms, a Miami importer that also owns flower farms in Colombia. “I’m not going to say the drugs don’t exist, but if you take flowers out of the equation, the pressure to produce more drugs would be enormous.”

Colombian roses have a number of advantages over U.S. flowers. They grow fast and at a high altitude with the same amount of sunshine all year.

The red roses many Americans will purchase this week are called Freedom roses in Colombia, a particular breed that was put into mass production around the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. These roses are durable, bright and strong, but they have little fragrance. They also grow near a major international airport, where planes can reach Miami in less than four hours. And, importantly, labor costs are low. The minimum wage in Colombia is around $300 a month.

In the first three months of 1992, Colombian roses were selling to U.S. wholesalers for an average of 24 cents per stem, according to a 1995 report from the U.S. International Trade Commission. The wholesale price of U.S.-grown roses remained trapped at around 35 cents a stem from 1986 until 2006, according to U.S. Agriculture Department data. It has ticked up in recent years because U.S. growers have focused primarily on higher-end roses that are designed for weddings and special events.

At USA Bouquet Company in Doral, Fla., 75 workers are crowded in one section of the room, putting imported red roses into vases and then carefully packing them in boxes for a Valentine’s shipment to Walgreens.

The roses that come in from Colombia ready to be quickly packaged and sold are referred to as “chop and plops,” flowers that need their stems recut but no other changes. Other flowers need to be assorted into specific bouquets to meet orders for supermarkets, online retailers or anyone else who locked in a contract with the company.

The room is around 40 degrees, cold enough to keep the flowers dormant but not so cold that employees will quit. The production floor can pack up 1,200 cases of flowers each hour, with 10 bouquets in every case, a dozen flowers in every bouquet, for a 16-hour workday.

There are dozens of similar warehouses within 20 miles of USA Bouquet. In the weeks running up to Valentine’s Day, many of them run around the clock, rushing to pack and ship flowers before the next truck arrives.

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