Category: Politics

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Foreign Policy Obama Pakistan Politics The War on Terrorism

Pakistani Power Politics

For those of you paying attention, President Pervez Musharraf, who has been rulingBenazir Bhutto Pakistan for the past eight years, won the presidential election in a landslide yesterday despite being weakened by all sides by domestic insurgencies, international opprobrium, and several constitutional and other crises. He won because of a last-minute deal he struck with the exiled leader.

The alliance is one that seems destined to fall apart, as Bhutto and Musharaff detest one another and represent two very different Pakistans. Bhutto will be entering the country in the next few days, with all charges against her dropped. She has already publicly declared that her life will be in danger by returning–whether from the Islamic militants who despise her or the current president, she did not say.

But let me spin this back to how this affects the race for president of the free world. As most people know, a few months ago, Senator Barack Obama made some comments about Pakistan in a foreign policy speech:

Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will. [my highlighting]

Bhutto, speaking at a public session before the Council on Foreign Relations responded:

Well, I wouldn’t like the United States to violate Pakistan’s sovereignty with unauthorized military operations. But the issue that I would like to stress is that Barack Obama also said, if Pakistan won’t act. And that’s the critical issue, that the government has to act. And the government has to act to protect Pakistan’s own serenity and integrity, its own respect, and to understand that if it creates a vacuum, then others aren’t going to just twiddle their thumbs while militants freely move across the border. [my highlighting]

Now let me highlight the significance of that: the former Prime Minister of Pakistan and current power broker in that country seems to believe that Senator Obama’s position is defensible–for America to violate her own country’s sovereignty. Senator Clinton on the other hand, does not engage in hypotheticals because that would reveal her thinking, her calculations and blasted Obama for his “irresponsible” remarks.

My question is: why didn’t Obama engage with Clinton–or anyone–more heavily on this issue, which ended up being talked up as a gaffe rather than a considered position?

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Obama Politics

A true parable

A true parable about the difference between thinking conventionally versus thinking unconventionally.

The elements: a student, two professors, a barometer, a tall building, and a physics test.

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Politics

The Candidates

A list of the candidates, to be updated frequently…

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Domestic issues Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics The War on Terrorism

The Choice

[digg-reddit-me]Here’s the full transcript of Obama’s speech at DePaul University.

And a choice excerpt:

As Ted Sorensen’s old boss President Kennedy once said – “the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears.” In the fall of 2002, those deaf ears were in Washington. They belonged to a President who didn’t tell the whole truth to the American people; who disdained diplomacy and bullied allies; and who squandered our unity and the support of the world after 9/11.

But it doesn’t end there. Because the American people weren’t just failed by a President – they were failed by much of Washington. By a media that too often reported spin instead of facts. By a foreign policy elite that largely boarded the bandwagon for war. And most of all by the majority of a Congress – a coequal branch of government – that voted to give the President the open-ended authority to wage war that he uses to this day. Let’s be clear: without that vote, there would be no war.

Some seek to rewrite history. They argue that they weren’t really voting for war, they were voting for inspectors, or for diplomacy. But the Congress, the Administration, the media, and the American people all understood what we were debatingBarack Obama in the fall of 2002. This was a vote about whether or not to go to war. That’s the truth as we all understood it then, and as we need to understand it now. And we need to ask those who voted for the war: how can you give the President a blank check and then act surprised when he cashes it?

With all that we know about what’s gone wrong in Iraq, even today’s debate is divorced from reality. We’ve got a surge that is somehow declared a success even though it has failed to enable the political reconciliation that was its stated purpose. The fact that violence today is only as horrific as in 2006 is held up as progress. Washington politicians and pundits trip over each other to debate a newspaper advertisement while our troops fight and die in Iraq.

And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you’ve been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place – the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.

Well I’m not running for President to conform to Washington’s conventional thinking – I’m running to challenge it. I’m not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war in Iraq – I’m running to change our politics and our policy so we can leave the world a better place than our generation has found it.

I had read with a bit of skepticism that the Obama team was holding “the full Barack” back to avoid peaking too early as Howard Dean and countless other alternate candidates have. But this speech is something different. Clearly, succinctly making the case for an Obama presidency and one part of the tragedy that would be Clinton II. I bear no ill-feeling towards Hillary, other than a vague unease. And I admit that the more I have seen her, the more I have come to respect her. That said: she represents convention, political caution, and the establishment.

The Establishment

As someone who respects and studies the “establishment” – as represented by such elite opinion-makers as the Council on Foreign Relations, The New Republic magazine, the Brookings Institute, The Economist magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, and a few other odds and ends – I believe Hillary is the candidate who best embodies what they have stood for and what they stand for today. She gives the answers they have scripted. She embodies the middle-of-the-road ideology embraced by most of these organizations, an ideology that focuses on economic liberalization and projecting strength and American power. This group is socially liberal, economically conservative, and hawkish on foreign affairs. They supported the Iraq war, immigration reform, Israel, combating climate change, and fiscally responsible policies. They are not some evil cabal as maintained by some conspiracy theorists, but rather are those who have taken it upon themselves to think deeply about these issues, those who are powerful enough to pursue their interests in politics, and those who once were in positions of significant power. Their contribution to the public debate is enormous. Their experience and conventions are well-worth hearing: if Bush had listened to them, he would have had a much more successful presidency. They did not push the Iraq war, but they acquiesced to it. They encouraged respect for military estimates and have been astonished by the Bush administration’s hubris and incompetence. It is largely because this group has been convinced that some form of universal health care is back on the table.

Hillary Clinton is campaigning as their candidate. But the funny thing is this: they have not embraced her yet. And while Senator Obama agrees with them in principle on many issues, he believes that these wise old men and women are part of the problem. And the funny thing is: many of them agree. The informal system that in so many ways has determined the policy and actions of America is broken. Not only did they get wrong the most important issue in the past decade, but they have been marginalized by the Bush administration which has not sought the held wisdom of non-ideologues.

The Choice

We need a president who will seek to challenge, reinvigorate, and reinvent this informal system. As a nation, we are headed into a half dozen enormous disasters on our current track – from the entitlement crisis to an invigorated islamist movement. We have been on this path for some time. This path has largely been set by the establishment, although the scope and consequences of our problems have been exacerbated intensely by the current administration. The wise old men and women do not know how to get us out; Hillary doesn’t know either. And neither does Obama.

But Obama sees and feels the problem – and Hillary does not. The choice we face is this: do we need a president who will be competent and strong, who will make few mistakes in the execution of her plans, who knows rather specifically what she wants to do, and who will oversee the downfall of American preeminence in the world? Or do we need a president who will make mistakes, who does not know precisely what he wants to do, who is intelligent and strong, but who sees the enormity of the challenge, and who stands an outside chance of reversing the decay and restoring America?

This presidential election should not, cannot be about which candidate will be the toughest on terrorism. What this election must be about is which candidate can rescue America from the precipice we are barely balancing on.

Continue reading “The Choice”
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Foreign Policy Politics

Rationalizing inhumanity

In keeping with the natural workings of the U.S. political process, the question of whether to denounce, punish, or attempt to deter chemical weapons attacks against a largely defenseless minority was never explained to the American people. It was settled, as it usually is, behind closed doors, where special interests ruled the day and where narrow versions of national interest helped rationalize inhumanity.

Samantha Power in “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide on page 228 discussing policy deliberations on Saddam Hussein’s genocide against the Kurds in Iraq.

I’m still in the process of reading this impressive book. There are two additional factors affecting how I evaluate it: first, this book was written before Dubya’s Iraq war; and second, Samantha Power is now one of Barack Obama’s top foreign policy advisors, as is Tony Lake, another character in the book.

So far, the book seems be repeating the same story over and over with a few deviations:

  1. an authoritarian state under a charismatic and ruthless leader begins to commit genocide;
  2. the world and America know that something awful is going on and do nothing;
  3. millions are systematically killed, relocated, attacked, raped;
  4. the world and America realize that there is a genocide being committed, but try to deny it as long as possible;
  5. Americans who are responsible for formulating the policy for the region push for more aggressive steps to curb the genocide;
  6. Americans and other responsible for deciding what to do equivocate, claim they need more information, and otherwise abdicate their moral responsibilities;
  7. some outside force restores order and stops the government from acting for reasons have nothing to do with the genocide.

One of the moments that summarizes this entire situation comes during the first President Bush’s term of office in response to the Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims. Facing enormous pressure from candidate Bill Clinton who has taken a hawkish position in the campaign, enormous public support for intervention, his own State Department, and Congress, George H. W. Bush gives a speech invoking genocide, the Holocaust, concentration camps, and other atrocities. Knowing full well that he has a plethora of information on the subject, Bush declares: “We will not rest until…the international community has gained access to any and all detention camps.”  A pathetically weak response designed to sap the momentum from the growing movement to intervene to stop a genocide.

Of course, in another typical pattern, after Clinton’s election as president, he decides to effectively follow the same strategy as  President Bush.

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Humor Politics

How the Clintons Relax

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Obama Politics

“Fired Up. Ready to Go.”

Holy Cross Basement Rally

[digg-reddit-me]At my college towards the end of my senior year, someone began passing anonymous threatening and demeaning messages to a gay student who was a friend of mine. The messages read, “All fags will go to hell,” and “Fuck you fag,” etcetera. What was truly incredible was the person targeted by these messages. This student was one of the kindest people I have ever met. He volunteered in the community and on campus; he was generous; when I worked with him in the dining hall, he was always one of the hardest workers, even when he was running a shift; he is truly one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. This made the attacks on him–some of which seemed to directly threaten his physical safety–all the more difficult to understand.

Responding to these harassing and threatening comments became a priority of the student leadership, of which I was a part. And I helped plan the events–a rally, buttons–with the innocuous and trademarked phrase: “Where is the Love?”; a petition in the campus newspaper. The rally was supposed to be held outdoors, but it was drizzling that day and there were concerns about the equipment, so it was moved to the basement of the campus. We had wanted a location that students would be walking by rather than one that they would need to find, and one of the dining halls was at the other side of the basement.

What I remember most though is one of the speeches given by a student who lived across the hall from my earlier in my college days and was also a friend. Everyone else had made their comments–well-meaning and well-put. But this student–Alex Cunningham–walked up, kind of slouched, wearing tattered jeans. He curled into himself, clutching the microphone, as if summoning something. And then suddenly, he started speaking loudly, in a totally different manner than any of the other students. He gave instructions, telling everyone that he was going to say a phrase and the crowd would repeat it back. And he started his chant.

It was both mesmerizing and powerful. A moment that I have felt the power of ever since.

Rally @ Washington Square Park

Last night, I went to see Barack Obama at Washington Square Park. I got there early and had to wait almost an hour and a half to get in. The crowd has been estimated between 20,00Rally @ Washington Square Park0 and 24,000–probably the largest campaign event of the year. The crowd was younger, but it was also diverse–with a number of the elderly, a few middle aged people, and lots of college and post-grad folk. Ethnically, it was as diverse as the subway.

I couldn’t see the stage from where I was–partially because I was short. I was actually pretty close to it. This was basically my view. However, some people were holding up cameras to record Obama on stage, and I could see him in the cameras.

The Speech

From what I could tell, this was Obama’s stump speech with a few add-ons. News reports indicated that he was tougher on his Democratic opponents, saying for example that he was the only one willing to speak tough truths and citing examples.

It was an effective speech–it dealt with the issue of experience masterfully, and on reflection, his comments on experience are even more compelling. His litany of things to change was good, and his tone was right. He explained that many people were there because they were fed up with President Bush. But that they also needed to be for something–and that something should not be just a more competent person to manage things as they are. What was needed was change–to change the system, to change the game, to create a new politics. A politics in which leaders were honest about challenges; in which real progress was possible; in which entrenched interests were not the biggest players.

It was a good speech and an effective speech, and it was delivered with a self-conscious charm that was very appealing. He ended it with a story about how one woman’s voice changed him. It was the best moment in his speech. He led the crowd in the chant “Fired up, ready to go.”

But something was missing.

A Television Show

Martin Sheen as President Bartlett in Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing is one of the great television characters. His President Bartlett is the kind of president only seen on TV.

At the beginning of the third season of the show, there is a series of flashbacks to when then Governor Bartlett was first running for president. He is shown answering questions at a political dinner. One of the characters–Josh, a Washington insider currently working for the Democratic party’s presidential front-runner played by Bradley Whitford–has been forced to attend the event by an old friend of his father’s. Barely paying attention, he grumbles about being there. Then the moment of truth comes: a farmer asks the candidate Bartlett why he supported a particular tax hike that hurt him. Bartlett answers, “Yea, I screwed all of you on that one. That one hurt a lot of my constituents. But I’d do it again and here’s why…”

For Josh, a hardened political infighter, this is one of those “A-ha!” moments and he knows he has found his candidate. He can see through the dismal setting and uninspiring performance to the President that Bartlett could be. Jeb Bartlett however is not ready. It is not that he needs more experience or that he needs seasoning or any such thing. What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.

This is what I felt about Barack Obama’s speech. He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be. If he is ready by then–if he is able to step into himself and be the leader he is able to project–we will have a great president.

Otherwise, we will have to make do. And America will be the poorer for it.

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Politics

That Biden Touch

This from Reuters about last night’s debate:

“I’m not suggesting it’s Hillary’s fault. I think it’s a reality that it’s more difficult, because there’s a lot of very good things that come with all the great things that President Clinton did, but there’s also a lot of the old stuff that comes back,” Biden said.

As Clinton fixed a chilly stare on him, Biden hurriedly added: “When I say old stuff, I’m referring to policy, policy.”

But how would this play in a partisan setting? And what if the candidate–and Guiliani, I’m looking at you–unabashedly brought up the ex-Presidents extracurricular activities in office?

Of course in Guiliani’s case especially it is a case of “he who is not without sin shouldn’t cast the first stone.”

Which brings up another factor. In a Clinton v. Guiliani matchup, do the personal dramas and “weird factor” cancel each other out because each has their own rather large and embarrassing amount of personal baggage?

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Obama Politics

“Senior White House Official” on Obama

Matt Drudge has this to say in one of his trademark “flashes” excerpting some breaking news from a new book to be published in which many “senior White House officials” were interviewed including Cheny and Bush:

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was “capable” of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

“It’s sort of like, ‘that’s all I need to get by,’ which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “And a laziness, an intellectual laziness.”

In other news, Bush says that Hillary will win the nomination. But am I the only one to see the irony of a Bush official citing a candidate’s “intellectual laziness” as a reason the candidate cannot win office?

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Obama Politics

Obama Gets Iowa Dem’s Endorsement

Former Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Gordon Fischer endorsed Obama today, citing among other factors a University of Iowa poll of Iowa Republicans showing Obama coming in third amidst the Republican field.

“It’s not a matter of trading the current White House resident for a new occupant,” Fischer said, “but replacing President Bush with someone who will change the way politics is done.”

Link is here.