The Broad View

Afghanistan Outpost

Our endless floundering in the Afghan quagmire is finally commanding some attention. Miraculously, it's taken only eight years for the American public to realize that something is gravely amiss with our Central Asian Adventure. In his latest NYTimes column, Bob Herbert compares Obama's escalation in Afghanistan to Johnson's in Vietnam and concludes that both presidents listened to the wrong advisors:

President Obama is being told (as Lyndon Johnson was told about Vietnam) that more resources will do the trick in Afghanistan — more troops, more materiel, more money.

Supporters of the war offer an array of rationales in a way that reminds me of Bush's constantly mutating excuses for the Iraq invasion: Every explanation carefully avoids the real, bedrock motivation for our occupation of a hostile country.

After all the huffing and puffing about Iraq's imaginary WMD, Saddam's imaginary ties to al Qaeda, Saddam's insanity, the regime's cruelty and oppression, establishing viral democracy in the region and more, the real reason for our invasion of Iraq was as obvious as it was unspoken.

When Dick Cheney pored over maps of the Iraqi oil fields with petroleum company executives during the secret meetings of his Energy Task Force, all was clear. When our military forces in Baghdad guarded the Oil Ministry while ignoring the looting at the National Museum, it was clear that file cabinets were vital security objectives but the priceless heritage of early civilization was expendable. Securing the Iraqi oil fields was our strategic objective in the first resource war of the 21st century and establishing massive permanent bases and a friendly puppet government was how we'd do it.

Afghanistan started differently. We had legitimate objectives at first --  the capture of bin Laden and the destruction of al Qaeda's network of training camps and safe havens in the country. Once we'd botched that, the stage was set for what we have now -- a prolonged and ineffectual occupation in an increasingly hostile environment. Nevertheless, we're establishing massive bases and protecting a puppet government that, more and more, is unfriendly.

So why are we still there? Of course, we're saving face. God forbid that we have to tuck our tails between our legs and accept ignoble retreat, defeated by a bunch of violent country bumpkins in a repeat of the Soviet debacle. But again, mostly bogus excuses abound. We're saving the Afghanis from the oppressive Taliban, whether or not they want to be saved. We're watering the seeds of democracy in Central Asia, despite propping up a rampantly corrupt regime with no support outside Kabul. We're fighting the scourge of opium, even though the poppy fields are once again blooming abundantly after a hiatus under the Taliban. (Interestingly, the Taliban originally banned opium production under Sharia law, but now they embrace the trade as a way to raise both cash and allies in the countryside.)

Afghanistan looks like a dry hole in terms of our strategic interests, yet Obama is doubling down. Perhaps the answer lies next door. Our bases in Afghanistan are the launchpads for invasion should events take a very bad turn in Pakistan. I can't imagine any other reason to put the spurs to this conflict.

Bush made a precedent of "pre-emptive" war in Iraq and now Obama seems to agree that it's a good idea in Afghanistan. Thus we're drawn deeper and deeper into both real and potential conflicts in countries and cultures where our understanding is shallow at best. And nobody talks about it.

We persist in believing that we must police the entire globe through the vast network of military outposts we've established and pay for with money that might otherwise be used for universal health care, investment in modern infrastructure, R&D in energy, medicine, climate control and more. Will we ever, as a nation, grow up?

[Cross-posted at The Followspot.]

Obama faces first diplomatic crisis

Will it become puppygate?

An association in Peru that promotes a breed of hairless canine has offered the Obama family a pure-bred pup, and it's hard to see what excuse the President-elect can make to turn down the pooch. Can he come out and say "Thanks but no thanks" without causing an international incident? Can he accept the dog without causing an uproar at home? A hairless dog is quite the opposite of the Goldendoodle the family is said to favor.

The delicacy with which Obama handles this test (not quite the sort of thing Joe Biden had in mind, I expect) may give us a deep insight into how he will handle future diplomatic outreach to friend and foe alike.

To be fair to the breed, a grown Peruvian Hairless would seem to be a handsome and elegant dog. The puppy version, at least the one pictured in the Daily Telegraph article linked above, is most definitely neither.

See also...

Uh-oh!

Well, the only poll that matters has been taken, the only vote that counts has been cast.

The Alien has endorsed McCain. Obama should just concede the election right now and save us all time and money.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a shocking reversal, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain.

With major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker the Alien has changed his endorsement amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Yes, it's true. The Alien has been mesmerized by Cindy McCain's eerily transparent eyeballs and was last seen cavorting with Mrs. McCain in a hot-tub.

Also abuzz are the Village Elders who have been rendered incoherent by the revelations. While they are properly scandalized by Cindy's dalliance with the Alien -- Sally Quinn has vowed to strike the hussy from her guest list -- they are simultaneously overjoyed that Favorite Son and former Maverick John McCain will be their next club president. The Washington Post reports that David Broder, Dean of the Undead, will postpone his embalming to attend the Inaugural Balls.

Weekly World News editors remain cautious in their predictions:

What impact this news will have on the election has yet to be determined. Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Do we have a "Plan B"?

Chart: NYTimes

I'm starting to hum "Remember My Forgotten Man" and "Blue Skies" and screen all those Depression-era films in my head.

I guess the big bailout package wasn't the be-all and end-all, after all. But wait! There may be some hope...

Here's Krugman and he's pretty shrill:

The response to this downward spiral on the part of the world’s two great monetary powers — the United States, on one side, and the 15 nations that use the euro, on the other — has been woefully inadequate. [...]

The United States should have been in a much stronger position. And when Mr. Paulson announced his plan for a huge bailout, there was a temporary surge of optimism. But it soon became clear that the plan suffered from a fatal lack of intellectual clarity. Mr. Paulson proposed buying $700 billion worth of “troubled assets” — toxic mortgage-related securities — from banks, but he was never able to explain why this would resolve the crisis.

What he should have proposed instead, many economists agree, was direct injection of capital into financial firms: The U.S. government would provide financial institutions with the capital they need to do business, thereby halting the downward spiral, in return for partial ownership. When Congress modified the Paulson plan, it introduced provisions that made such a capital injection possible, but not mandatory. And until two days ago, Mr. Paulson remained resolutely opposed to doing the right thing.

The British, Krugman explains, are taking the lead and doing just that: injecting ₤50 billion with interbank transaction guarantees. Hopefully, Europe and the U.S. will get on board with similar and coordinated plans.

They will have the opportunity this weekend with two important meetings scheduled of top international financial officials on Friday and the annual IMF/World Bank meeting the following two days. Krugman warns that they must seize this chance to forge a global rescue plan that they agree upon in principle, at least.

What should be done? The United States and Europe should just say “Yes, prime minister.” The British plan isn’t perfect, but there’s widespread agreement among economists that it offers by far the best available template for a broader rescue effort.

And the time to act is now. You may think that things can’t get any worse — but they can, and if nothing is done in the next few days, they will.

What if the whole world could vote?

London's Economist asks, "What if the whole world could vote?" and to provide a response to the question has set up a "Global Electoral College." There's an interactive results map and an opportunity for you to cast your vote for Obama or for McCain.

The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world's countries (including the United States) a say in the election's outcome. As in America, each country has been allocated a minimum of three electoral-college votes with extra votes allocated in proportion to population size. With over 6.5 billion people enfranchised, the result is a much larger electoral college of 9,875 votes. But rally your countrymen—a nation must have at least ten individual votes in order to have its electoral-college votes counted.

There are few countries whose votes in the Global Electoral College are a foregone conclusion. So the winner is unlikely to be decided by a small number of "swing countries". Rather, they will have to cobble together a coalition of small, medium and large nations. (A campaign stop in Beijing is recommended, as well as a tour of Africa.) Voting in the Global Electoral College will close at midnight London time on November 1st, when the candidate with most electoral-college votes will be declared the winner.

Maybe the authors of the idea really believed that the winner "will have to cobble together a coalition." One also might have thought that the readers of The Economist would be tilted toward McCain. Neither assumption proves true, at least as far as the map stands now.

It's all blue...except for Georgia and Macedonia, and the latter is merely "leaning" in McCain's favor.

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine to 1960...

As I listened to McCain and Obama duke it out last night over what to do about Georgia, I had a queasy sense of déja vu. Is it already 48 years ago that one of the rallying cries in the second debate between Nixon and Kennedy was "Quemoy and Matsu"? I was still a kid at the time, but somehow I remember thinking that Quemoy and Matsu must have been terribly important if the Vice President and this new guy got so excited over it.

The issue of the PRC's perennial mischief in the Strait of Taiwan, where the ROC-claimed islands of Matsu and the Quemoy group are located, lives on today but is hardly the Rubicon of Asia-Pacific geopolitics. In the 1960 presidential debate, Nixon pressed Kennedy to commit to using nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy and Matsu against the PRC. Get that? Nuclear war over a couple of islands that most Americans probably couldn't locate on a map.

Russell Baker, the incomparable Times columnist, recalled the demagoguery over Quemoy and Matsu in discussing its similarities to the issue of Nicaragua in 1985:

There hasn't been so much posturing and braying about so little since 1960. That was the year John F. Kennedy and Vice President Nixon managed to spend a big part of an entire Presidential campaign flailing at each other about Quemoy and Matsu.

Everybody remembers Quemoy and Matsu, I hope, because there isn't enough space in this column - or in this entire newspaper, for that matter - to explain why the future of humanity hung on the outcome of the Quemoy-and-Matsu situation. You had to be there.

And if you were there, of course, you probably can't believe - now that you think about it - that grown Presidential candidates really thought Quemoy and Matsu were important.

Baker could have written that this morning. He knew the same minefield was laid around both Quemoy/Matsu and Nicaragua: No one wanted to be accused of being "soft on communism."

Flash forward to 2008. Now no presidential candidate dare be accused of being "soft on Putin." Same thing.

Obama's response last night to McCain's goading over Georgia was much like Kennedy's over Quemoy and Matsu: measured and realistic. McCain was channeling Nixon. Nixon had accused Kennedy of "wooly thinking" of the kind that led to the Korean War and predicted that any flexibility on our part would open the door to the invasion of the ROC.

We know what happened. Kennedy won the election and the issue of Quemoy and Matsu died down outside the glare of presidential election politics.

Does anyone believe that 48 years from today our grandchildren will remember Russia's smackdown of Georgia? Is brinksmanship with Putin -- as opposed to hard but realistic bargaining -- the better course? Do we still believe in the domino theory?

Hey, anybody remember the Missile Gap? Not one of JFK's better moments in the '60 campaign. Demagoguery can be a two-way street.

[Photo: Al Rodgers, DKos]

Bastille Day

Vive la France!

(Aside: How come all the Germans at Rick's went to Yale?)

Chronicles of America in the 21st Century

Another step taken down the road to quivering paranoia, thanks to a State Dept. run by Bush men afraid of bushmen:

Three West African bushmen recruited to build a mud-hut village at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia have been denied visas because officials say the men were poor, didn't speak English and failed to convince them that their visit only would be temporary.

Museum director John Avoli said museum officials were heartbroken.

"They were denied because they were considered poor dirt farmers who lived in mud huts and can't speak English and supposedly have no business in America," Avoli said.

"No business in America." That would seem to be the new slogan of Fortress America, land of the spied-upon and home of the pissing in their pants over the darkies.

The U.S. consular official in Nigeria, Debra Heien, explained that not only were two of the bushmen "not able to make a living," but that one "couldn't properly explain the building project" and one didn't fill out his visa forms properly. 

Imagine that. I wonder if Ms. Heien would be able to make a living if she landed in an Igbo village. Never mind. The State Dept. obviously considers the bushmen a little too authentic to land in Virginia, unless it's the Virginia of 1808 and the men are in shackles.

Ms. Heien did offer this hope in a letter to Sen. John Warner (R-Va), whose staff had attempted to get the ruling reversed:

"Should the applicants decide to apply again, they must make appointments using our on-line appointment system."

Do the Igbo have WiFi?

Tools of the Trade

The corruptions of political speech are legion and never-ending. Caesar Bush has grounded his deceptions in the language of the CEO, the accountant, the technocratic fixer. Today's corrupted word is "tools". Here's Caesar Bush in his radio address last Saturday, explaining why he vetoed the intelligence authorization bill:

[...] Al Qaida remains determined to attack America again. Two years ago, Osama bin Laden warned the American people, "Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished." Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists.

Unfortunately, Congress recently sent me an intelligence authorization bill that would diminish these vital tools. So today, I vetoed it. And here is why:

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror -- the CIA program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives. [...]

Caesar changes it up with "techniques", "procedures" and "methods" -- it's all so antiseptic and professional. Americans should never need to think about the blood, the vomit, the urine and feces, the sweat of one-on-one terror practiced by our government representatives on captives who've been effectively removed from the face of the earth and hidden from the eyes of the law. Let's be clear. Here are the tools of the trade:

Rest assured, the CIA isn't the only government agency in need of more and better tools. In an earlier broadcast from what the Times calls "Radio Fear America," Bush castigated the House for delaying passage of the "Gut the Fourth Amendment Protect America Act":

The Senate passed a good bill that would have given our intelligence professionals the tools they need to keep us safe. But leaders in the House of Representatives blocked a House vote on the Senate bill, and then left on a 10-day recess.

Some congressional leaders claim that this will not affect our security. They are wrong. Because Congress failed to act, it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attack. At midnight, the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad. This means that as terrorists change their tactics to avoid our surveillance, we may not have the tools we need to continue tracking them -- and we may lose a vital lead that could prevent an attack on America. [...]

At this moment, somewhere in the world, terrorists are planning a new attack on America. And Congress has no higher responsibility than ensuring we have the tools to stop them.

Oh. My. God. Quick! Take my rights and keep me safe! For the tools of the NSA's trade, start here. After browsing there, you could try a (monitored) phone query to AT&T about that secret room in San Francisco.

Of all the contemptible aspects of the Bush Regime, the complete and total Orwellian corruption of language ranks up near the top in my opinion. The Clinton campaign tends to indulge in the same "up-is-down" equivocating and distortion. Every time I hear a patently false proposition from Hillary or her minions -- "this state isn't important" or "I have foreign policy experience" -- they pound another nail in the coffin of her arguments to be our president.

Irony Lost, or Travels With Condi

Do they even hear what they're saying?

Rice worried by Putin's broad powers

By Matthew Lee, Associated Press Writer

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

Hmmm...Amassing central authority? Check. Power-grab? Check. No countervailing institutions? Check. Problematic for democratic development? Check. Too much concentration of power in the White House, oops, I mean Kremlin? Check. Doubts about the independence of the judiciary, electronic media and the Congress Duma? Check, check and check.

We're nowhere near Russia in the deterioration of our democracy, but we're surely on the slippery downward slope. Is Rice so committed to being Bush's helpmate that she doesn't recognize all the signs as described by her own staff?

[The State Department's] most recent human-rights report on Russia notes continuing centralization of power in the Kremlin, a compliant legislature, political pressure on the judiciary, intolerance of ethnic minorities, corruption and selectivity in enforcement of the law, and media restrictions and self-censorship.

Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates received a "chilly reception" from Putin and senior Russian officials. We've been proposing a cooperative missile defense system in Eastern Europe to which the Russians are "vehemently" opposed. So first we push a plan we know they won't accept and then we lecture them on how they're messing up democracy. Brilliant.

Condi wasn't finished there. She also met with a number of Russian rights activists. They weren't quite so diplomatically stolid in the face of her hypocritical hectoring:

"Not all is ideal in America, either. We see protests against the war in Iraq and violations of human rights on the part of security services and violations of human rights in countering terrorism," Brod said.

Vladimir Lukin, the government-appointed human rights ombudsman, was quoted by Interfax as saying he told Rice that human rights should be discussed in a dialogue rather lecturing in a "doomsday" style.

I think only good manners kept the Russians from laughing in Condi's face. This is the woman who was hired for her toadying expertise in Russian affairs -- at a time when Russia was on the back burner. Now she finally has a chance to show her stuff and she delivers blush-worthy bromides. And this is the insider we're counting on to hold the line against Cheney's Iran ambitions? We're screwed.