Category: US election 2008

Kissinger urges talks with Iran, no preconditions

Yesterday, Henry Kissinger once again expressed support for opening direct talks with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program, without preconditions. He did that at a forum where four other Secretaries of State– Jim Baker, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Warren Christopher– also expressed support for such talks.
Let’s hope Kissinger’s message gets home loud and clear to President and Vice-President, whose offices are just a stone’s throw from where he was speaking, at George Washington University. After all, when they invaded Iraq they were taking his advice to do that. So let’s hope that when his advice is far, far saner than that earlier piece of grave mis-advice, they also pay him good heed.
Kissinger’s espousal of talking to, rather than bombing, Iran is not new. Back in March, Bloomberg reported this:

    “One should be prepared to negotiate, and I think we should be prepared to negotiate about Iran,” Kissinger… said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. Asked whether he meant the U.S. should hold direct talks, Kissinger, 84, responded: “Yes, I think we should.”
    There has been no response so far from Iran, he said.
    “I’ve been in semi-private, totally private talks with Iranians,” he said. “They’ve had put before them approaches that with a little flexibility on their part would, in my view, surely lead to negotiations.” He didn’t elaborate on who was engaged in the talks.
    … There has been no direct contact between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution, except for talks in Baghdad on Iraqi security between their ambassadors or technical experts.
    Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said March 9 that Iran wouldn’t engage with the U.S. until President Bush’s successor is elected.

Interesting, huh?
At yesterday’s forum at GWU, Colin Powell also notably said he hadn’t yet decided who to support in the presidential race.
Time was, an endorsement from Powell would have meant a huge amount to Obama. However, Powell’s pathetic, weak-kneed performance during Bush-43’s first term has considerably dented his political “brand.”
Pity. He’s probably a nice man.

Two big crises for Washington: Financial meltdown and Af-Pak escalation

Washington’s decisionmakers are today confronted with two huge and hard-to-handle crises. On Wall Street the large brokerage firm Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson decided the US taxpayer couldn’t afford to bail it out Merrill Lynch and the insurance firm AIG are also in very bad trouble. And in Afghanistan and Pakistan, tensions between the US and anti-US forces, primarily the resurging Taliban, have escalated to a point where they now pose a serious political crisis to the broadly pro-US (and nuclear armed) government of Pakistan.
Each of these crises points out the extent to which Washington, on its own, is no longer able to exert control over aspects of international life that until recently it was easily able to dominate.
Regarding the Wall Street crisis, the actions and preferences of foreign investors– primarily those from East Asia– has been crucial. The timing Paulson’s actions regarding Lehman– where he intensively explored a number options before he finally decided not to intervene– and earlier, in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was reportedly chosen to allow him to have the maximum impact before the Asian and European stock markets opened after their weekend. One of the banks he was hoping could help bail out Lehman was Britain’s Barclay’s Bank; and one of the other chief candidates to help out was reportedly a South Korean investment entity. But he was unable to clinch any of these deals.
Meanwhile, in the single, rapidly agglomerating crisis zone that I am tempted to call Af-Pakistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US– even with its NATO allies– is quite unable, without the help of the world’s other big powers, to calm the tensions and start to resolve the deep political problems that underlie the present crises in both constituent parts of Af-Pakistan. (I made this argument, regarding Afghanistan, in this early-August CSM piece.)
Some of the most thoughtful, up-to-date, and consistent reporting on Af-Pakistan is that provided by Joshua Foust at Registan.net. Today he writes this about the latest reported US raids into Pakistan:

    I really don’t understand how the U.S. can be expected to craft an appropriately subtle policy for the area—even if CJCS Mike Mullen is at the helm (I have tremendous respect for Adm. Mullen). For one [thing]… there is the messy problem of sovereignty—like it or not, whether you agree with how it’s being handled or not, that is sovereign Pakistani territory.
    Pretending the Pakistani government has done nothing about the tribal areas is daft: at American insistence, they have lost nearly 1,000 troops trying to quell the uprising there since 2004—about double what NATO and Coalition nations have lost in Afghanistan since 2001. Though only now, since removing the odious Pervez Musharraf, has the government been trying negotiations not with the militant leaders but the few tribal leaders left alive who are willing to take a stand, these have not been given a chance to succeed. It takes time—during the war against the Faqir of Ipi from 1936-1947, the British had miserable luck even getting the local maliks to tamp down on anti-British violence, though on occasion it worked. But the Faqir was only undermined after Partition, when agitating for a Muslim State became unnecessary…

Foust very helpfully reminds us that anti-Islamabad, anti-western agitation in Pakistan’s tribal areas “is not a new problem—there is no reason to re-invent the wheel or hyperventilate while pretending it is.”

I certainly agree it’s not a new problem. However, if the tribal agitations– and also, the US’s violent over-reactions to them– succeed in seriously destabilizing the Pakistan government, then that has huge further political ramifications for the entire strategic situation in that very sensitive part of the world.
Actually, the stance and policies that the US is now adopting towards Pakistan look somewhat comparable to the stance that Israel adopted for many long decades towards Lebanon, which was also a US ally.
Both in the days when the PLO had an armed presence in Lebanon, and later, when Hizbullah grew up there, Israel would (and still does) claim the “right” to launch “punitive raids” into the country, whether under a doctrine of “hot pursuit” or some other pretext. Indeed, some of those raids sent ground forces deep inside Lebanon, where they would stay and run an occupation regime for some length of time: most famously, the 22-year occupation of the so-called “security zone” in South Lebanon.
All this though Israel prides itself on being a law-abiding nation and a US ally, and while Lebanon was also a US ally…
In Af-Pakistan, the structure of the conflict is a little different. It is the US occupation force in Afghanistan, not the Afghan government, that is undertaking the raids into Pakistan. And Pakistan is directly an ally of the US. Go figure.
This morning, the BBC reported this:

    Pakistani troops have fired shots into the air to stop US troops crossing into the South Waziristan region of Pakistan, local officials say…
    It emerged last week that US President George W Bush has in recent months authorised military raids against militants inside Pakistan without prior approval from Islamabad…
    In the latest incident, the tribesmen say they grabbed their guns and took up defensive positions after placing their women and children out of harm’s way.
    Pakistan’s army has warned that the aggressive US policy will widen the insurgency by uniting the tribesmen with the Taleban.
    Last week the army chief declared that Pakistan would defend the country’s territorial integrity at all cost, although the prime minister has since said this would have to be through diplomatic channels rather than military retaliation.

It is possible to conjecture that the US military’s current round of stepped-up operations inside Pakistan may be connected to the Bush administration’s desire to capture Osama Bin Laden before the US election, November 4. But whether that’s the case or not, the operations are certainly doing a lot to destabilize Pakistan’s already fragile governance system– while they have done nothing at all to improve a situation inside Afghanistan that the EU’s outgoing envoy has now described as “the worst since 2001.”
It is hard, at this point, to figure out how these two big crises might affect the election here in the US.
On the economy, McCain yesterday continued to insist that “the fundamentals of the US economy are strong.” He looked as though he was trying to run on a bit of an anti-Wall Street, populist platform? Obama, more seriously and more plausibly called the fall of both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression” of the 1930s.
He also took the opportunity to criticize McCain’s broader economic philosophy:

    “It’s a philosophy we’ve had for the last eight years — one that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”
    “It’s a philosophy that says even common sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises…”

Not a lot of detail there yet on the specifics of how Obama would deal with the country’s roiling financial instability. However, he has given enough specifics about his tax policy and other aspects of economic governance to show he has a good grasp of how the economy actually works. (Unlike McCain.)
On Af-Pakistan, Obama’s has been quite clear for many months now that he supports the use of US military power against suspected terrorist targets inside Pakistan, even without gaining the permission of Islamabad.
This is just one of the ways in which, as Dan Eggen writes in today’s Wapo, “Bush’s overseas policies [have begun] resembling Obama’s.”
Eggen writes that Obama’s aides say that some of the recent foreign-policy moves Bush has taken

    complicate matters for McCain, who is more hawkish than his opponent on issues including the crisis in Georgia and the war in Iraq.
    “What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction,” said Rand Beers, who.. is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. “The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don’t think is the way he conceived of his campaign.”

But the Af-Pakistan situation– like the Wall Street crisis– could still get a lot worse in the six weeks between now and the election. At a first guess, that would seem to be bad for McCain’s chances, and good for Obama. Except that in a situation of acute foreign-policy crisis, US voters might well show a strong tendency to seek a sense of security from a “trusted, older white guy” person.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened here…

Palin’s performance: Insulting and very scary

McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-president is an insult to all American voters, regardless of gender. It also raises the disturbing prospect– in the event she becomes President– that the country would once again, as through much of the past eight years, be effectively ruled not by the elected president but by a group of unaccountable people who operate in the shadows around the White House.
The depth of the insult that McCain’s choice of Palin represents to the American people was revealed even more clearly yesterday in the clips that ABC News aired of the interview that Charlie Gibson conducted with her earlier in the day. (Partial transcript here. You can also see the video on that ABC News site.)
The interview showed a tightly scripted, generally extremely controlled woman who was nonetheless quite unable to answer a question about one of the principal strategic issues our country faces– whether in fact the President should continue to claim, as President Bush did in his National Security Strategy of 2002, that the US has the right to engage in “preventive” military action whenever it perceives a threat might arise. Asked about this by Gibson, Palin blustered and shifted uneasily in her seat as she tried to avoid revealing her ignorance of what the ‘Bush Doctrine’ actually is. The incident is recorded on page 4 of the transcript.

Continue reading “Palin’s performance: Insulting and very scary”

Women discuss Sarah Palin

So I was at the checkout counter in our great locally owned foodstore here in Charlottesville this morning, and I bumped into Deborah McDowell, a chaired prof in the University of Virginia’s rightly lauded English department. Debbie is an uber-talented African-American woman of commanding presence. After we said hi, I remarked how depressing it has been trying to deal with the emergence of Sarah Palin. She said she completely agreed. And as we stood there continuing to talk about the outrageous way Palin and other Repubs laid into Obama last week, the checkout clerk (female, white, over 40) joined in too.
We walked on out of the store. Debbie was asking, in her great English prof’s voice, “just how stupid can the American people be if they fall for this nonsense, after all that we’ve seen from Bush for eight years, and they elect just a continuation of the same thing… ?” Another woman, whom neither of us knew, (white, around 40?) walked over, cappuccino cup in hand, and joined in. She asked a question of fact– “Isn’t it true, though, that the Democrats have been in charge in Congress for the past two years?– that we tried to address. Later, I said one of the things I really resented was how Sarah had explicitly, from the get-go, tried to expropriate the feminist “mantle” from Hillary Clinton, whereas the policies she and McCain espouse on issues of particular relevance to women, including but certainly not limited to the right to choose to abort an early-term fetus, are deeply, deeply, anti-female.
Our new friend agreed completely with that, and said that– though she’s a little fed up with the raucousness of some of the Obama supporters around here– she does intend to vote for him. Because of the way she had asked the question at the beginning, she struck me as a thoughtful person.
All in all, an interesting conversation. Not a representative sample of anything, but indicative that there are still plenty of women around who have not been bamboozled by all the evident flair, the feistiness, and fol-de-rol of Sarah Palin.

Palin and the 3 a.m. phone call

I have long experienced at first hand the way that some men try to belittle and exclude women in public life through aggressive and often painful forms of name-calling and public humiliation.
I have also, certainly, heard “white” men– and women– use similar forms of name-calling to belittle, humiliate, and exclude African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, gay people, and even occasionally Jewish people from the public discourse. When I, as a straight, “white” woman hear such appeals to a supposed ethnic or straightnik solidarity that the perpetrators imagine I might share with them, it is sometimes a challenge to know how to respond. What I always like to do in such circumstances– and certainly try to do– is draw a clear line by saying I find such language offensive and don’t want to stick around to hear it.
I actually don’t hang around a lot with people who say such ugly things. And it’s been a long, long time since any guys of my acquaintance used language around me that was openly demeaning to women.
Maybe that’s largely a function of my selection of companions.
So what does it tell us about VP candidate Sarah Palin that, as Governor of Alaska already, she would

    (a) agree to go on a radio show run by two guys who had built their audience precisely by throwing demeaning language around very freely, and
    (b) during the on-air interview, after they have called another leader in the state’s Republican politics both a “cancer” and a “bitch”, she would do nothing but give a nervous little giggle before assuring them warmly that she has enjoyed being on the show with them?

I have found all the reports of Palin’s behavior on that occasion– as ably presented here by Juan Cole– extremely disturbing.
Even without taking into consideration that the political rival in question, the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green, is herself a cancer survivor. Though of course that makes it a lot worse. (And we should surely assume that Palin knew of Green’s health status at the time.)
In Juan’s post there, he also adds a clip from a GOP fundraiser earlier this year when a woman very loudly asks John McCain — in relation to, I imagine, Hillary Clinton– “How are we going to beat the bitch?”… and there are prolonged and loud guffaws of complicity all round, including from John McCain.
Both incidents tell us a lot about these two people who aspire to lead our country.
Neither of them drew any lines in the sand at all against the public use of such hateful language. Both seemed to me to be a little embarrassed by their interlocutors’ use of the B-word. But that didn’t stop eithert of them from laughing at it. And most importantly, neither of them did anything at all, right there and then, to dissociate themselves from the general idea that such language is quite acceptable and “okay” to use in pubic political discourse.
Palin reportedly, later, issued a public apology to Green. (But it may have been of the exculpatory form that “I am sorry if Ms. Green took offense at what was said”… blaming the victim for her reaction, rather than the perpetrators for their hate-fueled boorishness.)
But how about her reaction at the time, which came across like a couple of short bursts of possibly nervous giggling?
She didn’t stand up to her interviewers then at all. Not one iota. She giggled along with them.
John McCain is not a young man. If Palin becomes president, is she the kind of person we want answering the 3 a.m. phone calls when there’s an international crisis?
Not her. And not McCain either, for reasons too numerous to mention.

“Resolution”: Palin’s goal in Iraq

McCain’s VP pick Sarah Palin has left almost no record at all of having said or thought anything about foreign affairs. However, Matt Yglesias found this audio record of her saying, just a couple of weeks ago, that what the US seeks in Iraq is “resolution.” H’mm. Could actually mean any number of things.
She also says that, since her oldest son, a 19-year-old, is due to ship out to Iraq on Sept. 11, that she doesn’t know what the plan is, “to end the war that we’re engaged in… Let’s make sure we have a plan here… Respecting Senator McCain’s position on that.” (Biden’s son, a much more mature member of the Delaware National Guard, is due to ship out sometime soon. Actually, Biden’s son is about the same age as Sarah Palin and has a lot more government experience than she does.)
Her uncertainty that Bush has a plan for Iraq is expressed loud and clear!
But what is this “resolution” she seeks there? On its own it’s a totally non-specific term.
Could it mean, “To demonstrate the US’s resolution, and power?” I doubt it. Been there, done the shock and awe. Shocked a lot of people and was truly awful. But mainly, it ended up demonstrating (and increasing) the US’s weakness, not its strength.
Could it mean, “To find some kind of a resolution of the intra-Iraqi and US-Iraqi differences, as as to allow a graceful exit?” Maybe. But, um, Sarah, Bush has been trying to do that for five years now, and hasn’t succeeded.
Could it mean, “To get out fairly fast and find ‘resolution’ that way?” In the context of her mentioning her own son, it certainly sounds as though it could mean that, too.
But what it doesn’t really seem to bear any plausible relation to is McCain’s plan to stay in Iraq “as long as it takes.” I guess the old guy will be educating her pretty fast on the campaign’s poarty line.
I can’t wait to see her and Biden debating.

Perriello and Goode in Charlottesville

Today, the two candidates for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District had their first sustained public exchange of views. I made a point of going along to the forum, which was held in the large, nicely funded Senior Center just north of Charlottesville. And I was confirmed in my judgment that our Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, is a dangerous, mean-spirited man who needs to be defeated. But I also came away with some questions about the approach being followed by the Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Tom Perriello.
Here are the main things I noted at the 90-minute forum:

    1. The degree to which Pres. George W. Bush’s record was not a big part of the discussion.

Goode, quite understandably, didn’t make many mentions of Bush at all. (And when he was asked about the tensions with Iran, he seemed eager to distance himself from Bush. He said he thought the President should make a point of having broad consultation before imposing any blockade on Iran, and should not pursue a “go-it-alone” policy. H’mm. I wish he’d fought for that same position during the build-up to the war on Iraq, too.,)
But for his part, Perriello wasn’t trying to position himself as running against the Bush legacy, either. I would have thought that in most of the Fifth District, which stretches from Charlottesville a long way south to the state line with North Carolina, and which includes numerous very economically depressed communities, running against the Bush legacy would have been an attractive thing to do… As would be noting that Goode has voted almost in lockstep with Bush on virtually every issue… As would noting the truly massive amounts of taxpayers’ money that Bush has shoveled into the horrendously wrong-headed invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Perriello made almost no mention of any of these things. And get this: where he did refer to the failed legacy of Bush, he nearly always twinned this by referring to an equally failed legacy of Pres. Clinton, as well.
I found that stunning. I do, certainly, have many criticisms of what Clinton did during his eight years in office. But to put those failures on a par with Bush’s failures, as Tom did? That boggles both logic and the imagination.
Thus, for example, he said nothing about the fact that Clinton had balanced the budget and was poised to start bringing down the national debt– until Bush came along and with his completely unfunded wars plunged the country back into deep deficits again.

    2. The readiness that Goode showed to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment as part of his campaign.

He made the quite unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a big part of the health-care crisis in this country and argued for their summary deportation, the building of a huge wall system all along the border with Mexico, and an end to the phenomenon of “anchor babies.” Not clear how he proposed dealing with these squealing bundles of joy. Quite clear: the mean-spiritedness with which he showed himself ready to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for his own political gain.

    3. The degree to which Perriello was positioning himself as a certain kind of a “post-partisan” politician.

It wasn’t just those unfair references he made to the Clinton legacy, it was also the whole (extremely long-drawn-out) self-narrative that he presented. He described himself as belonging to– or “representing”? not clear– the second generation after the cohort that he and many Americans have taken to calling, in somewhat maudlin fashion, the “Greatest Generation”. (What Jim Crow?) So he talked quite a bit about his grandparents and their sterling qualities… And then, he said that many members of the next generation after theirs– he didn’t get personal about his parents here– had had a quite wrongheaded belief in the power of government to solve social and economic ills.
I found that critique outrageous. There was nothing there about the value of the civil rights movement– no mention of the civil rights movement, at all! That, here in Central Virginia, remember. Nothing about Medicare and Social Security– even though there in the Senior Center you had a clear majority of attendees at the forum who were the lucky beneficiaries of Medicare. Nothing about Head Start or any of the other great social programs of the 1960s, the era of belief in the possibility of a “Great Society.”
And then, he said, along came his generation, which did not believe that government could solve all the country’s problems but instead sought to make a difference through private entrepreneurship and work in non-profit organizations. (I’d bet that most of Tom’s income since he graduated Yale Law School in 2001 has come from inter-governmental or governmental funds, one way or another?)
He never did explain to my satisfaction how it was he made the transition from not believing that government has a significant role in solving social problems to thinking that he, personally, should run for political office. But evidently, that transition got made.
Tom’s positioning of himself as “post-partisan” in the way that he did made me distinctly uneasy. Not only because he really seemed not to have thought very deeply about many of those issues there, but also because I’d be very worried if Barack Obama shared this particular version of post-partisanship.
How can a person just blow off the whole experience of the Great Society– and also, by implication, the New Deal before that– and expect to have something useful to propose regarding the mounting social and economic difficulties this country faces? Does Tom Perriello think they can all be addressed through the work of private entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations? That would be a very dangerous position to hold, indeed.
Tom’s version of post-partisanship also seemed, at some points, to be related to a slightly vacuous self-referentiality. Especially in his opening comments, which were all about him and his place in his “three generation” scheme. Yes, he did make a passing reference there to having “a seven-point plan” for dealing with the country’s woes– but he never once told us what those seven points were! Ah, maybe he should have sent us to this page, on his campaign website.
Well, in the lengthy Q&A session, he was a lot better, and he generally gave answers that were sensible and thoughtful…. though he did get a little bellicose in talking about the need to “win America’s wars.”
Also of note in the forum: Both candidates made a number of references to the need to achieve “energy independence”, and to the dangers of “borrowing from the Chinese.” Two misleading memes there? Both also indicated some opposition to NAFTA.
Goode positioned himself as extremely anti-taxation (as well as anti-immigrant). At one point, right at the end, he made the outrageous claim that Obama “wants to send $845 billion” of US revenues to low-income countries.
Excuse me?
But Goode also, intriguingly, seemed to be predicting (or threatening?) that Obama would win the presidential race, when he used the argument that Virginians would benefit from having a strong Republican representation in congress to keep Obama in check.
I found the whole forum fascinating, though a little bit depressing. (Goode’s diatribes against immigrants got a disturbing amount of applause from the crowd. This, despite our city’s reputation as being a huge blob of liberals stuck at one end of a socially conservative district.) Still, there is something really important about having a constituency-based electoral system, where the people who represent you in the legislature have to come back to their districts each time there’s an election and stand face-to-face with their constituents. The political “representation” involved just seems so much more direct in this system than in a broad, nationwide p.r. system.
Anyway, if Tom Perriello reads this, I hope he (you) takes my remarks as an invitation to further discussion on some of these issues. I know that back in October, I also criticized some aspects of Tom’s “post-partisanship”. After that, I had a good, 40-minute discussion with him in the home of a neighbor. But I’m still concerned about his eagerness to criticize the work of earlier “generations” of Democrats.
Here’s a suggestion. Wouldn’t a stronger and more principled way to be “post-partisan” be to express appreciation of the work of some prominent members of the other party– as Obama has, with Chuck Hagel and even with some of his references to Ronald Reagan– rather than to feel you have to beat up on earlier “generations” of people from your own party?
Actually, I think that’s one key difference between Perriello’s version of post-partisanship and Barack Obama’s. That, and the fact that Obama seems to have a much more textured, informed, and realistic view of the role of (good) government in society. That view perhaps derived in large part from the direct, hands-on experience Obama gained working as a community organizer for low-income and other marginalized communities in Chicago, in his 20s.
Perriello has had only a little experience of doing work comparable to that– and most of that was in the distinctly “bwana-ish” situation of working in western-dominated institutions in West Africa and Afghanistan. But even in those situations, does he honestly think the dire social ills he witnessed could be solved just by private entrepreneurs and non-profits– and without the peoples of those countries finding a way to resolve their countries’ very deep-seated problems of governance? So far, he hasn’t given us any indication he has thought deeply about those issues, at all…

Obama on Palestine and Iran

During his time in Israel/Palestine, Obama made two important statements. On Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy he reaffirmed his longer-standing pledge to “make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a key diplomatic priority” when he said,

    ”My goal is to make sure that we work starting from the minute I’m sworn in to office to try to find some breakthroughs.”

That is excellent news.
He also made the much more Delphic comment that ““A nuclear Iran would be a game-changing situation not just in the Middle East but around the world.”
What, pray, does this mean?
It sounds somewhat threatening, but has no immediate meaning.
The NYT’s Jeff Zeleny (link above) also had these snippets about what Obama said on Iran:

    “Iranians need to understand that, whether it’s the Bush administration or an Obama administration, that this is a paramount concern to the United States.”
    … [H]e was left to defend a proposal he made a year ago to negotiate with Iran. He said he would “take no options off the table” to persuade that country’s leaders not to develop nuclear weapons.
    “My whole goal,” he said, “in terms of having tough, serious direct diplomacy is not because I’m naïve about the nature of any of these regimes. I’m not. It is because if we show ourselves willing to talk and to offer carrots and sticks in order to deal with these pressing problems — and if Iran then rejects any overtures of that sort — it puts us in a stronger position to mobilize the international community to ratchet up pressure on Iran.”
    Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, suggested that Mr. Obama had reversed a position he took a year ago when he said he was willing to meet with Iranian leaders without preconditions. For months, Mr. Obama has struggled to explain consistently about whether — and how — he would sit down with rogue leaders.

As I’ve noted numerous times, the “taking no options off the table” (or, “leaving all the options on the table”) rhetoric is militaristic and escalatory.
Since Obama is not the US president, no position he expresses about options and tables has any operational force at all, anyway. So rather than engaging in empty chest-thumping,wouldn’t it be much better for him simply sto tate that Iran’s nuclear program is a cause for strong concern, and that he will seek– or even, “aggressively” seek– a resolution to the impasse with Iran that ensures that these concerns can be allayed and the important principles of the NPT upheld while avoiding any actions that would undermine the security of the US and its friends and allies around the world?
Regarding Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, his vow to work on it “from Day One” is important and valuable.
As The Nation‘s John Nichols noted here, the key shortcoming of the peace diplomacies pursued by Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush was that both president fatally delayed real engagement in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy until the very last months of their presidencies.
Both instances of prolonged delay proved extremely damaging. In Clinton’s case, within the first nine months of his presidency he was handed the Oslo deal, already completed, on a silver platter by the Norwegians… But with the clear requirement (as stipulated in its terms) that further US diplomacy would be needed to nail down the final status peace agreement between the two sides that, Oslo declared, should be completed by May of 1999.
Did Clinton roll up his sleeves and immediately set to work on that? No, he did not. Taking the advice of the ubiquitous Dennis Ross, he dallied and dawdled, and diddled his time away concerning himself with ever smaller subsets and subsets of subsets of the real issue… Until US diplomats found themselves investing huge amounts of time and energy on trying to figure out– within what was still only an interim arrangement— which portion of a certain downtown street in Hebron should be used by Israelis on which days of the week, and which by Palestinians.
What time-wasting!
Clinton was the one responsible for that entire peacemaking “strategy” (or lack of one.) But as he did so, he was relying on the “expert” advice of Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk.
Meanwhile, the Israelis continued to pour concrete and people into their ever-growing settlement project in Greater East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. The number of settlers just about doubled between Oslo and the end of the 1990s. Palestinian frustration grew; and violence started escalating among both Israelis and Palestinians.
That’s why it’s particularly depressing to learn that listed as one of Obama’s key advisers on the Middle East we now have none other than– Dennis Ross, who came over to his campaign with some of the others from the failed Hillary campaign.
Maybe Dennis has seen the light and can get seriously behind a “From Day One” commitment to finalizing the Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement?
I hope so. But I’m not holding my breath…
But anyway, it’s not nearly as certain now as it was back in 1993 that the US can still be the Numero Uno peace-brokering supremo in the region… Probably, some other, broader and more politically legitimate model for peace-brokering will be needed going forward.

Obama and Maliki, face to face

They met today in the Green Zone.
That Reuters report has no further details. But it notes that Obama,

    has also welcomed a suggestion by Maliki that a timetable be set for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

So now, the US is in a particularly 21st-century kind of situation in Iraq. Not only is our government able to influence Iraqi politics, but the Iraqi government understands that it can influence ours. And equally importantly, beyond the realms of government, non-governmental individuals and citizen groups in each country have a voice in the global discourse and can communicate with each other as well as with their own governments. (As I noted, e.g., here.)
Governments can no longer monopolize border-crossing discussions of border-crossing issues.
Memo to George W. Bush and all other military adventurists: We are no longer in the 19th century! No nation, western or other, can any longer undertake military adventures outside its own borders and count on covering up the huge human and other costs of that adventure!
Deal with it. Start treating the Iraqis and all their neighbors as equal humans, equal nations, and start the negotiations required to exit the Iraqi sinkhole in a safe and sustainable manner as soon as possible.

Uh-Oh-Bama!

The candidate was reported as saying in Florida today:

    “[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel and Israel is always justified in making decisions that will provide for its security.”

Looks to me like ways too blank of a check.
No qualifications there, Senator? How about this: “Like any country, Israel is justified in making any legitimate decisions that will provide for its security.”
Words matter. Especially when they’re inscribed on blank checks.

    Update Sunday a.m.:
    Please note that in my critique above I haven’t even touched on the factual basis behind Obama’s assertion that “[T]here is no doubt that Iran poses an extraordinary threat to Israel.” I wanted to focus on the operational part of the sentence. But the operational part is evidently logically linked to the antecedent assertion, even though not strictly entailed by it.
    Regarding the factual assertion, it is quite simply incorrect. I am just one of many hundreds or even thousands of analysts of regional strategic affairs who judges that there is considerable doubt that Iran poses any “extraordinary” threat to Israel, let alone any threat of a gravity that would justify Israel starting a regional war to “prevent” or “pre-empt” it. Indeed, several strategic analysts in Israel itself, including former intel chief Efraim Halevy, judge that Israel could even live with a nuclear-armed Iran (though there is no evidence yet that that that is what the mullahs are actually aiming for.)
    Also extremely relevant here– though never mentioned by Obama or other leading members of the US political elite– is, as always, Israel’s own current possession of extremely robust nuclear weapons, whether fully assembled or just one step away from being so. Those give it, of course, considerable deterrent capability.