Category: Foreign Policy

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Iraq Obama The Clintons

Hillary Clinton lies about Obama

Not that this is really news.  Mother Jones investigates the Hillary 2008 campaign’s specific characterizations of Obama’s position thus:

Clinton and her aides have been peddling false information about Obama to undercut one of his primary arguments: she voted for the war; I was against it. Engaging in such disingenuous attacks may help Clinton beat back Obama, but it is hardly the way for her to counter Obama’s claim that she represents poltics-as-usual. It only proves his point.

Andrew Sullivan explains the strategy behind this move.  It seems clear though that the Clintons are banking on the laziness and gullibility of the American people.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics

The Petty Paul (Krugman)

I used to look forward to a Paul Krugman column.  Yes, he was a polemicist, but he was always angry with good reason.  Now, I read each column waiting for the gratuitous Obama smear.  Of course, often enough in these past few weeks, the entire column has been attacks on Obama. Today, perhaps in deference to Obama’s overwhelming victory over Krugman’s two preferred partisans, Krugman only has a throwaway line attacking the Senator:

The Democrats in general make far more sense. But among at least some of Barack Obama’s supporters there seems to be a belief that if their candidate is elected, the world’s problems will melt away in the face of his multicultural charisma.

Memo: It won’t work on the Chinese. [my emphasis]

Notice both the vagueness of the claim, and it’s mean-spiritedness. I doubt Krugman could name a single supporter who believes this.  And I cannot think of any other reason for including this gratuitous insult.

I fear Paul Krugman is becoming the left-wing’s William Kristol in his single-minded partisan fervor, indifferent to political realities on the ground but true to the vision that shaped him years ago.  He remains interesting – much as Kristol has – but he seems to be somewhat disconnected from reality.  William Kristol’s dogged defense of the Iraq war demonstrated how disconnected he was; Krugman opposes Obama because of his lack of partisan fervor – because he believes partisanship is necessary to win and to accomplish any significant changes.  But when his theory is challenged by the reality of an electoral victory (a small one to be sure), he does not brook any doubt.  He is surly.  Krugman is not in William Kristol territory yet; but if Obama manages to become the Democratic nominee, I’d be certain that Krugman’s doubts will remain strong.  And if Obama wins the presidency, I’m sure they’ll remain.  And if Obama accomplishes more than expected as president – I doubt, even then, Krugman will come around.

Still, if Obama is the nominee, expect Krugman to find something else to talk about for the next few months until November rolls around.  Expect a lot of talk about the Democratic position versus the Republican candidate.  That’s the problem when you’re a partisan.  Your intellectual honesty becomes a hostage to your party or your cause.  Just ask William Kristol.

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Iraq Politics

“Only idiots signed up. Only idiots died.”

Apparently Ted Rall is as offensive and clueless as my officemate.

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Pakistan

The coverup of Benazir Bhutto’s death

It seems clear now that Musharraf’s government is covering something up. Between this video broadcast by Sky News clearly showing a gunman shooting Bhutto, and the below video with another video and some investigative reporting, it is evident Bhutto was shot and Musharraf is now lying about it.

Found on Andrew Sullivan’s site.

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Pakistan

The Life and Death of Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto

[digg-reddit-me]As every news outlet is reporting, and as I am sure everyone already knows, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed this morning at Rawalpindi in Pakistan. She was shot twice at close range – once in the neck and once in the chest – by one of the two suicide bombers sent to kill her who had gotten through the security forces. President Musharraf is being blamed – directly or indirectly- for the assassination by many of Bhutto’s supporters. He was at her side in the hospital when she died – but is being blamed for providing inadequate security. The two had also been clashing since Musharraf made the deal with Bhutto to allow her to return to Pakistan.

Pay your respects.

Bhutto wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post shortly before returning to Pakistan which reads like the last note of a woman who knows she is going to die:

Extremism looms as a threat, but it will be contained as it has been in the past if the moderate middle can be mobilized to stand up to fanaticism. I return to lead that battle.

I have led an unusual life. I have buried a father killed at age 50 and two brothers killed in the prime of their lives. I raised my children as a single mother when my husband was arrested and held for eight years without a conviction – a hostage to my political career. I made my choice when the mantle of political leadership was thrust upon my shoulders after my father’s murder. I did not shrink from responsibility then, and I will not shrink from it now.

Shortly before she went back to Pakistan, she said that she believed she would be assassinated if she went back. In her autobiography, Daughter of the East, Bhutto said:

“I know that I am a symbol of what the so-called Jihadists, Taliban and al-Qaeda, most fear. I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan.”

But despite the fact that she knew these extremists were after her, she said that she did not fear the threats of Baitallah Masood or other extremists, but rather the fringe elements of the Pakistani military.

It is an understatement to say that today is not a good day for Pakistan or for world stability.

Edit:

“I am not afraid,” Bhutto told TIME last month, “I am ready to die for my country.”

The Associated Press provides the best short summary of Bhutto’s life that I have read with the introduction:

The suicide attack that killed Benazir Bhutto cut short an epic life, one bathed in blood and awash with controversy.

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Iraq Life The War on Terrorism

The morons die with our respect.

A direct quote from an officemate today; I walked in on the middle of this conversation:

…but war is good.  We need war every few years or so to kill off all the morons – send the jocks, the meatheads, all of them.  We need to let them volunteer, go off and get killed – like in Iraq; it’s perfect.  Who else would be willing to go?  I mean with respect of course – the morons die with our respect. [Waving his hand to dismiss someone.]

One of the most unusual people I know discussing why war is good.  He’s generally a conservative, in a Catholic religious sense.  But he has a determinedly independent streak and a penchant for saying outrageous things.

He also maintained at a previous point that the Taliban in Afghanistan were “basically” the “good guys” because they were religious instead of the thugs growing drugs.  I in no way endorse what he says – but his point of view is distinct and usually well-thought out.  It just goes to show how far a faulty premise can take you.

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Giuliani Law Libertarianism Obama Politics Post 9/11 Generation The War on Terrorism

Why I write this blog

It’s been about two months since I’ve started this blog. I started it knowing only that I wanted to write, and that I already had a dozen ideas for posts or articles. There were many times as well when I would read this or that article and be frustrated at the inaccuracies, and I wanted to correct them, or add to them, and I thought could advance the collective conversation.

This blog has in many ways been more successful than I anticipated – with over 125,000 pageviews and over 80,000 absolute unique visitors in this short time. I’ve been writing only in my free time here and there – a few minutes before lunch at work, after I get home at night, and on weekends.

Recently, I have been trying to determine what exactly it is that I have to offer, and therefore what this blog should be about. My most popular link so far was this funny cat video I came across on a Saturday night and embedded; next was this bit of electoral analysis which has proved remarkably prescient, especially in its title “The Beginning of the End of Hillary 2008”; then comes this uneven piece on the rhetoric used in the debate on what to do about terrorists and terrorism. As you go further down the list, there is one piece of pop-political-philosophy discussing the differences between two libertarian-minded political trends; a mention of Chris Rock’s comments introducing Obama with related video; the contrasting stories of the interrogation of two Al Qaeda related prisoners in the aftermath of September 11; and a video of a cheerleader getting trampled by a football team. The posts cover a wide range – from clear fluff to horse-race analysis of the presidential campaigns to more serious discussions of issues.

What is it that I have to offer?

Given my position – having a full-time job and blogging on the side – I cannot do what I would most want to do, in-depth first person research on every topic. ((I am trying to do this though, and to do it more – sending emails, letters, and in other ways trying to contact the subjects of my pieces; and also trying to get more information in this way.)) But I think there are other things I have to offer. I am a voracious consumer of media – especially about news and politics. I listen to many unedited candidate and policy-maker speeches. ((Through C-Span, the Constitution Center, and the Council of Foreign Relations primarily.)) I care deeply about a number of issues and follow them closely in the news including the issue of liberty in America today, the fate of Pakistan, the attempt to create a practical and moral foreign policy, and the construction of a strategy to wage a smart and effective War on Terror. I read opinions from a broad political spectrum, and take them seriously. Or at least most of them. I have read books by Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Barry Goldwater, as well as books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and I regularly read both conservative and liberal blogs and magazines, as well as some radicals that are not so easily classified. ((I believe there is a third way in politics – but that neither Bill Clinton nor his wife have found it, relying instead on cynical triangulation and the papering over of large differences with clever rhetoric.)) I believe I have generally sound judgment and a sense of the political winds, as well as a unique and insightful views on current events.

So what I have to offer is this: a funny video every Saturday; analysis of where the politics is headed in the near and slightly-less-near future; and serious policy discussion (leavened with some humor).

What this blog is about

There is one issue which above all shapes my thoughts today and is the impetus behind this blog: the precariousness of the American experiment. I am convinced that America’s status as a liberal ((In the classical sense.)) democratic republic is in existential danger. This danger is not only from terrorism, but from our government’s response to terrorism. I have come to believe that the Bush administration has undermined and subverted many of the institutions and ideas that have kept executive power in check since our founding: the media, the Supreme Court, the independence of executive agencies, the military, the Congress, and the rule of law. At the same time, the Bush administration has posited monarchical powers for the presidency, they have been relatively reticent in using them. ((Only relative to what they have asserted is their power. For example, the Bush administration has asserted that it does not need Congressional approval to go to war, but it still asked for it.)) For example, while Bush has asserted the authority to declare any person a terrorist and enemy combatant and hold them secretly and indefinitely without trial or charge and torture them for information, and given such a broad definition of terrorism as to include anyone who even criticizes him, he does not seem to have used this power to the extent he has asserted he can. This has led many people to see the rhetoric of those raising the alarm about these issues as unhinged from the reality of their lives. But because Bush has asserted such powers and undermined every check on his power, we are closer than ever to a police state.

Let me be clear – I think in every practical sense, America today is far from a police state. But with the theoretical foundations laid down by this administration, and the subversion of any check on executive power, we seem to be only one 9/11 away from a fall from authentic liberal democracy. It is this concern that is the prism which affects how I see every issue: it is why I became a Barack Obama supporter; why I am afraid of Rudy Giuliani; why I am so opposed to torture; why I am so concerned about our strategy in the War on Terrorism; why I started this blog; and why I will continue to write and seek other ways to affect America’s fate.

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Domestic issues Foreign Policy Politics Roundup

Two articles to mull over

World War III

Ron Rosenblum had this must-read article about World War III over at Slate magazine this weekend.

I think this is the urgent debate question that should be posed to both parties’ candidates. What happens if Pakistan falls into the hands of al-Qaida-inclined elements? What happens if Musharraf hands over the launch authorization codes before he’s beheaded?

Don’t kid yourself: At this very moment, there’s a high probability that this scenario is being wargamed incessantly in the defense and intelligence ministries of every nuclear nation, most particularly the United States, Russia, and Israel.

War is just a shot away, a well-aimed shot at Musharraf. But World War III? Not inevitably. Still, in any conflict involving nukes, the steps from regional to global can take place in a flash. The new “authorized” users of the Islamic bomb fire one or more at Israel, which could very well retaliate against Islamic capitals and perhaps bring retaliation upon itself from Russia, which may have undeclared agreements with Iran, for instance, that calls for such action if the Iranians are attacked.

If Pakistan is the most immediate threat, U.S., Israeli, and Iranian hostilities over Iranian bomb-making may be the most likely to go global. That may have been what the “very senior” British official was talking about when he said the Israeli raid on Syria brought us “close … to a third world war.” Iranian radar could easily have interpreted the Israeli planes as having its nuclear facilities as their target. On Nov. 21, Aviation Week reported online that the United States participated in some way in the Israeli raid by providing Israel information about Syrian air defenses. And Yossi Melman, the intelligence correspondent with Haaretz, reported a few days later that—according to an Israeli defense specialist—the raid wasn’t about a nuclear reactor but something more “nasty and vicious,” a plutonium assembly plant where plutonium, presumably from North Korea, was being processed into Syrian bombs.

How America Lost the War on Drugs

Ben Wallace-Wells meanwhile wrote this instant Pulitze prize contender for Rolling Stone on “How America Lost the War on Drugs” with the subhead: “After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.”

On anti-drug advertisements

The ads, which ran under the slogan “The Anti-Drug,” had been designed by a committee of academics who apparently believed that kids needed to be shown that not doing drugs could be fun too. In one characteristic spot, a pen draws an animated landscape, with a cartoon boy avoiding the advances of cartoon dealers before driving off into the distance with a cartoon dragon on a cartoon motorcycle. “My name is Brandon, and drawing is my anti-drug,” the narrator says sweetly. The commercials made abstinence seem so lame they could have been designed by the cartels…

On the escalating political rhetoric

[Bush’s drug czar] Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens “terrorists who wouldn’t hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties.”

Ben Wallace-Wells’s conclusions

By virtually every objective measure, the White House had lost the War on Drugs. Last year, Walters boasted that drug use among teenagers has fallen since 2002 – ignoring the fact that overall drug use remains unchanged. The deeper problem is that the drug czar has stopped measuring anything other than drug use. During the 1990s, at the direction of Gen. McCaffrey, Carnevale had created a comprehensive system to measure whether we were winning the drug war. The system took into account drug price and availability in the United States, how difficult it was for drug smugglers to get their product into the country and the consequences of drug use on public health and crime. But Walters simply tossed out that system of evaluation – as well as the unflattering facts it highlighted. “Had we kept it,” Carnevale tells me, “we would see that the Bush administration has not made a positive impact on any of the measures.”

Most unexpectedly of all, crime – a problem that seemed to have been licked a decade ago – is beginning to creep back up. In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was “accelerating at an alarming pace.” Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio and more than 300 percent in Orlando. Even in the cloistered world of policing, complaints began to build about the numbers and about the cuts in federal funding. “The reality is a lot of police officers are politically conservative folks,” says Ron Brooks, the president of the National Narcotics Officers’ Association. “But there’s been a lack of leadership in this administration on this issue.”

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Election 2008 Foreign Policy Iraq Politics The War on Terrorism

The Iraq Thing

“Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning,” said Clinton, “I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers.”[digg-reddit-me]

So Bill Clinton said yesterday in Iowa. Most people – myself included – were under the impression that the former president supported the Iraq war. Perhaps it was items like the one below that led me to such conclusions. Most of the commenters on this have concluded that Bill Clinton is trying to rewrite history. But parsing Clinton’s statements reveals something else. He made statements again and again that would lead any reasonable observer to believe he supported the invasion, but on closer examination, it depends on what your definition of is is.
In an interview with Time magazine in June 2004, Bill Clinton was asked if President Bush was right to invade Iraq.

You know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, even though I think he should have waited until the U.N. inspections were over. I don’t believe he went in there for oil. We didn’t go in there for imperialist or financial reasons. We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased.

At the moment the U.N. inspectors were kicked out in ’98, this is the proper language: there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that’s all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity.

After 9/11, let’s be fair here, if you had been President, you’d think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you’re sitting there as President, you’re reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve got to do that.

That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, “Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.” You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he’d sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I’ve always been worried about North Korea’s nuclear and missile capacity. I don’t expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can’t feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that’s why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you’re the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.

I’ve excerpted the entire response here for two reasons: 1) to demonstrate that I’m not selectively highlighting certain statements; and 2) to show how deftly President Clinton failed to answer the question. If I read this at the time, I would have been under the strong impression that Bill Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq. If I had read the text extremely closely, trying to determine if he had actually said he supported the invasion, I would have found that he had not. Clinton is suddenly vague when saying what he supports: calling it “the Iraq thing”.

A charitable reader, or even a normal person, would take this to mean that the individual speaking could not think of the appropriate word for a moment. But if, three years later, President Clinton is insisting that he opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, the whole conversation takes on a different cast: his comments are clearly designed to lead someone to believe he did support the invasion, but he was apparently careful enough not to say this directly. A lie is a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth. Clinton spoke as if he were trying to avoid being charged with perjury while avoiding the truth. But his intent is now clear.

In short, we shouldn’t be surprised: Bill Clinton lied for political reasons.

Meanwhile, Marc Ambinder explains how Bill’s statements have been hurting Hillary.

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Foreign Policy Pakistan Politics The War on Terrorism

Staving off disaster in Pakistan

Buried within the Washington Post piece by Michael Abramowitz explaining how Musharraf’s close ties to Bush pose problems in the administration’s response to the current situation is this prescription for how to stave off disaster when Musharraf inevitably falls:

Wendy J. Chamberlin, who served as ambassador to Pakistan during the critical months after Sept. 11, 2001, said the administration may have been justified in standing by Musharraf – but not after his recent seizure of emergency powers. “We have to make clear that our relationship is with the people of Pakistan and not with one man, and that he is not indispensable,” said Chamberlin, president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based policy group.

The Pakistan situation is revealing the high costs of pursuing the kind of personal diplomacy that Bush has reveled in without building relationships across the board and between allied societies. Bush based his relationship with Great Britain on Tony Blair and with Russia on Vladmir Putin and with Pakistan on Musharraf. The British relationship remains strong despite some tensions at the top because of the many levels of our countries relations. The same cannot be said of either relations with Russia or Pakistan. Our influence on Pakistan does not quite end with Musharraf – we do have a prominent relationship with former Prime Minister Bhutto and Musharraf’s main moderate opponent (who was removed from office in 1996 on corruption charges). But aside from connections with these two leaders, our influence on Pakistan is extremely weak. This is incredible considering Pakistan’s importance in the region and in the Bush administration’s supposed generational “War on Terror”.

Our flawed Pakistan policy is yet another example of the Bush administration’s prioritizing of transient tactical advantage over longer-term strategic planning.

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