Newshoggers.com

Kilcullen And A Pony

By Cernig

There's very interesting interview today with counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen in the New Yorker.

My take - he says there's less than a year before Afghanistan is irretreivable, that Pakistan is the true central front and that he can see how to rescue both nations. I think he's being overly optimistic about the timeframe to rescue the Afghanistan misadventure. It has already slipped past, for reasons Kilcullen actually explains in his interview - the recalcitrance and corruption of US-backed governments in Pakistan and Afghanistan, too many years of ignoring the very real Pakistan problem, training the Afghan police to be an army-lite instead of policemen and then allowing the Taliban to become the party of law-and-order, insensitive Coalition military operations etc. We can see how things need to be fixed but we can't get there from here.

When you look closer Kilcullen is entirely vague both on what needs to be done in Pakistan (compared with far more specific plans in Afghanistan) and on how to get the political leadership of both nations to go along with any Western plans.

Pakistan (rather than either Afghanistan or Iraq) is the central front of world terrorism. The problem is time frame: it takes six to nine months to plan an attack of the scale of 9/11, so we need a “counter-sanctuary” strategy that delivers over that time frame, to prevent al Qaeda from using its Pakistan safe haven to mount another attack on the West. This means that building an effective nation-state in Pakistan, though an important and noble objective, cannot be our sole solution—nation-building in Pakistan is a twenty to thirty year project, minimum, if indeed it proves possible at all—i.e. nation-building doesn’t deliver in the time frame we need. So we need a short-term counter-sanctuary program, a long-term nation-building program to ultimately resolve the problem, and a medium-term “bridging” strategy (five to ten years)—counterinsurgency, in essence—that gets us from here to there. That middle part is the weakest link right now. All of that boils down to a policy of:

(a) encouraging and supporting Pakistan to step up and effectively govern its entire territory including the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas], and to resolve the current Baluch and Pashtun insurgency, while
(b) assisting wherever possible in the long-term process of state-building and governance, but
(c) reserving the right to strike, as a last resort, at al Qaeda-linked terrorist targets that threaten the international community, if (and only if) they are operating in areas that lie outside effective Pakistani sovereignty.

There's a massive element of Pony Plan in his prescriptions, and it involves everything that the Coalition military cannot do on its own. How does the West get the Pakistani leadership to do a) and b), especially when that would first involve winnowing out the "fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan" which is the biggest stumbling block to finding a solution to both those massive problems and to ending the safe haven that Al Qaeda and the Taliban's leadership has enjoyed inside Pakistan?

That "and a pony too!" element in even this COIN guru's thoughts about the regions non-military problems reminds me hugely of the shortcomings in the military-led COIN strategy in Iraq, of course. And he's got this telling line on that: "we don’t want to un-bog ourselves from Iraq only to get bogged in Afghanistan while Iraq turns bad again." I thought the narrative was that we were past the chances of the latter happening...

Sarkozy Breaks Ranks On Missile Defense

By Cernig

Well now:

France's U.S.-friendly president sent a clear message Friday to the next American administration: Plans for a U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe are misguided, and won't make the continent a safer place.

... "Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security ... it would complicate things, and would make them move backward," Sarkozy said at a news conference with Medvedev. Medvedev smiled and pointed his finger at Sarkozy in approval.

...Sarkozy said he was worried about Russia's threat to deploy short-range Iskander missiles near Poland in response to the U.S. move.

"We could continue between Europe and Russia to threaten each other with shields, with missiles, with navies," he said. "It would do Russia no good, Georgia no good and Europe no good."

Sarkozy said he would discuss the missile issue with NATO counterparts at a summit early next year and proposed a pan-European security conference after that, to include Russia. Medvedev welcomed the idea.

All the more remarkable because:

1) Sarko wasn't just speaking for France - he was meeting with Medvedev as part of an EU-Russia summit and France currently holds the EU presidency.

2) His remarks came just days after the US missile defense supremo, Gen Oberling, said that US interests would be "severely hurt" if the program was cancelled. Obviously, Sarkozy doesn't think that French or European interests would be likewise negatively affected.

Yon And Instie Declare Victory In Iraq

By Cernig

Michael Yon, the Right's favorite "good news" war correspondent has declared victory in Iraq, telling Instapundit Glenn Reynolds "The war is over, and we won".

And the wingnut blogosphere seems ready to take them at their word. What a pity Yon couldn't have phoned Instie before the elections, eh?

I think thats probably a bit over-optimistic of them. So do Gen. Petraeus and the entire U.S. intelligence community, but what does they know, compared with Yon, Reynolds and the Fighting Keyboarders? However, since they believe it, can we have all the troops home now? Not just over the course of a few years, but right now?

A Boondoggle To Defend Against A Fiction?

By Cernig

On Wednesday, Iran announced it had tested what it said was a new missile. But Iran has a history of exaggerating its accomplishments in weapons development, variously claiming stealth aircraft that aren't and missiles that don't exist. Western experts reckon there was actually nothing new this time either - and in fact there may not even have been a "this time":

Andrew Brookes of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said: "I think the Iranians just keeping on rejigging the same missile and putting a new logo on it. It's basically the Shahab 3 with a different name, and the purpose of the test firing is to tell the world, 'don't forget us', we have missiles that can reach 2,000 kilometres."

"However, the launching of these missiles is not that meaningful because the Iranians have not developed an advanced minituarised warhead to fit into the front end, unless they are getting help from North Korea or Russia, and Moscow says it is not supporting Iran's missile programme.

... Duncan Lennox, editor of Jane's Strategic Weapons, said:.. "What is not clear is whether the test firing took place today or whether it's a photograph taken out of the archives but from the pictures it looks like a two-stage missile with a range of 1,900-2,000 kilometres."

And Dr. Jeffrey Lewis also notes that there's even scepticism over whether this rebranded missile, by either name, is actually solid fuelled - which makes a vast difference to its military usefulness as liquid fuelled missiles need a long time sitting on their launchers while they're filled with fuel (which can easily explode anyway) during which time they are sitting ducks for airstrikes.

Even such a missile is capable of hitting Tel Aviv, however - and the Israelis are supremely confident they could shoot it down before it did. It cannot reach Rome, Athens or Prague from Iran, and as such doesn't constitute any kind of threat to Europe. (Although it could reach Tbilisi, Georgia - but then again, so could earlier, far less sophisticated Iranian missiles, it's only 500 or so miles.) Even if Iran had missiles that could target Europe - and ever has warheads worth doing that with - as Dr. Lewis has previously noted, the Aegis cruiser platform would be a better alternative to the multi-billion boondoggle the Bush administration has proposed in Eastern Europe, both more effective and more sensitive to Russian concerns.

So what's going on? Well, Spencer Ackerman recently spoke to a bunch of Pentagon officials and military experts for a piece in the Washington Independent about Obama's relationship with the military and its supporters. Their unanimous advice was: "Consult, don’t steamroll — and don’t capitulate." and to make it clear there's only one Commander in Chief. In an adjunct piece at his FDL home, Spencer directly tackles the military budget and attitudes to "big ticket" procurement:

One of my sources for the piece is a Pentagon official who requested anonymity. He made a really interesting point that, alas, had to fall out of the piece. Despite the unsustainability of half-trillion-dollar military budgets during this period of dire financial hardship, the services will cling to their favorite big-ticket programs with an icy death-grip. If Obama's really going to make painful cuts to unnecessary defense programs, he's got to go all-out, making it clear that he's in charge and the cuts are happening no matter what. If he doesn't do that, he's going to get rolled throughout his presidency.

And he specifically links that to missile defense and Gen. Oberling, who told the AP:

The Air Force general who runs the Pentagon's missile defense projects said Wednesday that American interests would be "severely hurt" if President-elect Obama decided to halt plans developed by the Bush administration to install missile interceptors in Eastern Europe.

Oberling is due to retire in a couple of weeks. Does anyone doubt that his next job will be for either one of the contractors who stand to gain big-time from the ABM program or one of the neocon think tanks who have pushed it so hard as part of their "New American Century" plans? Those think tanks - themselves heavily funded by the very same arms manufacturers - have made explicit that missile defense should eventually include space-based weapons and be aimed at Russia too (thus Russia's consternation at the current plans) and intend a January push to sway the Obama administration and public opinion in an attempt to prevent Obama cancelling the program, as he has previously indicated he might.

These vested interests intend trying to steamroller Obama from word one, and Oberling is willing to bend the truth all out of shape in their service. He's pushing, as one ex-military writer puts it, "a ballistic missile defense system that doesn't work to defend it from ballistic missiles that don't work either." And the Cheneyites of the Right are willing to start Cold War II to get it, and the money for their arms-making allies that it represents.

Condi Rice's History

By Cernig

Warren Strobel at McClatchy's Nukes and Spooks blog:

The Bush administration will soon be history, but that hasn't stopped its senior members from trying to rewrite history for the next couple of months ... and no doubt, long after.

We were watching a video of CSPAN's interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when we had to suddenly stop and hit the rewind button. Rice said this, and we quote:

When I go to Europe, I no longer see any difference in the view that a stable and secure Iraq is in everybody’s interest, and that an Iraq that is democratic and in which Saddam Hussein, that brutal monster that caused three wars in the region, including dragging us in twice, that used – who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, that an Iraq that is democratic and friendly to the West is better for the Middle East. I don’t see much disagreement about that.

Dragging us in twice?

Pause. Think about that.

...In fact, the record is now clear (as we reported at the time) that President George W. Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq in early 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction or significant, operational ties to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. The Bush administration dismissed Saddam's accounting of his WMD, ignored offers of mediation, and used bogus and false intelligence to make the case for war. It didn't let the U.N. Security Council or opposition from Europeans get in the way. All that makes for an odd definition of "dragging us in."

And this woman wants to go back into education as a career. Do you think she really believes it, or do you think she just knows that the loyal base (you know, deep thinkers like "Thomas Sowell, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Governor Sarah Palin" - and Ted Nugent) will?

All Politics Is Local, Even In Iran

By Cernig

Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who is based in Tehran, has a must-read piece today in the Washington Post which details how, now that Obama is the President-Elect and offering no-precondition talks, non-trivial but junior members of the Iranian government are making noises about walking back their own offers to hold unconditional talks.

“People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous,” Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

... In recent interviews, advisers to Ahmadinejad said the new U.S. administration would have to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, show respect for Iran's system of rule by a supreme religious leader, and withdraw its objections to Iran's nuclear program before it can enter into negotiations with the Iranian government.

"The U.S. must prove that their policies have changed and are now based upon respecting the rights of the Iranian nation and mutual respect," said Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, the president's closest adviser.

Ahmadinejad's media adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, said that "in fair circumstances" Iran would be open to talks. "But that is not when you have a bayonet pressed at your artery," he added, referring to the U.S. forces deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

All this provides neocon hawks with the perfect opportunity to bang the "prefidious Iranians" drum, and Ed Morrissey doesn't miss that chance:

This is the point that Obama and his allies never seem to understand.  Some people just hate us, and not because of our policies on trade and security.  Iran is a nation run by radical Islamist mullahs who see secular democracy as the enemy of their religion, and Western values as a temporary heresy which they plan to correct with a global caliphate under Iranian control.

Irans’ mullahs see America as the bastion of these values, and Israel as our outpost for them in the region.  Europe is mostly irrelevant to them; they can deal with Europe after eliminating the arsenal of democracy, or hobbling it so badly that we no longer make a difference.

But it's Ed who is missing the point. As Spencer Ackerman points out, Obama is more of a threat to those mullahs than Bush ever was. If you're an intransigent theocon Iranian leader:

All of a sudden, you’re deprived of a method of demagoguery that’s aided your regime for a generation. And if you refuse to negotiate, you’ve just undermined everything you told the international community you wanted, and now appear unreasonable, erratic, and unattractive to foreign capitols. Amazing how the prospects for peace are more destabilizing to the Iranian establishment than any inevitably-counterproductive-and-destructive bombing campaign or war of internal subterfuge.

That's an analysis born out by Erdbrink's past work too. Back in 2004, he co-wrote a Time piece which pointed out that "dominant hard-line clerics are worried that friendly American behavior might aid reformers, who are less anti-Western than the conservatives."

There's a presidential election in Iran next year and a moderate now heads the committee which would choose the replacement for the ailing Ayatollah. In other words, it's not about nukes or about international opinion - its about the shakier thrones Irans hardline government now find themselves sitting upon; with the best weapon in their arsenal, Bush's neocon ways, consigned to history.

G.laringly O.bsolete P.achyderms

By Cernig

I take it as a given that any party-based system of democracy needs a healthy and viable opposition to stop the party in power getting too big for its boots and inevitably heading down the path of hubris towards results that aren't good for democracy. It's a pattern we've seen in the UK with the conservative years that began with Thatcher and with the social democrat years begun in turn by Blair. In the U.S., you've had something not dissimiliar - perhaps now to be perpetuated by Obama following in Blair's footsteps.

However (just like UK conservatives did after Thatcher and Major) the traditional home of U.S. conservatives, the Republican Party, seems intent on making itself as non-viable as possible for the forseeable future. Ted Nugent speaks for the not-so-silent minority of angry Republicans:

Consensus building is for wimps and soulless people who stand for nothing. Compromise is not about being tolerant: these days, it’s about giving up conservative principles.

...Conservative leaders and thinkers such as Newt Gingrich, Jed Babbin, Governor Jindal of Louisiana, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, Governor Sarah Palin and others need to turn up the heat and bring this less government, more individual freedom and strong national defense revolution to a boil. It is time.

My specialty is making Fedzilla punks squirm and turn into a puddle of sweat and drool. Therefore, in the spirit of famous butt kickers Generals Chesty Puller and George Patton, I say we launch an attack on all fronts. Uncle Ted hereby declares it is open season on RINOs. No bag limits or permits required. Conservative ideas, arguments and votes are the weapons we will use. Hunt them down and shine a blazing light on these RINO turncoat cockroaches. Zero in the "we the people" crosshairs of your voting assault weapon and aim for the RINO pumpstation. Double tap center mass. Whack em and stack em, track em and hack em, pack em and give em no slack. Let's do to the RINO beasts what we did to the passenger pigeon. Force out of the Republican Party out the subspecies known as RINOs.

Thus do the dinosaurs ignore their coming nadir, by impugning the adaptability of those pesky omnivourous mammals, neither carnivore nor herbivore but some unholy combinbation of both. It's a theme that other hardline "thinkers" of the right - like Malkin, Palin and Beck - have been plenty vocal about too.

And, all schaudenfreude aside, it's going to be a disaster not only for the G.O.P. but for America at large. If Obama doesn't follow Blair down the path of over-reach and broken promises (simply because, well, he'll get re-elected anyway without a viable alternative) then his Democratic successors in the Oval Office will. Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, in an NYT op-ed today, sets out how UK conservatives spent their time in the wilderness and how they found their way back.

Mr. Cameron’s candidacy was built on a simple premise: modernize or die. He told the Tories they had to look as if they actually liked the country they sought to govern, rather than wishing they could turn back time. They could not hope to form a winning coalition without appealing to the Britons whom Mr. Blair had made his own: women, suburbanites, the highly educated. Relying on angry old white men was never going to get the Conservatives much beyond 33 percent.

To that end, Mr. Cameron set about decontaminating the Tory brand. Central to that mission were forays into two areas of political terrain previously deemed forbidden zones. First, he signaled comfort with gay rights, ditching the party’s previous support for laws restricting sexual equality. Second, he championed environmentalism.

It remains to be seen whether the G.O.P. will be the vehicle for an eventual US conservative comeback. It's quite possible that it will atrophy and die under the direction of the American hard right's neocons and theocons - far more virulent than their British counterparts ever were. But if so, then some other party will be the conservative party, with a vastly reduced extremist influence, and the right will eventually regain at least parity with the left again. By then, that will be a good thing.

Hawks Pressure Obama To Ignore Iraqi Sovereingty

By Cernig

Some more thoughts about Gates staying on as SecDef and about Gareth Porter's article yesterday which says sources within Obama's transition team tell him that the chances of are pretty low. Gareth wrote:

Opposition to Obama's pledge to withdraw combat troops from Iraq on a 16-month timetable is wide and deep in the U.S. national security establishment and its political allies. U.S. military leaders have been unequivocal in rejecting any such rapid withdrawal from Iraq, and news media coverage of the issue has been based on the premise that Obama will have to modify his plan to make it acceptable to the military.

The Washington Post published a story Monday saying that Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opposes Obama's timeline for withdrawal as "dangerous", insisting that "reductions must depend on conditions on the ground". Along with Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of CENTCOM and responsible for the entire Middle East, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the new commander in Iraq, Mullen was portrayed as part of a phalanx of determined military opposition to Obama's timeline.

Post reporters Alec MacGillis and Ann Scott Tyson cited "defence experts" as predicting a "smooth and productive" relationship between Obama and these military leaders "if Obama takes the pragmatic approach that his advisers are indicating, allowing each side to adjust at the margins." But if Obama "presses for the withdrawal of two brigades per month," the same analysts predicted, "conflict is inevitable."

The story quoted a former Bush administration National Security Council official, Peter D. Feaver, who was a strategic planner on the administration's Iraq "surge" policy, as warning that Obama's timetable would precipitate "a civil-military crisis" if Obama does not agree to the demands of Mullen, Petraeus and Odierno for greater flexibility.

Underlying the campaign of pressure is the assumption that Obama's 16-month timetable is mainly posturing for political purposes during the primary campaign, and that Obama is not necessarily committed to the withdrawal plan.

There's certainly a gap between Obama's campaign promise of 16 months and the 36 months of the SOFA wording, but the hawks are seemingly advocating ignoring that SOFA hard limit too, if "conditions" warrant it. If Obama doesn't stick to that timetable, he has to explain why he's setting the SOFA negotiations and the stated intentions of the Iraqi government during those negotiations - that the US withdraw from urban areas by end 2009 and entirely by 2011, no exceptions or takebacks -aside. That's a no-no, as the US cannot unilaterally go ask for an extension of the UN mandate and expect to get it. A continued presence would then be an absolute infringement of Iraqi sovereignty and make the US presence clearly an illegal occupation. It seems to me that its the folks who are pushing for doing just that who are out of bounds. Not only are they asking to set international law at naught but inviting a massively renewed insurgency. That's just simply not a credible option.

Thus, it occurs to me that they're simply setting up a conservative-aiding and military-excusing narrative for when Iraq's civil war goes South again, which it must given that there's been no reconciliation of the various underlying factional causes for it. "Look at the mess - if Obama had kept the troops in Iraq like we advised it wouldn't have happened." Which will ignore, and hope no-one remembers by then, that staying wasn't a legal or sensible option.

And that's a long way of saying that the kind of brutal and mercenary "realists" who would advocate such a move for purely selfish reasons - and deliberately dump their own shares of blame on their President's head in the process -  have no business being anywhere near the triggers of the world's most powerful nation nor near the levers of power. Send them all into the wilderness.

Report: Obama To Stand Up For Iraq Withdrawal

By Cernig

Gareth Porter at IPS has been talking to (anonymous, as ever) Obama transition team folks who tell him that the chances of Robert Gates staying on as SecDef "are now about 10 percent".

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that two unnamed Obama advisers had said Obama was "leaning toward" asking Gates stay on, although the report added that other candidates were also in the running. The Journal said Gates was strongly opposed to any timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, and it speculated that a Gates appointment "could mean that Mr. Obama was effectively shelving his campaign promise to remove most troops from Iraq by mid-2010."

Some Obama advisers have been manoeuvering for a Gates nomination for months. Former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig publicly raised the idea of a Gates reprise in June and again in early October. Danzig told reporters Oct. 1, however, that he had not discussed the possibility with Obama.

Obama advisers who support his Iraq withdrawal plan, however, have opposed a Gates appointment. Having a defence secretary who is not fully supportive of the 16-month timetable would make it very difficult, if not impossible for Obama to enforce it on the military.

A source close to the Obama transition team told IPS Tuesday that the chances that Gates would be nominated by Obama "are now about 10 percent".

The source said that Obama is going to stick with his 16-month withdrawal timeline, despite the pressures now being brought to bear on him. "There is no doubt about it," said the source, who refused to elaborate because of the sensitivity of the matter.

As Gareth points out, mainstream opposition to a set timetable has been widespread, with a constant narrative saying that Mullen, Petraeus and Odierno all oppose a fixed timetable and that Obama would wiggle on a fixed timetable to stave of an inevitable conflict with the Pentagon.

But that Pentagon opposition seems to ignoring, or setting aside as beneath their notice, Iraqi statements that there must be a complete U.S. withdrawal by the end of 2011 and the revised "status of forces agreement" which seems to have removed any "wiggle room" without trampling all over iraqi sovereignty in a way that would announce High Noon for insurgents there. Obama, however, is reported to be ready to stand by his campaign promises and the wishes of the Iraqi people.

Obama's website makes no such pledge to "adjust" the timetable. Instead it says the "removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government." It defends the rate of withdrawal of one or two brigades per month and offers to leave a "residual force" in Iraq to "train and support the Iraqi forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism."

When Obama met with Petraeus in Baghdad in July, Petraeus presented a detailed case for a "conditions-based" withdrawal rather than Obama's timetable and ended with a plea for "maximum flexibility" on a withdrawal schedule, according to Joe Klein's account in Time Oct. 22.

But Obama refused to back down, according to Klein's account. He told Petraeus, "Your job is to succeed in Iraq on as favourable terms as we can get. But my job as a potential commander in chief is to view your counsel and interests through the prism of our overall national security." Obama defended his policy of a fixed date for withdrawal in light of the situation in Afghanistan, the costs of continued U.S. occupation and the stress on U.S. military forces.

Let's hope that Porter's sources are correct, and that the Big Media narrative saying Obama is about to turn away from his promise is just an attempt to "create reality" by the military and neo-whatever establishment.

Bush Push To Lock Policy For Obama Has Loophole

By Cernig

And now for some good news.

Last May, White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten instructed federal agency heads to make sure any new regulations were finalized by Nov. 1. The memo didn’t spell it out, but the thinking behind the directive was obvious. As Myron Ebell of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute put it: “We’re not going to make the same mistakes the Clinton administration did.”

... But that strategy doesn’t account for the Congressional Review Act of 1996.

The law contains a clause determining that any regulation finalized within 60 days of congressional adjournment — Oct. 3, in this case — is considered to have been legally finalized on Jan. 15, 2009. The new Congress then has 60 days to review it and reverse it with a joint resolution that can’t be filibustered in the Senate.

In other words, any regulation finalized in the last half-year of the Bush administration could be wiped out with a simple party-line vote in the Democrat-controlled Congress.

Given how often the Bush administration have sidelined Congress to push their own policies, the notion that a majority of Congress can so easily sideline Bush's last six months in office has a delicious sense of karma about it.

Unofficially Official Leaks To Pressure Syria, IAEA

By Cernig

Yesterday, some anonymous diplomats at the IAEA in Vienna talked to the AP, Reuters and others in a well-orchestrated leak and told them that the atom watchdog's inspectors had found traces of uranium at the bombed "Box on the Euphrates". Cue general speculation, unwarranted by the actual content of the leaks themselves, about Syria's secret nuclear weapons plans.

But the officially unofficial leakers didn't explain whether the "processed" uranium, was lightly enriched, heavily enriched or depleted, or even whether it was in a metallic form or an intermediary UF6 form between raw ore and metal. All of those could be described as "processed" and there's a lot of difference between them. The word was well chosen to fuel speculation.

Previously, even US officials who claimed the building bombed by Israeli warplanes was a reactor had said that it wasn't yet completed and, back in September, El-Baradei told an IAEA board meeting in September that preliminary findings from test samples taken by inspectors granted a visit in June to the desert location hit by Israel bore no traces of atomic activity.

The IAEA described the leaks as an effort to prejudice the agency's conclusions. IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the IAEA's evaluation of findings from a June visit to the site was not finished and a verdict was unwarranted until the report.

Arms Control Wonk Dr. Jeffrey Lewis points the finger at the US:

The real reason that ElBaradei is reluctant may have more to do with ongoing Israeli efforts to engage Syria. Hibbs has reported that the effort to pressure Syrua has “run aground on a separate diplomatic effort … to encourage Syria to isolate Iran (Hibbs, “Diplomatic efforts to engage Syria hindering US-led campaign at IAEA,” Nuclear Fuel 33:20, p. 4).

So, that’s the rub: Some countries — read the US — want ElBaradei to push for a special inspection — which the Agency has only requested twice in its history. ElBaradei has said that he won’t unless there is evidence of undeclared nuclear material. So, delegations are seizing on the uranium finding — however scant — to force ElBaradei’s hand.

You can see why the DG and the IAEA might be irritated, particularly if the evidence is less clear-cut than the diplomats are suggesting.

And, if it's the U.S. then you can be sure that the Fifth Branch Cheneyites are behind it, in yet another attempt to forestall diplomacy and create the conditions for conflict.

Obama, the Iran NIE and Honesty

By Cernig

I'm beginning to wonder what's with Barrack Obama on the subject of Iran's nuclear program, and it's worrying me. Despite the bright spot of his promise to negotiate freely with Iran - something the IAEA and Brent Scowcroft, among many others, agree with - Obama has consistently disagreed with the last US National Intelligence Estimate and the UN's atom watchdog by assuming that Iran is currently seeking nuclear weapons. He said so both during the debates and on the campaign trail. Obama has also, as a consequence of the claim that Iran is seeking nukes, refused to take military action off the table. It is, to say the least, schizophrenic.

Some might want to consider Keith Olbermann's reaction to Bush denying US intel in that way, back last year.

I firmly believe that Obama was the best of two choices and that he'll make the world safer by being less likely by far to carry through on belligerent rhetoric that ignores the facts as they are known - but let's not stick our heads in the sand about his oft-repeated words and what they in fact mean. He has ignored/denied the IAEA and NIE findings almost as much as Bush or McCain have, doubtless for his own political reasons.(I refuse to believe he's so dumb as to actually 100% believe his bald claim that Iran is actively seeking nukes in the face of the extant evidence.)

But now, it's time to lead, to tell Americans the truth rather than what is needed for electability among a US population that has been fed Iran demonization wholesale for decades, and to shuck of the Wormtongue voices of neo-liberals, neoconservatives and neo-whatevers. If Obama disagrees with the consensus finding of the US intelligence community and with the findings of the IAEA, both of whom say that if Iran ever had a weapons program it has been dead for years, then he must say so and say why. Otherwise, he must alter both his rhetoric and his policy to fit reality as expressed by those findings - we've had too many years already of, in Obama's own words, not letting facts get in the way of ideology (or political games).

IAEA Head Would Welcome Direct US/Iran Dialogue

By Cernig

Add Mohammed el-Baradei to the list of those welcoming Obama's statements that he'd talk to Iran.

"If there is a direct dialogue between the United States and Iran, I think Iran will be more forthcoming with the agency," IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said.

"(A) political opening will also convince Iran to work with us to solve remaining technical issues," he told a news conference in Prague after meeting Czech Foreign Affairs Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

"That political component of the (Iran) issue requires in my view a direct dialogue with Iran and that's why I am very encouraged by President-elect Obama's statement that he is ready to engage Iran in a direct dialogue without preconditions.

El-Baradei, who was one of those that said plainly that Iraq had no extant WMD and was thanked for being right by a Bush administration push to replace him, also underlined that, to date, there is no proof Iran is seeking nuclear weapons either.

We are able to verify all their declared activities, we are able to verify their enrichment programme, which is a good thing. But we are still not able to move forward on clarifying some of the outstanding issues related to alleged studies that could have some linkage to a possible military dimension."

Iran says its nuclear plans are to make electricity so it can export more oil and gas.

"There is a lot of concern about Iran, not today but about Iran in future... whether once they develop the technology, what are they going to use it for, whether they will go for nuclear weapons," said ElBaradei.

"That is the concern shared by the Security Council." [Emphaisis Mine - C]

There's a lot in that snippet to unpack.

First of all, there's the unequivocal statement that everything the IAEA has so far checked has come up clean - a civilian program only and one that cannot now be re-directed to military uses without IAEA foreknowledge. That warning period would be at least six months and possibly a whole year long, so why is anyone still talking about keeping military options on the table? Saber rattling is counter-productive in such a circumstance - there's plenty of time to put talk of such options back in process if Iran ever makes a move to re-enrich to bomb-grade but for now there is no such program.

Secondly - the "alleged" studies el-Baradei refers to are all from 2003 and earlier, from a time when US intelligence says Iran did have a nuke program, in a very early stage, which has since been shut down. Notice all those conditionals? That's because, as Gareth Porter notes in his latest investigative report, the IAEA has serious doubts about US-provided evidence for how extensive those studies were even then. All the information the US has provided the nuke watchdog has come from a laptop provided by the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, a Marxist-Islamist terrorist organistation advocating regime change in Iran in its own favor, which has provided a long list of faulty intelligence claims about Iran, but which has even so become beloved by neocon advocates that "real men go to Tehran". All of the information on the laptop is open to question about its authenticity. Gareth notes that the "next IAEA report, due out in mid-November, will include the first response by the Agency to a confidential 117-page Iranian critique of the laptop documents, according to the Vienna-based source."

Lastly, El-Baradei makes it clear that the IAEA's only worry now is about what Iran might do in future to turn its current entirely civilian program into one with a military dimension. That's in marked contrast to Bush administration officials, Barrack Obama and other Western political figures, who have continued to talk as if Iran has an extant nuclear weapons program. El-Baradei is reminding the UNSC that the evidence contradicts that rhetoric, something Russia has publicly acknowledged already and has refused to bow to US pressure upon. Even now, the Bush administration is trying to push through a third set of UNSC sanctions before Obama comes into office (and before the IAEA report on the "Laptop of Death"'s credibility) and a new meeting is scheduled in Paris for Thursday.

The neocons may be still pushing their narrative of the need to attack an imminently nuclear Iran, in rampant denial of the collapse of their plans for a New American Century. But the truth is that other US and Western policymakers' hostility to Iran, including Obama's rhetoric, have their roots in the decades old US Embassy fiasco and the campaign of demonization that following it rather than in any actual evidence about Iran's current nuclear plans. While that means that, sans a nuclear "smoking gun" there's little chance now of an attack, the race to sanction Iran for what it isn't doing (while rewarding Pakistan, India and Israel for what they are) will continue and will continue with the threat of war ever present.

"This may be the best example in recent times of highly coordinated threat of force against a country to bring about diplomatic solution...I'm not sure," said Ret. Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Hoar, the former head of CENTCOM, the military command responsible for the whole of the Middle East. "[...F]or people that think this is serious, I would put it in the utter folly department."

The best chance of heading that folly off is Obama's dialogue, as it can open up what Iran and the US share, e.g. on Afghanistan.

"What [the U.S.] can do and can't do with Iran is...pretty much a mystery because we have not been prepared to explore with them what the possibilities are," said [Brent Scowcroft, former Republican NSA]. "[...T]alking in itself is not necessarily a concession."

Pomegranates For Peace

By Cernig

My friend Nonny at Crooks and Liars has a great story about Englishman James Brett and his one-man mission to convert Afghanistan's poppy fields into a pomegranate cash crop. In 2007, he convinced a local farmer to switch crops, and a remarkable snowball efect ensued.

In 2007, Brett was invited to Kabul to talk to farmers from various regions of Afghanistan about growing pomegranates. He flew to Peshawar and drove through the Khyber Pass heading to Kabul While driving through the Nangarhar Province, he noticed a farmer in a field of opium poppies. After the seminar in Kabul, Brett bought a large piece of card and a blue marker pen, and wrote 'Pomegranate is the Answer'. On his return drive back to Peshawar, he saw the same farmer again in the field, jumped out of the car and ran toward the farmer with his makeshift sign. His horrified translator chased after this mad ginger-haired Brit, yelling, 'Don't go in there, you could be shot!' Undetered, Brett talked to the bewildered farmer through his translator, about the farmer's life, his family, his children, how he lived and why he grew opium, about Brett's own addiction to drugs. Brett explained that pomegranate was not only the best option as an alternative crop to opium poppies, but was the only feasible one for the Afghan climate and growing conditions, and promised to return to the farmer's land a couple months later with pomegranate saplings. He went home and set up a charity called Pom354.

Brett followed through on his promise, returning a few months laster to find the farmer had discussed this idea with sixteen other families with land around his own; all of them wanted to become involved. From there, the plan snowballed – in January, 2008, Afghanistan Television interviewed him, and other farmers asked him for help in changing their fields from poppies to pomegranates. The local member of Parliament and a respected Elder in the Tribal system wanted to know more. A tribal meeting covering the entire Nangarhar Province was called, and 200 Tribal elders invited.

The tribal elders agreed to finish poppy cultivation and switch to growing pomegranates throughout the entire Nangarhar Province by next year, making the region of 1.3 million inhabitants opium poppy free for the first time in a hundred years. The elders told Brett that their decision was based not only on a desire to maintain a level of stability, but because he was the first person who had ever come to them as just an ordinary man rather than a member of a foreign government or a military advisor, someone who simply wanted to see positive change.

That's just bloody excellent. Our feel-good story for today. And the larger lesson is: trying to "nation build" using the Pottery Barn rule, when your first and last thought is for your own national interest instead of the sovereign interests of the people concerned, is always going to fail. People aren't dumb.

A Rose By Any Other Name

By Cernig

The AP reports an officially unofficial leak from the Obama team that closing Gitmo is a priority for the new administration.

Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

That's good. This bit isn't so good:

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.

U.S. courts handle cases "entagled in highly classified information" on a reasonably regular basis and the forms for dealing with such cases are well established. That phrase is a euphemism (or "lie", to the unsophisticated).  Spencer Ackerman has it exactly right:

If there's anything the military commissions process should have taught, it's that reinventing the legal system doesn't work, as evidenced by the bevy of military lawyers who have resigned in protest of the commissions. The concern, stripped of euphemism, is that the evidentiary basis for many trials of Guantanamo detainees -- including, in many cases, torture -- would never be admissible in any court worthy of the name. That's the Bush administration's legacy. But it can't be the basis for cheapening our legal system.

So we'll wait to see what proposal actually emerges. But consider not only that this is one of the first initiatives that Obama is pursuing -- it's one of the first that he's leaking, as well. This is as clear a signal as can be sent that the Bush era isn't just over, it will be actively rolled back. How far it actually gets rolled back we'll have to wait and see. And pressure.

If the US cannot get convictions in either civil or military courts under the full panoply of law, even if those trials have to be held partially in camera to protect necessary national security secrets as provided for in law already, then the US has scewed the pooch and tainted those prosecutions indelibly with torture, illegal rendition and kangaroo justice. Under those circumstances even Hannibal Lecter would walk - and anyone who understands why these things are anathema to normal jurisprudence would say that was a good thing as a universal standard even if no-one would be happy about individual instances.

If the Obama administration cannot see that, then they will have made themselves complicit in the massive crime that the Bush administration has perpetrated through Gitmo, Bagram , Abu Graib, and a host of secret prisons and illegal torture flights. It doesn't matter whether travesties of justice are conducted on the mainland U.S., at the resort in Cuba or in some undisclosed location - they're still travesties of justice. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and any "hybrid" having any relationship to Bush's rigged tribunals would stink just as highly.

Iraq Provincial Elections On For Jan 31st

By Cernig

Finally, Iraqi authorities have confirmed the date of long-postponed provincial elections. There will be a roughly two month campaign season and elections on January 31.

Here's where the games start in earnest, because the Green Zone elites are in serious trouble if the elections go forward without a "guiding finger on the scales", so to speak:

According to a survey published by an Iraqi NGO, the Al-Amal Association, only 22.7 percent of 12,000 people polled in 11 provinces said they will vote for religious parties or blocks.

Voting for independent candidates is deemed a priority for 26.3 percent of the surveyed public of 11,000 Iraqis, while 23.7 percent said they will select democratic and secular blocks.

In the last provincial elections, in December 2005, religiously-affiliated parties won all the seats in the councils, with the exception of the Kurdish region and Kirkuk.

Expect every dirty trick in the book, from ballot stuffing to candidate assassinations to voter supression at gunpoint. And remember that secular candidates were meant to do a lot, lot better than they actually did in every set of Iraqi elections so far - for pretty much the same reasons.

More, the date sets aside four provinces, pointing up the "Kurdish Problem":

First scheduled for October 1, the polls were postponed when the national parliament struggled to pass an election law because of concerns over the disputed oil-rich northern province of Kirkuk.

The January ballot will be held in only 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces after the new law excluded Kirkuk and the three Kurdish provinces of Arbil, Dohuk and Sulaimaniyah.

Elections in the three Kurdish provinces will not be held until after March 2009 and the existing multi-communal council will continue to administer the province of Kirkuk.

Kirkuk is the biggest potential flashpoint in Iraq nowadays and the Kurds are using every trick they can think of to write their own writ in the areas they claim. Right now, they're digging their heels in and refusing to consider amendments to the Constitution, which have been seen as just as important to reconcilliation attempts as these elections.

I just don't see these elections, and the subsequent protracted playing out of Kurdish differences with the rest of the country, as being violence free. The question really is how bad will it be and how much will resultant bad blood retard rather than advance reconcilliation. There's no easy fix, but at least there's now a firm, Iraqi-imposed, exit date for the US and its coalition allies. I always found it ridiculous that the Pottery Barn rule had been reinterpreted as "we broke it, so we get to tell you how to run your store from now on".

Iraqis And Brits Remember Dead Together

By Cernig

It's Remembrance Sunday in the UK, the Sunday closest to the 11th of November, when at 11 minutes past 11 the Great War ended in 1918. A day to remember those fallen in Britain's wars - almost a million and a half in the two World Wars alone.

And in the middle of the desert in Iraq, a remembrance service for Britons fallen on that foreign field, along with the unknown but far larger number of Iraqis killed:

It looks like another combat mission, but elements of the 7th Armoured Brigade have gathered for arguably one of the most unique Remembrance Sunday services.

The location, a remote British war memorial, built in down town Basra in 1921, moved by Saddam Hussein in 1997, and rediscovered by troops working here in July this year.

Over 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops are remembered on the walls of this enormous building and despite the logistical problems and security risks the military were determined to conduct a final service of remembrance in the desert before they depart next year.

In recent months the British forces have been living and working with their Iraqi counterparts in 18 mentoring sites dotted around Basra.

On Sunday the Iraqi soldiers joined the British for the service, the troops standing side by side throughout the traditional two minutes of silence.

... "It was good of the Iraqi army to come to this and it was good of the Imam and the Padre to work out a combined service, it can be very difficult," Lt Colonel Felix Gedney, head of the mentoring operation in Basra, told me.

This was a good thing to do, on so many levels, on such a sad and thoughtful day when we should be remembering what we have in common as mere humans, not what divides us into warring factions.

Blogging Obama's Administration

By Cernig

Jeralyn Merritt has an excellent post about blogging during a Democratic administration: the short answer is that there's going to be plenty to be critical about as well as to supportive of. I feel the same way. Blogs have become an important facet of political debate and have often replaced the mainstream media in it's Fourth Estate role of providing information and interpretations of the facts independently of government spin. There's no reason to change that from Newshoggers point of view.

We'll continue to bring "news less travelled" and foreign affairs posts, as well as domestic politics. Offtimes, we will agree with President-Elect Obama's policies and broad style - as we do with his emphasis on negotiation and diplomacy rather than unwarranted belligerence. That's already showing fruit: Iraqi politicians are sure that Obama can help them make a transition to being the determiners of their own nation's future once again, North Korea is hopeful that it can come in from the cold through negotiation and even Russia, despite some hype suggesting otherwise, is hopeful that Obama won't be a saber rattler in the Bush mould.

A Kremlin statement said Obama and Medvedev "expressed the determination to create constructive and positive interaction for the good of global stability and development" and agreed that their countries had a common responsibility to address "serious problems of a global nature."

To that end, according to the Kremlin statement, Medvedev and Obama believe an "early bilateral meeting" should be arranged.

But there have also been some worrisome aspects to Obama's policy and team building, which we at Newshoggers have not and will not soft-soap. I, for one, recall all too clearly the empty promises of Tony Blair coming hard on the heels of the collapse of Thatcherism. There's a real risk that Obama, like Blair still far better than the alternative, may fall short on his promises or turn out to have misled on them.

In that respect Obama's staffing choices so far, replete with Clinton-era old guard, are a worry. There's no chance of the President-Elect or anyone who has his ear noticing this tiny blog, but I would still advise him if I could to put together a "Devil's Advocate" team of "young guns" to offer a more progressive and fresher alternative to the Cold Warrior mindset. In foreign policy, names that easily spring to mind include Vali Nasr, Juan Cole, Barnett Rubin, Marc Lynch, Travis Sharp and Matt Duss. In economics, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini and Pat Garofalo might be apposite choices.

Maybe, with such "oppo" teams contributing, Obama wouldn't be so given to saying Iran is seeking nuclear weapons when all the evidence says it isn't, or to claim Russia invaded Georgia when the Georgians were the aggressors. He'd perhaps want to rethink the potentially disasterous interventionist aspects of his policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan too. Jeralyn has a list too:

When we get a President who vows to impose a moratorium on executions, close Guantanamo, and try accused terrorists under the Code of Military Justice or in federal courts, who pushes Congress to abolish mandatory minimum sentences, put a lockbox on social security benefits and provide mandatory health care, including affordable and compassionate nursing home care for the elderly, and who has ended the war in Iraq and promised not to get us into other wars preemptively or under false pretenses

These are the kind of things that we should be keeping an eye on as an Obama administration comes together, and here at Newshoggers we certainly will, being critical when we feel we should no matter what partisan politics might ask.

Update: Nicole at Crooks and Liars comments by email:

The one thing that I would caution about being too reactionary about is the inclusion of former Clintonites in the administration.  First, just because you worked for Clinton doesn't mean that you are a DLCer. Second, just by default, because they're the only Democrats we've had in 30 years, if you hire Democrats in DC, chances are pretty good that you're going to get someone who worked for Clinton.  While there are some things that definitely detract from Clinton's legacy (NAFTA, DOMA, DADT come to mind), the prosperity and global status we enjoyed with Clinton are not exactly something we should be running away from.

She has a point and it's one I wish I'd made clearer in the original post - Clinton Dems are, mostly, the only ones available with experience of being in an administration so 'we go to the White House with the Dem staffers we've got, not the Dem staffers we wish we had', as it were. And not all of them are neo-liberal interventionists. But I think my idea of "oppo teams" would just be strengthened by the inclusion of those less awful Clintonistas.

Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald notes that of course it's too early to say how an Obama presidency is going to turn out, however:

It makes perfect sense -- for the reasons Digby so aptly described this week -- for people to start pressuring Obama now to pay attention to their political principles and agendas.  And it's certainly likely that Obama will end up doing many, many things that warrant and provoke intense criticism.  I have no doubt about that.   But he's entitled to actually start doing things -- on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, civil liberties, the economy, and otherwise -- before judgments are formed.

Obama's First Presser

By Cernig

It was Barack Obama's first press conference today and the consensus is that he handled himself very well indeed, a refreshing change from stumblin', bumblin' Incurious George. Only one minor fact-checking gaffe - which led to him apologising to Nancy Reagan for saying she held seances at the White House when in actual fact she consulted an astrologer, which is just as daft. It was apparently Hillary who held seances, even if that's not what she wants to call them.

However, over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has a more substantial criticism of Obama's actual policy plans:

You know, for all the decades of talk about fuel efficiency, alternative energy, and energy independence, the most fuel efficient personal vehicles on our roads are primarily foreign brands.  So why, pray tell, should bailing out inefficient Detroit automakers be the top priority if our goal is energy efficiency?

And the easy answer is that, like the big finance houses, they are too big to fail.

Georgian Aggression

By Cernig

Finally, the NYT is helping the American public play catch-up with Europeans on the conflict in the Caucusus. Across the pond, it's been generally accepted for quite some time now that the Georgians were the primary aggressors who turned a fairly low-scale civil war into a full-on military conflict with the local superpower, who then took a mile instead of an inch. Here in the US, it's all been about the Russians invading Georgia, as if that happened first, with both presidential candidates accepting that narrative.

But...

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

The observers in question all being members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or O.S.C.E. monitoring team, led by two experienced British military officers.

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.

All of which had been previously reported from other sources, just not prominently here in the US. Shelling civilian targets in this way is a war crime - something the NYT even now steers clear of but that the BBC has reported on in some depth. The media here isn't reporting on Georgian leader Saakashvili's domestic troubles either. He's had to fire both his Prime Minister and his Army Chief recently, over 10,000 protestors against his continued rule demonstrated Friday and the democratically elected opposition have asked that foreign aid to Georgia be carefully monitored so that Misha and his cronies don't line their own pockets with it. Saakashvili's response has been to accuse all his opponents of being Russian agents, which is historically what he does just before he calls out the police with clubs.

Now that McCain is out of the running, it seems that the US media are rather more inclined to risk "political balance" for accurate reporting on Georgia. Which may well soon have Americans asking why they are supporting the tie-munching, dissent-bashing neocon in charge there and offering him a place at the NATO table and aid to prop up his rule, instead of just supporting Georgia the country. As Will Bunch says "Just in case you needed an after-the-fact reason to be glad we're not talking about President-elect McCain".

Focus On The Family Compares Obama To Nazis

By Cernig

Two days after Obama and the Democratic Party won a ringing 7 million refusal of rightwing fearmongering and hate, the extreme right are unrepentant and none the wiser. Smintheus at Unbossed writes:

This evening James Dobson's Focus on the Family Action sent out a fundraising email to members that likened the victories of Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in Tuesday's election to the Nazi bombing of England during World War II. The author of this vile letter is Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Focus on the Family Action. It was nearly inevitable that anger over losing the 2008 election would soon provoke right-wing extremists to violate Godwin's Law. Obama's victory in Colorado may have been particularly galling for the Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family, which has been heavily involved in the political campaign this year advocating for conservative issues. James Dobson personally endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket this fall.

Focus on the Family has not so far posted this hateful fundraising letter on the web. Here is the opening section of the letter:

Dear Friend,

The spirit of Winston Churchill was alive and well on Tuesday night at Focus on the Family Action headquarters.

You may recall that in the most desperate days of World War II – when Great Britain was being pounded daily by Hitler’s Luftwaffe – that Winston Churchill called on his countrymen not to despair from danger but to rise to the challenge.

It goes on in exactly the same vein, saying that:

Our nation has never faced the kind of anti-family, pro-abortion assault that we’re likely to see in the coming weeks and months. We don’t have to guess what the Left will do now that they control Congress and the White House; they’ve told us.

What are FoF so upset about? Freedom of choice, freedom of marriage and legislation to combat discrimination against gays in the workplace. The last, according to FoF, will be an assault on FoF members' religious freedom. Nice of them to state so clearly that theirs is a path of bigotry.

Obama has their number.

Obama Should Include Russia On Missile Defense

By Cernig

Last week, one of George W. Bush's signature policy initiatives - that of missile defense sites in eastern Europe - took a massive hit as the Czech government, which has already signed a deal to host a radar site as part of the ABM initiative, bowed to opposition pressure and said it would hold off on final ratification of the deal until Obama took office in January.

Initially, the Czechs were planning to ratify the missile shield agreements without waiting for the US presidential election results.

For months Topolanek's centre-right government has defended the agreements reached with the Bush administration, but the Czech premier's political position has weakened at home after his liberal ODS party suffered defeats in recent regional and senatorial elections.

Lawmakers and Czech public opinion have been divided over placing the missile defence system in the former communist central European country, and angering Russia.

... The Czech left-wing opposition, which is against the radar installation, called the plans just part "of the erroneous policies of the Bush administration," said Jiri Paroubek, head of the Social Democrats who wants a six-month moratorium on the ratification process.

The Czech government narrowly won a "no confidence" vote on the 27th of October brought about by heated debate over Bush's plans. Only one vote saved them from having to call a general election. Some estimates put Czech public opposition to the deal at over 70%. In Poland, too, the majority of the populace are opposed to Bush's ABM plans, but the Polish premier has pushed through those plans anyway in return for massive military aid from the US.

Neocon backers of ABM are setting up for a big push in January, no doubt in an attempt to infuence Obama who has been vocally sceptical about the $450 billion program. His election platform position was that:

An Obama-Biden administration will support missile defense, but ensure that it is developed in a way that is pragmatic and cost-effective; and, most importantly, does not divert resources from other national security priorities until we are positive the technology will protect the American public.

Right now, the technology is neither cost effective nor pragmatic, and certainly won't protect the American public from non-exiostant Iranian nukes or from all-to-real Russian ones. But, as Peter Kilfoyle points out in the Guardian (h/t Kat), ABM is destabilizing:

It sets Russian against Pole and Czech. It has created a world where Putin and his generals can point to an encircling American military. Ever since the US revoked the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, Russia has looked nervously at American expansion. Missile defence, they fear, is ultimately aimed at them, and their strategic defence capability.

The Americans point the finger at "rogue states" – nowadays, a euphemism for Iran. However, when North Korea was the prime concern, the US engaged in an ultimately successful dialogue with them on their weapons programme. If Russia and the European Union had their way, talking with Tehran would remain the way forward.

Russia has actually called America's bluff on missile defence, offering co-operation against rogue states, and the use of radar facilities within Russia. The Americans turned them down.

What's Russia to think? Especially when neocon missile defense plans explicitly include space-based weaponry sooner rather than later and when the obvious focus of neocon planning is Russia, not Iran or any "rogue state". Obama would do well to shake off the hawkish liberal foreign policy establishment, who as old Cold War warriors are reflexively Russia-hating. He should either re-open negotiations with the Russians to expand missile defense planning to include them and European nations as full partners, or nix the whole thing.

Bush Agrees to "No Buts" Iraq Timetable

By Cernig

According to reports, the Bush administration has agreed to three out of five Iraqi amendments to the proposed new deal governing the US occupation there. The timetable for withdrawal by the end of 2011 will now be set in stone, with clauses allowing Baghdad and Washington to seek an extension for retaining troops in the cities beyond 2009 and in the country beyond 2011 dropped entirely. There's no definite information on which two proposals the US didn't agree to, but one seems likely to be the Iraqi wish for clarification of what "on duty" means when governing whether US soldiers committing crimes would be covered by US or Iraqi law.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says that Washington considers the negotiation process over and that it's for Iraqis now to decide whether they will accept the deal as is. The US embassy issued a statement saying "We've gotten back to them with a final text. Through this step we have completed the process on the U.S. side." The spokesman for Iraqi PM Noor al Maliki, however, has said that the US response "now requires meetings with the Americans to reach a common understanding."

Bush administration officials and the Pentagon had already tied to say that negotiations were closed before considering this latest set of amendments. My guess, given that the current wording would probably not pass the Iraqi parliament, is that the talking isn't over this time either. There's not a lot of time left until the UN mandate expires, though Iraq has said it will seek an extension to that mandate if needed.

Amazing though, huh? For so long the Bush administration has said they'd never agree to a fixed timetable, that any deal had to be "conditions based". And now they've agreed to a fixed timetable. Change you can believe in.

Bush Administration's Failed Tactics Kill More Innocents

By Cernig

Simply horrifying:

The NYT reports:

An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others at a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said.

The United States military and Afghan authorities were investigating the reports about the latest attack, the American military said in a statement, but it gave no confirmation of the strikes or any death toll.

Well, at least this time the footage of yet another care-less atrocity surfaced before the US military could do its kabuki of denial, investigation, denial again, admission and finally reluctant apology.

But this new disaster, both for Afghanistan and for the West's "hearts and minds" efforts there, underlines why Obama needs to get his act straight on Afghanistan and Pakistan fast and to change the Bush course there as quickly as possible. There are some seriously worrying parts to his policy for the region as he stated it during the campaign - suggesting he would send even greater forces across the border into Pakistan, for example - which would mean an even more hawkish stance than the Bush one in the region. On the other hand, he also offered a policy option - concentrating on civilian aid, education and negotiations - that would ratchet down tensions in the region and perhaps offer a path for more moderate Taliban to renounce violence and come in out of the cold. That latter is the only way to end the US war in the region with anything even approaching a "success" for US interests.

Update: Connor O'Steen, recently returned from Afghanistan, writes in an email:

Wedding parties are an easy target to mistake because there's a large congregation of people, and in rural areas especially there's a predilection to fire guns into the air in celebration. In addition to this the parties are sex segregated, so a drone camera would probably just see a large group of armed men firing guns in Kandahar. 'What else could it be?' they say, "2+2=Taliban."

But this leads to another question, which people are feeding the US Army intelligence about these targets, and why are we still listening to them? From an airstrike near Herat earlier this year, the Army concluded that they had been fed faulty intelligence by local contacts who were using the airstrikes as a solution to familial and tribal enmities. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if we were doing the same thing in the south.

This must in the end result in an arbitrary redistribution of power: the khans that we tap and payroll for 'intelligence' have us destroy their rivals, and their local power increases at the expense of the government in Kabul. Much like the Sunni 'Awakening,' I don't see these connections as being in the long term interests of American security.

He adds that Taliban local commanders aren't in short supply and can be replaced easily by the militants, but that " the kind of communal emnity you cause through collateral damage can't be repaired."

GOP - In Search Of A Moderate Leader?

By Cernig

Commenting on a David Frum article that says the only path to Republican recovery is away from Sarah Palin and her base supporters, Charles at LGF agrees and writes:

If the GOP decides to go in the Bobby Jindal direction (fundamental Christianity, creationism, hard-line anti-abortionism, aggressively anti-gay rights), it will be committing political suicide. As much as anything else, this election was a referendum on the social conservative agenda, and the social conservatives did not win.

That's very true - but what Charles doesn't mention is that it was also a referendum on the hardline neoconservative agenda, and that agenda very definitely didn't win either. Ramesh Ponnuru at the Corner:

McCain slipped by roughly the same amounts among self-described conservatives and moderates. But the losses among the moderates hurt more because there are more of them.

Neither the hard right theocons nor the hard right neocons have the GOP's answer, but both are going to be advancing their argument that they do, forcibly, for some time still. I'm forcibly reminded of what happened within the British conservative movement after the collapse of Thatcherism. Until the extreemists conclusively defeated and the GOP moves back towards the center, it will remain in the political wilderness. So, where's the US Republican Party's David Cameron?

Update: Could it be Jeff Flake? Ed Morrissey seems to think so, while arguing that the real Republican failure isn't the theocons or the neocons, but the bigspendercons. Flake's Wikipedia entry lists his positions on some hot-button issues.

Flake supports creating a temporary worker program for border security, leading some anti-illegal immigration conservative activists to give Flake the Republican In Name Only label.^[6] However, others consider him one of the most consistently conservative members of the House and strongly support him. He is one of eight House members to receive a 100% approval rating from the American Conservative Union.[6]

Flake voted against No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, Medicare Part D, Homeland Security Act^[3], and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. He joined John McCain and Jim Kolbe in sponsoring bills to increase legal immigration and establish a guest worker program.

Flake initially supported the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, but more recently has changed his position to one of cautious opposition, including voting against appropriations for both. He also supports ending the Cuba Trade Embargo and has been a proponent of reform in the House, particularly in the wake of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethical and fundraising controversies. He co-authored a letter with now former Congressman Charlie Bass of New Hampshire, which called for DeLay to step down ahead of his decision not to seek re-election to the House.^{[citation needed]}

Flake is strongly pro-life, with a rating of zero from NARAL; he has likewise received a zero rating from the Human Rights Campaign for his failure to support legislation that expands the 1969 federal hate-crime law or allows for same-sex marriage.

But oh, that name. The joke-writers would love it.

Early Projections: PA For Obama

By Cernig

Almost 8pm on the East Coast and ABC are projecting Vermont for Obama, Kentucky and South Carolina for McCain. Projected voting seems to heavily favor McCain in Georgia. All those states being projected for McCain were on Jay's watch list earlier.

ABC are projecting Pennsylvania for Obama!!

Obama seems to be ahead in Florida, McCain in Virginia.

7:13 CT I've just been told NPR agrees with ABC on PA. According to ABC, Obama is taking roughly an equal share of the white vote while making an almost clean sweep of the black vote.

Malkin Fears Obama's A Black Panther

By Cernig

Let's get this straight - I abhor any and all voter supression and intimidation, no matter who is doing it. And I consider the New Black Panther Party to be no better a set of bigotted nutters using religion and race for their own purile purposes than are the white supremacists and Christian Dominionists they oppose.

But Michelle Malkin has headlined a post about Black Panthers turning up outside a Philly polling place "Obama’s civilian security force: Billy club-wielding security guards at Philly polls" - when she has absolutely no evidence that these people have anything endorsement from Obama, in any shape or form.

If you believe that Malkin has just revealed her own racism thereby, backhandedly exposing in her own words her irrational fear of all blacks...well, you're not alone.

Update: And it looks like the whole story was hyped up in the first place by the Mccain campaign, Fox News and rightwing bloggers. Figures.

Update 2: Oh look - another made up story from the far right, this one about the supression of Republican vote-watchers in Philly.

For Any Value Of XY

By Cernig

My friend Charlie Stross hammers in the nail on Prop 8:

Speaking as a man who happens to be married to a woman, I'm mystified as to how banning someone else from marrying can in any way protect my marriage; but this kind of Orwellian misuse of language is typical of witch hunters. When challenged, supporters of the act often bring up irrelevancies: "marriage is for the purpose of having children," they say, conveniently side-stepping the question of why they aren't in favour of mandatory divorce for childless or elderly couples, or why they oppose allowing gay couples to adopt. Or, "marriage is a holy sacrament," which kind of assumes that everybody shares their definition of "holy".

A quick search for organizations supporting this proposition throws up the usual suspects: the Roman Catholic Church, American Family Association, Focus on the Family — basically the usual sleazy mess of hard-line Christian groups — with the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America along for the ecumenical pogrom.

Here's a good diagnostic test for whether a proposed law is bigoted: if it applies to a group of people, replace the subject group in question with "Jews" or "Blacks", and see how it reads. If Adolf Hitler or the Grand Cyclops would approve, then it's a fair bet that there's something fishy about it. In the case of Proposition 8, how would you vote if it read, "Only marriage between Christians is recognized in California"? Or "Only marriage between white-skinned people is recognized in California"?

If you are a Californian voter and you vote for Proposition 8, then I'm afraid it means you're a bigot. You favour depriving a subset of the population of their civil rights, you are willing to vote for a measure that will destroy existing marriages, and you will refuse to honour marriage contracts acknowledged elsewhere in the world. And you've tacitly admitted that your own marriage does need protecting (which is kind of pathetic).

Yup.

Is McCain's Optimism Credible?

By Cernig

Even the most optimistic of McCain backers seems to be admitting that the Dems are going to pick up substantial gains in the House and Senate today - which seems, at least in my poor brain, to be a bit of a mental contortion on their part.

I know that the McCain campaign, in desperation, called on people to vote for McCain/Palin as a balance to Democratic majorities on the Hill (and that the RNCC in response immediately called on voters to send Republicans to the Hill to counterbalance an Obama White House) but how realistic is that really?

McCain and Palin have, during their campaign, pandered to the very worst of their GOP base in the most obsequious, hate-raising and maverick-denying way possible. I just don't see it as likely that anyone who can vote for the McCain/Palin ticket as it campaigned could possibly decide to vote Dem for Senate or House. Likewise, if someone's already decided to voting Republican in a House or Senate choice, I don't see any way they will then decide to vote for Obama/Biden for the White House. It just doesn't pass the smell test, for me.

Which leaves the McCain/Palin "last minute victory" afficionados with an explanation problem - if the GOP are going to take a drubbing, I believe they're going to get it cross-ticket. And they are going to take a drubbing. Has anyone seen them try to square that with their claims, or is the credibility gap just handwaved? From what I've seen and read, it's the latter.

So, it seems to me, the "Last Minute Maverick" stuff is either 1) delusional, 2) simple cynical propaganda to try to stave off an utter collapse of the Republican vote, 3) an attempt to undermine Obama's presidency by giving conservatives excuses to consider it illegitimate, or 4) conservative bigwigs think they can swing stealing the election for McCain but doing the same down-ticket is too hard a task. My money, for now, is on option two. But it's still worth keeping an eye on Republican pre-emptive cries of foul as well as the far more widespread but less hyped stories that indicate the American electoral process, as a technical exercise, has very deep problems.

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Chris Hitchens Defends Khalidi

By Cernig

Chris Hitchens appears to have sobered up enough to realize what nasty people he hitched himself to when he chose to join the warmongering Right over the invasion of Iraq.

A few feeble cracks on a comedy show are not enough to erase the memory of a vulgar and vicious attack, mounted on a rival candidate McCain has publicly called "honorable," only a few days earlier. It had been said that Sen. Barack Obama had once attended a dinner for professor Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian academic. It was further said that the Los Angeles Times, which had first reported the five-years-ago dinner in Chicago, was deliberately withholding a videotape of the evening that would show Obama in the audience while tough criticism of Israel was being voiced. Here is how the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States described the situation in a radio interview in Miami:

I'm not in the business of talking about media bias, but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet? I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.

... Khalidi has been known to me for some time and can easily be read and consulted by anyone with the remotest curiosity about the Israeli-Arab dispute. He is highly renowned, well beyond the borders of his own discipline, for his measure and care and scruple in weighing the issue. If he is seriously to be compared to a "neo-Nazi," then the Republican nominee has put the United States in the unbelievable position of slandering the most courageously "moderate" of the Palestinian Arabs as a brownshirt and a fascist. What then has been the point of every negotiation on a two-state solution since President George H.W. Bush convened the peace conference in Madrid in 1991? Nazis, after all, are to be crushed, not accommodated. One would have to think hard before coming up with a more crazy and irresponsible statement on any subject. Once again, it seems that McCain utterly lost his bearings.

I put the word moderate in quotation marks above because I dislike employing it in its usual form. Rashid Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem, long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.

They always were Chris, even when they were your BFFs. Now, of course, they hate you almost as much as they do Khalidi and Obama - and would hate you just as much if you had a deeper tan.

Where Are All The McCain People At?

By Cernig

Conservative enthusiasm for their nominated candidate seems to be a bit lackluster.

TampaBay Buzz:

About 30 minutes before John McCain is scheduled to lead a rally outside Raymond James Stadium, looks like there's maybe 1,000 people here. What's up with that? On the day before the election? Bush drew at least 15,000 people to a rally just across the street on the Sunday before the 2004 election.

"We are the quiet majority that goes out and gets things done. ... I smell victory,'' said state Rep. Kevin Ambler. Good thing he smells it, because it's hard to see it with this crowd.

CNN's Political Ticker:

John McCain’s first rally of the day, in Tampa outside Raymond James Stadium, only drew about 1,100 people. Local reporters noting that at almost the same spot just before the 2004 election, President Bush drew about 15,000 people. Two weeks ago, Obama drew an estimated 8,000.

Republican Gov. Crist, who had previously agreed to do interviews with CNN and various local affiliates, bolted right after the rally with no explanation.

Hey John? No more caffeine for you!

Significantly, more conservatives will turn out for McCain's "pitbull" than for McCain himself. Equally significantly, even Mitt Romney refuses to say McCain ran a dignified campaign - and yet despite one of the sleaziest campaigns in the history of the World few bought into the McCain Mud Factory. That the conservative base is happier supporting even more of the Rovian same, only stupider, is the entire reason they are headed for the wilderness.

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The most ridiculous thing Bill Kristol ever wrote

By Cernig

Bill Kristol, always wrong, today wrote:

Barack Obama will probably win the 2008 presidential election.  If he does, we conservatives will greet the news with our usual resolute stoicism or cheerful fatalism.

Does even Kristol believe that? There's going to be a wailing and gnashing of teeth approaching biblical proportions. Internal civil war, recriminations and witch-hunts. Oh, and plenty of renewed calls for the rightwing coup the wingnuts have been pleading for since 2006, to save the poor, dumb American people from Teh Socialist, Muslim, Baby-Killing, Malcom-X-Kin Obamination.

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Dirty Tricks Done Dirt Cheap

By Cernig

Take one cherry-picked quote, say that a newspaper has been "hiding" it when it has been on their website all along and hype the result through several different rightwing noise-makers. Result - a scandal which says that Obama would like to drive the coal industry bankrupt. One good enough for Sarah Palin to tout on the stump.

The original quote, presented in a cropped clip of an Obama interview that discussed his policy on climate change and carbon "cap and trade", looked terrible for Obama. Especially in places like West Virginia and Ohio:

That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants are being built, they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted-down caps that are imposed every year. So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted. That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel, and other alternative energy approaches.

But it's just the Right cherry-picking its quotes again to fabricate a smear out of whole cloth.

This from the same interview - and unmentioned by the unethical smear-merchants at Newsbusters, who first floated the rightwing's version of the truth:

"But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion. Because the fact of the matter is, is that right now we are getting a lot of our energy from coal. And China is building a coal-powered plant once a week. So what we have to do then is figure out how can we use coal without emitting greenhouse gases and carbon. And how can we sequester that carbon and capture it. If we can’t, then we’re gonna still be working on alternatives."

Shows clearly that Obama meant only plants not using clean-coal technology would be hit.

And that is also McCain's position.

On June 21, 2005, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told McCain in a Senate debate that his legislation to curb climate change would "put coal of out of business." McCain didn't contest that claim. Indeed McCain agreed that his legislation would "require sacrifice" acknowledging that critics said it would cost "thousands of jobs."

But you won't be hearing that from Newsbusters, Drudge, Malkin, Fox News, Palin or any of the many others who climbed on this "November Surprise" bandwagon.

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Iraq Demands Troop Agreement Answers

By Cernig

The Iraqi government isn't going to allow the Bush administration to run out the clock on status of forces agreements or to punt the decision to the next administration.

Iraq expects a reply from the United States within days to its proposal for changes to a pact requiring U.S. troops to leave by the end of 2011, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Saturday.

"We expect by Tuesday or Wednesday next week to receive answers from the American side about the suggestions of amendments proposed by the Iraqi cabinet," Zebari told U.S.-funded al-Hurra Arabic language television.

"We are talking about a small space of time. It is not open ended, and every side is coming nearer to the moment of truth."

... Iraqi officials have said their proposed amendments would tighten the language demanding a pullout in three years, clarify circumstances under which U.S. troops could be tried in Iraqi courts, and ban U.S. attacks on Iraq's neighbors from its soil.

That last condition is clearly aimed at reducing tensions in both Syria and Iran. But senior Bush administration offcials have already said they're likley to refuse to consider the Iraqi's proposed amendments and have been ratcheting up the political blackmail as they try to force the Iraqi hand.

If the pact should fail, Baghdad has said it will seek an extension to the U.N. mandate. Washington has said that if the mandate expires without a deal it will halt all operations, including services it provides Iraq such as air traffic control.

U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt said a failure in the pact negotiations could hurt Baghdad's efforts to attract investment now that the country was perceived as being safer.

"What business people are telling us is that they're watching that set of negotiations as they factor in the public policy component of their investment decision," Kimmitt said on the sidelines of a Baghdad investment conference.

An extension to the UN mandate is far from certain to pass the UNSC. Russia has apparently told Maliki that it won't veto such a move, but there's always the Chinese. This Iraqi move, however, will at least mean that the affair will play out on Bush's time and leave the problem obviously one that Bush owns, even if Obama ends up having to fix it.

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Israel Fears Rightwing Extremist Plot

By Cernig

Israeli intelligence says that it fears assassination attempts from rightwing extremists, designed to derail negotiations on peace in Palestine.

There has been a recent increase in violence by hardline Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and this week, Israel marks the 13th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli opponent of his negotiations.

"Just ahead of the anniversary of Rabin's murder, the Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders," Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said. "The Shin Bet is very concerned about this."

One has to wonder whether that's the kind of thing that far-right US extremists might yet emmulate, if Obama were to carry through on negotiations with Iran, Syria and the rest - or if those extremists were really as worried about Obama ushering in a "socialist" takeover as they say he is.

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Jonah Goldberg Nukes The Shark

By Cernig

I have to wonder what Jonah is smoking nowadays, and whether he really thinks his attempt at satire in issuing an "Obama 2012, Four Years Later" retrospective from the future his own addled brain is adding to the debate:

The first mistake many cite was actually made before Obama was even elected: the selection of Joseph Biden as his vice president. During the campaign, all eyes were on John McCain's running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But even then there were signs of the troubles to come (ironically, Biden's biggest "gaffe" - about Obama being tested early in his presidency - proved eerily prescient).

Still, nothing prepared the country for some of former Vice President Biden's comments while in office. Early on, when he told the Russian foreign minister he'd "rather punch a nun in the throat" than cooperate on an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration knew they had a problem on their hands.

The strange comments and behavior kept coming: at an international summit on child poverty, he accused the Dalai Lama of issuing a "brain fart," he phoned Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts at home and called him a "[re]tard in short pants," and of course the several stories - clearly leaked by aides to the president - of Mr. Biden sitting in the president's chair in the Oval Office and being more than reluctant to get out when asked to do so by the president.

The last straw was Biden's complaint, emphatically offered at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, that he would have more influence over foreign policy if he were black. His staff's effort to dismiss the incident as a joke - at the normally comedic event - fell short largely because Biden shouted "I am not joking!" two dozens times in speech that lasted less than 10 minutes. The fact that Biden had not been invited to speak at the dinner in the first place only added to the controversy.

I mean, c'mon Jonah - Joe Biden isn't Dick Cheney!

And did Jonah really want to open the can of worms and have people speculating what "McCain/Palin, Four Years later" might look like?

Update: The Heretik laments Jonah's lack of confidence in McCain's comeback hopes and writes: "Looking ahead to 2012 means you don’t have to look at the hard reality of 2008, chump."

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State Of Hawaii Confirms Obama's Birth Certificate

By Cernig

LOLZ!!!one!

Can we now all agree that all the conspiracy theorists who waxed at such length trying to push this non-starter are all just pathetic nutters?

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Electoral College Predictions All Favor Obama

By Cernig

We all know that it's the Electoral College that really counts - and the BBC notes that as of today the top predictors all call the College for Obama with a comfortable margin over the 270 needed for victory.

CQ Politics: Obama 311/McCain 160

Real Clear Politics: Obama 311/McCain 132

Pollster.com: Obama 311/McCain 142

New York Times: Obama 291/McCain 163

Crystal Ball: Obama 364/McCain 174

Perhaps most significantly, the pollsters see Mccain's grip on Electoral College votes in Arizona, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia weakening.

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Would McCain Negotiate With Syria? (What Joe Lieberman Told The Syrian Ambassador)

By Cernig

Check out this very interesting interview with the Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha at Foreign Policy magazine.

He says clearly that the US raid into Syria was a "criminal, terrorist act", that it was done for reasons of US politics, that it blind-sided State who he had been negotiating with...and that Joe Lieberman personally assured him that McCain will negotiate with Syria if he wins.

Foreign Policy: The United States claims its Sunday night raid was undertaken to stem the flow of militants into Iraq. Why do you think this raid happened?

Imad Moustapha: Do we know why? Of course not. The only analysis we have is that they are doing this for pure domestic political reasons that have everything to do with the elections and the electoral campaign. They want to come out with a story.

But we are still waiting for the U.S. administration to come out and tell the American people: “We killed [Abu Ghadiya], and here is the proof that we killed him.” We have presented our side of the story. We have published the photos of the eight people that were killed, their names, and what they were doing. This is our side of the story. Let the United States come with its side.

... Suddenly, after everybody has recognized that the situation has improved dramatically in Iraq, [the United States] comes and they attack a village in Syria. They coldbloodedly murder eight Syrian civilians, villagers who are totally defenseless, totally innocent. This is a terrorist, criminal act.

The implication here is that the Bush administration wanted to boost McCain's standing in the poills with a little shock and awe and, since Iraq just doesn't provide the requisite level of fearmongering any more and attacking Iran would be too big a can of worms to open, they decided to launch a raid into the weaker neighbour.

Ambassador Moustapha continues by pointing out that Syria has had tens of thousands of troops trying to interdict their border with Iraq - at American behest - for years now. (And despite reports to the contrary, seems to have no intention of reducing that presence now.) However the US with its considerably greater resources has done less than Syria has to stem the flow of smugglers and militants.

Why didn’t [the United States] stop [the insurgents] for five years? They are the most powerful, advanced nation in the whole world. Their military size is at least 500 times our military’s size. Their military hardware is zillions of times more advanced than ours. If we can stop them, the United States can do a 10,000-times better job than us.

Each border in the world has two sides. I would say to [U.S. officials]: “We are doing everything possible within our means to stop them. These are porous borders. These are our means and capabilities. Prior to your war on Iraq, we used to have a couple of hundred of soldiers across this border. Because of your invasion and occupation of Iraq, we increased the numbers to tens of thousands.”

...Syria is not a rich country. We were not supposed to build dormitories and posts there just to help the American invasion of Iraq. However, we had to do this for one simple reason: If the United States believed that there are insurgents crossing the border into Iraq, we will not give the United States a pretext to attack Syria.

Well, that plan didn't work for the Syrians. Why not? The ambassador, without naming names, points to Cheney and the neocons and in so doing lays out evidence that Rice and State were blindsided:

...only last month in New York in September, while we were attending the U.N. General Assembly meetings, [U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice out of the blue requested a meeting with our foreign minister. So we sat with her, and the meeting was pleasant. Two days later, this meeting was followed with an extensive, in-depth meeting with Assistant Secretary of State David Welch. Every issue was discussed, and in general the overwhelming tone of the meeting was very positive. He told us clearly that the United States was reevaluating its policies towards Syria. We thought, “Things [are] finally starting to move in the right direction.”

And suddenly, this [raid in eastern Syria] happens. I don’t believe the guys from the State Department were actually deceiving us. I believe they genuinely wanted to engage diplomatically and politically with Syria. We believe that other powers within the administration were upset with these meetings and they did this exactly to undermine the whole new atmosphere.

That would fit well with reports that General Petraeus wanted to go talk to Syria too, but was prevented from doing so by Cheney. The purpose of all this is twofold - to give McCain and Republicans a foreign policy talking point in the lead-up to Tuesday and to perhaps complicate Obama's first few months in office. Just how much of a complication that could be came today as, in reaction to the Syria raid, Iraq wants to remove any possibility that U.S. troops could remain after 2011 from a proposed security agreement now under negotiation. If the the SOFA talks stall and the UN security agreement expires at the end of the year, leaving US forces in a legal limbo, the Bush administration will have deliberately set up Obama for the "crisis" that Republicans have been claiming would come in the first six months of an Obama presidency.

Yet despite the McCain camp's echoing of the neocon/Cheney faction's "no appeasement" rhetoric on Syria, the ambassador charges that they're lying through their teeth in public, again for partisan base-boilstering purposes.

I have reason to believe that even if [Senator John] McCain becomes president of the United States, he will also be inclined to sit and talk with Syria. I can tell you this on the record: Senator Joe Lieberman, who is supposed to be very close to McCain, has said this explicitly and very clearly to me personally.

Then again, maybe Joe was just lying to the ambassador.

Congressman Kucinch "We Must Question the Timing. We are on the eve of national elections and we must be mindful of the Administration's past manipulation of security issues in order to influence public opinion."

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Dems 25 Times Better Than GOP For Stock Market Returns

By Cernig

Via BloggingStocks, Peter Siris of Guerrilla Capital has some figures:

Since 1929 both parties have controlled the White House for 40 years and Siris estimates that the $10,000 would be worth $11,733 under Republican administrations and $300,671 under Democratic ones. According to Siris, "for whatever reason, Republicans have been in office during the three worst stock market declines: The Great Depression, the early to mid-1970s, and the current market."

That may sound interesting but what about recent presidents? Under the Clinton administration, the S&P 500 rose the most in the last 60 years -- up an average of 17.4% per year. The only president who posted a negative performance is a familiar name -- George W. Bush -- under his administration, the S&P 500 has fallen 27% from 1,342 to 979.

Siris will run the figures as part of his column in the NY Post on Monday. So the Mccain camp and republican pundits have all weekend to get their spin ready. They'd better start now.

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Hot Air And Grasping At Straws

By Cernig

Briebart today ran an AFP article with the misleading headline "US election: If Iraqis could vote it would be for McCain". I say misleading because it mentions in its first few paras exactly three Iraqis who prefer McCain - and in its last paras mentions two who prefer Obama.That's hardly all or even a representative sample of all Iraqis. That hasn't stopped a couple of rightwing bloggers grasping at straws - including Ed Morrissey, who continues his downward spiral of judgement at Hot Air and who I don't think would ever have linked such thin gruel at Captain's Quarters. Ed can count, but he chose not to mention the small sample size to his click-shy readers.

FWIW, back in July, Reuters did much the same thing in reverse. They interviewed two dozen Iraqis and came to the conclusion that Iraqis liked Obama better than McCain because "a black man would understand their plight." (Something only one of the seven quotes they printed even mentioned.) Back then, an Obama story was the one the media wanted to tell, coming off his close-run and exhaustingly covered primary contest with Clinton they needed to make it seem like Obama vs McCain was a real step up, not down, in tension and expectations. Now, they need to do build McCain again to make for an interesting nailbiter of a finish.

What it comes down to is that the media want a close horse-race because that sells better than a romp-home landslide victory. The news networks have been worrying what they're going to do election night if it's all over by teatime so they've been very relieved that McCain has been telling them that there'll be an upset in a close race and everyone's going to be up late watching election coverage.

That explains, entirely, the media push to describe McCain as closing the gap - which every indicator except some hyped outlier polls says he isn't, he's just solidifying his base support. It explains ridiculous speculation like whether or not Osama bin Laden will endorse a candidate, and whether he or AQ in general will actually mean it if he does. McCain's meant to be stronger on foreign policy -especially Iraq and the "War on Terror", so they're hyping these stories.

There'll be more of this kind of nonsense as the last few days tick by, and the media frantically tries to spin the story as one they think they can sell more of. Remember, because of the collapse of Voter News Service, the networks will be relying solely on AP exit poll data for Elections 2008. That's Ron Fournier in charge of what the networks will report, in other words. So even after the voting is over, we're likely to see a last run of hype about a close-run race.

But don't panic - Obama's got this.

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Court Tells CIA It Can Keep Torture Evidence Secret

By Cernig

On Wednesday, the Washington D.C. Circuit Court gave the CIA permission to keep secret unredacted transcripts in which 14 prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture they endured in CIA custody - without even looking at the evidence itself. (h/t Kat)

"The Court, giving deference to the agency’s detailed, good-faith declaration, is disinclined to second-guess the agency in its area of expertise through in camera review," Lamberth wrote (.pdf), referring to a procedure where a judge looks at evidence in his chamber without showing it to the opposing side.

The ruling comes in a case where the ACLU filed a government sunshine suit to force the government to unredact allegations from statements from so-called High Value Detainees such as 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheihk Muhammed that the CIA kidnapped and tortured them.

The judge's decision not to look at the blacked-out text to see if secrets are involved allows the Bush Administration to continue to hide its use of torture techniques, according to Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

The CIA says that releasing the transcripts would harm national security - by revealing torturous interrogation techniques and which nations were complicit in facillitating those tortures. That's not how they phrase it, but that's what the double-speak actually means.

"Among the details that cannot be publicly released are the conditions of the detainees’ capture, the employment of alternative interrogation methods, and other operational details," the CIA's Wendy Hilton told the court in a sworn affidavit (.pdf). "Specifically, disclosure of such information is reasonably likely to degrade the CIA's  ability to effectively question terrorist detainees and elicit information necessary to protect the American people"

The CIA also successfully argued that it needed to redact statements about what countries were involved in the program, saying that such allegations could destroy relationships with countries that helped with the CIA's controversial program of secretly kidnapping suspected terrorists and shuttling them to hidden prisons in Europe and Asia, where neither families nor the Red Cross knew of their detention.

The ACLU's Ben Wizner put it plainly (H/t Rachel M):

"This decision allows the Bush administration to continue its illegal cover-up of its systemic torture polices. The government has suppressed these detainees' allegations of brutal torture not to protect any legitimate national security interests, but to protect itself from criticism and liability. It is unlawful for the government to withhold information on these grounds."

It continues to pain me that Democratic leaders refuse to talk seriously about criminal investigations of those who ordered and were involved in illegal rendition and torture. Irealise that the extreme Right would make the issue as divisive as they could. I realise there's a lot of work to be done to roll back the damage the Bush years have done to America. But these war crimes strike directly at the very concept of America and at America's standing in the world as well as at fundamental premises of the rule of law. To deliberately not investigate - and not prosecute where needed - would be itself a crime.

As for John McCain - he thinks that Gitmo is "one of the nicest places in the world" and that allowing detainees who were tortured, illegally detained and are often innocent of all crimes even by the Bush administration's own admission was "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country". What a maverick.

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Iraq Wants Ban On US Using Its Territory To Attack Neighbours

By Cernig

Iraq has produced four proposed amendments to the satus of forces agreement with the US - chief among them being a ban on the US using Iraqi territory to attack its neighbours. The Iraqis want to be able to declare the agreement null-and-void if the US breaks the amendment.

Obviously this is spurred by the US incursion into Syria over the weekend, for which the motives are still murky. But Iraq's friendships with both Syria and the more likely next target of such raids - Iran - is obviously uppermost in Iraqi lawmakers' minds. If the agreement was voided following a hostile act, Iraq could declare the US presence there illegal or even open hostilities after doing so.

The Iraqis also want a clear definition of "duty" when cases arise involving crimes committed off base, presumably so that the US cannot do a legal dance around a provision already in the agreement that US soldiers and contractors are subject to iraqi law when off base and off duty.

And, interestingly, Iraq also wants the right to inspect all U.S. military shipments entering or leaving Iraq. I can see why they'd want to know about those entering - it would give Iran a heads-up if the US suddenly srated pflying in penetrator bombs or tac-nukes, for instance. But I wonder what lies behind the wish to inspect cargos leaving. Illegal renditions, maybe?

The Bush administration, though, have already indicated that they consider negotiations closed and won't look at new amnendments. They're bluffing with a busted flush again, counting on the Iraqi elite wanting a US presence more than it wants and needs political approval from the Iraqi populace. If they're wrong, then January will see either a humiliating climbdown by Maliki - who swore he'd not ask for a renewal of the UN mandate - in advance of provincial elections, or it will see the US occupation of Iraq become as illegal under international law as the original invasion was.

McCain's Friend The War Criminal

By Cernig

Both John McCain and his senior foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann are long-time friends of Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili. McCain's decade-long friendship with the Georgian leader is among the closest McCain has with any foreign leader and began in 1995, when McCain directed a search for potential leaders in the former Soviet republics after communism's collapse. He has gone on holiday and jetskiied with him, spoke to him daily on the phone during Georgia's recent conflict with Russia and even sent his wife to Saakashvili's side to offer his support during that conflict. Scheunemann has worked closely with the Georgian leader, accepting his money to lobby on Georgia's behalf on the Hill even while working for the McCain campaign.

But the firebrand, neck-tie chewing, U.S.-educated lawyer has had his problems in the past, at odds with McCain's depictation of him as - in McCain's legendary judgement - a freedom-loving promoter of democracy. In 2007, Saakashvili's government crushed an opposition protest by beating unarmed protestors, shooting them with rubber bullets and fire hoses. They also shut down a TV station critical of the government.

Now though, there's an entirely different category of problem for Mccain's judgement - Saakashvilli has been accused by a BBC investigative reporting team of ordering war crimes and atrocities during Georgia's surprise attack on its breakaway province of South Ossetia, causing the UK government to re-evaluate its support for Saakashvili himself, if not for Georgia.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia's supporters in the West.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was "reckless".

He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi.

It seems to be the case that the Georgian actions were mirrored by tit-for-tat Russian crimes, true. But this is the second time in a few short years that Saakashvili has revealed himself as more of a despot than a democratic leader. The details are horrific.

Human Rights Watch believes the figure of 300-400 civilians is a "useful starting point".

That would represent more than 1% of the population of Tskhinvali - the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in London.

Allison Gill, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said: "We're very concerned at the use of indiscriminate force by the Georgian military in Tskhinvali.

"Tskhinvali is a densely populated city and as such military action needs to be very careful that it doesn't endanger civilians."

"We know that in the early stages there were tank attacks and Grad rockets used by Georgian forces," she added.

"Grad rockets cannot be used in densely populated areas because they cannot be precisely targeted, and as such they are inherently indiscriminate.

"Our researchers were on the ground in Tskhinvali as early as 12 August.

"And we gained evidence and witness testimony of Grad rocket attacks and tank attacks on apartment buildings, including tank attacks that shot at the basement level.

"And basements are typically areas where civilians will hide for their own protection.

Worse, the BBC team uncovered evidence that civilians had been deliberately targeted.

Marina Kochieva, a doctor at Tskhinvali's main hospital, says she herself was targeted by a Georgian tank as she and three relatives were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She says the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, forcing them to crash into a ditch.

The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground.

She showed the BBC the burnt-out wreckage of the car on the town's ring-road, riddled with bullet holes and with a much larger hole, apparently from a tank round, in the front passenger door.

Ms Kochieva says a nurse from her hospital was killed while fleeing Tskhinvali in similar circumstances.

She says she counted 18 burnt-out cars on the ring-road on 13 August, at the end of the war, suggesting there may have been more casualties.

..."The Georgians knew this was the 'Road of Life' for Ossetians. They were sitting here waiting to kill us," she said.

Saakashvili has, of course, denied the accusations. But the UK government is taking them seriously and is not at all happy, perhaps feeling it has been taken for a ride by Saakashvili's protestations of being the oppressed lover of freedom and justice.

David Miliband, who visited Georgia immediately after the war to show solidarity with its government, said he took the allegations of war crimes "extremely seriously" and had raised them "at the highest level" in Tbilisi.

Apparently hardening his language towards Georgia, he called its actions "reckless".

But he added: "The Russian response was reckless and wrong".

"It's important that the Russian narrative cannot start with Georgian actions; it has to start with the attacks on the Georgians from the South Ossetians and that is the tit-for-tat that got out of control," he said.

Even the democratic Georgian opposition says that Saakashvili deliberately provoked Russia's military intervention, possibly believing McCain and Scheunemann's friendship meant America would rush to his aid militarily. (They've asked that billions of dollars in aid be carefully monitored so that the Georgian leader and his associates don't use it to simply prop up their rule. In turn, Saakashvili accuses them of being Russian agents.)

That's not the way McCain sees it - in his debates with Obama he repeatedly claimed Russia was the aggressor. But while the Mccain campaign is hyping up any and all associations between Obama and Bill Ayers, there has been little said in America about McCain's extraordinary lapse of judgement in his far closer association with the Georgian leader - an association which is doubtless driven by McCain's long-term ties to rabidly anti-communist rightwing groups which have sponsored fascist despots, death squads, anti-semites and atrocities aplenty.

John Who?

By Cernig

Why does GOP.com hate John McCain (and, presumably, America)?

Could it have something to do with the war between McCain's original realist supporters (belatedly coming to their senses about the disasterously bad decision Kristol and the Corner strongarmed McCain into) and the Palinites who make up the rump of the party that nominated him? As one Republican apparatchik said the other day "if your against Palin, you're dead to the party".

A Leak Of A Leak, Or Just Made Up?

By Cernig

This story in Israel's Haaretz newspaper is getting a lot of notice from conservative hawks.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is very critical of U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama's positions on Iran, according to reports that have reached Israel's government.

Sarkozy has made his criticisms only in closed forums in France. But according to a senior Israeli government source, the reports reaching Israel indicate that Sarkozy views the Democratic candidate's stance on Iran as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content."

Sarkozy has certainly been fairly hawkish on Iran - more so than he has been bout any other nation, in fact. But this story isn't even a leak coming out of the French cabinet, its based entirely on what an anonymous "senior Israeli government source" says - an Israeli leak. So it's actually a leak of a leak - or a leak of Israeli espionage - if not made up out of whole cloth.

I say that latter because Israeli hardliner policy is to keep the pressure on Iran by continually releasing or placing stories designed to make it feel isolated and under threat, in the hope that will convince Iran's leaders to give up trying to break Israel's nuclear monopoly in the region. Pretty much every lurid or hyped story which takes a very hawkish line on Iran, or that threatens an attack on Iran, is coming from Israeli "officially unofficial" sources right now - even if it's actually being printed in UK conservative papers or some part of Murdoch's far-flung. empire.

So, to be honest, I don't believe a word of it, except for "according to a senior Israeli government source", unless and until there's some independent confirmation coming directly out of the French government in some manner.

P.S. And if you see a complicit connection between this and GOP mailers that say Obama is "no friend of Israel" or Joe the Plumber's campaigning on behalf of the McCain campaign and his hyperbolic claims that Obama's election would mean "the death of Israel" - well, so do I. Birds of a hardline feather flock together.

Update: Oh look, Sarkozy calls the leak of a fairytale "groundless".

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Agree To Talk To Taliban

By Cernig

As the U.S. plans to escalate its military component in the region, Pakistan and Afghanistan are moving to defuse the reasons for fighting as a high-level meeting of delegates from the two countries agreed to open the doors to reconcilliation talks with the Taliban.

Former Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said both countries would talk only with those militants who "accept the constitutions of both nations," but did not explicitly say they must first disarm.

Another delegate to the two-day talks between political and tribal leaders in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad said that the offer was not open to al-Qaida members blamed for some of the worst violence in both countries.

"We agreed that contacts should be established with the opposition," said Abdullah, the head of the Afghan delegation.

"Those who are willing to take this opportunity and come forward, the door is open," he said.

Neither Pakistani-based nor Afghan-based Taliban spokesmen were immediately available for comment.

He said the meeting, or "jirga," had formed committees to seek contacts with "all parties in this conflict." They would then report back to a meeting in two months with their findings, he said.

Eventually, you have to talk to the terrorists you believe you can convert into non-terrorists. If that wasn't the case, the entire state of Israel, for example, wouldn't exist.

But you can bet that one of the conditions any Taliban offer to lay down its weapons will include is a withdrawal of Coalition forces from the region. The Afghan government knows that, and knows that the Taliban is still largely controlled and supplied by the Pakistani military and ISI intelligence agency. It seems that Afghanistan has decided to swap its independence for peace and become a Pakistani satellite - which was always the long-term aim of Pakistani foreign policy and use of the Taliban as proxies in Afghanistan. That's understandable but it may be as well for the US, India and others to start getting used to the new reality in the region.

Into The Future, With Blinkers On

By Cernig

Over at The New Atlanticist, Senior Advisor to the Atlantic Council Robert Manning notes that a new world order is being forged, with Americans largely oblivious to what's going on.

Don’t look now, but much about last week’s Asia-Europe Summit (ASEM) – from its remedies for the financial meltdown to its obscurity in the U.S. – spoke volumes about emerging multipolarity and the historic shift in global power.  Was America watching?

The milieu in Beijing, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy schmoozing with China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jibao, suggests that when President George Bush hosts what will be the first of several summits aimed at shaping new rules to govern global finance, he will hardly be the center of attention.

It may have been coincidence that the annual Asia-Europe gathering occurred smack in the middle of the worst financial crisis since 1929. But the symbolism was hard to miss. An Asia Rising holds the majority of global foreign reserves, over $4 trillion in foreign currency; Europe for all its flaws and lack of dynamism still boasts an economy as large as the U.S.  Yet most in the U.S. were largely oblivious, with coverage even on cable news networks nearly non-existent, and relegated to the back pages of the business section of the New York Times.

...What does all this mean for the U.S. as a global actor?  Well for starters, the stock of those clinging to the myth of a unipolar world makes the current Dow look robust. It was never quite true even in the one dimension where the U.S. is and will remain for some time indisputably overwhelmingly dominant: military power.

But a nation’s power, as the Chinese like to say, is a question of Comprehensive National Strength, with military capability one important indicator. In the real world, a nation’s usable power will differ, depending on the nature of the particular issue. In the world now taking shape, the most sensible operative model for U.S. foreign policy will in general terms shift from Single Superpower to Primus Inter Pares, first among equals.

Now, as a European living in America I'm undoubtably biased, but what Manning is pointing to seems to me to be a manifestation of American Exceptionalism, one so comprehensively pushed for so long that even self-confessed lefties who would like to see America's status as single and biggest bully on the block trimmed fall prey to it. Americans have been told for so long that America's status and power means that it doesn't have to care about the opinions of those beyond its shores unless it wants to that - surprise, surprise - Americans have stopped caring about what goes on beyond their own shores unless Americans are doing it. I've noticed this in my contributions to Crooks and Liars, where I mostly post foreign policy and foreign affairs pieces. With the exception of hot-button issues having an impact on domestic politics such as Iraq and, lately, Afghanistan, foreign affairs posts get about a third of the comments that domestic affairs posts do. And it's not just my posts - anyone writing such posts gets the same lackluster response. Quite often, several of the comments will be along the lines of "Who cares? Get back to the domestic scandal de jour."

(That lack of interest seems to be pretty pervasive on other sites too. The very best progressive or bi-partisan foreign policy analysis sites and blogs get a fraction of the readers that sites devoted to more domestic issues do. Of course, rightwing sites have the same ostrich attitude in spades, with the twist that they want America to continue doing it to foreigners as if it were still a sole superpower and are simply snearingly dismissive of any hint that such simply isn't possible any more.)

Sure, people are naturally more interested in what's close to home. But in today's world what's going on 'over there" is close to home. America's fall from sole superpower will effect every single American's life in immediate ways, from their bank account to their job to their sons and brothers fighting in foreign realms. I wrote once that American foreign policy consists of inflicting domestic policy on foreigners. In the new multi-polar world that's going to have to change some, but there's scant sign on either Right or Left that the bulk of Americans are ready to admit it in their hearts, rather than their heads.

US Forces Plan To "Step Aside" From Any Iraqi Civil War

By Cernig

And it's 1..2...3..what are we not fighting for?

Via Kevin Drum comes a piece in the NYT looking at the powderkeg of factional tensions in Mosul.

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is squeezing out Kurdish units of the Iraqi Army from Mosul, sending the national police and army from Baghdad and trying to forge alliances with Sunni Arab hard-liners in the province, who have deep-seated feuds with the Kurdistan Regional Government led by Massoud Barzani.

....“It’s the perfect storm against the old festering background,” warned Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, who oversees Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces and the Kurdish region. Worry is so high that the American military has already settled on a policy that may set a precedent, as the United States slowly withdraws to allow Iraqis to settle their own problems. If the Kurds and Iraqi government forces fight, the American military will “step aside,” General Thomas said, rather than “have United States servicemen get killed trying to play peacemaker.”

As one of Drum's commenters notes:

As I recall it, the program was: (1) increase troop levels (2) to reduce the violence to make space for (3) political reconciliation that will provide the foundation for (4) a reduction in violence not dependent on American troops (5) that will enable us to gradually withdraw without having to worry about whether Iraq will blow up again.

We never got past step 2. Now the reckoning.

That reckoning will involve violence, in more than one place and between more than just two factions, in the lead up to Iraq's provincial elections. The only real question is: how bad will it get? I totally understand Brig. Gen Thomas' wish not to have his people die policing a civil war six years into the U.S. occupation but doesn't this blow wide open the conservative talking point, so beloved of both Bush and McCain, that US troops have to stay in Iraq to help prevent such violence? Why are we still there?

Of course, if there's no new status of forces deal by January Thomas' plans become moot, since it's likely US forces would be confined to base anyway. In fact, they're using the threat of exactly that to try to strongarm Iraqi into accepting an agreement it isn't happy with. McClatchy reports:

The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq’s economy, educational sector and other areas _ "everything" _ said Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s Sunni Muslim vice president. "I didn’t know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services."

Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed “tens” of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.

But if the US military is planning to stay out of any faction fights anyway, just how much of a threat is that?

Confused Official Unofficial Leaks On Syria Raid

By Cernig

The usual anonymous suspects continue to be unable to get their anonymous stories straight on what happened in Syria at the weekend. This from Fox News:

Abu Ghadiyain, the target of Sunday's Special Operations raid in Sukkariyeh --about 4-5 miles away from Syria's border with Iraq, was at one point in the custody of U.S. forces, the official said. However, another U.S. official from a separate agency said Monday that latest intelligence shows Ghadiyain was killed.

Meanwhile, the official Bush administration line is "no comment" - leaving the field clear for these unofficial officials to spin as they wish. You'd think that if they actually did know the Special Forces folks had captured or killed an important AQI middleman, the supposed Commander In Chief might know about it and the Republican Party would be making hay with it at a time when their electoral prospects are as dismal as...well, the life of a rural farmer on the Syrian border when US Special Forces come calling by mistake.

But hang on a mo' - haven't we seen this particular melodrama before? Back when Israel struck the Box on the Euphrates in September 2007, there was no official confirmation for months, giving plenty of time for neocon "sources" to create all kinds of fairy stories for the world's press. Then, once they had their powerpoints and photoshops right, the powers that be announced it was a nuclear reactor and an imminent threat to world peace. (Thing is, I have my unofficial sources too - and more than one nuke expert has told me off the record that the presentation was better fabricated than the "reactor" was.)

If the administration even knows who it's commandos hit, and that it wasn't a bunch of poor construction workers, then let it say so clearly and present what evidence it has instead of sending out officials to speak anonymously and to contradict each other. Otherwise, Occam's Razor demands that the most plausible explanation is the Syrian one - that mistaken intelligence led to the massace of innocent civilians just as it has so many times before in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Update: I said there's be all kinds of lurid speculation based on less than spectacular sources. Here we go - from Murdoch's Sky News in the UK.

Publicly America is still saying nothing but US officials are making intriguing claims off the record.

Now, a respected Israeli intelligence expert says he has been told the operation was carried out with the knowledge and co-operation of Syrian intelligence.

Ronen Bergman, author of The Secret War with Iran, makes the claim in the Yediot Ahronoth newspaper, based on briefings with two senior American officials, one of whom he says until recently "held a very high ranking in the Pentagon".

...He claims the Syrian government told the Americans: "If you want to do this, do it. We are going to give you a corridor and carte blanche. We will not harm your troops."

Hang on - how would two "senior officials" - one of whom isn't at the Pentagon any more - know this for a fact, rather than just be speculating? And even if they did, why would they be blowing tacit Syrian co-operation (and the intel coup that would represent) wide open by revealing the fact to an Israeli journalist who works for a tabloid newspaper described as emphasizing "drama and human interest over sophisticated analysis"?

If We Can't Have Gun Control...

...can we at least have better gun-nut control?

By Cernig

This from J.S. O'Brien at Scholars & Rogues:

Yesterday, an idiot father and and even more brain-dead “instructor” allowed an eight-year-old boy to fire a fully automatic Uzi submachine gun at an event billed as, “all legal and and fun! — No permits or licenses required!!!” Naturally, the gun kicked up, as it is designed to do, flipping toward the child who managed to shoot himself in the head with it.  Since kids’ heads aren’t all that heavily armored, we now have a little boy who will never see his ninth birthday.

So, little Christopher Bizilj is dead, dead, dead.  His father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, director of emergency medicine (if you can believe it) at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, got to watch his son bleed out from a head wound on the floor.  And the people who put this little event together have to look at themselves in their mirrors and ask themselves the simple question, “What the FUCK made me think it was a good idea to put a submachine gun in a child’s hands?”

Words fail.

McCain, Short On Black Volunteers, Hires Obama Supporters

By Cernig

Classic.

Two women walk out of John McCain’s Mid-West headquarters carrying a pile of voter canvassing sheets, one sports a baseball hat declaring her a “team leader” of the Republican campaign. And both are black — an unusual sight in an election where Barack Obama’s support among African Americans is almost monolithic.

Are they volunteers? They look at each other sheepishly. “Not exactly,” replies one. “We work for an employment agency,” says the other. Who are they voting for? “I don’t want to say,” says the first woman. “Obama — of course!” whispers the braver of the pair.

They laugh, then look over their shoulders at the office behind them. “Don’t give him your name, he’ll put it in the paper,” says the cautious one, explaining that they cannot afford to lose their $10-an-hour (£6) jobs. “This is embarrassing. We’re doing this because we have to live. At least none of our friends can see us. We’re from Chicago — like Obama.”

Republicans have had to hire mercenaries for this ground war. And, if the experience outside the McCain headquarters was any guide, they may not all be shooting in the same direction.

Got to have those tokens as a smokescreen to distance Johnny and the Neocons from zealots like this (h/t C&L):

Federal agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree, the ATF said Monday.

In court records unsealed Monday, federal agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target a predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads. Agents said the skinheads did not identify the school by name.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Obama as its final target, Cavanaugh told The Associated Press.

"They said that would be their last, final act - that they would attempt to kill Sen. Obama," Cavanaugh said. "They didn't believe they would be able to do it, but that they would get killed trying."

Yet the GOP crawls ever closer to being a party only for dangerous rightwing extremists. Now, conservative critics are being told by one wing of the GOP that if they're against Palin, they are dead to the Republican party and by another that Mitt Romney, not Palin, is the heir-apparent. Jason Linkins writes:

the GOP is set splinter into a trio of factions: the Palin-philes, the Romney remainders, and those excommunicated from the movement for daring to make a lick of sense at one point.

Ted Stevens Guilty On All Charges

By Cernig

The end came faster than I thought it would.

Stevens, 84, was found guilty on all seven counts of lying on Senate disclosure forms to hide more than $250,000 in home renovations and other gifts from the head of Alaska oil services company VECO Corp.

Stevens, who had maintained his innocence, declined to comment when he left the courthouse.

He faces up to five years in prison on each of the seven counts, but under federal sentencing guidelines he would likely receive much less prison time or just get probation.

Do you think he has the nerve to keep fighting for re-election?

And what does this say about the judgement and morals of folk like Sarah Palin and Colin Powell, one of whom was a close ally and the other a staunch defender of Stevens?

The Purpose Of Rightwing Outrage

By Cernig

Today's rightwing outrage, "Obama the redistributionist", is explained and debunked by Andrew Sullivan and Maha. The McCain campaign's attack is such thin gruel that even Oliver wouldn't go back for more.

Sully asks if this is the best McCain has left in the last days of the election campaigns. I think he's missing the target audience. McCain has entirely stopped trying to convince the electorate to vote Republican. He and the entire GOP are now far more worried about keeping their base intact, staving off the worst of the coming civil war of recriminations. To that end, dog-whistles about terrorists, socialists and other ne'er-do-wells serve a useful purpose, giving Republicans a buffet of ready-made excuses to choose from and get angry about - instead of getting angry with the Party apparatchiks who have presided over the collapse of their Big Tent.

P.S. And isn't it ironic that the man who could lead the GOP out of the wilderness and back into a position of contention is an apostate heretic according to the idolaters, Golden Moose worshippers and Mammonites of the far Right?

Military Defense Lawyer, Client, Boycott Gitmo Trial

By Cernig

The Gitmo trails are beginning to assume the appearance of an Oscar Wilde farce.

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, facing a possible life sentence, sat mutely at the defense table. His lawyer announced the prisoner was boycotting the trial because he did not want a military attorney and because the judge had denied his repeated requests to represent himself.

The appointed defense attorney, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, asked to be relieved in deference to his client's wishes, but the judge refused. Frakt then said he could not participate either.

"I will be joining Mr. Al-Bahlul's boycott, sitting silently at the table," said Frakt, who then refused to respond to several questions from the judge.

The judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, said Frakt was obligated to participate and that both the lawyer and defendant, despite their wishes, would be required to attend the hearings — even if they stay silent.

"The commission will not proceed with an empty defense table," Gregory said.

This is only the second tribunal to actually convene, out of around 80 trials of detainees expected (from 255 still held). What's it going to be like by the time the 20th, 40th rolls around? And what about the other 170+ detainees?

It's quite clear the process is deeply flawed - so flawed that in a real court some very bad people would walk free because their trials are contaminated by tortured evidence and official interference in due process that, in truth, are just as much war crimes as the offenses detainees are accused of. Despite the howlings of the rabid Right, though, that's the way the civilization cookie should crumble. If they wanted it otherwise, the Bush administration's actions were entirely the wrong way to go about it.

Amy Goodman talks to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights about Gitmo

Little Regard For International Boundaries

By Cernig

Syria has released footage it says is of U.S. helicopters on their way to an attack inside Syrian on Sunday.

The post headline is taken from NBC's Richard Engel in Baghdad, describing special forces crossing the border into Syria on Sunday, the first time U.S. forces have invaded Syrian territory in all these years occupying Iraq. The U.S. military, in an officially unofficial leak to the AP, are claiming hot pursuit of Al Qaeda fighters out of Iraq and have said little else about it other than that the U.S. is "taking matters into its own hands". Syrian eyewitnesses are claiming that US forces shot and killed seven men and a woman, perhaps even abducting two, while the Syrian government are taking it a step further and alleging children died too. So far, though, the only funerals that have been held were for the seven dead men, which locals and the Syrian authorities say were simply construction workers (and which Fox News' Mike Tobin, pulling faux facts unsupported by evidence or even official U.S. statements out of his ass, says were known Al Qaeda operatives).

What is certain among the conflicting reports is that U.S. forces have now ignored international laws and trespassed on sovereign territory in Pakistan and Syria in pursuit of dodgy intelligence, in both cases with reasonably credible reports of civilians wrongly slain. Technically, these are acts of war and only U.S. military might prevents them becoming so. We know that Bush has ordered that he must personally approve any incursion into Pakistan, and it seems that he must have done so for this Syrian trespass too, one that is unique in all the time that the U.S. has occupied neighbouring Iraq.

So why? Why now? Well:

Joshua Landis, an American expert on Syria, commented last night: "The Bush administration must assume that an Obama victory will force Syria to behave nicely in order to win favour with the new administration. Thus White House analysts may assume that it can have a "freebee" - taking a bit of personal revenge on Syria without the US paying a price."

There's also the possibility that this is partly just another attempt at boosting flagging Republican support, since there's only one hot-head Bush ally running for president who is likely to approve of creating an international incident at such a late stage of the Iraqi occupation. But it's a move that is likely to backfire badly in the region. Arab states, including Iraq, will be angered by this mini-invasion and will point to a continued U.S. prssence in Iraq as destabilizing. Iran will, of course, back its Syrian ally. And even Israel won't be happy. As BJ noted, Israel's been progressing quite well with negotiations involving Syria on Lebanese peace and this incursion will work to derail those negotiations simply because of guilt by association. Israel also has an election coming up, and a mood of belligerence and instability can only help the hardliners, allies of the neocons who largely steer Bush and McCain's policy thinking on the region.

It helps the White House, if it is simply after a "freebie", that all of these incursions are being carried out by U.S. Special Operations forces, which have their own independent command structure (and an independent budget) headquartered in the U.S. - allowing Proconsul Petreaus and his subordinates to have some plausible denial of culpability when talking to local officials. But it's hardly likely to help long-term strategic planning. Still, the Bush administration now wants to send thousands more of these troops to Afghanistan, a move that Senator Russ Feingold has said will "only perpetuate a counterproductive game of cat and mouse that has has led to a steep erosion in Afghans' support for foreign forces."

These raids are arguably illegal war crimes by international law, destabilizing in and of themselves, counterproductive in the long term, but unlikely to lead to war with either Pakistan or Syria on their own. However it's worth thinking about something - Iran appears to be the only possible target nation for such raids that's been left out so far. If the Bush administration decide to attempt a "freebie" there, it's far more doubtful that the blowback will be so containable.

Update: Iran expert Kaveh L Afrasiabi writes at the Asia Times that Iran is spooked. (H/T Russ at Scholars and Rogues)

"The chances are that the US incursion into Syria is a dress rehearsal for action against Iran and the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards [Corps], just as they often portray Israel's aerial attack on Syrian territory last year as a prelude for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities," said the Tehran political scientist, adding that since the US had already branded Iran's Guards as terrorists, it had the necessary rationale to do so.

In the event the US indulges in such a gambit, the issue becomes whether it will be a one-shot single incursion or a series of raids and, more important, what will happen should Iran fight back and respond in kind, within Iraq's territory.

There are serious scenarios for major escalation nested in every micro action and US policymakers would be remiss to focus on their own action without taking into consideration the likely chain reaction that could lead to a regional flare-up.

(Many thanks to Heather from the C&L team for video links)

The Wild West (Coast Of Africa)

(Or, Blackwater vs Blackbeards of the Somali Main)

By Cernig

Mercenaries Security contractors think they may have found their next nice little earner. As an adjunct to thei Iraqi swashbuckling they're going to try some more of the same off the Horn of Africa.

Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms — some with a reputation for being quick on the trigger in Iraq — are joining the battle against pirates plaguing one of the world's most important shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia. The growing interest among merchant fleets to hire their own firepower is encouraged by the U.S. Navy and represents a new and potential lucrative market for security firms scaling back operations in Iraq.

Blackwater and others are in negotiation with shipping firms to put armed guards on vessels sailing past Somalia, and Blackwater already has a ship with response squads and helicopters in the region. But, given the heavy-handed (even bloodthirsty) actions of some security contractors in Iraq, not everyone's as gleeful as the US Navy is about the development.

Cyrus Mody, the manager of the International Maritime Bureau, says private security personnel can offer useful advice to ship captains, but he worries not all companies have clear rules of engagement or have sought legal advice about the consequences of opening fire.

... Mody says armed guards onboard ships may encourage pirates to use their weapons or spark an arms race between predators and prey. Currently, pirates often fire indiscriminately during an attack but don't aim to kill or injure crew. The pirates usually use assault rifles but have rocket-propelled grenades; some reports also say they have mini-cannon.

"If someone onboard a ship pulls a gun, will the other side pull a grenade?" Mody asked.

British contractors stress the importance of intelligence and surveillance, a safe room for the crew to retreat to if the ship is boarded, and the range of non-lethal deterrence measures available.

"The standard approach is for (pirates) to come in with all guns blazing at the bridge because when a boat is stopped it's easier to board," said David Johnson, director of British security firm Eos. "But if you have guns onboard, you are going to escalate the situation. We don't want to turn that part of the world into the Wild West."

Some would say it already has - but only one victim has been shot out of 63 hijackings this year. That could soon change.

Instahoglets October 26th 08

By Cernig

It's been a while since I did one of these, but with the elections dominating the news cycle there's some interesting foreign affairs "news less travelled" getting next to no notice right now.

- AIG, even after it had taken a bailout deal that left it 80% taxpayer owned, was still actively lobbying. The millions of your money it has spent influencing your representatives included a big chunk in favor of the US/India nuclear deal. Say whaaa?

- The Pentagon are preparing for a period of increased danger as various undesireables might decide - as they did during Brown's transition in the UK - that a new guy in charge is a good time for an attack. They don't think it matters whether the new guy is McCain or Obama, though, proving they're saner than the average Cornerite.

- Syria is claiming US helicopters attacked a village just inside its border with Iraq, killing 9 civilians and wounding 14, in a possible sign that cross-border strikes based on crappy intel aren't just for Afghanistan. If true, it's technically an act of war unless the US military claim "hot pursuit" of militants, which might be difficult to do if no militants were there. One worth watching.

- Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, there are reports that US aircraft mistakenly bombed and killed 20 private security contractors guarding a road construction project which came under attack by the Taliban. Airstrikes account for the vast majority of coalition-caused deaths in Afghanistan, and are vying with the Taliban to be the major killer of Afghanistan civilians. Its a tactic that has alienated the populace, handed propaganda victory after victory to the militants and weakened the Karzai government, but the military keep doing it.

- Newsweek says that Iran's nuclear facillities are too deeply buried for Israel to harm with conventional weapons even if it wanted to - which always leaves nukes. Meanwhile Obama's nuclear-weapons expert is suggesting getting rid of all nukes but in the meantime adopting a posture "limiting the purpose of nuclear weapons to preventing their use by others". If that sounds like a First Strike Doctrine to you - well, it does to me too.

- Georgia is still bubbling. "The leader of Georgia's pro-Russian breakaway Abkhazia region has ordered Abkhazian military forces to retaliate against what he calls all "provocations" from the Georgian side." And: "Georgia says Russia has deployed 2,000 additional troops in the pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia, a move Russia denies."

Update: The US has confirmed the raid into Syria in an "official leak".

A U.S. military official said the raid by special forces targeted the network of al-Qaida-linked foreign fighters moving through Syria into Iraq. The Americans have been unable to shut the network down in the area because Syria was out of the military's reach.

"We are taking matters into our own hands," the official told The Associated Press in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of cross-border raids.

The attack came just days after the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

A Syrian government statement said the helicopters attacked the Sukkariyeh Farm near the town of Abu Kamal, five miles inside the Syrian border. Four helicopters attacked a civilian building under construction shortly before sundown and fired on workers inside, the statement said.

The government said civilians were among the dead, including four children.

If the Syrians choose to make it so, America has a new war. It's unlikely that they will, for one since the U.S. is calling it hot pursuit even as the Syrians say only civilians died. It's still an escalation in the region, though, the first such cross-border raid into Syria in all this time.

The Amazing Mr Swift

By Cernig

Jon Swift is a genius. Not the old dead-tree satirist (well, him too) but the new-media e-Swift, the deftest hand with a poison keypad I've ever read.

Just go read his latest on the many paranoid ramblings of the Right. Here's a teaser:

What would an election be without a sex scandal?...Once again the conservative blogosphere’s most respected blogger Ace of Spades led the way. “Having now spoken to someone tracking the story, I can say: 1) It's not just a silly little rumor. 2) It will break in some form shortly,” he wrote. Ace even noticed that Obama had vacationed in the Caribbean, noting his source “hadn't even made that connection.”That’s just how Ace’s mind works, making connections that don’t even occur to peddlers of sleazy gossip.

George Packer is just one of those who has noticed Mr. Swift's abilities. One day, I'll be saying I knew him when he was an obscure psuedonymed blogger, instead of a pseudonymed A-list satirist.

Sarah Palin A 'Rogue' And 'Diva' - McCain Aides

By Cernig

The circular firing squad continues over at the Mccain-Palin campaign. CNN reports:

Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin “going rogue” recently, while a Palin associate says she is simply trying to “bust free” of what she believes was a mishandled roll-out that damaged her.

McCain sources point to several incidents where Palin has gone off message, and privately wonder if they were deliberate. For example: labeling robo calls “irritating,” even as the campaign was defending the use of them and telling reporters she disagreed with the campaigns controversial decision to pull out of Michigan.

A second McCain source tells CNN she appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.

“She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone,” said this McCain adviser, “she does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else. Also she is playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party. Remember: divas trust only unto themselves as they see themselves as the beginning and end of all wisdom.”

It's dog eat pitbull and pass the popcorn!

The Shape Of A Cabinet

By Cernig

The NYT today has a speculative piece on how each candidate might build their White House team. Most commentary on the article so far has focussed on a possible Obama cabinet - mainly because McCain's campaign just seems to be "going through the motions" at this stage. It quotes anonymous advisers (aren't they always?):

Obama advisers mention Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, as a possible White House chief of staff, and Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury secretary. To demonstrate bipartisanship, advisers said Mr. Obama might ask two members of President Bush’s cabinet to stay, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

...Mr. Obama has several possibilities for White House chief of staff, most notably Mr. Daschle, his close adviser, although that could be complicated because Mr. Daschle’s wife is a lobbyist. Other possibilities mentioned by Democrats include Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, former Commerce Secretary William M. Daley and Mr. Obama’s Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse. Mr. Podesta, who held the job under President Bill Clinton, could also be recruited for another tour of duty.

Besides Mr. Gates, some Obama advisers favor keeping Dr. James B. Peake, the veterans affairs secretary. But Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has made clear to colleagues that he has no desire to stay on no matter who wins, and neither nominee is inclined to ask him, associates say. Instead, Obama advisers are weighing a short-term appointment of an elder statesman to get through the current crisis and help instill confidence in global markets. The names being mentioned include the former Federal Reserve chief Paul A. Volcker and former Treasury Secretaries Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers.

Matt Y is sure it'll be a fresher face at the Treasury, though, and Booman is sure he doesn't want gates to continue as SecDef even though he thinks he's done a creditable job as one of the very few adults in the Bush administration. I'm not going to argue with either of them.

Looking at a possible McCain administration, there's a couple of names that jump out as "not just no, but F**k No!"

Many Republicans believe Mr. McCain would bring his top campaign staff with him to the White House, including Rick Davis, the campaign manager, whose history as a lobbyist has come up repeatedly during the election. Others who would most likely accompany Mr. McCain to the White House include Mark Salter, his adviser and alter ego; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, his economics adviser; and Randy Scheunemann, his national security adviser.

I've no real objection to Holtz-Eakin, although he's a campaign shill who is holding a book until after the election that, no matter what his boss might say on the stump, admits the next administration is going to have to raise taxes if it wants the books to be anywhere near balanced.

But Rick Davis - friend to Russian oligarchs and Italian fraudsters - would probably get tapped as McCain's chief of staff, which would in short order explode the myth of the maverick reformer, bane of K Street, and should give even conservatives collywobbles. And Scheunemann as NSA? My mind positively reels over the many conflicts this war-boosting, lobbying neocon could embroil America in.

It's just as well that the McCain campaign are treating transition as a purely intellectual exercise and that the wider conservative base are settling down to four years of Clenis-esque innuendo, argument from assumption, and downright paranoid mythmaking to excuse their own abject failure in being a viable alternative for government.

Back in August 2007, Obama outlined his criteria for choosing a cabinet at a private rally.

Report: Maliki Won't Sign US Forces Deal

By Cernig

According to a senior Iraqi lawmaker, Maliki-ally Sheikh Jalal al Din al Sagheer, the deputy head of the Shiite Muslim Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, neither Maliki nor Iraq's parliament are ready to sign the status of forces agreement with the U.S. as it is currently written.

"The problem is that when we were given the latest draft, we were told the American negotiators will accept no amendments to it, and the Iraqi government has more requirements," said Sagheer, an Islamic cleric who later led the Friday prayers broadcast on national television.

He said that Maliki had come to the Political Council for National Security, a top decision-making body, and said the new accord was the best he could obtain, but it didn't include everything that Iraq wanted.

If Maliki signed the accord and turned it over to the parliament, "I'm sure that the agreement will not be approved for 10 years," Sagheer said.

The cleric said the draft accord was "good, in general," but its timing was bad. If an Iraqi negotiator accepted the agreement, "he will be taken as an agent for the Americans," and if he were to reject it, "he will be taken for an agent for Iran."

A second factor is that the accord comes just before the U.S. elections, and an Iraqi negotiator had to ask whether it was best to negotiate with the lame-duck Bush administration or wait for its successor. More important, Sagheer said, are the approaching provincial elections in Iraq, which could be held early next year.

"Iraqi politicians don't want to give their competitors the chance to use this agreement to destroy them," he said.

Sagheer also said that Maliki is thinking about asking for a six month extension of the UN mandate instead, after receiving assurances that Russia wouldn't veto any UNSC resolution to that effect. The trouble there is that Maliki has already promised he wouldn't ask for any extension and an extension of the mandate, with its far looser terms for U.S. operations, would be even more unpopular and even more of a club in the provincial elections than the status of forces agreement would be. Everyone expects there to be an uptick in violence for those elections, the question is just how big a one. Trying to re-impose the UN mandate would be certain to make that uptick a nastier one.

The other option, if nothing gets done, is to at the very least confine U.S. forces to their bases - and that's if the expiry of the mandate even leaves the U.S. the legal standing to do even that much.

Meanwhile, John "watch my judgement" McCain is still trying to spin the status of forces agreement as being exactly what the Bush administration and he himself were looking for - and his adviser Randy Scheunemann is hinting McCain would just ignore the wishes of the Iraqis and international law anyway.

Local McCain Staffer Pushed Hyped Version Of "B-Attack" Hoax

By Cernig

You might have noticed that we hadn't posted a thing on the Ashley Todd "B for Barrack Attack" hoax that has been burning up the internet since yesterday eve. That's because, in our opinion, it wasn't a story. If it were true then it was a story about a mugger who is also a dumb-ass. There's plenty of those out there. When Todd admitted that the whole tale was a hoax, it became a story about an attention-seeking brat who never grew up. There's plenty of those too.

If you cover one, you should cover as many as possible, but this is a politics blog not a local news blog. I don't intend to denigrate the experiences of those who have been assaulted or mugged, in the least. I've had friends it has happened to, it's an awful experience when it really happens to someone...and I didn't blog about those either. Those who did were mostly dealing in faux-outrage and hyperbole.

Now, though, it's real news. TPM has the story.

John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

...A source familiar with what happened yesterday confirmed that the unnamed spokesperson was communications director Peter Feldman...

This is problematic because the McCain campaign doesn't want to have been perceived as pushing an incendiary story that not only turned out to be a hoax but which police officials said today risked blowing up into a "national incident" and has local police preparing to file charges against the hoaxster.

Two different TV stations have removed paragraphs from their original web coverage of the story - paragraphs provided by the PA McCain campaign - as the story turned out to be not what that campaign hyped it to be.

Feldmen's actions, trying to pre-empt a police investigation with an anti-Obama narrative that tied McCain's opponent to a nasty assault, are shameful. He really must resign. And we also want to know whether McCain's local campaign staff prompted or pushed Ashley Todd in any way.

McCain Pal Gets 54 Months For Fraud

By Cernig

Raffaello Follieri, perhaps most famous for being Anne Hathaway's ex-boyfriend, has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison this Friday after being pleading guilty to one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering.

Raffaello Follieri, 30, pleaded guilty in September to fraudulently obtaining US$2.4 million by leading investors to believe he had Vatican connections that enabled him to buy the Roman Catholic Church's unwanted US properties at a discount.

..."I have dishonored my family name and embarrassed the church I love," Follieri told Judge John Koeltl in US District Court in Manhattan in a statement in Italian that was translated into English.

"I will never be able to wash away the stain. I hope that someday those hurt by my actions will forgive me," Follieri said before the judge handed down the sentence.

He'll be deported after serving his sentence.

Follieri had good connections to both McCain and Rick Davis, for whom he had promised to "deliver Catholic votes", and was the host of John McCain's 70th birthday party, celebrated onboard the yacht of another dodgy character - a Russian oligarch who pretty much owns the tiny state of Montenegro.

In mid-September The Nation's website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor. This was where the real party was. The owner of the Queen K was known as "Putin's oligarch": Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of the Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as the ninth-richest man in the world, with a rap sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro's economy by snapping up its aluminum plant, KAP--which accounts for up to 40 percent of the country's GDP and some 80 percent of its export earnings--in a nontransparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians and journalists. The Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought the plant "because Putin encouraged him to do it." The reason: "the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean."

Deripaska is himself involved in some political scandal right now - involving both a high level Labour Party cabinet minister, Lord Peter Mandelson who was one of Tony Blair's closest advisors and the current shadow chancellor, the Conservative Party's George Osborne. Both McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis have dubious ties to Deripaska too. Other McCain campaign advisers, lobbyists to a man, have their own shady connections.

John McCain keeps saying he's a reformer and a maverick with no time for the incestuous and often shady dealings of the K Street crowd - but his actions speak louder than his words.

McCain Surrogate -War With Iran Is Certain

By Cernig

Republican William Grayson, president of a San Francisco hedge fund company and former general counsel for the San Francisco Republican Central Committee - and "cleared by the McCain campaign to serve as a McCain surrogate":

"Let me assure you of this," Grayson said after the student presentation on foreign policy. "The next president, whether it is Senator Obama or John McCain, will go to war, and he will go to war with Iran.

"They are very busy developing nuclear weapons. They will use those nuclear weapons against Israel or any of its allies, and that is a war that we're going to fight," Grayson said.

This in a speech to students at Dominican University, CA.

His opposite number, Tony West, there as a representative of the Obama campaign said simply:

"I do not believe it is a foregone conclusion that this nation will go to war with anybody in the next four or eight years."

Well no, it isn't - at least not if McCain and his couterie of angry neocon nutters are kept out of the White House.

Palin Appeases Some Terrorists

By Cernig

There's a clearcut distinction for Sarah. Bill Ayers is a domestic terrorist. Abortion clinic firebombers and those who assassinate clinic doctors are her base. That makes them 'freedom fighters for unborn babies imprisoned in lefty-socialist wombs'.

Update: Dave Newiwert has a list for Palin - of the wingnut domestic terrorists she should be concerned about.

The Collapse Of The Republican Circus Tent

By Cernig

There's got to be more than a little schaudenfreude involved for Dems watching the G.O.P.'s meltdown as the worst-run Republican campaign in recent history gasps its way towards the finish line. The theocrat Family Research Council is accusing the NRCC of "abandoning social conservative candidates". McCain aides are already sending out resumes because they're already certain they won't be getting jobs in the next administration. Sarah Palin seems to be working for herself, rather than her running mate, even while the old wardog is still trying to guard her back from media spotlights.

E.J. Dionne calls it a conservative civil war - which is hardly the one the extreme Right have been looking forward to for so long. He writes:

For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against "liberal elitists" and "leftist intellectuals." Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.

The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity -- and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.

And then there is George W. Bush. Conservatives once hailed him as creating an enduring majority on behalf of their cause. Now, they cast him as the goat in their story of decline.

... Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush's apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the "real America" is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin's speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.

Conservatives came to believe that if they repeated phrases such as "Joe the Plumber" often enough, they could persuade working-class voters that policies tilted heavily in favor of the very privileged were actually designed with Joe in mind.

It isn't working anymore. No wonder conservatives are turning on each other so ferociously.

For years, the Right has had a big tent - full of bread and circuses for Joe Sixpack, Joe Biblebelt and not-so-poor Joe Plumber - while the Left has been herding cats in a fractured coalition that couldn't find anyone or anything worth coalescing around. Now the tabels are turned, bigtime. Schaudenfreude? Pass the popcorn!

Quote Of The Day

By Cernig

Quote of the day comes from a Guardian report on the falling fortunes of Crawford, Texas, now that Bush is the lamest of ducks.

“A man who cuts cedar in 100 degrees in the summertime in Texas - there's something wrong with his brain”  Keith Lynch, 70, 4th-generation Crawford rancher.

Amazingly, every Texas resident knows that - but still a majority of Texans voted for the rancher who doesn't own cattle.

Iraq Agreement Leaves Bush, McCain Policy In Tatters

By Cernig

By any stretch of the (sane) imagination, the agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, as currently written, is a humiliating debacle and crushing defeat for Bush policy and neocon dreams of permanent hegemony. As Gareth Porter points out:

The final draft, dated Oct. 13, not only imposes unambiguous deadlines for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011 but makes it extremely unlikely that a U.S. non-combat presence will be allowed to remain in Iraq for training and support purposes beyond the 2011 deadline for withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces.

Furthermore, Shiite opposition to the pact as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty makes the prospects for passage of even this agreement by the Iraqi parliament doubtful. Pro-government Shiite parties, the top Shiite clerical body in the country, and a powerful movement led by nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that recently mobilised hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in protest against the pact, are all calling for its defeat.

At an Iraqi cabinet meeting Tuesday, ministers raised objections to the final draft, and a government spokesman said that the agreement would not submit it to the parliament in its current form. But Secretary of Defence Robert Gates told three news agencies Tuesday that the door was "pretty far closed" on further negotiations.

In the absence of an agreement approved by the Iraqi parliament, U.S. troops in Iraq will probably be confined to their bases once the United Nations mandate expires Dec. 31.

The clearest sign of the dramatically reduced U.S. negotiating power in the final draft is the willingness of the United States to give up extraterritorial jurisdiction over U.S. contractors and their employees and over U.S. troops in the case of "major and intentional crimes" that occur outside bases and while off duty. The United States has never allowed a foreign country to have jurisdiction over its troops in any previous status of forces agreement.

Gareth goes on to note that the administration seriously underestimated Maliki's opposition to a Bush agenda seriously opposed to it's own, and has also underestimated Iraqi opposition to the deal even as currently written - which could yet mean that there's no deal at all in place when the UN mandate expires, leaving the U.S. presence in Iraq clearly illegal.

But if the Bush administration have been shocked and surprised, John McCain seems to have been driven into abject denial. Spencer Ackerman points out that McCain flat lied about the provisions of the agreement in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday.

Long story short: Either McCain hasn’t read the latest text or he’s just making stuff up. (Transcript courtesy of the Mighty DeLong and his Amazing TiVo Device.)

Blitzer: The Bush administration seems to be close to what is called a “status of forces” agreement with the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It calls, in the draft agreement at least, for the complete withdrawal of combat forces from villages and cities by July 30 of 2009, and out of the country by December 30, 2011. If you’re elected president, would you, as commander-in-chief, honor this agreement if, in fact, it’s formalized?

McCain: With respect Wolf, and you know better, my friend. You know better. It’s condition-based. It’s conditions-based, and Ryan Crocker, our ambassador to Baghdad, said, “If you want to know what victory looks like, look at this agreement.”

You know better than that, Wolf. You know it’s condition-based, and that’s what the big fight was all about.

Actually, my friends, it’s McCain who should know better. I’ll have much more on this in a piece tomorrow morning, but if you read Article 25 of the Oct. 13 text — as I blogged yesterday — you’ll see it says that “The U.S. forces shall withdraw from Iraqi territories no later than December 31st, 2011″ and goes on to say “U.S. combat forces will withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibilities in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009.”

The only way to square McCain's circle, unless you assume that he really has lost it completely, is that McCain has no intention of letting the Iraqis have a say in what happens to their country should he become President. His chief foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, suggested as much in a conference call on Wednesday.

But either way - insane or imperialist - these people should in no way be allowed to continue to hold the reins of power or control of America's military.

Palin Backs Immigrant Amnesty

By Cernig

Oh dear. Sarah Palin, in an interview with Univision, has backed an amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

Interviewer: To clarify, so you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?

Palin: I do because I understand why people would want to be in America. To seek the safety and prosperity, the opportunities, the health that is here. It is so important that yes, people follow the rules so that people can be treated equally and fairly in this country.

Needless to say, the wingnuts, those few mentioning it so far, are not at all happy.

The Corner leads the charge:

What Palin's response shows is that, first, she's completely open to whatever kool-aid they want her to drink — i.e., she has no innate resistance to amnesty for illegals that would cause her to look for less-unappealing ways of saying what the campaign wants her to say. And second, it shows what the campaign is telling her about McCain's views on the issue — if McCain's talk of "border security first" were anything but boob bait for Bubba, his operatives would have made it clear that Palin was supposed to include that in her discussion of immigration, but she didn't even make a passing reference to it.

Daniel Larison:

I have given up trying to understand what Palinites see in their favorite candidate.  If this does not drive home how malleable and unacquainted with the relevant policy options she is, I’m not sure what would.

With 12 days to go, this is going to hurt the McCain/Palin camp even worse than the $150k blown on Sarah's make-over. I'm waiting to see what the Malkinites will make of it.

(And I wonder, are immigrants the "barbarians at the gate" that Neo-Roman elitist Andy McCarthy is so afraid of?)

Update: Malkin - "We're Screwed, '08!"

An Elitist Hater Of Democracy

By Cernig

Andy McCarthy at NRO's Corner blog approvingly quotes this bit of nonsense from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.

I mean...wtf? Let's leave aside the thought that the authoritarian Heinlein would undoubtably have included McCarthy, who doesn't produce anything except bloviating, in his definition of "parasites". McCarthy approves of the notion that democracy should only be for an elite, not "the plebs". Why does he hate America, where the notion of all men being equal and equally enfranchised is enshrined in the very fabric of the nation?

So which definition does McCarthy want to use for "the plebs" who should be disenfranchised, leaving only an elite he's surely defining to include himself? And which invaders, exactly, does he expect to enter his New Imperial State? Maybe he could explain.

33 Minutes of Fearmongering

By Cernig

The Russians aren't fooled by continual protestations that America's missile defense plans are aimed at "rogue states" - none of whom yet has the capability of throwing a nuke at the U.S. and who probably would choose infiltration as a delivery method in any case. They've been beefing up their missile force, introducing a new mark and modifying existing missile types with decoys, in the face of American righwing zeal for destabilizing the balance of deterrence that has served the world so well for decades.

That's not surprising. I'm sure that Russian intelligence and military planners can read, and surf the sites of those rightwing think-tanks who have provided the intellectual impetus for the Bush administration, Mccain and others. They know that missile defense, despite the spin of the Bush administration, has always been about the Soviet Union, and then Russia. It's all about Reagan's Star Wars dream, which had as its focus the "Evil Empire" still described in such belligerent terms by John McCain.

For instance, they'll have already noticed that the Heritage Foundation is planning a major publicity push on missile defense in January, planning to pressure President Obama to continue funding the multi-billion program.

The wingnut think-tank will be releasing a documentary, called 33 Minutes, and is already boosting it on its own website. The fearmongering blurb for the film says:

A ballistic missile from a foreign enemy would take 33 minutes to reach the United States. With each passing day, this becomes a growing danger to America, yet our government has failed to build the missile defense systems capable of defending us against such attacks.

Our enemies are attempting to stockpile arsenals that threaten our freedom and prosperity. North Korea and Iran are the most prominent, but this also includes Russia, China and other nations that have missiles capable of killing Americans in very large numbers and threatening our allies.

The time has come to revive the strategic missile defense system that America uniquely can develop, maintain, and employ for its own defense and the peace-loving world's security.

This documentary aims to do just that by highlighting the disastrous consequences of a nuclear explosion on American soil - one that could happen in just 33 minutes.

North Korea is dismantling its nuclear arsenal and Iran doesn't have one. Nor does it have anything close to the technology to land a warhead on American soil. So it's on to the next on the list - Russia. The website's blog today bears out that emphasis, with most posts about Russia. One that's worth noting, though, extols the need for treaty-breaking space-based weaponry.

The Washington Times reports that the Pentagon is on board to study space-based missile defenses. Congress appropriated $5 million for the endeavor.

Given the ever expanding threat of nuclear proliferation, the U.S. needs to be prepared to defend on all fronts, including protecting satellites. Developing wide-ranging protection should be a top priority. An anonymous defense official said, “It’s really the only way to defend the U.S. and its allies from anywhere on the planet.

This exposes yet another administration fib - that space-based weapons aren't being considered because they'd present a clear red line to Russia and seriously escalate tensions between the two nations, probably triggering a new arms race and a return to the Cold War for real. This is, after all, the same administration that unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2001.

Space-based weapons are a red line for much of the American public too, since many are aware of just how destabilizing such a move would be and few want to return to the dark days of the nuclear clock. The conservative think-tank proposal for dealing with American public perceptions is a simple one. Misdirection.

Arms control advocates are currently focused on preventing the weaponization of space. They base their proposals on the assertion that space is not already weaponized,[23] which is valid only if prop­erly defining the term "space weapons" is irrelevant to the exercise of controlling them.[24]

The fact is that space was weaponized when the first ballistic missile was deployed, because ballistic missiles travel through space on their way to their targets.

... Congress needs to reject the charge that space-based ballistic missile defense interceptors would constitute an unprecedented move by the U.S. to weaponize space. It can do so by adding a preamble to the amendment to provide more robust funding for construction of a space test bed.

This preamble should take the form of a congres­sional finding that the deployment of ballistic mis­siles weaponized space

Umm, yeah. That'll convince the Russians not to join in the wingnut arms race. And this is the same as hanging Reaganesque "Brilliant Pebbles" weaponry permanently in space, as the Heritage folks advise, because?

But let's cut to the chase, shall we? The wingnuts don't want missile defense systems to protect against rogue states. They want them so that the U.S. can attack Russia or China with a better chance of success than Russia or China could attack America.

Is there a potential threat of space wars taking place in the near future? It is a distinct possibility due to the actions of China and Russia. The two nations are attempting to update the 1967 Outer Space Treaty to limit the ability of the U.S. to develop and employ space-based missile defense systems. Is this just a noble effort on the part of China and Russia to declare the use of space for peaceful purposes alone, or are they individually and possibly together seeking to create a situation that would limit the U.S.'s research and development of space-based missile defense systems while giving them the opportunity to get up to speed with similar systems of their own. The space wars have begun to take shape with China and Russia seeking the update of this 41 year old treaty.

... What China and Russia are really seeking with the updating of this treaty is more time to research, develop, and test their own missile defense systems. They are highly threatened that the U.S. has not only nuclear weapons, but missile defense installations that are capable of eliminating any nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon delivered in a ballistic missile from anyone, including Russia, China, or ? China and Russia know they are behind in the development of these missile defense systems, and they want to limit the U.S. any way possible to allow them the time necessary to catch up.

What exactly is wrong with those nations having their own ABM shields - or even sharing one with the U.S. and other nations? Wouldn't that protect everyone from rogue states?

No, the neocon think-tanks who are advising the Bush administration and the McCain campaign are quite clearly looking for a U.S. first strike capability as part of their dreams of American hegemony. That's incredibly dangerous. The Russians and Chinese know this already - they can read. The only people who don't are the bulk of the American populace.

Al Qaeda Endorses McCain, Chertoff Undermines His Spin

By Cernig

Wingnuts from John McCain on down have been breathless in the last couple of days about Joe Biden's remarks that a terrorist attack would almost certainly try to test President Obama in his first six months in office. The spin is that Obama is too risky a choice and Mccain has already been tested (P.O.W.!). McCain even had a "mushroom cloud" moment!

Unfortunately, Michael Chertoff has already undercut McCain's spin by saying he would expect terrorists to try to test either candidate if they should become president - and suggested that any test of Obama would be likley to come from domestic bloodthirsty nutcases, not foreign ones.

``Any period of transition creates a greater vulnerability, meaning there's more likelihood of distraction,'' Chertoff said in an interview yesterday. ``You have to be concerned it will create an operational opportunity for terrorists.''

The risk is the same whether Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain is elected president on Nov. 4, he said. That comment undercuts McCain's argument that the U.S. would be more in danger of an attack if Obama, 47, wins.

... Still, he said, he's concerned about the effect of rhetoric from some hate groups or individuals during the campaign.

``There's a general level of intemperateness in the discussion as we approach the election,'' he said. ``Do I worry that it could trigger in a disturbed individual a desire to do something? Absolutely, I worry about it.''

And now, there are reports that McCain has the backing of Al Qaeda. The logic, for them, is simple:

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier," the message said. "Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush."

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Md., monitors the Web site and translated the message.

"If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American interests," the message said, "this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it."

The WaPo adds:

the comments summarized what has emerged as a consensus view on extremist sites, said Adam Raisman, a senior analyst for the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamist Web pages. Site provided translations of the comments to The Washington Post.

"The idea in the jihadist forums is that McCain would be a faithful 'son of Bush' -- someone they see as a jingoist and a war hawk," Raisman said. "They think that, to succeed in a war of attrition, they need a leader in Washington like McCain."

And Eric Martin notes that this should come as no surprise. "The CIA concluded that bin Laden attempted to swing the election for Bush in 2004 with the release of a videotape in the last weeks of the campaign." McCain is like Bush on speed when it comes to belligerent, unthinking words and actions. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that equation.

Update: Spencer Ackerman relates a "panicked" conference call with Mccain advisers.

Political Haiku

By Cernig

The Heretik is leading a political haiku writing stint. He leads with this:

Meltdown, bailout, no

Pirate Wall Street bankers, yo

What they make, don’t know.

Go on, have a try.

Torturing Legality

By Cernig

What a surprise. Dubya had his fingers crossed when he said his administration was looking at ways to shut down Gitmo.

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

Spencer Ackerman:

The “legal risks” are called “due process of law” and “adherence to universally-embraced standards of civilization.”

The place rightwingers profess to believe is some kind of "holiday camp" is still full of innocents who were tortured into confessions, too.

Like 17 Uighurs a federal court had ordered released, who now won't go free.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit stayed a federal judge's order releasing the men, and it ordered oral arguments in the government's appeal, to be heard Nov. 24.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ordered the government Oct. 7 to release the men, all Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly seven years. The same panel temporarily stayed Urbina's order a day later.

The government has been trying to find new homes for the Uighurs for years. It no longer considers them enemy combatants and provided no evidence in court that they posed a security risk. The men cannot be returned to their homeland because they face the prospect of being tortured and killed. China considers the men terrorists.

Judges A. Raymond Randolph and Karen L. Henderson sided with the government and issued the order without comment; Judge Judith W. Rogers dissented, writing that the Bush administration's legal theories were flawed. The government has argued it can detain the Uighurs without cause until it locates a new home for them.

Justice Department lawyers have argued that only the president or Congress has the legal authority to order the Uighurs' release into the United States.

And if Congress ordered their release, Dubya's henchmen would doubtless refuse on the grounds of his Supreme Executive Authoritay.

The Uighurs aren't the only ones held purely because they are evidence of Bush administration war crimes.

The Pentagon announced Tuesday it dropped war-crimes charges against five Guantanamo Bay detainees after the former prosecutor for all cases complained that the military was withholding evidence helpful to the defense.

America's first war-crimes trials since the close of World War II have come under persistent criticism, including from officers appointed to prosecute the alleged terrorists. The military's unprecedented move was directly related to accusations brought by the very man who was to bring all five prisoners to justice.

Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld had been appointed the prosecutor for all five cases, but at a pretrial hearing for a sixth detainee earlier this month, he openly criticized the war-crimes trials as unfair. Vandeveld said the military was withholding exculpatory evidence from the defense, and was doing so in other cases.

The chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay has now appointed new trial teams for the five cases to review all available evidence, coordinate with intelligence agencies and recommend what to do next, a military spokesman, Joseph DellaVedova, said in an e-mail.

DellaVedova said the military might renew the charges against the five later.

Clive Stafford Smith, a civilian attorney representing detainee Binyam Mohamed, said he has already been notified that charges against his client would be reinstated.

The Independent has more on the "farce" the Bush administration are passing of as due process:

Mohamed, 30, who lived in west London, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2004. He was accused of planning an attack that included the use of radioactive material and chemical weapons.

But Mohamed insists he admitted to plotting the dirty bomb attack only after being tortured, which included having his penis cut with a razor. Mr Stafford Smith said: "The Bush Administration will not even admit in public that they rendered Mr Mohamed to face torture in Morocco, let alone allow him a fair trial. Meanwhile he sits in solitary confinement in Guantanamo, in total despair, contemplating whether he should just commit suicide."

Reprieve, which has long campaigned for the case against Mohamed to be dropped, says he should be returned to the UK. They say he is a victim of "extraordinary rendition" and torture. The charity says Mohamed was sent to Morocco by the CIA in July 2002, where he was tortured for 18 months before being rendered to a secret prison in Afghanistan.

Mohamed has been fighting a long, high-profile legal battle in both the American and English courts for access to 42 documents. Lawyers for the Muslim convert believe the secret papers may contain information backing his claim that he only confessed to terrorist activities after being held incommunicado for two years and suffering ill-treatment. The US government has been accused of using a strategy of delay to avoid having to disclose the evidence that could support the torture allegations.

So keen were the administration to prevent Mohammed's papers coming to light that they threatened the UK government with an intelligence-sharing embargo if it let a UK court rule in Mohammed's favor.

I continue to believe that, if President Obama thinks war crimes trails in America would be too devisive, all he has to do is step aside when The Hague comes calling with warrants for Bush and the rest and use the their own line: "if they've done nothing wrong then they have nothing to fear". With a smile.

Former Embassy Hostage - Obama's Right On Iran

By Cernig

The folks at WhirledView have a bit of a scoop. Career diplomat Victor Tomseth was one of the 50 Americans held hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. It's thus particularly significant that he should be one of over 300 former diplomats who have backed Barack Obama, and that he should have written an op-ed for the Register-Guard of Oregon and for WhirledView specifically backing Obama's Iran policy of negotiation.

As McCain’s friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, when asked by Goldberg to name something unusual about McCain, put it: McCain believes that “some political problems have military solutions.”

...Obama’s comments demonstrate a more sophisticated understanding of Iran’s relative power than the McCain view that Iran poses an existential threat. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, in 2006 Iran spent approximately $7.35 billion on defense... Even tiny Israel has a military budget more than half again as large as Iran’s.

Granted, the possession of nuclear weapons is a qualitative advance in military capacity (provided it is accompanied by a capability to deliver such weapons). At the moment, however, it is highly doubtful that Iran possesses either a nuclear weapon or the capacity to deliver one against even Israel, let alone the United States.

Could that change? Obviously it might at some point. However, it does not appear that day has arrived or that it soon will (see the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate key judgments, “Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities.”

An understanding that Iran does not hold all the nuclear cards — and indeed that its hand in certain fundamental aspects is a weak one — underlies Obama’s policy approach to the Iranian nuclear issue. He believes that the United States has not exhausted nonmilitary options, and in many respects has not even tried seriously to apply them. He proposes a comprehensive settlement with Iran: In exchange for abandoning dual-use nuclear technologies and support of terrorism, the United States will offer incentives such as support for Iran’s entry into the World Trade Organization, economic investment and a process leading to normalization of diplomatic relations.

If, however, Iran continues its troubling behavior, the United States will instead step up efforts to isolate Iran economically and politically.

Experience shows that Obama’s approach can work. Nearly 30 years ago, Iranian authorities first condoned and then facilitated the holding of more than 50 American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. At that time, too, there was a war faction in the United States that called for bombing Iran back into the Stone Age.

President Jimmy Carter chose a different course, one of patiently negotiating a resolution using nonmilitary sticks and carrots. It took 444 days to drive home the point to Iranian leaders that there are real costs for international isolation, not the least of which was Iran’s discovery that it had few friends when Saddam Hussein seized the hostage crisis as an opportunity to launch a military attack.

The hostage crisis contributed significantly to President Carter’s 1980 loss to Ronald Reagan. But he succeeded in resolving the crisis without resort to war...

Remember, Tomseth was one of those hostages, held for 444 days. He was no casual observer.

Meanwhile, even Israel appears to be coming around to the idea that negotiating with Iran makes sense - leaving McCain and the neocons entirely isolated out on the belligerent fringe of world opinion. Trita Parsi, co-founder and current President of the National Iranian American Council, writes at Rootless Cosmopolitan:

On the eve of his departure from political life, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Olmert...argued that Israel had lost its “sense of proportion” when stating that it would deal with Iran militarily. “What we can do with the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, we cannot do with the Iranians,” Olmert said, in stark contradiction to his own earlier warnings on Iran as well as the rhetoric of many of his hawkish cabinet members. “Let’s be more modest, and act within the bounds of our realistic capabilities,” he cautioned.

... A more nuanced rhetoric on Iran may have the down-side of reducing pressure on the U.S. to act - “If we don’t talk about Iran, the world will forget about Iran,” as Israeli Iran expert David Menashri put it – but has the up-side of enabling new options to emerge for the Jewish state.

Warning about being “boxed into the corner,” a recent Haaretz editorial offered a clear break from Israel’s Plan A: “The best chance of calming the atmosphere and reducing the threat lies in starting negotiations between the United States and Iran… [I]t is the only route not yet tried and is likely to help moderate Iranian policy. Israel must encourage an American rapprochement with Iran, with the understanding that this will serve the Israeli interest as well.” And in a video by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, several high-ranking Israeli generals throw their weight behind U.S.-Iran diplomacy as a path towards advancing Israeli security.

... Unlike Olmert who recognized the unfeasibility of Plan A while leaving office, Israel’s new Prime Minister, Tzipi Livni, may enter office with Plan B in sight. She rejects the idea that Israel “will not be able to live” with a nuclear Iran and says Israel must deal with the challenges it faces. Though Livni won’t go as far as Barack Obama in promising direct diplomacy with Tehran, she may help Israel find a few more options on Iran.

There's always a possibility that a more moderate president in Iran in 2009 may help find a few of those options too. Sidelining the zealots, be they Iranian, Isreali or American, is the best chance for solving all of the issues in the region. Even Churchill, hero of the Right, preferred talk to war.

A Grand Bargain In Afghanistan?

By Cernig

While the presidential candidates try to outdo each other on hawkishness on their Afghanistan/Pakistan policies and violence rises even further, the military seem to be the ones really running U.S. foreign policy in the region. And they're looking for a Grand Bargain.

This week's Sixty Minutes has eye-opening footage from a forward operating base in eastern Afghanistan, which includes up-close combat with Taliban militants.


Watch CBS Videos Online

The footage underscores what a recent draft of a National Intelligence Estimate called Afghanistan's "downward spiral", with a 30 percent increase in attacks in the last year.

These soldiers had not come this close to their enemy in Afghanistan before - close enough to lob hand grenades. Staff Sgt. Jake Schlereth had to crawl into a cornfield in pursuit. "You couldn't see [the enemy]…and…I had to get down on the ground and look and see if they were down there…you knew they were in there," he tells Logan.

At least twelve enemy fighters were killed in the skirmish and one U.S. soldier was wounded. The soldiers found a camera left behind by the enemy that contained images of at least 50 heavily armed fighters, showing details of their training and actual attacks. But it also showed enemy surveillance of U.S. soldiers on patrol. Says Capt. Thomas Kilbride, who leads such patrols, "This is showing a [U.S.] unit driving. I don't know if this is us or not." Does he think he and his men are being watched every time they go on patrol? "Oh, yeah," he says.

The images on the camera prove the enemy is better armed and organized. One of the men killed was carrying an identification card issued across the border in Pakistan. The U.S. military plans more fighting ahead in the winter months, when violence is usually less. "I'm here to predict this winter will be the most violent winter so far," says Gen. Schlosser.

But with experts saying that an Iraq-style Surge and Awakening, as advocated by John McCain, won't work among the Pushtun tribes who are implacably hostile to outsiders and occupiers - and likewise saying that Obama's more hawkish policy on Pakistan is a step too far that would touch off a larger regional conflict - General David Petraeus has put together a team of advisors who are saying the the best bet is to make a deal with the Taliban to return them to some sort of respectability as long as they give up Al Qaeda in the process. One of those advisers, Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid, has joined with New York University Prof. Barnett Rubin to write an essay entitled "From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan" published this week in the influential 'Foreign Affairs' journal. Jim Lobe at IPS News writes:

Both Obama and McCain have called for increases in U.S. and NATO troop strength, and President George W. Bush currently intends to send 8,000 more U.S. troops to join the 34,000 who are already there before he leaves office. The NATO commander in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. David McKiernan, who commands a total of nearly 70,000 troops, said last week he will need yet another 15,000 more next year.

But while those forces may help keep the lid on, they cannot defeat the Taliban, particularly so long as their Pakistani allies provide a safe haven, according to Rashid and Rubin, whose article criticises the Bush administration’s "war-on-terror" rhetoric that "thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogenous ‘terrorist’ enemy."

"(The) United States must redefine its counterterrorist goals," they argue. "It should seek to separate those Islamist movements with local or national objectives from those that, like al Qaeda, seek to attack the United States or its allies directly – instead of lumping them all together." Those willing to sever ties with al Qaeda should be engaged, according to the authors.

"...An agreement in principle to prohibit the use of Afghan (or Pakistani) territory for international terrorism, plus an agreement from the United States and NATO that such a guarantee could be sufficient to end their hostile military action, could constitute a framework for negotiation. Any agreement in which the Taliban or other insurgents disavowed al Qaeda would constitute a strategic defeat for al Qaeda," according to the two authors.

It's almost certainly a good idea. Bob Gates has said that "There has to be ultimately, and I’ll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this. That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us," and I've agreed with that concept for years. But one would think the State Dept. under the next President, rather than Petraeus, in the role of regional proconsul, should be doing the running.

However, Rashid and Rubin want to take it a step further - and that's where I think their plan becomes highly problemmatic.

At the same time, Washington and its allies should pursue a "high-level diplomatic initiative designed to build genuine consensus on the goal of achieving Afghan stability by addressing the legitimate sources of Pakistan’s insecurity...," they argue.

They call for the UN Security Council to establish of a contact group consisting of its five permanent members, and possibly NATO and Saudi Arabia, to promote dialogue between India and Pakistan on Afghanistan and Kashmir, and between Pakistan and Afghanistan on delineating their border with the central aim of "assur(ing) Pakistan that the international community is committed to its territorial integrity." The group should also provide security assurances to Russia and Iran about U.S. NATO intentions and to promote regional economic integration and development.

The problem is that Pakistan isn't only concerned with its own territorial integrity. Pakistan's foreign policy has always been run by the Pakistani military, primarily aimed at India and always seen the use of proxy terror groups as a way to counter the assymetric balance of conventional forces. The Pakistani military has always had one primary mission - India. One of its primary objectives has been to bring Afghanistan into its own orbit and deny India influence there. While India must worry about the other regional power, China, Pakistan has always co-operated with China both militarily and politically on the local stage - the two nations develop fighter jets together, exercize together, vote together in local forums. India was the only reason why Pakistan developed a nuclear arsenal (India worried about Pakistan and China) and you can be sure that every nuclear weapon in Pakistan's inventory is assigned to an Indian target and to no other - something that it is doubtful is the case for India's weapons.

Throughout their short history as seperate nations - which has included four outright wars - India and Pakistan have been burdened by extremists who define themselves in terms of opposition to their neighbour and in supremacist religious rhetoric. Both have always had to cope with militant portions of their own military and political spectrums who define themselves in terms of a perceived military threat from the other nation. In India's case, although offtimes these factions have gained ascendancy, the democratic process has kept their influence from being total. Pakistan, on the other hand, has been a military dictatorship more often than it has been even slightly democratic and, when a democracy, was constantly threatened by coups from one of its two militant factions - the religious and military extremists. Accordingly, the military has made a de facto trade off with the Islamists. The military runs the nation and the Islamists use it as a safe base to preach, recruit and stage their worldwide Jihad. Neither rocks the other's boat all that much and so a balance of power has evolved, teetering on a precipice of civil war which spills over locally from time to time. Rashid and Rubin's plan doesn't provide an incentive to either group to change that equation.

Instead, as so often in the past, India should offer concessions to a nation which has talked the talk far more often than it has walked the walk. There is no mention anywhere of curtailling Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, and its alleged sponsoring of terror groups in Kashmir, Afghanistan and India. No mention of the tens of thousands of Taliban and Al Qaida trained militants in Pakistan (Jane's in 2004 estimated 20,000 such in Karachi alone). No mention of Pakistan's inability (reluctance) to capture Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar - and other major terror/crime figures such as Dahwood Ibrahim - who are certainly hiding on their territory. It's a plan the Pakistanis will love - because it enables them to keep on doing what they've been doing, playing the West for all they are worth while asking concessions from their main rivals. It's highly unlikely that the Indians or anyone else in the region will want to play ball just to give the U.S. cover as it makes for an exit.

Crossposted from Crooks & Liars

An Assault On Democracy

By Cernig

In 2008, faced with a groundswell of public opinion that should deliver a landslide of disapproval for the Republican party and send it into the political wilderness for years, the poor losers of the GOP are more than ready to prevent that end by any means. Few, if any, of the tactics it is using are illegal - often the result of careful legislation designed to preserve the Republican majority forever - but added together they comprise an assault on democracy which would stun even the cynical and sly politicians of Old Europe.

In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."

The GOP and the McCain campaign have been trying to drum up a Bradley Effect, with campaign and party apparatchiks trotting out racist whistles against Obama (and by extension against the party he now leads) at every opportunity while party leaders pretend to be oblivious and unknowing. McCain, Palin and the GOP's Congressional leaders would condemn any overt racism, of course, and attribute it to some bad apples - but they seem remarkably dense in not spotting anything other than utter hate speech racism from their followers (or the candidate himself) when it occurs. The merest veil of deniability conceals their deliberately looking the other way while their supporters run riot.

Nor have their smears stopped at racism. Calling Obama and Dems in general traitors, terrorist abettors, "feminazis" and (oh, horrors) socialists has become a substitute for debating issues. (Actually, Obama's just echoing Lincoln.) From an early stage, the GOP knew it was going to run on personality smears as a substitute for facts. Again, much of the groundswell of hate on the Right is implausibly deniable by the leadership, but since any media attention only fuels their base's paranoia and engenders new smear attacks, "implausible" is all they need to keep the ball rolling independently.

But even all that isn't sufficient to either cage the vote or at least to provide plenty of excuses to keep Republican leaders in charge of their party after the elections. So we now have the ACORN faux-scandal, which John McCain has hyperbolically called 'an assault on democracy" and which seeks to provide a ready-made narrative for de-legitimizing the election.

It also serves, through the time-honored tactic of calling your opponents out for what you yourself are doing, to conceal very real Republcan voter registration fraud - not just individuals cooking up daft names to register as a way of getting paid for no work but a concerted effort to cook the books by making Republican support seem stronger than it really is.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party -- a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states -- has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

... The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

And, of course, we still have that mysterious glitch in electronic voting machines - the one that only ever seems to work in favor of Republican candidates - in places like West Virginia. They're out to prove Florida 2000 wasn't a one off. It has often been said that, to prevent such "glitches" having an effect, Obama has to not just win but win handily. That's inconvenient to network bosses who are already wondering how they'll fill election evening coverage if it's all decided by teatime. John McCain has assured Chris Wallace today that there will be a full election night to cover and some polls seem to help his case for that (and, obviously, influence voter's perceptions) - even while others don't.

But at the end of the day the GOP is prepared even for a Democratic landslide. They'll just package up all the hate, all the smears, all the Alien Nation rhetoric and throw caution to the wind.   

We've crossed some more lines ... in a long series of lines that have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party and an explicitly fascist political movement. And John McCain and his political handlers appear to have no moral compunctions whatsoever about whipping this movement into a frenzy and providing it with scapegoats for all that hatred, simply to try to shave a few points off Barack Obama's lead in the polls.

To call this "country first" only works if you assume your opponents (and scapegoats) are not really part of that same country. And we all know where that leads.

Yes, we do. And the extreme Right has been happily contemplating violent resistance or even a coup to defend themselves from what they see as a hostile and un-American Democratic takeover for years now. They even write books about it.

The Heretik Returns

By Cernig

Good news.

The Heretik is back, in all his Kafka-esque glory.

The Calm Before The Storm?

By Cernig

John McCain's declarations of victory in Iraq are likely to turn out just as premature as Bush's famously-flightsuited "mission accomplished", simply because the various faction fights underlying violence in Iraq have been postponed, not solved.

A few days ago, Mariam Karouny of Reuter's Baghdad bureau posted this on the Reuters blog:

Conversations with senior Iraqi officials in the past few days suggest the optimism may be premature.

Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians spoke of “bad news” ahead. They talked of deep political divisions, and assassinations ahead of the provincial elections expected in January.

A senior Sunni Arab official, wishing me a happy Eid last week, said: “I wish I could mean this. Nothing has really changed since you have last visited.”

A Shi’ite official pleaded: “Please be careful, we are expecting lots of problems. Don’t be fooled by the current security situation.”

No-one sane expects there to be anything other than a rise in violence focussed around the provincial elections. The real question is: how bad will it get? If it's bad enough to kick off another round of recriminatory attacks and counterattacks, Iraq will revert back to pre-Surge conditions very quickly. If not, then Iraq has a chance at merely having the kind of background violence experienced in Lebanon or Palastine. With a split in the ruling Shiite elite,between Maliki's Dawa and Hakim's ISCI, to contend with and an insurgency that appears to be gathering its strength again and which seems capable of pre-Awakening attack levels, the latter seems a slimmer possibility than the former.

Can We Use The L Word Now?

By Cernig

Not quite- although there's a 89.96 probability of an Obama victory, there's only a 32.75% chance of a landslide (375 plus electoral college votes) according to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.

But it certainly looks like one in this pic. "All I can say is wow," Obama said as he took the stage.

Obama's Best Line Yet

By Cernig

Via Steve Benen comes what I think is Obama's best line of the whole campaign.

It comes down to values -- in America, do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it?

Perfect. It encapsulates all that is wrong with the unstated Republican theology political philosphy America has lived with since Reagan. Obama continues:

"Lately, Senator McCain has been attacking my middle class tax cut. He actually said it goes to, 'those who don't pay taxes,' even though it only goes to working people who are already getting taxed on their paycheck. That's right, Missouri -- John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people 'welfare.'

The only 'welfare' in this campaign is John McCain's plan to give another $200 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations in America -- including $4 billion in tax breaks to big oil companies that ran up record profits under George Bush. That's who John McCain is fighting for. But we can't afford four more years like the last eight. George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas, they are out of touch, and if you stand with me in 17 days they will be out of time."

Zinger!

The McCain Plan for Health Insecurity

By Cernig

At the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. David Blumenthal reviews McCain's healthcare plans - and finds the same old Republican "I'm alright, Jack" philosphy. (h/t Avedon)

John McCain emerges not as a maverick or centrist but as a radical social conservative firmly in the grip of the ideology that animates the domestic policies of President George W. Bush. The central purpose of President Bush's health policy, and John McCain's, is to reduce the role of insurance and make Americans pay a larger part of their health care bills out of pocket. Their embrace of market forces, fierce antagonism toward government, and determination to force individuals to have more "skin in the game" are overriding — all other goals are subsidiary. Indeed, the Republican commitment to market-oriented reforms is so strong that, to attain their vision, Bush and McCain seem willing to take huge risks with the efficiency, equity, and stability of our health care system. Specifically, the McCain plan would profoundly threaten the current system of employer-sponsored insurance on which more than three fifths of Americans depend, increase reliance on unregulated individual insurance markets (which are notoriously inefficient), and leave the number of uninsured Americans virtually unchanged. A side effect of the McCain plan would be to threaten access to adequate insurance for millions of America's sickest citizens.

The main purposes of Mccain's plan appears to be to dump more money into private health insurer's coffers and enable insurers to dump bad risks (those currently covered but paying high premiums) onto the State by making insurance unaffordable for them:

In the individual market, administrative costs consume 30 to 50% of premiums, as compared with 12 to 15% in the large-group, employer-sponsored insurance market. The McCain plan, therefore, could cause administrative waste to skyrocket. Because of these high administrative expenses, and because insurers want to avoid sick people, individual health insurance tends to be less generous than employer-sponsored plans, requiring higher deductibles and copayments and offering less coverage of preventive and catastrophic care. Perhaps most worrisome is that many chronically ill patients who lose employer-sponsored coverage will have trouble finding any insurance at all in the individual market. The McCain plan calls for deregulating private insurance markets — eliminating, for example, state requirements that insurers offer plans to persons with preexisting conditions.

To counter these side effects, McCain will offer a $2,500 tax credit for individuals and a $5,000 tax credit for families to help them purchase health insurance. But consider the math. The average family policy in the United States now costs about $12,000, of which the average employer contributes about 75% ($9,000). Thus, if they could find comparable insurance in the individual market, that coverage would cost families losing employer-sponsored insurance $4,000 more than they previously paid ($9,000 minus $5,000). Many of these families will enter the ranks of the uninsured.

All those new uninsured would join the ranks of those who wait until their health problem becomes an emergency and then head to EMS, increasing the cost of their care dramatically and leaving many unable to pay - at which point the State picks up a huge bill which could have been far lower if it had only been the healthcare provider in the first place.

The choice facing health care professionals, like all Americans, is basic: Who deserves to be trusted with the stewardship of America's health care system? The McCain proposal violates the bedrock principle that major health policy reforms should first do no harm. It would risk the viability of employer-sponsored insurance and the welfare of chronically ill Americans in pell-mell pursuit of a radical vision of consumer-driven health care. Senator McCain's plan does not demonstrate the kind of judgment needed in a potential commander in chief of our health care system.

Blumenthal is an unpaid Obama campaign adviser, so he's certainly biased - but the situation is actually worse than he admits. Not only is McCain's healthcare plan a disaster, but so is Obama's - although one on slo-mo - because there is no long-term viability in employer-sponsored health insurance. Companies and corportations are collapsing under the weight of such schemes. It';s significant that in 2004 big auto manufacturers begged Canada to keep its national healthcare system, so they could keep their own costs down and saty in business across North America. In 2003, GM spent $4.5 billion on health care for its US- based employees and retirees, at a cost of $1,200 per car, according to a GM spokesman. "If we cannot get our arms around this [healthcare] issue as a nation, our manufacturing base and many of our other businesses are in danger," warned Ford's Vice Chairman Allan Gilmour.

But the correct alternative to pick is a national health service, which could be funded at a level of 11% of GDP, higher than that of any other Western nation, without a single tax raise - if only insurance company profits and beaurocracy weren't sucking all the good out of the system. Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-author of a 2001 study and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard, put it best:

We pay the world's highest health care taxes. But much of the money is squandered. The wealthy get tax breaks. And HMOs and drug companies pocket billions in profits at the taxpayers' expense. But politicians claim we can't afford universal coverage. Every other developed nation has national health insurance. We already pay for it, but we don't get it.

Deborah Burger, President of the California Nurses Association, says that in a supposedly civilized nation healthcare should be a right, not a responsibility:

Nir Rosen: How We Lost the War We Won

By Cernig

Nir Rosen imbedded with the Taliban for his latest report on Afghanistan, out now in Rolling Stone. His experiences included almost being executed by a fanatical Taliban local warlord, but he came away with the conclusion that adding more troops to Afghanistan won’t work, and that we should prepare an exit strategy.

Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement — to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.

"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now — or are even nominally allied with the government — are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability.

John McCain's strategy - following the Bush administration in handing policymaking to General Petraeus - isn't going to work any better. Talking our way to an exit from the doomed adventure in Afghanistan really is the only way out of that grim trap.

Spencer Ackerman calls Rosen's report an instant classic of war reporting and I totally agree. Just read it, ok?

Amy Goodman talks with Nir Rosen about his Taliban embed.

International Regulation For The Global Economy

By Cernig

The UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, has rediscovered his "small-s" socialist roots during the current financial crisis he helped create by forgetting them and thus allowing US-style unregulated risk-taking in UK financial markets. It hasn't hurt Brown in the polls either - where once he had trailed so badly that everyone had written him off, now he's ahead of his Conservative Party rival by 11 points.

His credibility on the international stage is high too. He was the most successful treasurer of a Western nation since WW2, with 13 straight years in the black, and is the architect of the current international plan to restore liquidity to the world economy by having governments take equity stakes in banks and other institutions. It's a process known as "nationalisation" but somehow the U.S. media doesn't want to use that word or remind voters that the conservative Bush administration has been forced to socialist policy by its own maladministration.

Now, Brown has an op-ed in the Washington Post setting out the next stage of fiscal recovery - international laws to regulate the financial sector. He's even using the words "new Bretton Woods".

We must deal with more than the symptoms of the current crisis. We have to tackle the root causes. So the next stage is to rebuild our fractured international financial system.

This week, European leaders came together to propose the guiding principles that we believe should underpin this new Bretton Woods: transparency, sound banking, responsibility, integrity and global governance. We agreed that urgent decisions implementing these principles should be made to root out the irresponsible and often undisclosed lending at the heart of our problems. To do this, we need cross-border supervision of financial institutions; shared global standards for accounting and regulation; a more responsible approach to executive remuneration that rewards hard work, effort and enterprise but not irresponsible risk-taking; and the renewal of our international institutions to make them effective early-warning systems for the world economy.

Such an international regulatory framework, if enshrined in a treaty, will have the force of international law - and that's clearly what Brown and the other European leaders intend. It will then be largely immune to Republican deregulatory zeal even in the U.S., because laws adopetd by treaty have the force of federal laws but international treaties cannot be changed just by enacting domestic legislation to do away with them. Free market conservatives (and neocons, who hate any restriction on American hegemony and freedom to act as it sees fit) are going to hate Brown's plan, but what choice do they have? The medicine will taste bitter but a little bit (not too much) socialism will be good for what ails the world economy.

But what I would find really interesting would be if someone asked John McCain, "maverick reformer", if he thinks the fiscal socialism that the Bush administration has already enacted and the socialism to come are good ideas. And if not, what would be his alternative?

Gordon Brown answers questions on the future of the economy, bankers bonuses and global co-operation

Update: Nobel winner Paul Krugman is all for some fiscal socialism and nanny-stating on the domestic scene too.

there’s a lot the federal government can do for the economy. It can provide extended benefits to the unemployed, which will both help distressed families cope and put money in the hands of people likely to spend it. It can provide emergency aid to state and local governments, so that they aren’t forced into steep spending cuts that both degrade public services and destroy jobs. It can buy up mortgages (but not at face value, as John McCain has proposed) and restructure the terms to help families stay in their homes.

And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.

Will the next administration do what’s needed to deal with the economic slump? Not if Mr. McCain pulls off an upset. What we need right now is more government spending — but when Mr. McCain was asked in one of the debates how he would deal with the economic crisis, he answered: “Well, the first thing we have to do is get spending under control.”

...The responsible thing, right now, is to give the economy the help it needs. Now is not the time to worry about the deficit.

That's something Dems have already argued (as have I), but having the Nobel winner back you up is nice.

Working Class Heroes

By Cernig

And the Right wonders why the word 'socialist" is losing its sting. The WaPo:

A national survey by The Washington Post, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that large percentages of low-wage Americans struggle to pay for life's staples. Eight in 10 find it hard to pay for gasoline or save for retirement, while more than six in 10 said it was tough to afford health care. And roughly half said they were having difficulty affording food and housing.

Workers are more productive than ever, as the output per person has hit new highs in the past eight years. But rather than funding wage increases for most employees, the fruit of that new efficiency has largely bypassed all but the people in the best-paying jobs, as inflation-adjusted incomes for typical Americans edged downward from 2000 to 2007.

Now, as the global financial system strains to absorb its biggest shocks since the Great Depression, the once faraway world of Wall Street is making things worse for low-wage workers.

Even before last week's dramatic declines on Wall Street, credit markets had tightened, making borrowing more expensive -- or impossible -- for people and businesses whose credit histories are less than stellar. Already, most lenders are requiring higher down payments for mortgages and more collateral for other loans. Tighter credit means less spending and fewer jobs. Inevitably, those at the bottom of the income ladder are most vulnerable to all of those changes.

"Low-wage workers have had a difficult balancing act in terms of matching their expenses with their limited incomes," said Margaret C. Simms, director of the Urban Institute's Low-Income Working Families Project. "They are very limited in their ability to deal with an emergency."

The WaPo illustrates these stark statistics with a look at the life of Regino Romero, a single father of three kids earning "just over $13 an hour, which he calls barely enough to survive". There are plenty with less to get by on. It isn't easy being working class in Bush's America.

Sing it, John.

The New Atlanticist - The "Unanswered Question" Of NATO Expansion

By Cernig

If you follow foreign policy and foreign affairs, here's one for your bookmarks - the New Atlanticist blog. It's the online mag of the Atlantic Council of the United States, which is a think-tank expressly devoted to being a support group for American interest in NATO. Given that, it has a decidedly realist, center-right and hawkish tinge to it but under the excellent editorship of moderate conservative James Joyner (of Outside The Beltway) the blog has been producing some thought-provoking posts by some foreign policy luminaries and by James himself.

For instance, James notes a new study by the Congressional Research Service, "NATO Enlargement: Albania, Croatia, and Possible Future Candidates," [PDF] which says:

U.S. officials continue to view NATO as the primary institutional mechanism to ensure transatlantic security. They argue that although NATO’s primary purpose is the defense of its members, the alliance has become a force for peace throughout Europe.

This provides a clear U.S. answer to what James says is "the unanswered question" about NATO enlargement.

Inherent in the discussion, but not answered in the report — which is, after all, intended to prevent Members of Congress and their staffs with information, not dictate policy — is the goal of the Alliance.  Albania and Croatia add little strategic value, Macedonia creates friction within the Alliance just by its name, and Georgia and Ukraine are on the other side of a "red line" drawn by Russia.  So, if NATO is primarily a defensive military alliance, adding any of them in the near future is counterproductive.

If, on the other hand, NATO is only incidentally military but mostly a means of spreading and institutionalizing Western values and cooperation, then cautiously adding those states as they meet the required political, economic, and military standards promotes the Alliance's mission.

Spreading American values, rather than broader "Western" ones, is an integral part of every hue of Very Serious Person foreign policy ideology and has been for decades. Indeed, it's one of the defining criteria for admission to the VSP set instead of being dismissed as an isolationist crank or a DFH. It's the very epitome of "soft power". And NATO has been one of the main platforms for diseminating such values since the collapse of the Soviet Union raised the question of what NATO was going to do once it's declared enemy wasn't around anymore.

The real unanswered question is whether pushing American soft power through a NATO expansion is worth the risk of armed conflict with a resurgent Russia. Neo-whatevers (liberals and conservatives) seem to think it is, or think that Russia will blink, while those less burdened by ideology and more concerned by their position near the front lines of any conflicts (Germany and France) do not. Both nations have made it clear that they will veto, indefinitely, any nation's membership if the applicant is or is highly likely to be involved in military confrontation with Russia. It's a red line dictated by realpolitik and the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty.

For the neocon camp, of course, this is an opportunity to further one of their most pernicious bits of ideology. They hate treaties, all treaties, even ones that enshrine military alliances - each one, they feel, undermines America's ability to act without compromise as a supposedly hegemonic sole superpower. Even the NATO organisation demands compromises of American power, and so they're quite happy to undermine and weaken the Alliance from within just as they have with the UN. Pushing NATO's role "of spreading and institutionalizing Western values and cooperation" actually works to destroy the organisations effectiveness as a purely military alliance, leaving the way open for "coalitions of the willing" or some "League of Democracies" (the McCain/Krauthammer plan to endrun around the UN). At the end of the day, neoconservatives still want military and soft-power coalitions, but they want the U.S. to be able to dictate the terms.

Ireland's Biggest Bookie Pays Out On Obama Win

By Cernig

It's a publicity stunt by Ireland's biggest bookmaker, sure. But the odds on a McCain win are now terrible.

Paddy Power PLC says it is so sure Barack Obama will win the U.S. presidential election next month that it paid off Thursday on all bets it had taken backing the Democratic candidate. It said it shelled out more than euro1 million, about $1.35 million.

"We declare this race well and truly over and congratulate all those who backed Obama — your winnings await you," the company said in a statement.

They did the same with the Irish referendum for the EU Constitution, calling it early for a "yes" vote and getting egg on their faces (and millions in free publicity) when they had to pay out on the "no" result.

But Powers, which is still taking bets even after calling the race, is offering odds of 5 to one on McCain winning, while a euro on Obama only gets you 11 cents on a win. I'm of the opinion that those odds are pretty accurate.

Petraeus' Foreign Policy

By Cernig

There's little doubt that General David Petraeus is a smart cookie, and quite a few people I respect highly as foreign policy reporters and analysts have good opinions of his abilities. But when did a four star general get handed the authority to act as if he were Secretary of State?

The WaPo reports today (h/t Russ at Scholars & Rogues):

Gen. David H. Petraeus has launched a major reassessment of U.S. strategy for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and the surrounding region, while warning that the lack of development and the spiraling violence in Afghanistan will probably make it "the longest campaign of the long war."

The 100-day assessment will result in a new campaign plan for the Middle East and Central Asia, a region in which Petraeus will oversee the operations of more than 200,000 American troops as the new head of U.S. Central Command, beginning Oct. 31.

The review will formally begin next month, but experts and military officials involved said Petraeus is already focused on at least two major themes: government-led reconciliation of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the leveraging of diplomatic and economic initiatives with nearby countries that are influential in the war. [Emphasis Mine - C]

All of this seems like a good idea to me. But, crucially, neither of those themes are military ones and the military shouldn't be leading the way on them. It's about seperation of power and having the military subordinate to civilian policymakers rather than the other way around.

So where are the US ambassador, State Dept. and Condi Rice, who should be leading the way on them while the military man concentrates on military matters? For that matter, won't the leaders of other nations involved in the region wonder why America has appointed a de facto proconsul (again) and want their say?

"When you look at a lot of these problems, you see considerable regional connections," Petraeus said yesterday. The effort would embrace all of Afghanistan's neighbors and possibly extend to India, which has had a long-standing rivalry with Pakistan. "There may be opportunities with respect to India," he said.

An overview of the review team's mission obtained by The Post says that including other government agencies and other nations in the planning will "mitigate the risk of over-militarization of efforts and the development of short-term solutions to long-term problems."

Nevertheless, some experts questioned whether Petraeus will have the authority to carry out such a sweeping strategy.

"General Petraeus is not in charge of our diplomacy. He can't decide whether we try to form an international contacts group on Pakistan," said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University.

Moreover, in dealing with Afghanistan at Central Command, Petraeus will face limitations that he did not encounter as the top commander in Iraq, such as the lack of a unified military command and serious resource shortages.

"We don't own it. It's been a NATO effort since 2006. He won't have the same sway with Karzai and the ambassadors and a bunch of other people that he had in Iraq," said a former senior military official with experience in Afghanistan.

Perhaps most worrying of all, Petraus' mini foreign policy is being described as "a policy bridge from one administration to the next" by one of his team members, Clare Lockhart, co-founder of the New York-based Institute for State Effectiveness along with former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani. Does Obama know and approve of Petraeus' and the military's intended hijacking of his administration's foreign policy and the authority of his SecState in Afghanistan and the surrounding region?

Welcome Back To The World, America

By Cernig

That headline may seem premature to some, after all McCain the neocon hasn't lost the election yet. But at this stage does anyone really think he's going to win? As Eric pointed out earlier, it's not just that Barack Obama has outperformed McCain in the race, it's that Obama's been riding a wave of American public opinion - rich Republican loyalists like Joe the Plumber to the contrary - that has had enough of "I'm alright, Jack", "me, myself and I" Republicanism in all its permutations both foreign and domestic.

Americans actually want a new social contract between themselves for mutual support, between themselves and government so that there are some safety nets against the ups and downs of life, and between their nation and others so that they don't have to look to unwilling coalitions for goodwill any more. That sea-change in opinion, fuelled by the current crisis of faith in rampant capitalism and military adventurism, is bringing America back into the mainstream of opinion in the free world, from way out on the right wing.

I saw one conservative pundit opine that Obama will be to the Left of all his European allies (I think it was at The Corner, but I didn't bother saving the link). That's ridiculous hyperbole from someone who thinks his readers won't bother checking his claims. Obama isn't the most leftwing senator as the Mccain campaign has claimed - Bernie Sanders is. And even Euro-conservatives like Sarkozy, Merkel and British heir-apparent David Cameron are to the left of Obama on some important issues - like national healthcare, military interventionism and fiscal regulation. In Euro-terms, Obama isn't a socialist or even a democratic socialist - he barely scrapes into the realm of being a center-right social democrat. The Republican Party, though, has more in common with the far-right fringe in Europe - the Thatcherite rump of UK diehards and other nationalistic browbeaters - than what anyone across the pond would recognise as modern electable conservativism.

America will vote for Obama, I'm certain - not because America wants to move left but because America is heartfelt sick of being too far Right. The adjustment is one of rejoining the mainstream center. That's a good thing for America and the world. And, it just might leave room for a real Left in American politics, as the far Right stomps off grumpily for its time in the wilderness. Bernie Sanders might actually have a reasonable chance at a run on the White House in 2012, if he were so inclined.

Another Number Two?

By Cernig

The Pentagon has announced that US troops have caused "major disruption" to Al Qaeda in Iraq by killing the network of terrorist cell's alleged second in command. He is the third "Number Two in Al Qaeda" to be killed in Iraq and was a complete unknown as far as press reports go. Googling either of the names he used according to the Pentagon - Abu Qaswarah and Abu Sara - turns up no previous mentions before this announcement of an Al Qaeda leader, just a Baghdad chicken restaurant owner and a Shiite guy getting a haircut.

Over at Think Progress, Amanda Terkel writes:

Al Qaeda continues to remain resilient in the face of these attacks from the U.S. military, who are trying to undo a situation created by Bush’s invasion. No matter how many times troops kill top leaders, new ones emerge, because the insurgency continues to be, in part, fueled by the U.S. occupation. As counterterrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann said in 2005, “If I had a nickel for every No. 2 and Nov. 3 they’ve arrested or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be a millionaire.”

The nature of a cell system is that decapitating the leadership doesn't really effect day to day operations and, if Abu Sara really was an AQI leader rather than a conveniently timed patsy (he died on October 5th but the announcement was made today, the day of the last presidential debate), his death is likely to have just as little effect. Meanwhile, the real reason for the terror group's loss of relevance in Iraq, the Sunni Awakening, is under threat of disbandment from the Shiite-led central government. That threat, most prevalent in the region around Mosul, has led to a minor resurgence of AQI in the area. Elsewhere, the underlying destabilizing faction fights which make Iraq a place no-one sane would want to declare a successful victory continue unabated.

Rick Davis Blasted Smear Campaigning In 2004

By Cernig

In tonight's debate, John McCain seems set to "go there" on Ayers, goaded into it by Obama's plainly saying that McCain had until now been too chicken to say it to Obama's face.

It's quite possible Obama has a range of rebuttals ready. It's not as if he doesn't have plenty of examples of Mccain's dodgy friendships to choose from. He's also probably hoping McCain loses that famous temper, messily, on live TV in front of millions - the obvious followup being ads of McCain snarling and the simple question "would you trust this man with America's nukes?"

But McCain also has another problem with "going there" - sheer hypocrisy from his campaign. As Bill Scher points out, Rick Davis penned a Boston Globe op-ed back in 2004 in which he urged Bush and Kerry to pressure their supporters not to engage in smear campaigns. He wrote as campaign manager for McCain's failed primary bid, which crashed after a Bush camp smear about McCain having fathered "an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge."

It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate's political weakness.

...Campaigns have various ways of dealing with smears. They can refute the lies, or they can ignore them and run the risk of the smear spreading. But "if you're responding, you're losing." Rebutting tawdry attacks focuses public attention on them, and prevents the campaign from talking issues.

Back then, Davis described such smear campaigns, designed to keep voters from considering candidates stances on the issues, the "blackest of the dark arts". Don't you just love the smell of sheer hypocrisy in the morning? McCain's connection to his lobbyist chums are certainly far closer than Obama's to Ayers.

We got a preview of how tonight might play during the primary debates:

Deadheads For Obama

By Cernig

By Cernig

We're all DFH's now.

But some of us always were.

The surviving members of Grateful Dead performed together Monday night at Penn State University in support of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, reports the Associated Press.

Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart jammed together for the first time since their reunion tour in 2004.

... "I believe him enough to be able to get up in front of my constituency, these people out there," Hart said, pointing out the door to his dressing room, "and tell them 'I believe.' That's really important. The Grateful Dead does not take this lightly. We've never really done something quite like this."

Maybe some music will chill out the nutroot whiners.

Sinking Ships And Collapsing Tents

By Cernig

Ross Douhat absolutely nails the central issue of the current Cold Civil War (to borrow a term from Mark Steyn) in the GOP:

an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point.

That pretty much says it all. Pass the popcorn.

From Little ACORNs

By Cernig

(Crossposted from Crooks and Liars)

Accusations of voter fraud by the pro-Obama progressive group ACORN. It's the subject all the rightwing bloggers are going nuts over and now they've been joined in their prosecutory zeal by the Wall Street Journal. But looking closely at the outrage, it becomes obvious very quickly that if there is a problem at all then, "the more accurate accusation may be voter-registration fraud -- for which there appears to be plenty of checks in place to guarantee it doesn't turn into some actual voter fraud."

The McCain-Palin campaign is being careful in its wording, limiting its direct accusations while hinting at far more. A current fundraising email under Sarah Palin's signature says:

The left-wing activist group, ACORN, is now under investigation for voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states. ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Barack Obama and Senator Obama himself has said, "I have been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career." The Obama Campaign even paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate for "get out the vote activity." And now we find out that ACORN is suspected of voter registration fraud.

... We've always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn't know how far their allies would go. The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states.

The media, in the main, are only too happy to pile on - as this compilation of reports by a rightwing YouTuber illustrates:

It's a mystery, though, how voter registration fraud might turn into actual voter fraud, despite Palin's dark hintings. Brad Friedman, writing in the Guardian, makes the point well and says the whole ACORN kerfuffle is a massive GOP hoax:

Here are the facts. Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

You'll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That's true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won't hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won't be voting this November. You needn't worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.

Matt Yglesias adds:

... if you go out and register over a million voters you’ll wind up with a lot of bad forms being submitted. But just as 30,000 is a lot of people and also only a very small fraction of one million people, when you’re talking about registering over a million new voters you’d need orders of magnitude more bad forms to constitute real evidence of a systematic fraud campaign.

In short, there's no actual voter fraud going on here, despite the fevered fervor of the loyal Right and implied but unstated accusations from the McCain-Palin camp.

There does seem to be a problem, though, with a percentage of voter registrations being turned in to ACORN by paid workers trying to game their system, one that the group is well aware of and has encouraged prosecutions of workers on. But it also appears to be a systemic problem. The group has had workers found guilty in the past of exactly the same kind of fraud attempts, going back to the 2004 election cycle and beyond. ACORN appears to get no benefit from these fraud attempts, but then again it doesn't exactly lose either. Donors are going to keep giving ACORN money in any case and so there's no real incentive to amend practises.

It's exactly the same problem found in Western aid agencies in the Third World, where corruption, graft or just plain bad practises continue to be a problem year after year because no-one in a decision-making capacity with the agency feels any pain. We've seen the same problem recently in the financial sector with big-earning executives pocketbooks untouched by their own mismanagement. The solution, as always, is one only the group itself can implement - tighten hiring practises and rearrange the group's internal rules so that paid execs lose money when their workers try to pull a fast one. That'll give them an incentive to winnow out the fraudsters aggressively and at an early stage.

But if that's all the fire there is behind the smoke and mirrors show, why are the Republicans making so much of it? (And why haven't they aggressively sought their own voter registration drives if ACORN is so partisanly biased? The GOP still gladly accepts any Republican registrations ACORN turns in - you betcha!)

Well, one of the factors is that ACORN is just the kind of group Republicans love to target. The WSJ article linked above makes that plain in its third paragraph.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform.

Obviously in league with Satanic Forces, then.

It's a useful scapegoat for Republican culpability in the current financial meltdown too. ACORN has been called a "major contributor" to the crisis because of its advocacy for loans for minorities on easier terms. But while it's true that a bad loan is a bad loan no matter what color your skin is, and that the Reagan "ownership society" was always a scam to put your money into the financial sector's pockets that too many liberals fell into, the subprime crisis was mostly caused by lending houses working far beyond the guidelines even ACORN was happy with and ACORN tried to reign in such predatory lending. Nor did the group have anything to do with the creation of the"toxic debt" problem - leveraging securities at 30 or even 40 to one over their already dubious face value - which turned a big problem into a $500 trillion plus worldwide disaster. That was entirely down to conseravtive-pushed removal of legislation governing such transactions.

Then there's the smoke screen the ACORN narrative, properly hyped up, provides for accounts of Republican voting irregularities. As blogger "Hotflash" at Show Me Progress writes:

the biggest part of must be to distract the media from the voter disenfranchisement that the GOP is busy quietly instigating. The New York Times reports:

States have been trying to follow the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and remove the names of voters who should no longer be listed; but for every voter added to the rolls in the past two months in some states, election officials have removed two, a review of the records shows. The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote.

Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio seem to be improperly using Social Security data to verify registration applications for new voters. .......

In three states - Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan - the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.

If and when that voter disenfranchisement ever gets traction in the MSM, we can expect lots of he said/she said. "You sliced our voters off the rolls!"/"You turned in fake registration cards!" Republicans hope that press stenographers will shrug and imply that both sides have been guilty.

And finally, ACORN provides a convenient excuse for diehard Republicans who cannot understand why the country can't stand them and is moving en masse away from their failed ideology, while at the same time providing an excuse for legal challenges to vote results. Scott Limeaux notes that if this were not the case, there'd be an easy solution.

...if for some reason it was critically important for virtually every single name collected in mass voter registration drives to be accurate, there's an obvious solution in effect in many other liberal democracies: have professionals trained by the government be responsible for ensuring that citizens are registered. Of course, we're not going to here about that remedy from people frothing at the mouth about ACORN because the point isn't to make registration a perfect process, but rather to use inevitable errors as a pretext to suppress legitimate voters. Since the Supreme Court has declared that you can do this even if there's literally no evidence that anyone in the state has fraudulently voted based on an erroneous registration, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

From little ACORNS, a multitude of excuses and narratives can grow.

Cleese On "The Funniest Palin"

By Cernig

"She's like a good looking parrot". (h/t Sully)

(Recently, Ron gave us a little bit of Cleese's poetry on the subject of politically-inclined dead parrots too.)

Yet More Lobbyist Trouble For McCain

By Cernig

Murray Waas reports that McCain's transition chief used to work closely with lobbyists who were jailed for aiding Saddam Hussain's attempts to get around international sanctions, and that Mccain's handpicked man, another lobbyist by the name of William Timmons, would have benefitted to the tune of millions had one of their deals worked out. (Hat-tip, Nicole Belle.)

I wrote on Saturday that McCain's lobbyists had played him for a patsy at the very least - or maybe it's that Mccain is a total hypocrite when he trumps up his "maverick" label as being somehow opposed to lobbyist influence over lawmakers. But either way, his own stable of lobbyists and their misadventures, into which Mccain has often been dragged, raise huge questions about his judgement and character.

Grim Prospects In Afghanistan

By Cernig

Over at The New Atlanticist, the magazine of The Atlantic Council of the United States edited by moderate conservative blogger James Joyner, there's a clear eyed appraisal of the Afghanistan occupation by Donald M. Snow, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama. I encourage everyone to read the whole thing, which is remarkable in its honesty, especiallly for appearing in America's premier support think-tank for NATO, but here's the really significant bit for me:

The Pentagon has asked for a thorough review at both the conceptual and operational levels. The conceptual part begins with a review of America’s objectives in Afghanistan. It is mind-boggling to think that any country would fight a war for seven years without knowing the objective (what it seeks to accomplish), but unfortunately such a question is not inappropriate.

What is the policitcal objective in Afghanistan? Almost everyone would agree that getting rid of Al Qaeda tops the list, as noted in the last post, but what after that? A democratic, stable Afghanistan? A surgical removal of Al Qaeda from Pashtun territories on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that leads to democratic stability in Pakistan as well? How important are each of these possible objectives to the United States? No one seems to know, or be publicly willing to discuss or defend.

The Pentagon apparently also wants to know which of these goals are achievable, particularly through the application of military force. When the question is asked this way, the prospects become especially grim.

...

How did we get into this terrible mess? The short answer is through inadequate thinking and inattention. Obama is right about taking the eye off the ball in 2001 when we might have destroyed Al Qaeda, but after that failed, we quit thinking about what to do next. Instead, we kept doing the same things that have been failing in the hopes of different outcomes. We still are, and that is not a compliment to our sagacity.

U.S. policy suffers from two major shortcomings in Afghanistan. First, we really do not know what we want to accomplish (what are the objectives?). Beyond eradicating Al Qaeda, do we really care what happens there? Your answer can lead to very different conclusions and courses of action. Second, what CAN we accomplish? The lessons of history do not encourage military adventurism in Afghanistan by outsiders. Ask the British or the Russians, or scores of others before them. The retiring British commander in Afghanistan suggested we could be there another ten years. For what?

[Emphasis mine - C]

The textbook way to military defeat in detail, even when you have overwhelming military superiority at your command, is to fritter away that superiority chasing ever-fluctuating political chimeras rather than militarily-attainable objectives. Yet after the invasions succeeded (because they were clear-cut missions winnable by a well trained and well equipped military), that's what happened. This really is the central point of criticism of Bush policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is likewise the central point in McCain's continuance of those policies. Yet seven years after the fact, we're no closer to giving the troops a mission that troops can accomplish and there's little prospect that they will be given such a mission even if they stayed ten years. Better to bring them home instead of frittering their lives and national treasure away on chimeras that cannot be won by military might.

Believing What They Want To Be True

By Cernig

Ilan Goldenberg on the Bush administration's tendency to make assumptions:

Karen DeYoung has a great article in the Washington Post about the never ending security agreement negotiations.  This particular assessment sets off all kinds of alarm bells. 

U.S. officials, uncertain of where Maliki really stands, tell themselves that ultimately he cannot afford for U.S. operations to shut down.

Basic rule about Iraq.  Whenever American officials start "telling themselves" things, instead of simply looking at the situation as it actually is, you know they're in trouble.  Officials in the Bush administration told themselves we'd be greeted as liberators.  Told themselves there was a direct connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq and that there were WMDs.  Told themselves that there was no insurgency and it was just some dead-enders.  Told themselves all kinds of things that were not confirmed by intelligence or realities on the ground.

In the last year and half things have changed with a less ideological more pragmatic crew running the show.  Both the Awakenings movement / Sons of Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire were the result of a willingness to pragmatically agreeing to work with, or at the very least tolerate, former enemies.

But from the start, the negotiations over a security arrangement have been based on assumptions that may or may not be true.  If they turn out to be wrong then the U.S. may find itself on January 1, 2009 with approximately 130,000-140,000 troops sitting in Iraq without legal protections - a potentially disastrous and untenable situation. 

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Then consider John Mccain, who seems to be dead set on staying in Iraq no matter what the Iraqis think - assuming "If we had to, we could just force it down the Iraqis throats". How disasterously wrong he could be is left as an exercise for your imagination.

Dow Closes Up Record 946 Points

By Cernig

Wow, amazing how everyone loves creeping socialism when it's their own asses on the line. Today's meteoric rise easily eclipsed the dot-com era record of 499.19 for a one day gain.

Wall Street stormed back from last week's devastating losses Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrials soaring a nearly inconceivable 936 points after major governments' plans to support the global banking system reassured distraught investors. All the major indexes rose more than 11 percent.

There were cheers and applause on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the closing bell, a