Category Archives: The World

Who throws a shoe?

Actually, that Austin Powers quote has little to do with the point of this post — although it was a weird thing to do, a la Random Task….

What I do mean to point out is the fact that across the Mideast, the "Arab Street" was out en masse demonstrating in favor of the guy who did his utmost (by Middle Eastern standards) to insult President W. in Iraq — less than 24 hours after the incident. From The New York Times:

Barely 24 hours after the journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, was tackled
and arrested for his actions at a Baghdad news conference, the
shoe-throwing incident was generating front-page headlines and
continuing television news coverage. A thinly veiled glee could be
discerned in much of the reporting, especially in the places where
anti-American sentiment runs deepest.

In Sadr City, the
sprawling Baghdad suburb that has seen some of the most intense
fighting between insurgents and American soldiers since the 2003
invasion, thousands of people marched in his defense. In Syria, he was
hailed as a hero. In Libya, he was given an award for courage….

What occurs to me is that this is an impressive display — or many impressive displays, I suppose — of organizational ability. Just think — if the energy and effort that goes into these spontaneous (and sometimes not so spontaneous) expressions of indignation were channeled into building viable industries or — dare we hope — self-government or respect for the rule of law — we’d never have another bit of trouble from that part of the world. Trouble is, a lot of these cultures and systems don’t do "constructive." But they certainly do resentment. You betcha.

Iraq_bush_shoe_wart

Blinded by ideology

39 Replies

Just to show you the difference from an UnParty approach and an ideological one, take a look at The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial on the Detroit bailout, and compare it to ours.

Both of us are against the bailout. So we agree, right? Not quite. It seems that the one thing that bugs the WSJ the most about the deal is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it might force Detroit to make sensible cars for a change. And that, to the libertarian extremists at the Journal, would be like taking the country to Room 101 — in other words, it would be the worst thing in the world:

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the real goal of Democrats isn’t to save jobs per se, but to tell Detroit what cars to make and how to make them. The goal is to turn GM and the rest into Big Green Machines that will stop making SUVs and trucks and start making small cars that run on something other than carbon fuel. If consumers don’t want to drive them, well, the next step will be to impose subsidies or penalties and taxes to coerce them to do so. Giving the federal government an equity stake could also lead to protectionism, as the politicians attempt to shield Detroit’s mismanaged assets from competition by citing the interests of the UAW, the environment, or some other "social" good that has nothing to do with making cars Americans will want to drive.

Here’s what’s wrong with that — or one of the things wrong with it: As I’ve made clear, I’m against the bailout. But if there IS a bailout, provisions requiring Detroit to build cars that move us toward energy independence and maybe, just maybe, reduce greenhouse gases would be a GOOD thing about deal, not a bad one.

Moreover, if we the taxpayers are putting up the money — which, we shouldn’t, but if we are — we have EVERY RIGHT in the universe to demand that Detroit make whatever kinds cars we demand. If we want them all to be purple and green two-tone three-wheelers that run on moonbeams, that by God is the kind of cars the recipients of OUR money ought to get. If the market demands some other kind of car, then the car companies that aren’t taking our frickin’ money can make them.

Of course, I also believe — as the founder of the Energy Party — that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with making it illegal to sell those idiotic land yachts that Americans have been driving for the past decade or so. SUVs are contrary to the national interest — strategically and environmentally — and I am utterly unmoved by anyone’s argument that they should be allowed to help fund the next bin Laden to come out of Saudi Arabia’s madrassas just because — and this infantile "reason" is offensive to me in the extreme — they WANT to.

Of course, the God-given right to fund petrodictators — helping Mahmoud buy the Bomb, for instance — while at the same time destroying the planet, for no better reason than some moronic desire to loom over the rest of traffic in a vehicle that can carry 8 times as many people as it ever actually carries, is of SUPREME IMPORTANCE to the editors of the WSJ. Nothing is more sacred. One gets the impression that if someone came up with a foolproof plan to capture bin Laden, neutralize the Taliban, stabilize Pakistan, turn our economy around 180 degrees, end man-made global climate change and make everyone in America a millionaire (without the currency losing value, mind you), the WSJ would be against it if it also included a requirement that CAFE standards rise.

Obama and national security: Pragmatism, continuity

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Sorry I haven’t posted today — actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I’m not about to type it again, so there.

Anyway, I thought I’d put up something that would provide a chance for y’all to discuss Obama’s National Security team. I’ve already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don’t have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I’ve always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he’s generally lived up to that.

But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America’s role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he’s not disappointing me.

Some of y’all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there’s the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.

Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don’t think Obama’s going to blow Iraq just to please them. He’s fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he’ll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he’ll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from
moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against
pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq.
There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that
a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt
in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is
the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin
drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long
and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also
an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world
in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said
during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi
leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to
sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving
tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull
this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats
could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it.
Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national
security credentials than that.

The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.

Now we’re seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try
to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of
law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for
its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That’s why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it’s why I was, too. But I didn’t think something like this would happen so fast. As you’ll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn’t expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can — as long as we don’t screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.

I realize that doesn’t fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration’s policies would be as different from the Bush administration’s as night and day, and Obama’s going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it’s the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it’s what will work.

As David Brooks wrote today, in a column headlined "Continuity We Can Believe In:"

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a
series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In
recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and
development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat
organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short
run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals
improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots
around the world.

He has developed a way of talking about
security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government
and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of
counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to
describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns….

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I’m already seeing continuity I can believe in.

And here’s the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.

Obama’s the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.

Some things that I ‘watch with horror’

8 Replies

First, a warning — I’ve posted some disturbing images at the bottom of this post. They are painful to look at. If you wish to avoid them, do not scroll down!

Following up on my Sunday column, it occurs to me that it might be helpful to elaborate a little more on the proper meaning of "watched with horror." If you’ll recall, the NYT used that phrase to refer to such practices as scanning telecommunications for terrorists without proper authorization, and imprisoning supposed terrorists at Guantanamo.

In the column, I gave examples from history of things that are more properly "watched with horror," if the words are to mean anything — the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, and the like. I included some from recent years — genocide in Darfur and 9/11 — but perhaps not enough. I can make it much more immediate than that.

The terror attacks in Mumbai are certainly something I "watched with horror," both from a personal and geopolitical perspective. Just days before it happened, my Dad had been reminiscing about having Shore Patrol duty in Bombay during his Navy career. That meant digging sailors out of some pretty sleazy dives, but it also meant staying at the Taj Mahal hotel. It was a shock to have that place suddenly in the news, and for something so horrific.

Two weeks ago, my brother was over there on business — and of course, he would have been a target had he been there still. As my father would have been, long before. That was underlined for me in a sidebar piece the WSJ ran Friday, accounting for the employees of various international firms in Mumbai.

Stan Dubinsky from over at USC sent me an e-mail that had been sent out by Hesh Epstein, the Chabad rabbi here in Columbia, about the young Chabad rabbi and his wife killed by the terrorists — presumably for the "crime" of being Jewish. I took a lecture course a couple of years back given by Rabbi Epstein (about Jewish beliefs regarding the Messiah, it was fascinating), and was deeply impressed by his devotion and scholarship. If it had been Hesh over there instead of that young man and his wife… the tragedy would have been far more personal. As it is, it’s bad enough.

Too much personal? Then consider the overall death toll, and the geopolitical implications — India is blaming Pakistan, and both countries have nukes.

I think what got me to thinking about the personal angles was Nicholas Kristof’s column yesterday (beware the image if you follow the link!), which I chose this morning to put on tomorrow’s op-ed page, and which started like this:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed.

Here in Pakistan, I’ve been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region…

This is something I "watch with horror," without even having to see it. Unfortunately, I DID see it, in a photograph with Kristof’s column online. And it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen such images. I had run across the ones you see below (with their original captions) a week or two ago when I was looking for something to go with a previous Kristof column, and had searched the AP archive for "Pakistan" and "women." The images all moved on the wire earlier this year.

This is the kind of thing that I believe the phrase "watched with horror" should be reserved for. And that’s my point in posting these images. I almost put them in the paper, but I thought Kristof’s column communicated the horror fully enough. As you know, one thing I use the blog for is to post things I don’t put in the paper. Maybe I was wrong to balk at doing that. But as hardened as newspapermen are supposed to be, I hesitate even now to post them here. And yet, these pictures aren’t as bad — that is, the injuries aren’t as recent — as the cases Kristof wrote about.

Kristof and his wife received the Pulitzer for reporting on the democracy movement in China years ago. He deserves another one for telling these women’s stories — as he has done for the powerless (so often women) in Darfur and elsewhere. By horrifying decent people everywhere, he performs a great service.

Acidburns1

Irum Saeed, 30, adjusts her scarf as she poses for a photograph at her office at the Urdu University in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, July 24, 2008. Irum was burnt on her face, back and shoulders with acid thrown in the middle of the street by a boy whom she rejected for marriage 12 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery 25 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Irum is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns2

Shameem Akhter, 18, poses for a photograph at her home in Jhang, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 10, 2008. Three years ago three boys threw acid on her. Shameem has undergone plastic surgery 10 times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Shameem is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Acidburns3

Attiya Khalil, 16, poses for a photograph at her home in Lahore, Pakistan, Wednesday, July 9, 2008. Attiya’s face was burnt with acid thrown by relatives of a neighbor boy whom she rejected for marriage around 3 years ago. She has undergone plastic surgery three times to try to recover from her scars with the help of Depilex-Smileagain Foundation in Lahore. Smileagain is an organization that helps burn victims to reintegrate into society through medical and psychological support, sometimes employing them as beauticians at Depilex beauty centers. Attiya is one of the 240 registered victims of Smileagain’s help list in Pakistan. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Thomas Smith and the pirates

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Among my e-mails today was one calling my attention to an interview (by someone I’m not familiar with, if you’ll forgive the dangling preposition) with Columbia’s Thomas Smith about the pirates. A sample:

TUSR: Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was stunned
by the pirates’ reach. I was taken aback by Mullen’s surprise—the reach
has been well-documented in all manner of media, even a lengthy feature
in National Geographic this year that somewhat romanticized the
pirates. So why is an admiral stunned?
SMITH: Admiral
Mullen was ‘stunned’ by the pirate attack taking place so far from the
coast, about 450 miles offshore. The attack in fact was a bit
surprising. It was bold, very risky for the attackers, and much farther
out into the so-called ‘blue water’ than previous attacks we’ve seen by
similar bands in recent history.

Now, I’ve since seen a few
bloggers and others criticizing the admiral for his remarks –
suggesting that no true fighting admiral would say such – and perhaps
‘stunned’ was a less-than-stellar word choice. But the admiral is a
professional Naval officer, not a politician. And so I say, it’s easy
for those who have never been to war or to sea—and have no frame of
reference for an appreciation of just how vast and unforgiving the sea
can be—to criticize.

And as long as I’m on the subject, there was a nice piece in the WSJ Saturday drawing some parallels to the Barbary Pirates. I sort of knew the outline of all of that, being a history major who sorta kinda concentrated on that period, but I learned at least one interesting fact from the piece I don’t remember having known before:

By the 1790s, the U.S. was depositing an astonishing 20% of its federal income into North African coffers…

We finally decided maybe it would be better to build a Navy, and deal with the problem. Trying to buy off the pirates just encouraged piracy — which sort of stands to reason, if you think about it.

Anyway, the piece further encouraged a notion I’ve been kicking around, which might turn into a column: The idea that the Somali pirates actually pose an opportunity to President Obama once he’s in office. It’s a chance to show the willingness to use force in the defense of international peace and security, with a ready-made multinational coalition to dramatically demonstrate his unBushness:

Of course, the world is a vastly more complicated place than it was two
centuries ago and America’s role in it, once peripheral, is now
preeminent. Still, in the post-9/11 period, America would be
ill-advised to act unilaterally against the pirates. The good news is:
It does not have to. In contrast to the refusal to unite with America
during the Barbary Wars, or more recently the Iraq War, the European
states today share America’s interest in restoring peace to the seas.
Moreover, they have expressed a willingness to cooperate with American
military measures against the Somali bandits. Unlike Washington and
Jefferson, George W. Bush and Barack Obama need not stand alone.

Colombian FTA editorial

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Our Colombia Free Trade Agreement editorial today (which, as with the Joe Lieberman piece, you should be able to tell I wrote) was based in so many sources that I thought it would be nice to give you a version with links here. So here you go:

Congress should
pass Colombian
Free Trade pact

WHAT DO The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times all have in common? They all agree with The State: All say Congress should pass the Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
“Pass the Pact,” says The Post. “Seal the deal,” says the L.A. Times. The Journal says the pact offers President-elect Barack Obama a “Lame Duck Opportunity” — tell Congress to agree to a deal with President Bush to link a Detroit bailout to passage of this and other free trade agreements before the end of the year: “U.S. business and the rest of the world would applaud…. President Bush could do the heavy lifting.”
Perhaps most impressive of all — it’s certainly caused some buzz in the blogosphere — is this opening sentence of the New York Times piece: “We don’t say it all that often, but President Bush is right: Congress should pass the Colombian free-trade agreement now.”
That puts The Times, uncharacteristically as it notes, on the opposite side of liberal Democrats in Congress — and in disagreement with Mr. Obama’s stated position. But as the broad consensus among editorial boards indicates, pretty much any one who looks at this issue who was not recently elected with the help of Big Labor sees the need to pass the pact.
Why? It’s common sense. Most Colombian goods already flow into the United States duty-free. This agreement would open Colombia to U.S. products, made by U.S. workers.
It also would, perhaps most importantly, solidify our relationship with a loyal ally in a region where we have too few friends. Not passing it would give the back of our hand to a country roughly surrounded by nations ruled by people who mean the United States ill.
It’s ironic that Democrats would oppose this agreement while Mr. Bush supports it. As The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote in a column that ran on our op-ed page in April: “For seven years, Democrats have rightfully complained that President Bush has gratuitously antagonized the world, exasperating our allies and eroding America’s standing and influence.
“But now the Democrats are doing the same thing on trade.”
So what’s the argument against the pact? Opponents say the Colombian government has been complicit in violence against union leaders in that country. Some point to recent indictments of top officials for colluding with right-wing paramilitaries who have terrorized unionists. But such indictments actually argue for the agreement, demonstrating how President Alvaro Uribe’s government has cracked down on such violence. Last year, violence against union members dropped below the rate for the general public.
Some, ironically echoing an argument used by John McCain in a different context, say the agreement should not pass this year because Sen. Obama was elected while opposing it and “elections have consequences.” But as we noted in endorsing Sen. McCain, “Few will cast their ballots on the basis of the Colombian Free Trade Agreement,” and indeed, some who disagreed with our endorsement took us to task for even bringing up a topic so irrelevant to their preference for Sen. Obama.
The president-elect, and congressional Democrats, are perfectly free to re-examine their positions on this issue. They should do so, and listen to the many independent voices that say they should pass this pact now.

Hillary at State: Bad call, Barack

36 Replies

You know the thing we talked about earlier in the week, the thing that David Broder and Tom Friedman and I all said was a bad idea?

Well, apparently it’s happened:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton
has decided to give up her Senate seat and accept the position of
secretary of state, making her the public face around the world for the
administration of the man who beat her for the Democratic presidential
nomination, two confidants said Friday….

That’s bad news for the simple fact that Barack Obama needs to be "the public face" of U.S. foreign policy, because he starts off with most of the world having such a great impression of him. Why squander that by putting Hillary Clinton between him and the world?

His secretary of state needs to be someone who is HIS agent and seen as no more than that, not a larger-than-life rival. The office of secretary of state is far too important to be anyone’s plum or concession prize.

This is Obama’s first significant mistake.

What to do about the pirates?

22 Replies

Back on this post, bud said:

NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian naval vessel sank a suspected pirate
"mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden and chased two attack boats into the
night, officials said Wednesday, as separate bands of brigands seized
Thai and Iranian ships in the lawless seas.
-USA Today

Where’s the U.S. Navy? We spend 3/4 of $trillion a year on the
military and it’s the Indian Navy that sinks these thugs. I know we
have the capability to defend the shipping lanes. So what gives?

And to think, I was going to post something a couple of days ago about the pirates, but thought y’all wouldn’t be interested. Silly me.

As I said to bud (who, if I recall correctly, thought we couldn’t succeed in Iraq, which is neither wet nor moving), you think it’s a snap for even the world’s largest blue-water Navy
to prevent small craft from taking UNarmed merchant ships in a section
of ocean three times the size of Texas? The supertanker was 450 miles
off Mombasa. Look at a map. Think about it.

Folks, the U.S. Navy IS working hard on the piracy problem, along
with the Brits, the French, Italy, Canada, Greece and Denmark. And,
obviously, the Indians.

You know what would have been the best thing we could do to stop
this piracy? Not abandon Somalia to chaos back in 1993 (a retreat on
our part that incidentally persuaded Osama bin Laden that it would be
easy to take down the U.S.; just inflict a few casualties). Piracy works
in the Gulf of Aden because the pirates have a safe place to hide the
prizes, since the "government" of Somalia is useless.

And that will continue to be the case as long as we have failed
states in East Africa. That’s why (ahem) the United States has to
employ a full-range policy of forward engagement in the world. (Remember, we stopped the Barbary pirates NOT by playing defense on the
high seas, but by sending the Marines ashore to take their haven. Diplomacy also played a significant role, but then the Barbary States were states; there was someone in charge to dicker with.)

I’ve been watching the latest piracy problem for awhile (I’m into that stuff, being both a Navy brat and a fan of Patrick O’Brian), and the overall story has been one of the U.S. Navy going after the privateers with increasing aggressiveness. This from the NYT on Oct. 30:

As Somalia’s rulers have struggled with an insurgency and political
instability that culminated in the resignation of the prime minister on Monday,
piracy has flourished off its shores. Experts say that there have been
“many more” than the 26 attacks formally reported to the International Piracy Center this year, and new hijackings are reported with unfortunate frequency.

But the latest hijacking came with news that the United States Navy
has now entered the fray. A distress call from a Japanese-owned
chemical tanker, Golden Mori, found its way to the U.S.S. Porter, an American destroyer, which intercepted and then sank the two skiffs that the pirates used to reach the ship, according to CNN.

Now, the pirates have no obvious exit route, and another American destroyer, the Arleigh Burke
is on their tail in Somali waters, which are usually something of a
pirate refuge. This time, the American navy received permission to
enter from the embattled transitional government….

As you can see, the U.S. and international allies have just started stepping up their response to this growing problem. But to think we’ll just snap our fingers and the problem will go away is unrealistic.

Once you have a failed state as a haven for pirates, the only way to prevent the incidents from happening (unless you think ALL international shipping should be escorted by our Navy at taxpayer expense) is for the merchant ships to be prepared to repel boarders. And yeah, they’ll probably need to hire private contractors for that, much to Capital A’s horror (unless of course you DO think third-nation-flag private ships should be guarded at taxpayer expense). Fighting close battles with small arms at the drop of a hat was a skill the average sailor had 200 years ago, but not today. They’ll likely have to hire some guns.

Once the vessel is taken, and the U.S. or other navies respond, what do you propose we do? We’re fully equipped to sink them (as you saw above we had no trouble sinking the pirate boats, once they were under our guns), but the sailors who specialize in the skills it would take to RETAKE the vessel intact (which I’m guessing that most of us — especially the owners of the ships or their cargos — would prefer), the U.S. Navy Seals, are really, really busy elsewhere these days. (Set Iraq aside; we need all we can train and more in Afghanistan.)

The piracy problem is, of course, closely tied to the terrorism problem. The same sorts of conditions can foster it, and it presents the same challenges to international law (what do we do, for instance, if we catch the pirates — send them to Guantanamo?).

It’s an interesting problem, or rather SET of problems, and one the new president will have on a front-burner, given the escalation in recent days. The supertanker finally grabbed the attention of all of y’all who had NOT been paying attention.

Pass Colombian free trade pact

6 Replies

Hey, don’t just go by me on the need to pass the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Listen to The New York Times, which said this week:

We believe that the trade pact would be good for America’s economy
and workers. Rejecting it would send a dismal message to allies the
world over that the United States is an unreliable partner and, despite
all that it preaches, does not really believe in opening markets to
trade. There is no more time to waste. If the lame-duck Congress does
not approve the trade pact this year, prospects would dim considerably
since it would lose the cover of the rule (formerly known as fast
track) that provides for an up-or-down, no-amendment vote.

Because
of trade preferences granted as part of the war on drugs, most
Colombian exports already are exempt from United States tariffs. The
new agreement would benefit American companies that now have to pay
high tariffs on exports to Colombia.

It also would strengthen
bonds with an important ally in a volatile corner of South America —
that also is the main source of cocaine shipped into this country and
where the United States has very few friends these days.

As for those of you who say you don’t care what the NYT says, this post isn’t aimed at you. It’s aimed at people a lot more likely to care what the Gray Lady says — Democrats in Congress (and Barack Obama), who have against all reason opposed this agreement.

Find a better job for Hillary

16 Replies

This advisory just came in:

{bc-broder-column advisory}<
{DAVID BRODER COLUMN}<
{(ADVISORY FOR BRODER CLIENTS: David Broder has written a column for} Wednesday publication on the potential selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. Expect the column by noon Eastern.)<
{(For Broder clients only)}<
<
(c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Mr. Broder is reflecting the huge buzz inside the Beltway about appointing Sen. Hillary Clinton to State, which I think would be a mistake, for this reason:

Given the reaction his election has gained from around the world, Barack Obama’s best international ambassador is Barack Obama. His policies are more likely to gain acceptance among friends and foes because they are his policies. You put somebody as Bigger Than Life as his erstwhile opponent in the top job at State, and suddenly the State Department becomes the Hillary Department. Everyone, from the U.S. media to foreign potentates, would look at the actions of the State Department in terms of "What Hillary Clinton is doing," rather than what is being done in the name of Barack Obama.

I just can’t see her effacing herself enough not to get between Obama and the rest of the world — even if she wants to.

Sure, one doesn’t have to be a nonentity to be SecState — look at Colin Powell. But Gen. Powell was known as the Good Soldier, a man who serves something greater than himself. That’s not something I can see Hillary Clinton (or her husband; in that they are a matched pair) pulling off successfully.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem the right job for her. What would be the right job? You mean, aside from U.S. senator from New York, which is not too shabby in itself? Something special. Economy Czarina or some such. Something ad hoc, something geared specifically to her. Sure, she failed when she was given the health care thing, but that was a long time ago; I think her political skills have improved since then.

I don’t know; I just don’t see her as the right person for Secretary of State.

As for the other two who have stirred the most comment:

I don’t know whether Larry Summers is the best person to be SecTreas or not, but he certainly shouldn’t be given the job because of that Harvard nonsense. Whomever the president-elect chooses, he needs to make it clear he’s not kowtowing to the absurd prating of the sillier feminists. I don’t know whether boys are better than girls at math or not; I do know it’s offensive to this boy’s intelligence to say it just can’t be so, because I don’t want it to be so, which is what I heard from those who ran him out of Cambridge.
There seems to be a lot of bipartisan murmuring that Robert Gates should stay on at Defense. I don’t know whether he’s a great secretary of defense or just seems like one because he followed Rumsfeld, but I’ve always liked the guy. So it would be fine by me if he stayed. At the same time, the president needs to know he’s got his own person in that job, so I wouldn’t think it would be horrible if another highly qualified candidate were nominated. Gates sets the bar pretty high, though.

Judge Sanders should have used another historical reference

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Alex Sanders is a great guy, but he is a political partisan. He’s someone I like in spite of that fact.

And like most folks who try in good faith to defend partisanship, he was unconvincing in a letter you no doubt saw on page this past Sunday:

Ignoring candidate’s party seldom works
As in every election, I heard people say they always vote for the candidate, not the party. People who think like that go to horse races and bet on the jockey, not the horse. That seldom works out for them.
Incidentally, I wasn’t the first person to express that idea. Winston Churchill was.

ALEX SANDERS
Charleston

It so happens that Churchill provides us with one of history’s most dramatic examples of the madness of putting party ahead of the candidate.

Churchill did as much as any man to save Britain from the Nazis in WWII, and the British people were grateful. But when the war was over they voted him out of office — not because they didn’t want him to be their P.M. any more, but because they chose the Labour Party to rule Parliament.

It was a terrible shame, but that’s the parliamentary system — one that, at least in the case of the executive part of government, makes the individual completely subordinate to party. Thank God we can avoid that in this country, as long as we don’t surrender our ability to think and choose to parties. No matter what Alex Sanders says.

So when do we invade Pakistan?

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OK, so now Iraq was a bad idea, because Obama was against our going into Iraq, and the people (except for 46 percent of them) voted for Obama, so that’s the new truth. Right?

And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

See? I’ve always said I love Big Brother.

But here’s my question: When do we invade Pakistan? You know, that’s where al Qaida is and all, as certain people keep telling us. As one of my interlocutors said back here, "Al-Qaida was not in Iraq until we got there." Which prompted me to say:

If al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and we can’t get AT them in Pakistan, on
account of the fact that Pakistan gets really, REALLY upset when we go
in there after them, and they’re a sovereign country and all (which
doesn’t bother ME; I still think it was a good idea to follow the enemy
into Cambodia in 1970, but presumably a lot of folks who voted for
Obama Tuesday disagree, although not necessarily Obama himself, which
is another topic), then isn’t it kind of a good thing to draw them into
Iraq, where we happen to have troops to fight them?

Sorry about the long sentence, there.

Re-education is never an easy process, and as you see, I’m a particularly hard case.

You see, I forgot for a moment that Obama is all for doing a Cambodia and chasing al Qaeda into Pakistan, so in that sense we really didn’t need to go into Iraq (I still think we should have, for other reasons, but let’s stick with this point for now).

At least, I think Obama’s OK with that. That was the impression I had back in August 2007, when I wrote:

BARACK OBAMA was right to threaten to invade Pakistan
in order to hit al-Qaida, quite literally, where it lives. And as long
as we’re on this tack, remind me again why it is that we’re not at war
with Iran.
OK, OK, I know the reasons: Our military is
overextended; the American people lack the appetite; the nutball factor
is only an inch deep in Iran, and once you get past Ahmadinejad and the
more radical mullahs the Iranian people aren’t so bad, but they’d get
crazy quick if we attacked, and so forth.
I can also come up with reasons not to invade Pakistan, or even to talk about invading Pakistan. We’ve heard them often enough. Pakistan is (and say this in reverent tones) a sovereign country; Pervez Musharraf
is our “friend”; we need him helping us in the War on Terror; he is
already politically weak and this could do him in; he could be replaced
by Islamists sufficiently radical that they would actively support
Osama bin Laden and friends, rather than merely fail to look
aggressively enough to find them; fighting our way into, and seeking a
needle in, the towering, rocky haystacks of that region is easier said
than done, and on and on.
But when you get down to it, it all
boils down to the reason I mentioned in passing in the first instance —
Americans lack the appetite. So with a long line of people vying to be
our new commander in chief, it’s helpful when one of them breaks out of
the mold of what we might want to hear, and spells out a real challenge
before us…

Anyway, this seems particularly relevant at the moment, because Obama just won the election — perhaps you heard about that — and on Election Day itself, I read this in the WSJ:

ISLAMABAD — Pakistani officials warned U.S. Gen. David Petraeus
that frequent missile strikes on militant targets in Pakistan fan
anti-American sentiment in the country, an ally in the fight against
terrorism.

The new U.S. commander of America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq met
Pakistani officials, including Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar
and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, as part of his first international
trip since taking over U.S. Central Command three days earlier….

So what’s the new Commander in Chief going to tell Petraeus to do about all that? Keep up the pressure on al Qaida and the Taliban in their Tribal Area hidey-holes? Or back off in deference to our ally?

I’m sorry to interrupt everybody’s warm and fuzzy feelings about how we’ll be at peace with all the world now that Obama is going to be our president, but I’m ornery that way. I’ve got this habit of noticing that the real world has this way of intruding upon us…

Kagan’s right: Security trumps all

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Frederick Kagan has it exactly right in today’s Wall Street Journal: "Security Should Be the Deciding Issue." An excerpt:

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a "real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression — the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

A couple of things to note: Mr. Kagan doesn’t express a preference for either Obama or McCain. Of course, folks likely to vote for McCain are more likely to agree with him that security overrides such considerations as the economy. Democrats love it when the economy is the one thing on the table; just ask James Carville. And of course, I’ve had arguments with bud here about the relative importance of foreign affairs vs. the domestic economy. He thinks the economy is everything, and to me it’s less important (not to mention simply being something I hate to spend time talking or thinking about, because it has to do with money).

And, yeah — I trust McCain more on national security. At the same time, I don’t think Obama would be all that bad. Yes, he continues to insist upon being wrong about Iraq. But I think he has calculated that he has to be consistent there; his views on the rest of the world aren’t nearly as MoveOn.orgish.

But set all that aside, and the main thing I’m saying here is that I agree with Mr. Kagan: For us we turn inward fretting over our pocketbooks at the expense of ignoring our proper role in the world would be extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah, we can do both. But not the economy at the expense of international security.

South of the Border

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Some of y’all really hated it that I mentioned the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in the McCain endorsement — which to me illustrates the no-win situation I saw myself in with all those loyal and devoted Obamaphiles out there. Nice people, many of them, but hard to please if you don’t agree with them.

If I had just cited the usual reasons — being right on Iraq, taking a stand on doing the right thing on immigration, being a war hero, etc. — I would have been castigated for lack of original thought. So I decided to include something you might not have thought of — and something that actually helped confirm my preference for McCain — as a way of broadening the discussion. Perhaps predictably, I got the obvious response from those determined to find fault: Obviously you don’t have any good reasons, since you drag this out of left field.

No win situation.

Doug mentions back on this post that The Economist has endorsed Obama. Well, a couple of days ago I was reading something in The Economist that reminded me of why the Colombian FTA is important to me, but also why y’all might have trouble understanding that.

Blame it on my upbringing — or part of it, anyway. I spent two years, four-and-a-half months — easily the longest I lived in one place growing up — living in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From late 1962 through spring 1965. Like Obama in Indonesia, I saw a lot during that time that most nine-to-11 year olds growing up in the States don’t see. For instance, I was not only there during a military coup, but I was in the house at the time during when the plot was being hatched, at least in part. Our landlord was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy, and my parents had left me at the landlord’s house while they went out one day. While I was there, a man came to visit the captain; they went into a room and closed the door. The next day, the president had been put on a plane to Panama, the man who had come to visit was a member of the new military junta, and our landlord had a big post in the new government. Minister of Agriculture, I think.

My guitar teacher, who had a little shop down by the waterfront where he made his own guitars by hand, was an agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence, I would later learn. And the missionary who preached at the nondenominational English-language services we attended on Sunday was working for the CIA. But not everyone was running things or plotting to run things. I remember the men who squatted in a circle in the dust of the vacant lot near our duplex as they bet on the cockfight in the center of their circle. I remember the smell of REAL poverty, the Third World kind, that arose from the poorest barrios of the city. It was different, very different, from living in this country.

I also remember people who were there working for JFK’s Alliance for Progress program. And ever since I came back in 1965, I’ve been acutely conscious of the fact that most of my fellow Americans just don’t give a damn one way or the other about these countries in their own backyards. JFK was the last.

This cultural indifference is definitely reflected in the mass media. So it is that I have to turn to such publications as The Economist to find out what’s going on in the realm of the Monroe Doctrine. It’s weird. Anyway, I got to thinking about that when I read this piece in The Economist the other day. It was about the irony that folks in Latin America seem to prefer Obama, even though it’s McCain who cares about the region enough to learn about it:

OF THE two candidates in the American presidential election, it is John McCain who knows something about Latin America. Not only was he born in Panama, he also visited Colombia and Mexico in July. He thinks the United States should ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia and, at least until it became politically toxic, wanted to reform immigration policy. Ask him who the United States’ most important friends around the word are and he pretty quickly mentions Brazil.

And yet if they had a vote, Latin Americans, like Europeans, would cast it for Barack Obama—though without much enthusiasm. Preliminary data from the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries over the past month and published exclusively by The Economist, show that 29% of respondents think an Obama victory would be better for their country, against only 8% favouring Mr McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, 30% say that it makes no difference who wins, while 31% claim ignorance. Enthusiasm for Mr Obama is particularly high in the Dominican Republic (52%), Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil (41%). In Brazil, six candidates in this month’s municipal elections changed their names to include “Barack Obama” in them.

In the third presidential debate, I noticed two things (well, I noticed a lot of things, but two things related to this post): That McCain had cared enough to understand what it meant to support a trade agreement with a key ally in the region — an agreement that could only be good for this country in terms of trade and jobs, and which affirmed a country that had undertaken huge sacrifices to ally itself with U.S. interests. That was the first thing. The second was that Obama seemed not even to have scratched the surface of the issue. His answer was such Big Labor boilerplate, it seemed plain that he had not looked into the issue or thought about it beyond his party’s talking points.

To me, that spoke to things that were true about the two candidates in a broader sense — experience, and the ability to differentiate between our friends in the world and those who wish us, and their own people, ill. I had been deeply impressed by the recent piece Nicholas Kristof — a guy who almost certainly will vote for Obama — had done on this issue, and the degree that Obama’s answer utterly failed to look at the issue as knowledgeably and thoughtfully as Kristof had. And as McCain had.

I sat and talked to Ted Sorensen about Obama as the heir to Camelot, and was deeply impressed. But I’ve gathered since then that aura aside, Obama seems actually less likely to take the kind of interest in Latin America that Kennedy did. McCain is more likely to do so. Ironic, huh?

So to me it was more than, here’s a little esoteric fact I know and you don’t. To me, it mattered. But to me, South America has always mattered.

Wall Street’s worst week ever

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Well, the stock market had its worst-ever week. But you knew that this morning, didn’t you? This just confirms it.

Those hammerheads need to calm down. Somebody take them out for a good time this weekend or something, OK? Improve their outlook on life. Buy them a lot of beers, or whatever they drink. Get them… I mean, introduce them to some companionship of the opposite sex or something. Or turn a hose on them.

Somebody besides me do it, I mean. Those people drive me crazy; I don’t want to get anywhere near them.

Wall_street_wart

Scattered thoughts on the debate

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First, I’ll refer you to video from the panel discussion last night, where you will find Joshua Gross and others offering their thoughts.

I was wiped out last night, and didn’t stick around to talk to folks after the discussion ended a little before midnight. Long day. I hope folks didn’t think I was rude, but I’d been fighting a cold and had no resources left. I’d told everyone at the start that I was just there to observe; it was the newsroom’s show.

On my way out I did run into our own Norm Ivey, who was there sporting an Obama ’08 T-shirt. You can see some of Norm’s recent comments on this post, and this one, and this one.

As I said last night from my Treo, I don’t think this was a debate that changed any minds — although Norm raised the interesting point that the candidates were speaking to voters who hadn’t paid attention until now, and that on that score he thought McCain did better. I can’t say, because I wasn’t looking for that while I watched.

Nor do I have an overall observation or theme. I thought each candidate exhibited some strengths and weaknesses, as follows:

McCain strengths:

Having been right about the Surge. There’s so much more to that than the fact that by sending those extra troops, and using them properly, we created a stituation in which we can start talking about drawing down and leaving behind a stable Iraq. It goes to the core fact that McCain was right, and Bush was wrong, for four years before the president finally got rid of Rumsfeld and switched to a strategy that would work. This narrative (and so many other things) gives the lie to the Democrats’ "McCain equals Bush" nonsense. It communicates that he won’t give up on our nation’s commitments, or let American blood be spent for nought. And it shows he knows the differences between approaches likely to work, and those not to.
The constant reminders of his long experience with these issues. The answer he gave to the "bomb, bomb Iran" remark was his best moment. He gave the history of his judgments of major decisions involving the deployment of our military, from being against sending the Marines to Lebanon in 83 to backing Clinton on Bosnia in defiance of many in his party. It strongly suggested the thought, "Oh, yeah — and Obama just got to the Senate…"
His long-held opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending, and clear willingness to use his veto and the bully pulpit to fight it. Lehrer was irritating with his constant hammering on "if the bailout passes, what will you give up," but McCain gave the best answer.
The reminder that he and Biden pushed through the 9/11 commission, again in spite of the Bush administration.
His answer on the initial economic question, emphasizing how encourage he was that Democrats and Republicans were working together finally, made Obama’s answer about "failed policies" of Republicans look petty.

McCain weaknesses

One overrides all others, and he did it repeatedly and intentionally — his condescending references to Obama "not understanding" issues. Obama is a smart man, but even if he weren’t, McCain’s constant attempts to put him down would have been unseemly, and beneath him. Yes, I believe there are some things Obama "doesn’t get," but that’s not a gentlemanly way of putting it, and I’m betting it created a lot of sympathy for Obama. Most of all, it was inconsistent with the sort of man McCain is — he is usually deeply humble and gracious to those who disagree with him (something that I think is all the more admirable because of his natural temper; he has chosen to be mild in disagreement, and it speaks well of him). This was artificial and offensive, and whoever talked him into taking this approach should not be listened to again.
As we knew already, he is not as smoothly articulate as his opponent. He lost himself in his sentences a number of times, particularly toward the end, and that did him no good.

Obama strengths

His argument that Iraq has sapped our resources to the point that we can’t "project force" where we need to elsewhere in the world. Yes, Democrats have long said this in regard to Afghanistan, but he took it beyond that. This remains the strongest argument that critics of our involvement in Iraq have, and he used it well, doing an excellent job of distancing himself from those in his party who are reflexively against ANY military action, and that’s something he has to do to be credible as a candidate for commander in chief.
Beyond exhausting the military, he also made a good argument that Iraq has enabled and strengthened Iran — a familiar argument, but he presented it well.
His gracious acknowledgment of the courageous leadership McCain showed in standing up to the administration on torture. The normal Democratic position is that McCain "caved" on the issue, and is no better than Bush. That’s a deeply unfair characterization, and Obama showed himself to be above that.
More articulate, as always (see "McCain weaknesses").

Obama weaknesses

Continuing to be wrong on the Surge, and not acknowledging it, hurts him with everyone else except his base. Trouble is, that base will go nuclear if he acknowledges it. (The thing is that logically, he could still assert it was wrong to go INTO Iraq, but that the Surge was the thing to do.) The "worked beyond wildest expectations" earlier helped, but McCain turned that against him well, noting that it was no surprise to HIM.
Probably no one else noticed this, but when he tried to excuse his failure to hold hearings on Afghanistan (a weakness in itself), he said that’s not the practice on the committee chaired by his veep candidate. That made me fully realize, in a way I hadn’t before, just how upside-down the ticket is in terms of qualifications — the number two guy on the ticket is the number one guy’s CHAIRMAN. If I had been McCain, I might have succumbed to the temptation to point out the irony.
This is a silly one, but the "professor" was much in evidence in his pedantic insistence on trying to pronounce foreign names and terms the way natives of those countries might, but doing it with such an obvious American accent (the bad guys in Afghanistan were the "Tollybon," said as only an English-shaped tongue could say it). Maybe you couldn’t hear it; it’s something from my childhood when I lived in South America and was bilingual — even though I can hardly speak it now, hearing other gringos try to be SO proper in their pronunciation and fail still grates on my ear.

Yeah, I know — I gave McCain more strengths, and Obama more weaknesses. But each item does not have equal value, and overall, I think they came out even. That’s bad news for McCain, because the subject of most of the debate was his personal area of strength, and he needed to clearly win this one.

I don’t think he did that, but then I can’t speak for all independent voters.

Meanwhile, back in the world: We’re now having firefights with Pakistan

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Folks who have been looking back and forth between the presidential election and the crisis on Wall Street, only to see the two merge, may be surprised to know that things have gotten hairier over on the Afghan-Pakistan border. We’ve been sending commandos and other assets after al Qaida over there (you may recall that’s where Osama bin Laden is supposed to be hiding out), and Pakistan has been getting madder and madder over it.

And now, apparently, we’re shooting at each other … although Pakistan claims it was just shooting flares at our helicopters — to start with, anyway .

I just thought I’d mention this in case there is a debate tomorrow night, and in case anybody thought there wasn’t anything important besides the economy to talk about.

The United States of France

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A thoughtful reader shared this with me, from TIME magazine:

How We Became the United States of France

By Bill Saporito Sunday, Sep. 21, 2008
This is the state of our great republic: We’ve nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We’re about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they’re a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Note the piece that the phrase "We’ve nationalized the financial system" links to. That one photo of Henry Paulson is rapidly becoming ubiquitous. I used it for the Daddy Warbucks thing, and I also put it on tomorrow’s op-ed page with a column by Robert Samuelson headlined "Paulson’s panic."

Hey, that’s the United States of Freedom to you, mon ami.

So everything’s OK on Wall St. now? No?

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So this morning, for the fourth day in a row, The Wall Street Journal spreads the collapse of major financial institutions across six columns — which, to a guy who used to be a front-page editor, is more alarming than any numbers you might throw at me.

And as if that weren’t enough, a one-column headline below and on the right-hand-side of the page, said "Worst Loss Since ’30s, With No End Yet in Sight." What a way to start the day, huh?

But now I go to the WSJ site and see a grinning trader (one Theodore Weisberg, above), and the headline "Stocks Soar; Banks Lead the Way."

OK, that’s nice. I don’t know why this is happening, and I don’t think it reverses all the bad news, but it’s nice. I’ll resist trying to analyze it. I see it had something to do with an action by the Fed and other central banks, which tempts me react like a history major and say something some thing like, "Nothing like a strong central bank — take that, you Jeffersonians!" But I won’t. I’m aware of how little I actually understand….

Seven years on

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Seven years ago this week, I was filled with optimism. Not everyone responded to the events of 9/11/01 that way, but I did.
Yes, I was mindful of the horrific loss of human life. But nothing could change that; my optimism rose from what I believed would come next.
Surely, I thought, we could set aside foolishness and use the unprecedented resources our nation possessed — military power, certainly, but also our economic dominance and perhaps most of all the strength of the ideas upon which our nation is built — to make future 9/11s less likely.
By “foolishness” I mean a number of things. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for oil produced by nations that consider fostering al-Qaidas as being consistent with their interests. (Joe Biden has a great speech he’s given around South Carolina for years about the incalculable opportunity wasted by George W. Bush on Sept. 12, when, instead of urging us to every sacrifice and every effort toward transforming the energy underpinnings of our economy, he told us to go shopping and delegate the war fighting to the professionals.)
But the greatest foolishness was the pointless, poisonous partisanship that militated against focusing the nation’s resources toward solving any problem. It should have been the easiest to set aside. It’s not that I read too much into those Democrats and Republicans singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; it’s that partisanship is based on considerations that are so much less substantial than the realities of 9/11. Those attacks should have melted away party differences like the noonday tropical sun burning away a morning mist.
But partisanship is an industry that employs thousands of Americans — in the offices of Beltway advocacy groups, in the studios of 24/7 cable TV “news” channels, in party headquarters, on congressional staffs and in the White House. And they are much better focused on that which sustains them — polarization for its own sake — than the rest of us are on the interests we hold in common.
They lay low for awhile, but as most of us went back to shopping while our all-volunteer military went to war, the polarization industry went back to work dividing us, hammer and tongs. They tapped the powerful emotions of 9/11 to their purposes, and led us to levels of bitterness that none of us had seen in our lifetimes.
But what did I expect to happen, seven years ago? Nothing less than using our considerable influence to build a better world. Go ahead, laugh. All done now?
In an editorial the Sunday after the attacks, I wrote that “We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term — military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.” That meant abandoning a lot of foolishness.
Take, for instance, our policy toward the Mideast. Our goal had been stability above all. Prop up some oppressive regimes and come to terms with others; just don’t let anything interfere with the smooth flow of petroleum. Saddam upsets the equilibrium by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia? Send half a million troops to restore the status quo ante, but don’t topple his regime, because that would upset the balance.
But 9/11 showed us that the status quo was extraordinarily dangerous. It produced millions of disaffected young men, frustrated and humiliated by the oppression that we propped up. Things needed to change.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed part of the equation well in Cairo in 2005: “For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” The New York Times’ Tom Friedman took it further, speaking of the need to “drain swamps,” the figurative kind that bred terrorists the way literal bogs breed malaria.
But instead of leading a national effort on every possible front — the military speaks of our national power as being based in the acronym DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic” resources (those who put their lives on the line are wise about these things) — we’ve spent most of the past seven years bickering over the military aspect alone. This argument between the antiwar left and the hawkish right has so weakened the national will to do anything that we came close to failure in Iraq, could still fail in Afghanistan and are helpless in the face of Russian aggression in the Caucasus and Iranian nuclear ambition.
So how do I feel about our national prospects today, given all that has happened? Forgive me, but I am once again (cautiously) optimistic, based on a number of signs, from small to momentous:

Dramatic improvement in Iraq — thanks largely to the “surge” that he belatedly embraced after four years of floundering — has changed the national conversation, and led President Bush to speak of starting the process of moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the battleground even the partisans can agree upon.
Last week Secretary Rice sat down to solidify a new understanding with Moammar Quaddafi of Libya, the once-intractable sponsor of terror whose mind was changed by the Iraq invasion.
The choice for president is between two men who gained their respective parties’ nominations by speaking to the deep national desire to move beyond partisan paralysis. (I realize they would lead in different directions. But if either can lead a national consensus toward implementing his best ideas, we will be better off — if only for having had the experience of agreeing with each other for once.)

Yes, the threads of hope to which I cling are delicate, and cynics will regard me as laughably foolish. But the alternative is not to hope. And that, given the potential of this nation, would be the ultimate foolishness.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

bradwarthen.com

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