And A Child Shall Lead Them

Don Rumsfeld never struck me as the religious type, and the assumption being made about this GQ article and his use of Bible quotes in intelligence briefings prepared for George Bush is that he played upon his boss' evangelicism to present the war in Iraq in a language well-understood to the then-President, the way a father would appease a son by playing a game of peek-a-boo. In the article, Robert Draper assigns the impetus for these cover sheets as a Major General working in intelligence for Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers, and according to him "my seniors ... appreciated the cover pages."

That clever bureaucrat, Rummy, always winning the battles inside the corridors of power, or at least making appearances to that end. Except this desire to work the system to his advantage crashed on the rocks of his own obstinacy during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

"In many ways," says one of Bush’s national-security advisers, "Rumsfeld was more interested in being perceived to be in charge than actually being in charge." When I repeated this quote to an administration official privy to Rumsfeld’s war efforts, this person’s eyes lit up. “One of the most fateful, knock-down-drag-outs was over postwar reconstruction,” says this official. “It was the question of who’d take charge, State or DoD. Rumsfeld made a presentation about chain of command. ‘If State takes over here, are you saying Tommy Franks is going to report to a State official? Mr. President, that’s not in the Constitution!’ ” [...]

A final story of Rumsfeld’s intransigence begins on Wednesday, August 31, 2005. Two days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—and the same day that Bush viewed the damage on a flyover from his Crawford, Texas, retreat back to Washington—a White House advance team toured the devastation in an Air Force helicopter. Noticing that their chopper was outfitted with a search-and-rescue lift, one of the advance men said to the pilot, “We’re not taking you away from grabbing people off of rooftops, are we?”

“No, sir,” said the pilot. He explained that he was from Florida’s Hurlburt Field Air Force base—roughly 200 miles from New Orleans—which contained an entire fleet of search-and-rescue helicopters. “I’m just here because you’re here,” the pilot added. “My whole unit’s sitting back at Hurlburt, wondering why we’re not being used.”

The search-and-rescue helicopters were not being used because Donald Rumsfeld had not yet approved their deployment—even though, as Lieutenant General Russ Honoré, the cigar-chomping commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, would later tell me, “that Wednesday, we needed to evacuate people. The few helicopters we had in there were busy, and we were trying to deploy more.” [...]

The next day, three days after landfall, word of disorder in New Orleans had reached a fever pitch. According to sources familiar with the conversation, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff called Rumsfeld that morning and said, “You’re going to need several thousand troops.”

“Well, I disagree,” said the SecDef. “And I’m going to tell the president we don’t need any more than the National Guard.”

The problem was that the Guard deployment (which would eventually reach 15,000 troops) had not arrived—at least not in sufficient numbers, and not where it needed to be. And though much of the chaos was being overstated by the media, the very suggestion of a state of anarchy was enough to dissuade other relief workers from entering the city. Having only recently come to grips with the roiling disaster, Bush convened a meeting in the Situation Room on Friday morning. According to several who were present, the president was agitated. Turning to the man seated at his immediate left, Bush barked, “Rumsfeld, what the hell is going on there? Are you watching what’s on television? Is that the United States of America or some Third World nation I’m watching? What the hell are you doing?”

Rumsfeld replied by trotting out the ongoing National Guard deployments and suggesting that sending active-duty troops would create “unity of command” issues. Visibly impatient, Bush turned away from Rumsfeld and began to direct his inquiries at Lieutenant General Honoré on the video screen. “From then on, it was a Bush-Honoré dialogue,” remembers another participant. “The president cut Rumsfeld to pieces. I just wish it had happened earlier in the week.”

And through this we learn who was the ACTUAL child in the White House. Bush may have been the boy king but at least he had a spark of recognition, if only about his own legacy, that kicked in four days late every once in a while. Rumsfeld simply had an insatiable desire not to control everything, but to make it appear like he controlled everything. He wanted to strut around as the main gatekeeper in the White House, and such gatekeeping mattered far more than. This report almost makes the turf wars sound like a game, like a child protecting his blocks at playtime in kindergarten. And this need for control, this petty outmaneuvering without regard for the real-world implications of the actions, permeates the entire neocon thought process, the entire way they relate to the world.

Rumsfeld comes off like the most insecure bastard that ever lived. And I came away learning far more than I expected about the ideological project with which he associates himself.

Sweet Neocon

Hard to argue with Andrew Sullivan here. "From extending and deepening the war in Afghanistan, to suppressing evidence of rampant and widespread abuse and torture of prisoners under Bush, to thuggishly threatening the British with intelligence cut-off if they reveal the brutal torture inflicted on Binyam Mohamed, Obama now has new cheer-leaders: Bill Kristol, Michael Goldfarb and Max Boot."

Importantly, the neocons never really offered a full-throated criticism of Obama. They always viewed him as someone they could deal with. Sure, Dick Cheney is out there on the margins, but his criticism must be understood in the context of his own culpability. And now he's spinning off into true tinfoil hat territory. Apparently there's a conspiracy against him on Iran. But really, the economic and religious right conservatives have led the way on opposing Obama - see the move by the RNC to rebrand the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist Party". On the key issue of empire and hegemony, Obama hasn't really disappointed them, as Sullivan notes above.

By adopting the cover-up of Bush Administration Constitutional abuses, Obama has implicated himself within them, and has therefore taken on Bush-era excuses (e.g. "This will hurt our troops") to justify the cover-up. And by continuing the war pose in Afghanistan, without so much as a plan, Obama has pleased the neocons who view the world as a battle to be fought rather than a collection of people to be engaged. And so we're seeing a good deal of unease among Hill Democrats over this right-wing mindset:

House leaders have yanked from an emergency military spending bill the $80 million that President Obama requested to close the detention center, saying he had not provided a plan for the more than 200 detainees there. The White House has said the center will close by Jan. 22, 2010.

It is virtually certain that the Democratic majorities, with solid Republican support, will approve $96.7 billion in spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other military operations.

But with votes in the House on Thursday and in the Senate next week, the discomfort among Democrats points to a harder road ahead for Mr. Obama and the prospect of far more serious rancor if conditions worsen overseas.

The unease, particularly over the war in Afghanistan, is greatest right now in the more liberal ranks of the Democratic caucus and is more evident in the House than in the Senate.

But American troop levels and war costs in Afghanistan will soar in the coming year, and party leaders, including Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the House Appropriations Committee chairman, have warned that Democrats will most likely give the administration just one more year to get a handle on the military situation there before they start losing patience.

Losing patience - I know the feeling.

Guess What, Diplomacy Works

An astonishing statement from Cuba.

SANTO DOMINGO (AFP) — The United States welcomes as an "overture" an offer of wide-ranging talks from Cuban President Raul Castro, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday.

"We have seen Raul Castro's comments. We welcome this overture. We're taking a very serious look at it," Clinton said here at a press availability with Dominican President Leonel Fernandez.

On Thursday Castro said "we are open, whenever they want, to discussing everything: human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners, everything they want to discuss."

But, said Castro on the eve of this weekend's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, any dialogue "must be as equals, without the slightest violation of the self-determination of the Cuban people."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Robert Wood said if reports on Castro "are true, it is a positive step."

Obviously, this won't get resolved overnight. But Raul Castro has as much to gain from a cooling of relations with the United States as anyone. Lucas O'Connor has a bit on that.

This new openness from the Cuban government is less surprising than it may immediately seem on its surface. While the government came to power motivated towards empowering the poor and breaking the legacy of oligarchy and neo-colonialism, the political course charted by the Castros has always been pragmatic more than ideological. For decades, the better economic and political support system for this regime came from the Soviet Union and alignment with Communist powers. Since the end of the Cold War, Cuba has been moving slowly to open itself up to free enterprise and outside investment.

These talks, and the potential steps towards openness with the United States, is a logical step along that path. Remittances (largely from the U.S.) currently represent 1.8% of Cuba's GDP and "helps the island's $58 billion economy, as the Cuban government charges fees that take about 20 percent of exchange-wired dollars."

The overall point here is that negotiation and diplomacy works. Extending a hand instead of a clenched fist can result in the opponent recognizing a new era of relations and returning the favor. Those tough guys on the right who thinks that we must only degrade and villify our foes in the world do so because they need enemies and don't want to resolve these problems - they work better as campaign bullet points. The President has taken the opposite view, and it's good to see.

Here's a Slogan: Less Shooting Wars

As we wait for tonight's debate, I imagine those tuning in will be a little confused about the foreign policy focus. Jim Lehrer will probably ask about the bailout and the economy to a certain extent, but foreign policy was the agreed topic. So foreign policy we will see. I wrote about the key issues a couple days ago, but we can add the terrifying prospect of a third shooting war in the Pakistani frontier.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 25 -- Pakistani troops and a U.S.-Afghan ground patrol exchanged fire Thursday near a frontier checkpoint, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, in a new heightening of armed tension between allies in the war against Taliban insurgents [...]

The United States has been urging Pakistan to move forcefully against Taliban havens in its mountainous border regions, complaining that guerrillas cross into Afghanistan to stage attacks. At the same time, U.S. forces have stepped up their own attacks on suspected hideouts in the restive tribal region of Waziristan, mostly using Predator drones; this month, helicopter-borne commandos went in for a ground strike.

This has led to deep anger in Pakistan's ruling circles. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani on Wednesday told journalists that Pakistan would not tolerate any act against its sovereignty and integrity in the name of the war against terrorism. Earlier, an army spokesman said any U.S. troops crossing into Pakistan would be fired on.

This results from the failure to have any kind of agreed policy with the Pakistanis, and the continued failure of policy in Afghanistan, which is as unlikely to bear fruit as all the other Western power grabs which failed in the Kush.

The National Security Network has a good primer on the global challenges. But it's very simple. George Bush and the neocons have been wrong about virtually every foreign policy issue, catastrophically wrong, of the past 50 years. The correct response is to make that argument and advocate for a completely new direction, one that gets us in less shooting wars and making us a more secure nation, and by the way those goals go hand in hand.

This is Going To Leave A Mark

I already talked about Sarah Palin's interview with Charlie Gibson, the reviews for which have not been all that positive. She made an honest but ill-considered comment about going to war with Russia over Georgia, and she blanked on the question of what is the Bush doctrine, only answering it after help, and wrongly (the issue was preventive war vs. pre-emptive war, and she just went with the latter). But this statement could be even more damaging, because it's such an obvious falsehood.

Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."

The idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a view once promoted by Bush administration officials, has since been rejected even by the president himself. But it is widely agreed that militants allied with al-Qaeda have taken root in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion.

"America can never go back to that false sense of security that came before September 11, 2001," she said at the deployment ceremony, which drew hundreds of military families who walked from their homes on the sprawling post to the airstrip where the service was held.

I think the last thing anybody wants or needs is for a national leader to go around conflating Iraq and 9/11 again, especially on THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS. It's discredited nonsense designed to whip up a patriotic fervor that can be used for all kinds of nefarious ends. And as you'll see in the video of the event, she was reading from a prepared script. This was intentional.



Now, you would think that such an astonishing ignorance of world affairs would be immediately disqualifying for higher office. But you would be wrong. In fact, Palin's lack of knowledge or even interest in foreign policy isn't a bug, says Robert Kagan, it's a feature.

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy advisor to McCain, derided criticisms of Palin as elitist.

“I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” he said. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.”

They really think this way. The neocons believe that those with experience of the world are eventually corrupted by it, and those pure enough to have no experience whatsoever are more receptive to their worldview. This stands to reason - only an ignorant fool would follow the logic of the group that has been wrong on foreign policy time and again for over 50 years. The value of ignorance EXPLAINS the failures of neoconservatism, and the neocon worldview cannot be ingested without a fair degree of ignorance. So it's symbiotic.

Neocons believe that on the world stage, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. No wonder they consider Sarah Palin such a darling.

Looking The Part

It's amazing that all it takes for the media to swoon over John McCain is for him to huff and puff while Russia goes ahead and does whatever it wants anyway.

For the last several days, Senator Barack Obama has seemed to fade from the scene while on his secluded vacation here, as his opponent, Senator John McCain, has seized nearly every opportunity to display his foreign policy credentials on the dominant issue of the week: the conflict between Russia and Georgia.

Only once, at the beginning of the week, did Mr. Obama discuss the fighting in public, when he emerged from his beachfront rental home to condemn Russia’s escalation, in a way that seemed timed for the evening television news. He took no questions whose answers might demonstrate command of the issue.

Mr. McCain and his surrogates, however, have discussed the situation nearly every day on the campaign trail, often taking a hard line against Russia to the point of his declaring the other day, “We are all Georgians.”

First - Honolulu is a major city, and not secluded in any way. Second, McCain has "displayed" his foreign policy credentials in ways that are ignorant:

My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.

Presumptuous:

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: "If I may be so bold, there was another president . . ."

He caught himself and started again: "At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America's advocacy for democracy and freedom."

And thuddingly stupid, not to mention dangerous, involving himself in a foreign conflict where one of his staffers is a registered lobbyist for one side, talking to the Georgian President several times a day, which obviously sends mixed messages, and advocating what amounts to war with nuclear-armed Russia.

But none of that, of course, matters. I understand fully the optics of this. Whether McCain is cynically using the conflict to make himself look Presidential or not, the contrast between the two candidates when you have the sound off is pretty glaring. If Obama comes back tomorrow at the Saddleback Church event in Orange County (the first joint event of the campaign) and looks the part a little bit then this could blow over. However, there is a contrast here that the right will be sure to exploit. And it certainly gives reporters the shakes to see bravely bold McCain strongly calling for the mass deaths of their sons and daughters. That makes him "serious."

Escalation

While Georgia is apparently acknowledging a catastrophic mistake by provoking a war with a world power, Russia is not letting up:

Russian tanks and troops moved through the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and advanced on the city of Gori in central Georgia on Sunday night, for the first time directly assaulting a Georgian city with ground forces after three days of heavy fighting, Georgian officials said.

Georgian tanks were dug into positions outside Gori and planning to defend the city, said Shota Utiashvili, an official in Georgia’s interior ministry. He said the city of Gori was coming under artillery and tank fire. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

The Russians are claiming that Georgia has not retreated, and they are not recognizing the truce called for by Georgian leader Mikhail Saakashvili. I think they see an opportunity to pound a Western ally into dust and maybe even take back some of their Soviet-era territory. This is a tense moment for the world.

...oh, and the McCain campaign's claims that Obama is bizarrely in sync with Moscow are laughable, and a typical attempt to paint the Democrat as a scary Communist. McCain is the one with the top advisor who was a lobbyist to Georgia. They tried to pull off a neocon's wet dream of taking on the bug bad bully Russia and they got spanked, like neocon military operations always do. He has absolutely no credibility on this.

Osama Gets What Osama Wants

He had some help from the oilmen in the White House, but bin Laden's hope has come to pass:

In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden — the terrorist organizer of 9/11 who still roams free — listed as one of his many grievances against the U.S. that Americans “have stolen $36 trillion from Muslims” by purchasing oil from Persian Gulf countries at low prices. The real price of a barrel of oil should be $144, bin Laden demanded.

Ten years ago today, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase.

Bin Laden's strategy didn't work, for the most part, in the Muslim world, where his goal of an Islamic caliphate is actually massively unpopular. His strategy with regards to America, to drain us economically while entangling us in protracted conflicts that destabilize the world, has been picture-perfect. By responding childishly and without reason instead of resolutely and with respect to the universal nature of the problem, understanding the importance of public diplomacy and global poverty, for example, we have given the world's top terrorist absolutely everything he has wanted. He has a new safe haven in Pakistan, the renewed ability to launch attacks and an opposing empire struggling with enormous structural problems. Oil isn't as high as it is solely because of bin Laden - rising demand in China and India is a far greater factor - but global instability absolutely inflates the price.

There will not be a new caliphate and women in Missouri forced to wear the hijab - that's paranoid crazy talk of the highest order. But there is no question that failed neoconservative policies - policies of which they are still incredibly proud - have weakened our security, our economic future and our global standing, and given a great victory to extremists. Heckuva job.

Embarrassing Rhetoric On Iran

I don't know if this Jerusalem Post story about an imminent attack on Iran is true or not. There have been dozens of these kinds of stories. But you cannot deny that Bush and Cheney have certainly been using the kind of rhetoric that presaged war with Iraq with respect to Iran. They certainly SOUND like people who want to attack.

And that's intentional. Because at its root, modern conservatism demands a Manichean view of the world with an enemy of irrepressible evil. If it's not China, it's Iraq, or North Korea, or Libya, or Syria, or Iran. Blustering about the threat posed by Iran, while terrible policy, is considered good politics among conservatives - it scares people, it gives them an enemy to focus on, and it allows them to frame Democrats, or even Republicans who dare to negotiate with enemies, as Chamberlain-like appeasers, despite the wrongheadedness of that approach.

So John McCain is just following in typical conservative footsteps by ratcheting up the fear over Iran. But to do so, he has to actually lie about several things. He first has to pretend that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the leader of Iran. Which he isn't. The Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the leader. Ahmadinejad is about as much the leader of Iran as the House Majority Whip is the leader of America. And when confronted on this, McCain preferred to wallow in the ignorance of a poorly-informed electorate.

At a press conference yesterday, Time’s Joe Klein pressed McCain on this point. According to Klein, McCain said that Ahmadinejad “represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations,” but then Klein pointed out that “The Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader”:

McCain responded that the “average American” thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn’t get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, “But isn’t it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?” Oh well.

McCain also has to lie about the magnitude of the threat that the United States, armed with the most powerful military on the planet, faces from Iran, a medium-sized country with a tiny and nearly non-functional military. McCain has to base this hyping of the threat on a seemingly unending series of hypotheticals that lead in a Rube Goldberg-like fashion to perceive Iran as a threat. But unlike in previous years, we have a Democratic opponent who is willing to actually call b.s. on these ridiculous scenarios, and ask for some perspective.

"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela: these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at a time when they were saying we want to wipe you off the planet. (...) Iran, they spend one one-hundredth of what we spend on the military. I mean, if Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance."

I know that the wingnut brigade is flipping out about this, but it's obviously true on its face. You can do the math yourself, as hilzoy did, and 30,000 warheads pointed at the US, compared to ZERO, is pretty much a larger threat.

And in the continued back and forth over this quote, Obama has shown how perceptive you can look when you just look at the facts as they are instead of trying to position yourself as "the hawk" or part of the "serious foreign policy elite."

"Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely."

Obama also called Iran the "single biggest beneficiary" of the Iraq war and pledged to secure all loose nuclear materials during first term, if he is elected president.

Obama could have gone ahead and mentioned Ahmad Chalabi's spying for the Iranian government, and how Osama bin Laden is completely opposed to Iran and engaging them could have been a moment to rally cut off Al Qaeda. And later on, he probably will.

This is really shaping up to be one of the big wins early on in the general election. He's fighting back on national security with a great deal of confidence. And he's really coming at the issues from a different angle than we've seen from the Democratic Party.

After the Kerry loss of 2004, Democrats began to vow: we understand what happened. We're not going to let ourselves get outboxed and intimidated next time around, especially on national security. There was every reason in the world to think this was an empty promise. If Hillary Clinton were the nominee, it wouldn't be exactly empty, because the Clinton camp does know how to return fire. But it would be a dissatisfying thing for most Democrats to watch, because Clinton's returns of serve would consist of hawkish statements designed to prove that she could be just as tough as the Republicans (witness her recent promise to "obliterate" Iran).

Obama is doing something altogether different. He is standing for an alternative vision of how America should operate in the world, and he is defending it tooth and nail. I'm not sold on the idea that negotiations without preconditions with hostile powers are the world's best strategy. If the US had some leverage over Iran that might be one thing, but, in our current state, we have little. Still, this is one of those cases where the symbolic message of what Obama did last Friday is more important, for now, than the substance. He said: These people have screwed up foreign policy and security. I have a different way of doing things. And I'm not ceding an inch.

This is a good manifestation of why so many Americans have rallied to Obama as the breath of fresh air the country needs right now.

Indeed. But these aren't even that difficult concepts. Matthew Yglesias has written a book called Heads in the Sand which argues for a new conception of foreign policy outside the current consensus that strength can only mean acting tough, that the only proper pose is some kind of hegemonic hyper-nationalism that advocates for intervention based on strategic interests and simplistic shibboleths (like the "Global War On Terror"). This is a more intelligent foreign policy doctrine, based on common sense and broad diplomatic engagement, both private and public. McCain is invested in the old worldview, Obama is advocating for something new.

McCain's Terrible Foreign Policy Plans

(second in a two-part series!)

A lot of focus is on the DNC's devastating new ad about John McCain's Iraq policy, and that's important. But I want to start with McCain's policies outside Iraq and work my way inside.

For instance, it should interest you to know that McCain's foreign policy ideology is to be the worst nightmare to all of our enemies, which is certainly not an adult maneuver, but also misreads the goals of foreign policy itself.

Consider Saddam Hussein. He's a bad dude. And which American president is his worst nightmare? Well, it's George W. Bush. Thanks to Bush, Saddam got booted from power and killed. Compared to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Dubya was a disaster for Saddam. But of course Dubya's Iraq policy has also been a disaster for the United States of America, whereas Clinton and Papa Bush ran policies that made us better off. International politics shouldn't be conceived of as some nutty zero-sum race to the bottom where our goal is to make Hamas cry -- the question is who are we trying to help and do we have ways to do it.

Unfortunately, this belligerence extends beyond enemies and into putative allies. Were you aware that McCain essentially wants to restart the Cold War?

On March 26, McCain gave a speech on foreign policy in Los Angeles that was billed as his most comprehensive statement on the subject. It contained within it the most radical idea put forward by a major candidate for the presidency in 25 years. Yet almost no one noticed.

In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the cold war on Western terms, dismantling the Soviet empire and withdrawing from large chunks of the old Russian Empire as well. McCain also proposed that the United States should expand the G8 by taking in India and Brazil—but pointedly excluded China from the councils of power.

We have spent months debating Barack Obama's suggestion that he might, under some circumstances, meet with Iranians and Venezuelans. It is a sign of what is wrong with the foreign-policy debate that this idea is treated as a revolution in U.S. policy while McCain's proposal has barely registered. What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war.

This is madness. Russia's supremacy in oil resources and China's supremacy in the new economic landscape make them the worst countries to alienate in perhaps the entire world. You engage these countries - sometimes through tough talk and desiring to push them in the right direction, like on Tibet - but you do not start acting actively hostile to them!

Of course, this is the only way McCain knows how to relate to other nations - through militarism and belligerence and using massive strikes of American power to dominate the world. McCain is actually more purely neoconservative than even George Bush - he ran on a "national greatness" agenda in 2000 which included "rogue-state rollback" - his plan to start massive uprisings in other countries, decapitate leaderships, and overthrow sovereign governments all over the world. He's the biggest hawk in American politics, and his options for foreign policy usually fall along the lines of "bombs" and "more bombs".

And this gets us to the DNC ad, which is sparking a HUGE Republican hissy fit.



First the RNC said this was illegal coordination with the Clinton and Obama campaigns, absent any proof. Then they decided that ads featuring the opposing candidates in their own words are lies that must not be aired.

The Republican National Committee wants CNN and MSNBC to stop airing the DNC’s new national television advertisement, calling it “false and defamatory” and illegally coordinated.

“This is a complaint about the facts that are being misrepresented in the ad, and this being a deliberate falsehood, that we are saying, stations have an obligation to protect the public from airing a deliberate falsehood,” said Sean Cairncross, an RNC lawyer.

The RNC provided no evidence to support their change that the communication was illegally coordinated, aside for a few newspaper articles pointing out that some Democrats work for both a candidate and the committee, like pollster Cornell Belcher. DNC chairman Howard Dean said this morning that neither campaign saw or heard the ad before the put it out.

The RNC is ginning up the threat of legal action to give weight to their criticism of the ad’s content. Cairncross would not say whether the party will sue CNN or MSNBC, the two cable networks airing the ad, if they refuse to kill it.

The DNC is in no way backing down, with Howard Dean making the funny statement "I understand the RNC thinks it's illegal to criticize John McCain."

But let's delve into why the RNC and the McCain campaign is so upset. They clearly have some information that endless replays of the "100 years" comments just would totally sink the campaign. This wasn't so much a problem when McCain said comments like this for basically the entire primary season. Here, look:



But suddenly, now, in a general election, it's a big problem. So they want to claim that he was talking about a post-war presence. As Dean says in the above clip, anyone who thinks that we can keep troops in Iraq for 100 years and not have them shot at or attacked is a lunatic. McCain is committed to leaving troops inside Iraq until there is no violence and "the war is won". THEN, he wants a 100-year, or lifetime, commitment in the region. There is no timeline placed on how long it could take to get the violence under control; indeed, this month was among the worst in close to a year. So McCain wants to keep troops in Iraq until the war is over, and would never pull them out a minute beforehand. How is that BETTER than the "100 years" comments? How should that comfort the overwhelming majority of Americans who see no political solution in Iraq and want the war to end? Josh Marshall puts this best.

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it's okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there's little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn't like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn't change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

If there is an unfair supposition at work here, there is a simple way to find out. Someone should ask McCain how long he's willing to have us stay in Iraq even if we are sustaining casualties. Since he believes it is in our strategic interests to stay there on a permanent basis I doubt very much he'll say that in that case he'd only be comfortable staying two or five or some other relatively short span of years. That is because he believe we should stay there on a permanent basis, ideally with no casualties but with casualties if that's what it takes.

Plus, McCain has been all over the place on a continuing Iraq presence, saying in 2005 that Iraqis resented the US presence and need their visibility reduced. Then he flipped to advocating a presence like in South Korea and Japan and Germany, then he flipped back in an appearance on Charlie Rose, rejecting such a parallel, and now he's back on it. So who the hell knows what he thinks on that front.

But what we do know is that McCain believes global solutions go hand in hand with military solutions. And his warped sense of "honor" concludes that we cannot show weakness or defeat, even if staying in Iraq, for example, impacts our long-term security goals. He'd rather keep us bogged down in a war with no end in sight. And that is why Joe Klein, ye gods, is right.

...I was thinking about posting yesterday about McCain's cheesy nonsense about Obama being endorsed by Hamas. If McCain wants to go that route, I can suggest another: that John McCain is probably the favorite candidate of Osama bin Laden, just as George W. Bush was Osama's presidential preference.

Why? Because both Bush and McCain have bought Osama's disinformation about Iraq being the central front in the war on terrorism. Of course, bin Laden wants the gullible neocons to take the Iraq bait because Afghanistan really is the central front of the war on terrorism--more precisely the Afghan-Pakistani border areas where the real Al Qaeda lives. The war in Iraq has been a grand strategic gift to Osama, keeping the U.S. military tied down elsewhere and off his tail.

Indeed.

Academic Argument

There's of course a lot of consternation about the debate. But a far more important comment, a far more revealing comment, came out of that other abomination this week, the Hardball College Tour circle jerk between Tweety Bird and John McCain, where St. Maverick let his most contemptuous slip show:

MCCAIN: We can look back at the past and argue about whether we should have gone to war or not, whether we should have invaded or not, and that's a good academic argument.

It sure is. I can't wait for the lecture series:

Five Thousand Dead Americans, Hundreds of Thousands of Dead Iraqis, Trillions of Dollars in Treasure to Create An Iranian Client State: What Was the Purpose of This Lecture?

The only ones debating the invasion as an academic argument are the academes in establishment Washington who don't want the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history pinned on them. They're academes as diverse as Doug Feith and Charles Krauthammer, Colin Powell and Bill Kristol, Richard Perle and Judy "I was proved fucking right" Miller and Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon. They all live up in an ivory tower where accountability is verboten, and with each mistake they climb a flight of stairs. They are cheered on by warbloggers and neoconservatives who so desperately want the blood off their hands, who are more afraid of their place in history than what their catastrophic mistake has done to the nation and the world.

This requires an academic argument.

BAGHDAD (AP) — A suicide bomber struck the funeral of two anti-al-Qaida Sunni tribesmen in a town north of Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens, police said.

The blast was the latest this week to break a period of relative calm in Sunni areas, raising concerns that Sunni insurgents are reorganizing at a time when U.S. and Iraqi troops are battling Shiite militiamen elsewhere.

There is nothing more dismissive, ugly and cruel than for the men and women who signed the death warrants of so many people for an exercise in futility to cast that historic mistake as something unworthy of discussion, as some sort of borrrr-ing lecture series instead of the fundamental question that will haunt the rest of their lives. "Academic argument" is actually the comment of the 2008 campaign. It encapsulates everything about conservatism.

Unfortunately, we have to find a media that isn't similarly culpable and desirous of ignoring Iraq for their own reasons, that is willing to report it.

Apply The Standard

I confess to being a little pissed off that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, someone with a fresh and engaging perspective on foreign policy, someone that Democrats should be pushing to get involved in the foreign policy arena, can have her political career put on ice for a three-second indiscretion, making a comment that approximately every staffer of a high-stakes campaign has said about their opponent at one time or another, if not worse. But that's politics, and Samantha Power didn't want to be a distraction, so she quit. I wish her well and hope she would have a very high-ranking job in a potential Obama Administration.

Well, then we have to fairly apply the standard. Calling Barack Obama Ken Starr is the equivalent of calling him a monster in Democratic circles. Howard Wolfson needs to resign.

(The point, for the dense, is that NONE of them should have to resign over something they say. Are we all three years old?)

Furthermore, Hillary Clinton should resign, as long as we're using this yardstick, for claiming that there's some imaginary threshold needed to be commander-in-chief and you can only cross it by marrying a President and sipping tea with Sinbad in Kosovo.

“I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold.”

This infuriates me on so many levels. It's an example of even-McCainism, where Democrats hide between the legs of manly John McCain and prop up his dangerous ideas on national security for no good reason. Someone who frightens military leaders and top aides with his hotheaded temper and batshit crazy ideas about constant war. Nobody who thinks this kind of stuff has crossed the threshold to be so much as a dogcatcher:

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

Why the hell would you want to validate and legitimize that kind of dangerous nonsense? McCain's neoconservatism has been totally rejected and shown to be a farce. Praising him at the expense of a Democratic opponent who might end up being the nominee is the worst kind of stupidity. McCain has neither the ideas or the temperament to be commander-in-chief. Period.

Hillary Clinton can either resign, or stop this tactic of being continually shocked about random comments. And Obama, for his part, can stop playing the part of a wounded animal and buy in to this browbeating.

John McCain, ay? Bring it the f!%k on.

I just watched Rudy Giuliani endorse John McCain, and McCain proceeded to invoke 9/11 three times in the space of five minutes. I guess Arnold Schwarzenegger's about to endorse in a few minutes. And even the dregs of the conservative movement have resigned themselves to the idea of a Republican nominee they have little but contempt for ("perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy"). Some on our side are tearing their hair out, thinking that McCain's electability outstrips our remaining candidates, and that we're resigned to failure in November.

Are you kidding? Beating St. McCain of the Blessed Maverickiana will be DELICIOUS. Let me count the ways.

The Tweety Effect - An Epic Repudiation Of The Media

John McCain is beloved by his little circle jerk in the Village. It's the main reason that conservative media can't stand him, and it's why they find him untrustworthy. A dishonest and catty group who worships access to the campaign bus and flattery and cocktail weenies, this media group will go to the mat for their man. It's like having Chris Matthews HIMSELF running for President. As we saw in New Hampshire, once the journalistic elite inserted themselves into the election, voters became immediately distasteful. They can't help themselves. They're likely to do it again. And when they do, we have the opportunity to deny them their perfect saint in the White House, their honorable man, and watch them be despondent for months.

Passing the Popcorn - The Conservative Crackup

Although I firmly expect the conservative movement to rally around their nominee, for some the grudges will absolutely continue.



McCain obviously doesn't have enough of a base problem to deny him the Republican nomination. But it's extremely clear to me that, with a field that doesn't inspire anything more than a grunt, McCain's victory is very tied to perceived electability. For a substantial portion of the Republican base, he will never be a sufficient option. And they'll be angry. And they're not likely to remain quiet. They're arrogant fundamentalists who can't brook any disavowal of their opinions, and they will continue to hurl insults, stew in their own juices, or perhaps even stay home, or support a third-party candidate from the right (though I'm skeptical). I'm all for further fracturing throughout all of 2008, particularly among the anti-immigrant section of that coalition, who are sitting by helplessly as their single issue becomes a non-factor and even the seeds of McCain's victory.

Bomb Bomb Iran - A Chance To Fully Repudiate Neoconservatism

It was no accident that Rudy Giuliani immediately ran to the side of John McCain today. They share the same desire, bloodlust even, for more wars and a more aggressive foreign policy. The platform is less jobs and more wars and the lizardoids in the Republican Party decided that they're on board. McCain is completely tied to a disaster in Iraq that the country has rejected. He hasn't met a war he didn't like. And there's a very good reason for this. His understanding of the economy is based on growing the defense budget to astronomical proportions to reward his rich defense contractors back in Arizona. See, McCain is the very opposite of a "porkbuster," he's someone who uses the war machine as an economic engine. And those are the only jobs he would create as President.

By stopping McCain head-on in November, progressives have the opportunity to completely upend conventional wisdom about the perceived Republican advantage on terror. Neoconservatism is a disease that has gripped this nation and still drives our perception of ourselves as some kind of benevolent empire. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the sundry crises all over the world and in the war on terror are a direct result of this failed thinking. Instead of sidestepping it, it needs to be beaten, definitively, among the American people. And McCain's presence will mean that the election will still be fought, to some degree, over Iraq, which is a political loser for Republicans.

Beating Their Bench - Leaving Them With The Rotted Remains

Chris Bowers has more on this idea that beating McCain is better for the progressive movement in the long run.

Beating McCain is better than beating Romney: If McCain becomes the nominee, it is only because Republicans think he can win, not because they actually like him. As such, as long as we can pull it off, defeating McCain is actually preferable to defeating Romney. If we beat McCain, then not only did we beat Republicans, but we beat Republicans who sold out in order to try and beat us. Crushing a patsy placeholder like Romney is one thing, but crushing Republicans and conservatives who hated their nominee, but chose him because they thought he could win, is way, way, better. If we beat McCain, then Arnold is the only national Republican moderate left, and he can never run for President. In other words, beat McCain, and we not only beat Republicans, but we beat their entire bench.

John McCain is not at all unbeatable. Just as John Kerry went on a favorable/unfavorable yo-yo in 2003 due to electability, the same with McCain. What goes up can very easily come down, especially when the focus of a national campaign reveals his warmongering and his cluelessness on the economy. And by beating him, we beat maverick-ism. We beat the High Broderists. We beat Bush Dogs. We beat the neocons. We beat the Republicans right into the ground.

I'm BEGGING for John McCain now. And make Lieberman your VP; that'll make it even more wonderful.

The Continuing Story of A.Lunatic

Another way in which we see the failure of our media is in their sustained characterization of Rudy Giuliani as a "moderate" Republican with "liberal views" on a variety of subjects, when the evidence is entirely clear that he is more like an extreme form of authoritarian neoconservative with meaningless views on social issues that he's desperately trying to abandon. David Greenberg in the Washington Post finally provides the context that voters need:

As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was "liberal" -- and the second-to-last was "moderate." With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.

Most notable here of Greenberg's copious examples - including his efforts to censor art exhibits at the Brooklym Museum and fund parochial schools with government money - are those which concern extreme executive power.

In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council's permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving -- even if the suspects were later acquitted [...]

The fanciful notion of Giuliani's liberalism also omits the piece de resistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.

Try as he might, Josh Marshall could not come up with one other instance in American history where a politician sought to overstay his legally sanctioned term of office. This shows more than anything the willingness for Giuliani to take advantage of any opportunity to expand his power.

There's also official secrecy, a hallmark of the Bush and Giuliani years, in the latter's case including the laundering of his mayoralty documents.

Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.

Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.

That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as "America's mayor," serves as the foundation of Giuliani's presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.

And if you look at the issues he's foregrounding in the Presidential race, they all have to do with a megalomaniacal view of foreign policy fueled by his batshit insane B-Team advisers.

There can be no doubt that the pundit-based media is completely misreading the Republican field, touting it as a battle between social conservatives and the "liberal" Giuliani, when nothing can be further from the truth.

The Entire Chickenhawk Movement, Explained

A neoconservative friend just inadvertently, in the course of trying to explain something else, gave me his entire worldview:

War is messy, especially when the people you are fighting hide behind women and children as their shields. A culture of cowards.

Yes, it is difficult for us to talk intelligently about war, and it is messy, because the people I am "fighting", the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, ARE hiding behind shields. Yes, it IS a culture of cowards.

How pithy and apt.

Like Borat In The Antique Shop

The United States in the Fourthbranch era really does resemble Borat in an antique shop, constantly knocking shit over, and claiming we're going to fix everything as we simultaneously make it worse. What's similar, however, is that, just like Borat, we're playing a role, and we're not actually interested in making ANYTHING better, least of all through this bumper sticker of democracy promotion

The Washington Post today has an Iranian detainee pleading with the Bush Administration to stop with the happy talk of "bringing democracy" to Iran, because it's only making the nation more and more autocratic:

A radio reporter being detained in Iran urged the Bush administration yesterday to end its vocal campaign for democracy there, saying it encouraged Iran's government to curtail its citizens' freedoms [...]

(Parnaz) Azima said the Bush administration's $66 million campaign to promote change inside Iran through Persian-language news, entertainment and music broadcasts has spurred President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government to work to eliminate Iran's democracy movement.

"I hope that Mr. Bush's administration doesn't repeat this. This is a very serious mistake," she said. "The open announcements about funding democracy in Iran have angered the government, and now they have one goal -- to crush those activities and to put pressure on the Iranian activists, especially those who are inside Iran."

This isn't the first time we've heard about Iran curtailing freedoms recently. They are arresting and purging the country of its intellectual class, particularly academics. They're also enforcing censorship codes, cracking down on protesters, and forcing civil society groups into hiding. Why is this happening now? The Iranian economy is in a lot of trouble. They were forced to ration gasoline today because, while being an exporter of oil, they don't have the refining capacity to keep up with domestic demand. Gas stations were burned by angry motorists. And the whole economy is showing problems, not just the energy sector.

Like any authoritarian society threatened by popular unrest, the mullahs are cracking down on dissent. But they have an incredible ally in this: the United States. All this public rhetoric about regime change in Iran, and particularly about the military options, has led to where we are: an unpopular government that can still garner popular support by pointing to American infilitration.

Michael Hirsh's Newsweek article about life in Iran tells a pretty robust story:

The president's effort, launched more than a year ago, has so far had the opposite effect of what Bush intended. Even though it's made little headway in promoting discontent with the regime, the mullahs have used it to intimidate reformers by tainting them as U.S. collaborators. "All the local democracy [groups] are complaining about it," said Azima, a thin, frail woman wearing a beige manteau and paisley higab, in an interview at her lawyer's office. "They don't want to have contact with me." [...]

Such is the paradox of Iran today. After years of turmoil, including mass street protests against the regime in the 1990s, the revolution has adapted. Among the public, political apathy now reigns. Active political opposition to Islamic rule is all but gone. And the current government, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is adopting a rather savvy tactic of letting ordinary people enjoy themselves a bit and, above all, taste the fruits of prosperity. He can afford to do so, sitting on $70 billion to $80 billion in oil revenue a year, which he uses to subsidize Iran's isolated economy (though Ahmadinejad has become widely unpopular for reintroducing state control of private business and driving up inflation). At the same time, his government is permitting less and less political dissent. Radio and TV are totally controlled by the government, and newspapers—which remain quasi independent—were recently confronted with a new, stricter censorship code [...]

The success of this oppressive but subtly effective system should give the regime-change advocates in Washington some pause. From the evidence in the streets of Tehran, there is no indication that this is a government or a political system that's ripe for overturning. In fact most Iranians—government officials and opposition figures alike—tend to poke fun at the Bush democracy program. "If the Americans are willing to spend their budget inside [Iran] for the purpose they are pursuing, they should just give the money to us directly," Ali Larijani, the chairman of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told NEWSWEEK with a laugh. "They are just distributing it through the wrong channels."

I know "understanding the enemy" is verboten in American foreign policy, but we might want to try it sometime before we pour a bunch of money down a sinkhole in the name of "democracy promotion." Countries are obviously going to react with a certain protectiveness about their sovereignty when they see this major effort to undercut them from the outside. This is also true in Gaza, where we've had our thumbs on the scale of democracy ever since we recklessly pushed elections, only to see Hamas come out as the victor. As Juan Cole put it:

The events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.

I would submit that this is pretty much exactly how the neocons want things to go in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. Rather than seeing democracy flourish from the bottom up, they would RATHER make an open and awkward statement of regime change, forcing the Iranians to become more belligerent, further opening tensions and pushing toward a wider war. In Palestine, I believe the idea was to bring Hamas out into the open so they could be cut off and humiliated, through the "thumbs on the scale" promotion of Fatah over them. They may have even wanted to isolate them in Gaza, making it easier to starve them out. These are some dangerous games that The Fourthbranch Administration is playing, and they're designed to increase the possibilities of more global combat, more use of weapons and defense contractors, and more projection of massive American military might. Some people just don't learn any lessons.

Freedom's on the March

In Pakistan (you know, our great ally in the war on terror):

- A government-led crackdown against the news media and the political opposition intensified here Tuesday, with hundreds of party workers arrested and television stations bracing for raids.

The crackdown came as Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, moved to limit the political fallout from his decision three months ago to suspend the nation's chief justice. Critics have accused the president of authoritarianism and said his tactics are an indication of his slipping grip on power.

In Saudi Arabia, another ally:

I'd heard about Saudi Arabia, that the sexes are wholly segregated. From museums to university campuses to restaurants, the genders live corralled existences. One young, hip, U.S.-educated Saudi friend told me that he arranges to meet his female friends in other Arab cities. It's easier to fly to Damascus or Dubai, he shrugged, than to chill out coeducationally at home [...]

I spent my days in Saudi Arabia struggling unhappily between a lifetime of being taught to respect foreign cultures and the realization that this culture judged me a lesser being. I tried to draw parallels: If I went to South Africa during apartheid, would I feel compelled to be polite?

The rules are different here. The same U.S. government that heightened public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women prizes the oil-slicked Saudi friendship and even offers wan praise for Saudi elections in which women are banned from voting. All U.S. fast-food franchises operating here, not just Starbucks, make women stand in separate lines. U.S.-owned hotels don't let women check in without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone have long been regarded as prostitutes.

In Iran, where our continuing belligerent talk has stifled efforts at political reform:

Tehran's jailing of Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year old grandmother who holds dual Iranian-American citizenship, as well as the interrogation of others with similar papers, is evidence that Washington's latest attempt to foist change on Iran is backfiring — as Iranian democracy advocates had warned. The Bush administration had trumpeted its $61.1 million democracy program, including Farsi-language broadcasts into Iran, education and cultural exchanges and $20 million worth of support for "civil society, human rights, democratic reform and related outreach" as an important effort. However, sources tell TIME that several key Iranian reformers had repeatedly warned U.S. officials through back channels that the pro-democracy program was bound to expose them as vulnerable targets for a government crackdown whether they took Washington's funds or not.

Iranian civil rights activists contacted by TIME say that the cases against the Iranian-Americans have fostered the most repressive atmosphere inside Iran in years, making democracy advocates terrified to work or even speak on the telephone. Many are deeply reluctant to leave or re-enter the country, fearing that they will meet the same fate as Esfandiari, who was initially detained while heading to the airport after an eight-day visit to Iran to see her 93-year old mother. She and at least two other Iranian-Americans were charged with espionage. Esfandiari is the director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mideast Program in Washington. The Wilson Center has strongly denied that she or the center has received any of the Bush administration's funds.

In Cuba!

The continuing hostilities with the US have played into Castro's hands. It was as an embattled nationalist leader of a small island, standing up to an aggressive, neighbouring superpower, that Castro preserved his revolutionary credentials most effectively. The shortcomings of life under his regime were, he argued, attributable mainly to the US embargo. Many swallowed the argument. He knew, too, how to capitalise on the latent anti-Americanism in Latin America, Europe and Canada to give his struggle more universal appeal [...]

In fact, the regime seems to act with zeal to ensure that the embargo continues. When it looks as if the US government might consider ending it, some heavy-handed Cuban act ensues that the status quo prevails. In 1996, when Clinton was keen to initiate rapprochement, the regime shot down two US planes manned by members of a Cuban exile group rescuing those escaping the island on rafts. When, in 2003, an influential cross-party lobby in the US seemed set to dismantle the embargo, the Cuban government promptly incarcerated 75 prisoners of conscience and executed three men who hijacked a tugboat with a view to getting to Miami.

But don't worry, there's good news: turns out the Cold War is over!

"Russia is not our enemy," Bush emphasized as relations between Washington and Moscow fell deeper into an icy chill with Putin's threat to retarget rockets at Europe.

When the best foreign policy move all week is pleading with everybody that the Cold War is over, you know things are pretty bleak.

There's a very good reason for this rise of authoritarianism abroad. The neoconservative project to bully the world has produced an equal and opposite reaction. It's removed any moral authority from the United States to press democratic reforms because we refuse to set a decent example. So it gives allies a safety valve to rule with dictatorial means, or just to reject it since we don't have a real argument to make. It also forces other nations, like Iran, to crack down out of fear that they are being undermined and will be toppled in the name of democracy promotion. So you get a more repressive society while intending to get a less repressive one.

We need to relate to the world in a more honest and a less unilateral way. Unilateralism breeds unilateralism. And it makes this a far less safe world.

Right Between The Eyes

Bill Kristol, last seen getting every single thing wrong about foreign policy since the day he was born, has the gall to criticize someone for not taking risks from the comfort of his penthouse apartment in Manhattan and not on the streets of Baghdad.

Will Bush pardon Libby? Apparently not--even if it means a man who worked closely with him and sought tirelessly to do what was right for the country goes to prison. Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, noting that the appeals process was underway, said, "Given that and in keeping with what we have said in the past, the president has not intervened so far in any other criminal matter and he is going to decline to do so now."

So much for loyalty, or decency, or courage. For President Bush, loyalty is apparently a one-way street; decency is something he's for as long as he doesn't have to take any risks in its behalf; and courage--well, that's nowhere to be seen. Many of us used to respect President Bush. Can one respect him still?

There's so much that can be said about this, but none of it half as good as what TBogg said.

...here he goes again talking about "courage" and "decency" as if this hump has ever done a courageous or decent thing during his shiftless privileged life. Bill Kristol is worried about his PNAC neocon buddy Scooter when:

More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise [...]

These are the consequences of the actions and chest-thumping policies of people like Scooter Libby, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, etc. They play a game where only other people lose, but never themselves. Then they just move on to think tanks and visiting professorships and book contracts where nobody ever points out to them that they fucked up. They fucked up really bad.

If there was a shred of decency or an ounce of courage in any one of them, take your pick, they would each be making an appointment with Mr. Heavy Rope and Mr. Stout Overhead Beam, and their last act on earth would be to pin a note to their shirt that simply states: "I'm sorry. I was wrong."

Amen. TBogg only gets serious about as often as the cicadas come out from underground to terrorize the Midwest, but when he does it's thrilling to watch.

On a related note, Rick Perlstein takes a look at the letters to the court from Libby's band of neocon well-wishers and finds them to be a fascinating study in GOP thinking, where none of their friends can do any wrong, where they're all paragons of virtue or simply misunderstood, where forces conspire against them from simply doing the right thing for them and their families. But:

What's missing from every single one - every one: a single forthright statement about the magnitude of the offense for which he'd already been convicted.

But who cares, Libby loves families!

It's nothing short of enormously gratifying to see this two-bit huckster get everything that's coming to him. And hearing the right-wing noise machine in full bleat tickles me as well.

UPDATE: I should mention that the majority of the Republicans at the debate would pardon Libby if they were President, and the best answer was Mitt Romney's, an encapsulation of his whole campaign really, as he made the principled statement that he's never pardoned anybody because he doesn't believe in overruling juries, but in this case he probably would because that's what he thinks primary voters want him to say.

I Know, Let's Get The Whole World Mad At Us

January 2009 really can't come too soon, and it may be too late. It's bad enough that this Administration ignored its allies and pushed through into a disaster in Iraq, a disaster they'd like to prolong for the next 50 years. Apparently they want to reconstitute the Cold War as well, restarting conflict with China and Russia.

Apparently the idea before 9-11 was to push Taiwan toward independence and provoke a shooting war with the largest country on the planet.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.

The top U.S. diplomat in Taiwan at the time, Douglas Paal, backs up Wilkerson’s account, which is being hotly disputed by key former defense officials....

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

This would be literally unsane (the opposite of sane), but the neoconservative project has always been predicated on finding an enemy, and after the Cold War ended they were openly looking for a new enemy until 9-11 cemented the question.

Not only were these provocations made with respect to China, but currently, Russia is being provoked mightily over installing new missile defense sites in Eastern Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe would force Moscow to target its weapons against Europe.

The threat, in an interview published Sunday in Italy's Corriere della Sera and other foreign media, marked one of Putin's most strident statements to date against the U.S. plans and came just days before he is to join President Bush and other leaders at a Group of Eight summit in Germany.

In the interview, Putin was asked whether the proposed missile defense shield would compel Moscow to direct its own missiles at locations and U.S. military sites in Europe, as during the Cold War.

"If the American nuclear potential grows in European territory, we have to give ourselves new targets in Europe," Putin said, according to Corriere. "It is up to our military to define these targets, in addition to defining the choice between ballistic and cruise missiles."

I didn't think it was possible to get worse, to actually combine all of the accumulated threats of the 20th century at the same time. Is there somebody shouting in the beer halls in Bavaria as well, talking about a putsch?

This is a terrible development. We know Putin has been consolidating power into a very anti-democratic model, and now he's pointing missiles at Western Europe again. So the difference between him and, say, Leonid Brezhnev, is what, exactly?

There are days like this where I want to crawl into the cushions of my couch and hide for 18 months.

UPDATE: Mikhail Gorbachev:

The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has blamed the US for the current state of relations between Russia and the West.

In a BBC interview, Mr Gorbachev said that the Russians were ready to be constructive, but America was trying to squeeze them out of global diplomacy [...]

In an interview with Radio Four's The World This Weekend, Mr Gorbachev said relations between Russia and the West were in a bad state.

"Well, it's worse than I expected," he said through a translator.

"We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire.

"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire, we know about empires, we know that all empires break up in the end, so why start again to create a new mess.'"

There are a lot of reasons for going into Iraq, but empire-building is almost certainly one of them. A new kind of empire, to be sure, but empire nonetheless, one where the arms of military and economic power have influence worldwide.

Iraq 4-Evah

Well, at least they're being honest:

President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday.

The comparison was offered as the Pentagon announced the completion of the troop buildup ordered by Bush in January. The last of about 21,500 combat troops to arrive were an Army brigade in Baghdad and a Marine unit heading into the Anbar province in western Iraq [...]

Presidential spokesman Tony Snow said Bush has cited the long-term Korea analogy in looking at the U.S. role in Iraq, where American forces are in the fifth year of an unpopular war. Bush's goal is for Iraqi forces to take over the chief security responsibilities, relieving U.S. forces of frontline combat duty, Snow said.

"I think the point he's trying to make is that the situation in Iraq, and indeed, the larger war on terror, are things that are going to take a long time," Snow said. "But it is not always going to require an up-front combat presence."

Instead, he said, U.S. troops would provide "the so-called over-the-horizon support that is necessary from time to time to come to the assistance of the Iraqis. But you do not want the United States forever in the front."

South Korea is a terrible model for what we face in Iraq. First of all, it wasn't a democracy for most of the time - Syngman Rhee was a dictator who ruled the South for decades - so unless there's an admission here that Iraq needs a strongman, it's a strange analogy. Second of all, the Korean War was conventional warfare with an actual front (the DMZ), not a series of sectarian battles with different ethnic groups and competing interests.

But it's a great model if the goal is to set up a permanent presence in the Middle East to control the flow of the world's oil supply. Which is clearly what this delusional maniac wants to do:

[B]y all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

The entire neocon projects hinges on staying in Iraq forever. The permanent bases had to leave Saudi Arabia, so they had to be relocated to Iraq. The more disruptive our presence is, the more pulling out would trigger a catastrophe, the better these guys feel. And most of the Democratic candidates appear to have bought this, even while sounding antiwar. We are likely to have some kind of troop presence in Iraq for the rest of all of our lifetimes unless some brave politician decides differently.