Tiptoeing through the mud
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, September 12, 2008

[Obama’s] task is to remind Americans that the stakes in this election are far higher than the matter of who said what and when about Palin. He isn’t doing that.

Yes, Democrats are a gloomy lot, inclined to see catastrophe around every corner and the other side as tougher, meaner and more manipulative. Imbibing this potion of false pride about Democratic virtue mixed with paranoia about the Republicans’ dark genius only leads to defeat followed by glorious disillusionment.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Obama has lost control of this campaign. And he will not seize back the initiative with the sometimes halting, conversational and sadly reluctant sound bites he has been producing. The excitement Obama created at the beginning of the year has vanished, perhaps because his campaign (and, yes, many columnists) bought into the McCain campaign’s demonization of the big rallies. Absurdly, McCain is now contesting the terrain of change — and doing so at celebrity rallies of his own.

Editor’s Comment — The reason Obama has lost control of this campaign is that he’s succumbed to his fear of losing. The last time he showed a flash of boldness was when he responded to the Jeremiah Wright fiasco by giving his speech on race. Ever since then, it’s been caution all the way.

When McCain looked like he was destined for irrelevance he took a risk and picked Palin. His gamble paid off. Now it’s time for Obama to show he’s not being crippled by fear.

First off, he should rebuke his own supporters for treating Sarah Palin as though she’s a threat to the universe. 50% of the attention she’s getting is driven by the hysteria of those who’ve become obsessed about stirring a pot of scorn, venom, and fear, that merely serves to elevate her importance.

Next, Obama needs to dump the word “change”. It was flimsy to start with; now it’s an albatros around his neck. It’s time to focus on fear — as in shining a glaring light on well-founded fears that the Republicans want to play down — and to turn the Obama rhetorical flair into some fire and brimstone passion.

Is America a nation of frogs that’s going to let itself get boiled alive, or can we look at the economic carnage of the last decade and decide that there’s no time left if we want to avert a disaster?

Instead of whining about the tone of the campaign and its lack of substance — a response that merely reinforces the image of Democrats as cry-babies — Obama needs to take command and show that when it comes to change he’s not afraid of changing his own campaign.

Obama’s woes have nothing to do with ‘lipstick’
By Howard Fineman, MSNBC, September 10, 2008

… if I were an Obama partisan I would be worried that his mistakes have a common thread – pride.

Obama seems to want to do things on his own, and on his own terms. It’s understandable. Obama has his own crowd – from Chicago, from Harvard, and from a new cadre of wealthy, Ivy-educated movers and shakers.

“He’s an arrogant S.O.B.,” one of the latter told me today. “He wants to do it his way, and his way alone.” But politics doesn’t work that way. And has Obama should know, or is about to find out, that everyone needs a little help.

Bill Clinton’s advice to Barack Obama
By John F Harris, Politico, September 12, 2008

There they were in Harlem Thursday, the 42nd president and the Democrat who hopes to be the 44th, for a two-hour lunch hour chat at Bill Clinton’s office.

It is not at all clear that Barack Obama particularly wants Clinton’s advice about how to win the presidency—after all, he kept the former president at a cool distance, with just occasional phone calls, for months—but many Democrats believe it is increasingly clear that he could use it.

Bush said to give orders allowing raids in Pakistan
By Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, September 10, 2008

President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

Iraq, U.S.-funded militia at loggerheads
By Saif Rasheed and Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

A meeting Thursday aimed at sowing faith between Iraq’s government and leaders of U.S.-funded paramilitary forces instead highlighted distrust between the sides, three weeks before Iraq takes control of the armed groups.

Leaders of the so-called Sons of Iraq disputed Iraqi plans to absorb only 20% of the fighters into the Iraqi military and police, and they expressed doubts that their members would be protected when the U.S. military turned over responsibility for the units to Iraqi officials.

Does killing Afghan civilians keep us safe?
By Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, Los Angeles Times, September 12, 2008

This week, as we remember the nearly 3,000 American citizens who died in the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or in a remote field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, we also should think about the civilians who are still dying in Afghanistan.

Consider, for instance, the recent American airstrikes on Azizabad, a village in western Afghanistan, on Aug. 22. The United Nations, Afghan government officials and independent witnesses all say that the United States killed about 90 civilians in these strikes, most of them women and children. Cellphone videos of the scene show motionless children lying under checkered shawls and veiled women shrieking alongside them.

According to a report by Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, dozens of freshly dug graves are scattered in the village’s cemeteries, some so small they could fit only children. The U.S. initially said that many fewer civilians had died, but it has now promised a thorough investigation.

It’s a grisly story but hardly an isolated one. The month before the Azizabad incident, Afghan officials say that American airstrikes near Kabul killed 27 civilians at a wedding party — including the bride. In another incident, on March 4, 2007, nine civilians died when their mud home north of Kabul was hit by two 2,000-pound bombs dropped by U.S. aircraft. American officials said they were aiming for two insurgents seen entering the house after firing a rocket at a U.S. military outpost, according to Human Rights Watch.

An anatomy of collateral damage in the Bush era
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 11, 2008

In a little noted passage in her bestselling book, The Dark Side, Jane Mayer offers us a vision, just post-9/11, of the value of one. In October 2001, shaken by a nerve-gas false alarm at the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney, reports Mayer, went underground. He literally embunkered himself in “a secure, undisclosed location,” which she describes as “one of several Cold War-era nuclear-hardened subterranean bunkers built during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the nearest of which were located hundreds of feet below bedrock…” That bunker would be dubbed, perhaps only half-sardonically, “the Commander in Chief’s Suite.”

Oh, and in that period, if Cheney had to be in transit, “he was chauffeured in an armored motorcade that varied its route to foil possible attackers.” In the backseat of his car (just in case), adds Mayer, “rested a duffel bag stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival suit.” And lest danger rear its head, “rarely did he travel without a medical doctor in tow.”

When it came to leadership in troubled times, this wasn’t exactly a profile in courage. Perhaps it was closer to a profile in paranoia, or simply in fear, but whatever else it might have been, it was also a strange kind of statement of self-worth. Has any wartime president — forget the vice-president — including Abraham Lincoln when southern armies might have marched on Washington, or Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, ever been so bizarrely overprotected in the nation’s capital? Has any administration ever placed such value on the preservation of the life of a single official?

Sarah Palin’s myth of America
By Joe Klein, Time, September 10, 2008

Sarah Palin has arrived in our midst with the force of a rocket-propelled grenade. She has boosted John McCain’s candidacy and overwhelmed the presidential process in a way that no vice-presidential pick has since Thomas Eagleton did the precise opposite — sinking his sponsor, George McGovern, in 1972. Obviously, something beyond politics is happening here. We don’t really know Palin as a politician yet, whether she is wise or foolhardy, substantive or empty. Our fascination with her — and it is a nonpartisan phenomenon — is driven by something more primal. The Palin surge illuminates the mythic power of the Republican Party’s message since the advent of Ronald Reagan.

To start with the obvious, she’s attractive. Her husband (“And two decades and five children later, he’s still my guy…”) is a hunk. They have a gorgeous family, made more touching and credible by the challenges their children face. Her voice is more distinctive than her looks: that flat, northern twang that screams, I’m just like you! Actually, the real message is: I’m just like you want to be, a brilliantly spectacular…average American. The Palins win elections and snowmobile races in a state that represents the last, lingering hint of that most basic Huckleberry Finn fantasy — lighting out for the territories. She quoted Westbrook Pegler, the F.D.R.-era conservative columnist, in her acceptance speech: “We grow good people in our small towns…” And then added, “I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.”

Editor’s Comment — Those of us who initially scoffed at McCain’s VP choice might eventually be vindicated, but right now it looks like we were dead wrong. Indeed, the near hysterical reaction against Sarah Palin may well be doing more to reinforce than undermine her political strength.

This looks like a classic case of underestimating the opposition. There are two ways of responding to the mistake: work hard to prove that it wasn’t a mistake, or try to see what can be learned.

Joe Klein, from his perch in Manhattan, wants us to see this as yet another case in which the Republicans are succeeding in hoodwinking average Americans, yet in pressing his argument he pedals a few myths of his own.

We haven’t been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. It is the suburbanites and city dwellers who do the fighting and hourly-wage work now, and the corporations who grow our food.

Well, when it comes to dying in Iraq, researchers have run the numbers and Klein is dead wrong. Tom Engelhardt quoted demographer William O’Hare from the University of New Hampshire whose study [PDF] quantified the disproportionately high mortality of rural soldiers sent to Iraq:

We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60% higher. We know, from other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.

America might no longer be a nation of small towns but even now, a quarter of Americans live in the rural America that Klein seems to think is a thing of the past. And even if the small towns have dwindled in size, the small-town mentality is clearly alive and well.

The McCain campaign has made huge strides in closing the so-called enthusiasm gap — but it’s not just because of Sarah Palin. Obama’s genuflections to the establishment had already helped make the gap much narrower to cross. The challenge Obama now faces is in crossing the ordinariness gap.

Doing this doesn’t demand finding his own icon of average America. (With hindsight, Jim Webb looks like he would have been a much more effective running mate than either Biden or Clinton because, unlike them, he melded working class roots with the appearance of being a Washington outsider. Moreover, he would have done far more to make Obama look bold rather than cautious.) But Obama and the campaign desperately need to find ways of showing that they understand an America that now feels it is looked down upon.

The way to respond to the Palin challenge is not to focus on what’s wrong with her; it’s to show that you respect the source of her appeal. The white working-class America that is weary of Obama might be better served by a Democratic administration, but what it wants first of all is respect.

Speak your piece: Sarah Palin and frog bait
By Julie Ardery, Daily Yonder, September 9, 2008

The biggest catch I ever saw was a 15-pound catfish. Cousin Boojer Tweedy of Knickerbocker, Texas, pulled it out of the creek one summer about midnight. “Any fish’ll bite if you got good bait….” This lunker took a live frog.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. Just as Barack Obama seemed to have worked off his April blunder about helpless rural Americans who “cling” to guns and religion, the Alaska governor leaps into the campaign.

“I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA” Palin told the Republican convention, “because I wanted to make my kids’ public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn’t need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too. Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown.
And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves….”

Wooee, the Democratic catfish are hungry! …

From the bleacher seats here at Daily Yonder, Palin’s small-town swagger and the wrath it’s incurred have been fascinating to watch (as seeing a catfish skinned alive can be). James Joyner of outside the beltway admits he’s “rather baffled that the ‘small town mayor’ meme is catching on so readily.” I’m not. Palin’s rural upbringing and experience as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, have inspired something rare: a chance to look inside the many public prejudices – reverential and damning, both — about rural America.

For that’s really what Palin’s candidacy offers: live bait. It’s a way for some to suck on their fantasy of rural goodness, and for others to gnaw their rural bigotry down to the bone.

Obama can’t win against Palin
By Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2008

Of all the advantages Gov. Sarah Palin has brought to the GOP ticket, the most important may be that she has gotten into Barack Obama’s head. How else to explain Sen. Obama’s decision to go one-on-one against “Sarah Barracuda,” captain of the Wasilla High state basketball champs?

It’s a matchup he’ll lose. If Mr. Obama wants to win, he needs to remember he’s running against John McCain for president, not Mrs. Palin for vice president.

Editor’s Comment — The Obama campaign shouldn’t have to hear this from Karl Rove to know it’s true. But here’s an idea for a gutsy ad that would toss the Palin appeal back in McCain’s face. Here’s a first draft as I make this up on the fly:

Does John McCain need to start watching his back?

Until just a few days ago he was having trouble pulling out a crowd.

Now the crowds are roaring, but they’re not shouting his name — (audio clip: “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah…”).

Are John McCain’s newly enthusiastic supporters dreaming about seeing him enter the oval office or are dreaming about his replacement?

Big Bang machine starts. World doesn’t end.
By Paul Woodward, The National, September 11, 2008

As the biggest scientific experiment in history got started on Wednesday morning, Andy McSmith in The Independent wrote: “It was Oscar Wilde who declared that ‘all art is useless’ – which was not a condemnation, but a proclamation. If you want to create something of beauty, he meant, do not be distracted by people who ask what it is for. On that basis, whatever emerges from the £4.4bn experiment that begins today in the vast complex built at the Cern – The European Organisation for Nuclear Research – laboratory near Geneva, where infinitesimally small particles travelling at mind-boggling speeds will crash together with so much force that they almost replicate the Big Bang, could be called the most expensive work of art in human history.

“Mathematicians and physicists have a sense of the aesthetic, as surely as poets and dramatists. In Einstein’s theory of relativity or Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, they see works of great simplicity and beauty. What they long for now is a simple and beautiful ‘theory of everything’ that will explain the whole of physics, from the movement of galaxies to the behaviour of subatomic particles, because there is a hole in theoretical physics which causes more distress to the 6,500 scientists working on Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) than the scary speculation about the black hole that some people think will swallow up earth if their experiment goes wrong.”

Drop in violence in Iraq attributed to secret assassination programme
By Paul Woodward, The National, September 10, 2008

“The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret programme the US military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward,” CNN reported.

“The programme – which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb – must remain secret for now or it would ‘get people killed,’ Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

” ‘It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,’ Woodward said.

All counterinsurgency is local
By Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, The Atlantic, October, 2008

June was the deadliest month for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since the invasion in October 2001. July became the second straight month in which casualties exceeded those in Iraq, where four times as many U.S. troops are on the ground. More Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since the invasion began than in the first nine years of the Vietnam War, from 1956 to 1964.

As in Vietnam, the U.S. has never lost a tactical engagement in Afghanistan, and this tactical success is still often conflated with strategic progress. Yet the Taliban insurgency grows more intense and gains more popular traction each year. More and more, the American effort in Afghanistan resembles the Vietnam War—with its emphasis on body counts and air strikes, its cross-border sanctuaries, and its daily tactical victories that never affected the slow and eventually decisive erosion of rural support for the counterinsurgency.

As the Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, noted in a blunt interview with the BBC in May, the current military engagement is also beginning to look like the Soviets’ decade-long Afghan adventure, which ended ignominiously in 1989. That intervention, like the current one, was based on a strategy of administering and securing Afghanistan from urban centers such as Kabul and the provincial capitals. The Soviets held all the provincial capitals, just as we do, and sought to exert influence from there. The mujahideen stoked insurgency in the rural areas of the Pashtun south and east, just as the Taliban do now.

The Petraeus doctrine
By Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic, October, 2008

For a military accustomed to quick, easy victories, the trials and tribulations of the Iraq War have come as a rude awakening. To its credit, the officer corps has responded not with excuses but with introspection. One result, especially evident within the U.S. Army, has been the beginning of a Great Debate of sorts.

Anyone who cares about the Army’s health should take considerable encouragement from this intellectual ferment. Yet anyone who cares about future U.S. national-security strategy should view the debate with considerable concern: it threatens to encroach upon matters that civilian policy makers, not soldiers, should decide.

What makes this debate noteworthy is not only its substance, but its character—the who and the how.

Right at the edge
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, September 7, 2008

Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.

The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.

The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight. According to two of these villagers, whom I interviewed together with a local reporter, the Americans started calling in airstrikes on the Pakistanis after the latter started shooting at the Americans.

Reduced dominance is predicted for U.S.
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will “be the least significant” asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because “nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.”

Fingar’s remarks last week were based on a partially completed “Global Trends 2025” report that assesses how international events could affect the United States in the next 15 to 17 years. Speaking at a conference of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Fingar gave an overview of key findings that he said will be presented to the next occupant of the White House early in the new year.

In hunt for bin Laden, a new approach
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

Frustrated by repeated dead ends in the search for Osama bin Laden, U.S. and Pakistani officials said they are questioning long-held assumptions about their strategy and are shifting tactics to intensify the use of the unmanned but lethal Predator drone spy plane in the mountains of western Pakistan.

The number of Hellfire missile attacks by Predators in Pakistan has more than tripled, with 11 strikes reported by Pakistani officials this year, compared with three in 2007. The attacks are part of a renewed effort to cripple al-Qaeda’s central command that began early last year and has picked up speed as President Bush’s term in office winds down, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials involved in the operations.

There has been no confirmed trace of bin Laden since he narrowly escaped from the CIA and the U.S. military after the battle near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001, according to U.S., Pakistani and European officials. They said they are now concentrating on a short list of other al-Qaeda leaders who have been sighted more recently, in hopes that their footprints could lead to bin Laden.

Secrets of the Taliban’s success
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, September 11, 2008

Kandahar has traditionally been the city of Afghan royalty, warlords and the center of resistance movements against the British and Russia. It was also the spiritual heartland of the student militia, the Taliban, that emerged in the 1990s to combat the vicious civil war that was tearing the country apart.

The Taliban took over Kabul in 1996 and opened the country to al-Qaeda’s training camps, while Osama bin Laden settled in Kandahar. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan a few months later, the Taliban agreed to lose their government but, in the tradition of the Afghan code of honor of Pashtunwali, they refused to hand over their most wanted guests to the Americans.

Seven years after 9/11, the resurgent Taliban movement is exclusively led by Kandahari clans, which still boast of their sacrifices for the Islamic brotherhood in the name of Pashtunwali, but they maintain that the Taliban have never harbored – and never will – an aggressive agenda towards the world community.

Obama to Palin: ‘Don’t mock the Constitution’
By Peter Slevin, Washington Post, September 8, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama delivered an impassioned defense of the Constitution and the rights of terrorism suspects tonight, striking back at one of the biggest applause lines in Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s speech to the GOP convention.

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

Obama had a few problems with that.

“First of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch ’em,” Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. “They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later.”

If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government’s sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

“My position has always been clear: If you’ve got a terrorist, take him out,” Obama said. “Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take ’em out.”

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.'”

Editor’s Comment — This is a contest to decide who on January 20, 2009, gets to pledge that he will “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

For the last seven years the Republicans (with an unconscionable degree of acquiescence on the part of Democrats) have been chipping away at the foundations of American democracy. It’s time for Obama — empowered with his experience as a constitutional scholar — to run with this theme. Defending the constitution is the most solemn pledge that a president makes. Political consultants might say that this is too high-minded to have popular appeal, but however ignorant much of the electorate might be, the idea that America and its constitution are indivisible, resonates even among those who can’t explain what that means.

America can’t afford to have another president who’s soft on the Constitution.

What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick
By Juan Cole, Salon, September 9, 2008

John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

McCain pledged to work for peace based on “the transformative ideals on which we were founded.” Tolerance and democracy require freedom of speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

On Nov. 4, Remember 9/11
By Jeffrey Goldberg, New York Times, September 9, 2008

The next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.

Editor’s Comment — When Jeffrey Goldberg, or anyone else, gravely pronounces that preventing a nuclear attack on America is a supreme responsibility for the next president, it’s hard to dispute — but I will.

Why?

Would the global significance of a terrorist nuclear attack be any less if the target was Paris, or Istanbul, or Tel Aviv, or New Delhi?

America could take no comfort if it happens not to be the target and the fact that the attack could (and in fact is more likely) to occur elsewhere merely underlines that a global threat of this kind demands an international response. In this — as in confronting global warming — success or failure hinges on the ability to develop and sustain international cooperation. “United we stand” has to be more than a patriotic rallying cry; it has to be a recognition and expression of collective interests.

9/11 rumors that become conventional wisdom
By Michael Slackman, New York Times, September 9, 2008

Seven years later, it remains conventional wisdom here that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda could not have been solely responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that the United States and Israel had to have been involved in their planning, if not their execution, too.

This is not the conclusion of a scientific survey, but it is what routinely comes up in conversations around the region — in a shopping mall in Dubai, in a park in Algiers, in a cafe in Riyadh and all over Cairo.

“Look, I don’t believe what your governments and press say. It just can’t be true,” said Ahmed Issab, 26, a Syrian engineer who lives and works in the United Arab Emirates. “Why would they tell the truth? I think the U.S. organized this so that they had an excuse to invade Iraq for the oil.”

It is easy for Americans to dismiss such thinking as bizarre. But that would miss a point that people in this part of the world think Western leaders, especially in Washington, need to understand: That such ideas persist represents the first failure in the fight against terrorism — the inability to convince people here that the United States is, indeed, waging a campaign against terrorism, not a crusade against Muslims.

Pulling the curtain on Palin
By E. J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, September 9, 2008

John McCain’s campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.

Of course, McCain’s people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know.

McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it’s not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.

Record contradicts Palin’s ‘bridge’ claims
By Elizabeth Holmes and Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2008

The Bridge to Nowhere argument isn’t going much of anywhere.

Despite significant evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign continues to assert that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told the federal government “thanks but no thanks” to the now-famous bridge to an island in her home state.

The McCain campaign released a television advertisement Monday morning titled “Original Mavericks.” The narrator of the 30-second spot boasts about the pair: “He fights pork-barrel spending. She stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.”

Gov. Palin, who John McCain named as his running mate less than two weeks ago, quickly adopted a stump line bragging about her opposition to the pork-barrel project Sen. McCain routinely decries.

But Gov. Palin’s claim comes with a serious caveat. She endorsed the multimillion dollar project during her gubernatorial race in 2006. And while she did take part in stopping the project after it became a national scandal, she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere.

Palin billed state for nights spent at home
By James V. Grimaldi and Karl Vick, Washington Post, September 9, 2008

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has billed taxpayers for 312 nights spent in her own home during her first 19 months in office, charging a “per diem” allowance intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business.

The governor also has charged the state for travel expenses to take her children on official out-of-town missions. And her husband, Todd, has billed the state for expenses and a daily allowance for trips he makes on official business for his wife.

Palin, who earns $125,000 a year, claimed and received $16,951 as her allowance, which officials say was permitted because her official “duty station” is Juneau, according to an analysis of her travel documents by The Washington Post.

Olmert indicted as deputy is accused of war crimes
By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, September 8, 2008

The Israeli Attorney General has been urged to launch a criminal investigation into whether Shaul Mofaz, a leading prime ministerial candidate, ordered “war crimes” to be committed when he was the military’s chief of staff.

A leading Israeli law professor has written to justice officials, calling for the investigation into claims – highlighted by The Independent last month – that during a briefing to army officers in May 2001, after the start of the second Palestinian uprising, Mr Mofaz ordered a daily “quota” of Palestinian deaths.

Last night, Israeli police recommended to prosecutors that the Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, be indicted in a corruption investigation. With Mr Olmert committed to resigning after his Kadima party holds a leadership vote a week today, the recommendation will have no immediate impact on his tenure and does not guarantee an indictment by the Attorney General.

U.S. rules out unilateral steps against Russia
By Thom Shanker and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, September 9, 2008

The Bush administration, after considerable internal debate, has decided not to take direct punitive action against Russia for its conflict with Georgia, concluding that it has little leverage if it acts unilaterally and that it would be better off pressing for a chorus of international criticism to be led by Europe.

In recent interviews, senior administration officials said the White House had concluded that American punishments like economic sanctions or blocking Russia from world trade groups would only backfire, deepening Russia’s intransigence and allowing the Kremlin to narrow the regional and global implications of its invasion of Georgia to an old-fashioned Washington-Moscow dispute.

Even as they vowed to work with allies, administration officials conceded that they wished the European Union had been willing to take firmer action than issuing tepid statements criticizing Russia’s conduct. But the officials said the benefits of remaining part of a united front made it prudent for the United States to accept the softer approach advocated by Italy and Germany, among other allies.

Caution over confrontation
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, September 10, 2008

In the month since the Russian invasion of Georgia, the Bush administration has crafted a policy that should please some liberal critics and upset conservative hard-liners — a low-key approach that tries to help the Georgians recover without backing Russia further into a corner.

The Georgia strategy is premised on working jointly with European allies, and on avoiding the sort of unilateral U.S. military threats that would scare them off. It is also tempered by the administration’s earlier mistakes in dealing with mercurial Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, which set the stage for his unwise Aug. 8 attack on South Ossetia that provoked the punishing Russian reaction.

It’s a policy, in short, that distills some of the foreign-policy lessons learned at the shank end of the Bush presidency. And its contours, interestingly enough, arguably are closer to the thrust of Barack Obama’s initial, cautious reaction to the Georgia crisis than to the more confrontational approach of John McCain.

U.S. and Iraqi officials try to reassure citizen patrols about transfer
By Erica Goode and Mudhafar al-Husaini, New York Times, September 9, 2008

Gathered in the domed hall of a palace built by Saddam Hussein, Awakening Council leaders in the Adhamiya neighborhood met with Iraqi and American military officers on Monday to learn what the future holds for them once the Sunni-dominated citizen patrols begin reporting to the Iraqi government on Oct. 1.

About 75 leaders and rank-and-file members from the western side of the neighborhood listened and murmured as Brig. Gen. Tarek Abdul Hameed explained what would happen when responsibility for paying and directing 54,000 Awakening patrol members in and around Baghdad was transferred from the Americans to the Iraqi government.

The meeting, the Iraqi and American officers said, was called in part to quash rumors that there would be mass arrests of Awakening members and that American forces would no longer be involved with the patrols.

Obama takes first direct shot at Palin
By Charles Babbington, AP, September 6, 2008

Barack Obama made his first direct criticism of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on Saturday, saying she pretends to oppose spending earmarks when she actually has embraced them.

Speaking to 800 people at the Wabash Valley Fairgrounds in Terre Haute, Ind., the Democratic presidential nominee ridiculed John McCain and his running mate, the Alaska governor, for describing themselves as agents of change at this week’s GOP convention.

“Don’t be fooled,” Obama told the crowd surrounding him in a large barn. “John McCain’s party, with the help of John McCain, has been in charge” for nearly eight years.

“I know the governor of Alaska has been saying she’s change, and that’s great,” Obama said. “She’s a skillful politician. But, you know, when you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient, and then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that’s not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.”

Palin and McCain’s shotgun marriage
By Frank Rich, New York Times, September 7, 2008

Given the actuarial odds that could make Palin our 45th president, it would be helpful to know who this mystery woman actually is. Meanwhile, two eternal axioms of our politics remain in place. Americans vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. And in judging the top of the ticket, voters look first at the candidates’ maiden executive decision, their selection of running mates. Whatever we do and don’t know about Palin’s character at this point, there is no ambiguity in what her ascent tells us about McCain’s character and potential presidency.

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

That ideological sellout, unfortunately, was not the worst leadership trait the last-minute vice presidential pick revealed about McCain. His speed-dating of Palin reaffirmed a more dangerous personality tic that has dogged his entire career. His decision-making process is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless.

McCain-Palin becoming Palin-McCain?
AP, September 6, 2008

The banners, buttons and signs say McCain-Palin, but the crowds say something else.

“Sa-rah! Pa-lin!” came the chant at a Colorado Springs rally on Saturday moments before Republican nominee John McCain took the stage with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a woman who was virtually unknown to the nation just a week earlier. The day before, thousands screamed “Sa-rah! Sa-rah! Sa-rah!” at an amphitheater outside Detroit.

“Real change with a real woman,” read one sign at a Wisconsin rally. “Hurricane Sarah leaves liberals spinning,” cried another.

Editor’s Comment — If the McCain campaign thought it had closed the “enthusiasm gap”, it’s also ironically opened it up: the more adulation Palin gets, the less of a leader McCain looks. Come November, no one’s going to the voting booth to elect a vice president.

Palin’s true north
By Timothy Egan, New York Times, September 4, 2008

Long before the slogan known to 48-hour libertines — What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas – became commonplace, I heard a variant of that in Alaska, and not just at closing time in fishermen’s bars.

Distance breeds isolation, and in Alaska that often means an arm’s-length code of personal privacy. The state is full of people who have left behind marriages, debts and places that simply weren’t big enough to contain their personalities.

As she showed Wednesday night with her acceptance speech, Gov. Sarah Palin fits the mold of a certain kind of Alaskan – “take it from a gal who knows,” as she said. The state has a unique political ecosystem, as quirky, odd and compelling as the big land itself.

But it is John McCain’s biggest gamble to hope that there is enough of Palin’s Last Frontier in the rest of the country to carry his ticket to the next frontier.

Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: a culture clash
By Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, September 7, 2008

In a dingy storefront on a noisy block in the middle of Gaza City, metal shelves bulge with dusty audiotapes extolling Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad. Alongside them, a pouty Jennifer Lopez beckons from the cover of a CD. DVDs are also on offer, of not-yet-officially-released movies like “Wanted,” “Hancock” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan,” the Adam Sandler comedy about a Mossad agent turned hairdresser in a New York City salon run by a Palestinian woman.

Amer Kihail, 32, a slender man with an elastic, hangdog face, runs the store, called New Sound. Do Gazans living under Hamas buy much Western music or many Western movies? Mr. Kihail looked baffled, and maybe even a little annoyed, by the question.

“Of course,” he said.

Ruled by Hamas, penned in by Israel, grappling with daily shortages of food and supplies, Gazans need an escape. Culture turns out to be not just an afterthought but, many say, essential to surviving here. Especially for young Gazans, what’s on satellite television and the Internet, on tapes and compact discs, is a window to the world beyond the armored checkpoints, and a link to Arab society elsewhere and, crucially, to the West.

And in what is clearly an emerging struggle within Hamas between political pragmatists, trying to consolidate their new authority, and extremists who have begun pressing a more fundamentalist agenda, culture is a central battleground for control of Gaza. A release from confinement and hardship, even mundane television becomes freighted in this context.

Editor’s Comment — Here’s the key quote: “… you cannot joke with Hamas.”

Puritans, ideologues and extremists all share the same blind spot: the inability to experience delight in ambiguity.

In this failing is contained the most profound constraint on human freedom: the failure to recognize that the world is bigger and richer than the representations through which we attempt to understand it.

Russia’s role in the Iran crisis
By Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, Boston Globe, September 6, 2008

It is one of the rites of passage of the fall – every September, the Bush administration returns to the United Nation for another sanctions resolution against Iran. However, this time there is much consternation in Washington that Russia’s invasion of Georgia – and the subsequent chill that has descended on relations between Russia and the West – has ended any possibility of cooperation between the United States and Russia in dealing with Iran’s nuclear imbroglio. Such fears are overblown.

Russia’s assault on Georgia may produce no measurable change of its Iran policy. Indeed, President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia made it clear that, despite the harsh rhetoric that has been exchanged between Moscow and Washington, Russia continues to support efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The primary reason for the continuity is that both Iran and Russia are essentially satisfied with existing US-European policy of applying incremental and largely symbolic UN sanctions on Tehran. Moscow feels that as long as the diplomatic process remains in play, America is in no position to launch a military strike that could destabilize the Middle East. At the same time, the theocratic regime has increasingly adjusted to a sanctions policy whose impact is negated by increasing oil prices.

Although Tehran would be grateful for a Russian veto of any future sanctions resolutions, it does seem content with a Russian policy that waters down UN mandates while deepening its commercial ties with Iran. On the one hand, Moscow has supported three previous Security Council injunctions against Iran, yet it has also signed lucrative trade deals and expanded its diplomatic representation in Iran. The incongruity of today’s situation is that Russia rebukes Iran for its nuclear infractions while providing technical assistance to the Bushehr plant, which is a critical component of Iran’s atomic industry.

Shimon Peres warns Israel’s hawks over Iran strike
By Uzi Mahnaimi, The Sunday Times, September 7, 2008

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has warned the prime minister that a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could provoke a broader conflict.

Peres is the first senior politician to advise Ehud Olmert against such an attack at a time of growing tension when other leading figures are threatening airstrikes unless Tehran halts its nuclear programme.

The Israeli air force has rehearsed an operation to destroy sites connected with the project.

“The military way will not solve the problem,” said Peres, the 85-year-old founder of the Jewish state’s nuclear programme, in an interview with The Sunday Times.

China calls for peaceful resolution of nuclear standoff
By Edward Wong, New York Times, September 7, 2008

President Hu Jintao of China urged other nations on Saturday to negotiate a resolution to Iran’s nuclear issue during a meeting with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, making clear again that China disapproves of any move by Western countries to attack Iran with military force.

Mr. Hu met with Mr. Ahmadinejad on Saturday in the Great Hall of the People here after Mr. Ahmadinejad flew into Beijing to attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, which began in the evening.

“At present, the Iran nuclear issue is faced with a rare opportunity for the resumption of talks, and we hope all parties concerned could seize the opportunity and show flexibility to push for a peaceful settlement of the issue,” Mr. Hu said in the meeting, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.

Maliki drops the mask
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, September 5, 2008

What’s up with Nouri al-Maliki? As security anxieties subside in this slowly calming city, political speculation has rarely been so intense. First, it was Maliki’s demand that all US troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Then came signs that his government wants to undermine the Sunni tribal militias, known as the Awakening councils, on whom the Americans have relied to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq. Now there are moves to take on the powerful Kurdish peshmerga troops and push them out of disputed areas in the strategic central province of Diyala.

Why is the prime minister doing this? Is “the puppet breaking his strings”, as one Arab newspaper put it? Or is the more appropriate metaphor “dropping the mask”? Those who knew Maliki in exile in Syria during Saddam Hussein’s time now recall that he opposed the US-led invasion. His Daawa party did not attend the eve-of-invasion conference of US- and UK-supported exiles in London, and he opposed the party’s decision six months later to join the hand-picked “governing council” set up by the first occupation overlord, Paul Bremer.

Maliki’s new line has discomforted the Americans. Some officials put on a brave face, saying it is a sign of Iraqi confidence in their own sovereignty, a development that, of course, they support as proof that the Bush administration’s strategy of rebuilding a proud country is succeeding. Others say it reflects overconfidence, even hubris, as Iraq is a long way from being able to survive without US military protection.

Zero hour for Zardari
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, September 4, 2008

Zardari does not immediately stand out as the person best equipped to tackle Pakistan’s myriad problems. Yet because he is expected to renege on a promise to curb the sweeping authority accumulated by Musharraf, he is set to become the country’s most powerful civilian president ever. Some see this as a high price to pay for democracy.

“Some people call Pakistan a rogue state. Now it’s going to be a rogue’s state,” said a former senior government official. “Zardari will have the power to appoint a prime minister, dissolve parliament and appoint the chief of the armed forces. He will be in charge of the nuclear command authority, which oversees Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal. His style of leadership combines arrogance with ignorance and cronyism. He has no real party platform. What we are looking at is the rise of a civilian dictator.”

So harsh a verdict, delivered before Zardari takes office, may be a trifle premature. Less impassioned observers say two factors are key to whether he will be an effective leader. One is the attitude of the US. On pragmatic grounds but also because of its ideological commitment to supporting democracy, Washington has taken a back seat so far as the political process unfolds. For his part Zardari pledged this week to maintain the US alliance and help prosecute the “war on terror”. But his reliability is questioned.

Hamid Karzai blames Britain for Taliban resurgence
By Dean Nelson, The Sunday Times, September 7, 2008

The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has blamed Britain for the resurgence of the Taliban and its growing activity in large tracts of the country.

His remarks, made to Afghan MPs, follow a clash with Gordon Brown over the Kabul regime’s links with warlords and drugs barons.

Karzai claims Brown has threatened to withdraw British troops from Helmand province, where 31 of them have died this year, if the president reinstates two provincial governors sacked for alleged dealings in the heroin trade.

One of them is Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand, who was forced out under British pressure two years ago after nine tons of opium and heroin were discovered in his basement. Karzai’s plan to reinstate the governors has alarmed western diplomats in Kabul and dismayed British officials.

A leader beyond denial, as war plans flounder
By Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, September 7, 2008

In this fourth volume of his quartet of books on the Bush White House, Bob Woodward reaches a damning conclusion about the presidency of George W. Bush. “A president must be able to get a clear-eyed, unbiased assessment of the war,” he writes. “The president must lead. For years, time and again, President Bush has displayed impatience, bravado and unsettling personal certainty about his decisions. The result has too often been impulsiveness and carelessness and, perhaps most troubling, a delayed reaction to realities and advice that run counter to his gut.”

“After ordering the invasion,” Mr. Woodward goes on, “the president spent three years in denial and then delegated a strategy review to his national security adviser. Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. There was no deadline, no hurry. The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management. He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead.”

In this respect, Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush in “The War Within” — a book Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has called incomplete and misleading — amplifies the one he drew in his last book, “State of Denial” (2006), in which the president emerged as a passive, stubborn and intellectually incurious leader, given to an almost religious certainty about his decision making and inclined to make instinctive gut calls. It stands in striking contrast to the laudatory portrait in the first book in this series, “Bush at War” (2002), which depicted the president in Rovian terms as a strong, resolute, even visionary leader.

Doubt, distrust, delay
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post, September 7, 2008

During the summer of 2006, from her office adjacent to the White House, deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan sent President Bush a daily top secret report cataloging the escalating bloodshed and chaos in Iraq. “Violence has acquired a momentum of its own and is now self-sustaining,” she wrote July 20, quoting from an intelligence assessment.

Her dire evaluation contradicted the upbeat assurances that President Bush was hearing from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. commander in Iraq. Casey and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were pushing to draw down American forces and speed the transfer of responsibility to the Iraqis. Despite months of skyrocketing violence, Casey insisted that within a year, Iraq would be mostly stable, with the bulk of American combat troops headed home.

Publicly, the president claimed the United States was winning the war, and he expressed unwavering faith in Casey, saying, “It’s his judgment that I rely upon.” Privately, he was losing confidence in the drawdown strategy. He questioned O’Sullivan that summer with increasing urgency: “What are you hearing from people in Baghdad? What are people’s daily lives like?”

“It’s hell, Mr. President,” she answered, determined not to mislead or lie to him.

‘Noise of terrorism’
By Allison Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2008

A Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three suspected of being a “fixer” for al-Qaida, moving money to support terrorist operations, has been charged with assault and attempted murder in federal court in Manhattan.

Aafia Siddiqui, 36, holds a bachelor’s degree from MIT and a doctorate from Brandeis University.

Siddiqui’s lawyers and human rights groups claim Siddiqui was abducted by intelligence agents and tortured at secret interrogation facilities for five years, until she became a cause celebre in Pakistan and authorities engineered her sudden reappearance with her eldest son, an 11-year-old, in Afghanistan this summer. It is thought she may have been held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, an American detention facility located at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

According to the indictment, Siddiqui appeared in Ghazni on July 17 carrying a bag packed with chemicals and notes about a “mass casualty attack” involving the Empire State Building or other US landmarks. The following day, she allegedly grabbed an M-4 rifle from a US Army officer and fired it, while stating “her intent and desire to kill Americans.”

She had vanished with her children in March 2003, while the FBI sought her for questioning about suspected ties to al-Qaida and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

She is not accused of any terrorist crimes, though prosecutors say the investigation is ongoing.

“There’s all the noise of terrorism, but it’s not in the charges,” said Joanne Mariner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch in New York who has followed the case.

Legal experts say if her lawyers are right, Siddiqui, already unique for being the only woman suspected of high-level al-Qaida involvement, would be the first person to face prosecution in a US criminal court after being held in secret intelligence custody.

In a more diverse America, a mostly white convention
By Eli Saslow and Robert Barnes, Washington Post, September 4, 2008

Organizers conceived of this convention as a means to inspire, but some African American Republicans have found the Xcel Energy Center depressing this week. Everywhere they look, they see evidence of what they consider one of their party’s biggest shortcomings.

As the country rapidly diversifies, Republicans are presenting a convention that is almost entirely white.

Only 36 of the 2,380 delegates seated on the convention floor are black, the lowest number since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies began tracking diversity at political conventions 40 years ago. Each night, the overwhelmingly white audience watches a series of white politicians step to the lectern — a visual reminder that no black Republican has served as a governor, U.S. senator or U.S. House member in the past six years.

Editor’s Comment — How can a party that doesn’t resemble the country, credibly put the “country first”?

A white minority that claims a right to speak for everyone is merely expressing its contempt for those outside its ranks.

That Sarah Palin can rouse the spirits of the Republican faithful by no means suggests that she’s about to inspire a groundswell of popular support across the nation. That John McCain was correct in believing that Palin could fire up a lackluster campaign does not resolve the Republicans’ fundamental challenge: How can a party that has been dominant for this long now plausibly present itself as a force for change?

Biden: Israel’s decisions must be made in Jerusalem, not D.C.
By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz, September 4, 2008

The former chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations also criticized presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain’s approach to Israel and the United States’ diplomatic tensions with Iran by portraying the Islamic Republic as being in a fractured and weak state.

“McCain says it’s status quo or war – and there’s nothing in between. We all know Iran is weak and weak economically,” Biden said. “We should stop making Iran into this 12-foot giant. They are not. They are not. The more we do that, the more we undercut our own self-interest.”

Biden also questioned the wisdom of a pre-emptive U.S.-led attack on Iran, at a time when the U.S. is “bogged-down in Iraq,” adding that he has been “stunned by the incompetence” of the Bush administration in its handling of the war in Iraq.

Biden defended his opposition to the Kyl-Lieberman Iran amendment, which calls for labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and passed by a vote of 76 – 22, saying that he didn’t want to help the government find a “pretext for war with Iran,” especially in light of what he described as the Bush administration’s inept handling of the war in Iraq.

Going on an imperial bender
By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, September 4, 2008

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don’t stay, often American equipment does — carefully stored for further use at tiny “cooperative security locations,” known informally as “lily pads” (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad.

American forces attack militants on Pakistani soil
By Pir Zubair Shah, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, New York Times, September 4, 2008

Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.

Until now, allied forces in Afghanistan have occasionally carried out airstrikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan against militants hiding there, and American forces in “hot pursuit” of militants have had some latitude to chase them across the border.

But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.

It also seemed likely to complicate relations with Pakistan, where the already unstable political situation worsened after the resignation last month of President Pervez Musharraf, a longtime American ally.

Ukraine government near collapse
By Clifford J Levy, New York Times, September 4, 2008

The Western-leaning governing coalition in Ukraine, which took power during the Orange Revolution in 2004 but has endured repeated tumult ever since, appeared once again near collapse on Wednesday.

The president of Ukraine, Viktor A. Yushchenko, asserted that he was the victim of a “political and constitutional coup” carried out by his ally, Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, and threatened to call for early parliamentary elections. She blamed him, saying he was seeking ways to rebuild his flagging popular support.

The instability erupted on the eve of a visit to Ukraine by Vice President Dick Cheney, who arrived in the region to show his support for American allies in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month.

Palin: average isn’t good enough
By Sam Harris, Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2008

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won reelection.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.

Obama answers your science questions
By Brandon Keim, Wired, September 2, 2008

America asked Barack Obama about science, and Obama answered.

“This is the first time we know of that a candidate for president has laid out his science policy before the election at this level of detail,” said Shawn Otto, CEO of ScienceDebate2008.

A 38,000-member coalition of scientists, engineers and concerned citizens, ScienceDebate2008 pushed presidential candidates to attend to science — an area that is vital to America’s economy and touches on nearly every important political issue, but is generally neglected during elections.

What Palin says about McCain
By Mark Mellman, The Hill, September 2, 2008

In selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) as his running mate, John McCain violated the first, and perhaps only, rule of vice presidential selection — first do no harm.

Commentary aplenty has explored her qualifications for the job. Instead of retracing that well-trod ground, consider what the process reveals about John McCain himself.

With his first “presidential” decision, McCain has cast considerable, and mostly unflattering, light on his own character and thinking.

First and foremost, it underlines his rash and impetuous nature. Whatever her appeals, what kind of person offers the vice presidency to someone he met just once before? What kind of judgment does that reflect?

Editor’s Comment —

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and Third by experience, which is the bitterest.” — Confucius

“The intelligent want self-control; children want candy.” — Rumi

A word that has fallen out of the contemporary political vernacular but dearly needs resurecting is wisdom. Has this not been, thoughout history, what people most wanted from their leaders: that their actions be guided by wisdom?

Experience is the field in which wisdom can grow, but no amount of experience eliminates the danger of impulsiveness. Indeed, to be impulsive is to unshackle oneself from the past and disregard everything but the passion of the moment.

The flash of impulse invigorates and empowers the individual by confusing his adversaries. It might at very specific moments demonstrate the courage and flexibility that the circumstances demand. But beyond that, if impulsiveness is an operating procedure — if it is the way someone works — there’s no doubt that those driven by impulse are parading their lack of wisdom.

If John McCain has more wisdom than he’s recently displayed, he’ll give the GOP another shock and with or without grace engineer the means to allow Sarah Palin to step aside. But for this to happen would seem so un-McCain, it seems almost impossible to imagine.

Palin disclosures raise questions on vetting
By Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, September 2, 2008

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

The “Eagleton scenario”
By Joshua Green, The Atlantic, September 2, 2008

Barring a dramatic reversal, Sarah Palin will formally become the Republican vice presidential nominee Wednesday night. Since Friday, when the pick was announced, news surrounding Palin has been almost uniformly negative: the initial focus on her lack of experience quickly gave way to reports of her involvement in the Troopergate scandal, the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark, an Alaskan separatist party, a 527 group organized by recently indicted Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, and, on Labor Day, her teenage daughter’s pregnancy.

Here in St. Paul, talk of Palin has dominated the Republican convention—even more so than cable news—and by Monday night discussion among Republican operatives and reporters had turned to whether Palin would survive or become the first running mate since Thomas Eagleton in 1972 to leave a major-party ticket. On Monday, the InTrade futures market opened trading on whether Palin would withdraw before the election.

McCain ad: Palin more qualified than Obama
By Mike Allen, Politico, September 3, 2008

Mounting a ferocious defense of his embattled running mate, John McCain said he is buying a TV ad arguing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has more experience than the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama.

In an effort to rev up conservatives, a campaign statement issued a list of critical media mentions that it called “smears” of Palin, who speaks in primetime at the convention on Wednesday night.

Obama, Arabs and cheap shots
By Scott McLeod, Time, September 1, 2008

Friends here are still annoyed by the hint of unexpected Arab-bashing they detected in the historic acceptance speech last week by Barack Obama, otherwise a very popular figure in the Muslim world. I hope that Obama wasn’t taking a cheap shot. But my friends have a point.

Al Qaida has free movement in Pakistan, top official concedes
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy, September 1, 2008

Pakistan’s top security official Monday admitted that al Qaida’s leadership moved freely in and out of the country and vowed that “no mercy” would be shown to extremists based in its tribal territory that borders Afghanistan.

In the past, Pakistan has been heavily criticized for rejecting evidence that al Qaida was largely based in the country and for denying that the tribal territory was used as a safe haven for Afghan insurgents.

U.S., Afghan troops kill 20 in Pakistan
By Candace Rondeaux, Washington Post, September 3, 2008

At least 20 people were killed in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday after U.S. and Afghan troops crossed from Afghanistan to pursue Taliban insurgents in an early morning attack that marked the first known instance in which U.S. forces conducted an operation on Pakistani soil since the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began, according to witnesses and a Pakistani official.

The United States has conducted occasional air and artillery strikes against insurgents lodged across the border in Pakistani territory, and “hot pursuit” rules provide some room for U.S. troops to maneuver in the midst of battle. But the arrival of three U.S. helicopters in the village of Musa Nika, clearly inside the Pakistani border, drew a sharp response from Pakistani officials.

“We strongly object to the incursion of ISAF troops on Pakistani territory,” said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, referring to the International Security Assistance Force, the coalition of U.S. and other NATO troops that has been battling the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan since 2001.

A sting in Pakistan’s al-Qaeda mission
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, September 4, 2008

The Pakistani military has halted operations in Bajaur Agency in the northwest of the country, saying “the back has been broken” of the militancy there.

A military spokesman said that in light of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began on Sunday, all action would stop, which would allow about 500,000 displaced people to return home. Officials claim that in three weeks of fighting 560 militants have been killed, with the loss of 20 members of the security forces.

The ground reality, though, is that the operation failed in its primary objective, to catch the big fish so wanted by the United States – al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. This would have been the perfect present for Islamabad to give the George W Bush administration in the run-up to the US presidential elections in November.

Return to the Valley of Death
By Sebastian Junger, Vanity Fair, October, 2008

This is not a war where soldiers are taken prisoner; if a position were to be overrun, virtually every American in it would be killed during the firefight. The wounded would probably be executed where they lay, or worse. The Taliban would take astronomic casualties, but they may have calculated that one or two such incidents would cause the American public to demand an end to the small-base strategy in Afghanistan. With roughly 30,000 troops in the country—there are more police in New York City—the U.S. command would never be able to reinforce those small bases. They would have to withdraw to larger ones instead, and swathes of territory between these bases would become open to infiltration by the Taliban.

In early July, American military intelligence learned that a force of 300 foreign and local fighters had massed around another remote base, named Bella, but the Americans completed a planned pullout before they could be attacked. Bella had been occupied by Chosen Company, part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, and Chosen had just finished a 15-month deployment in one of the most rugged and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. Like the rest of their brigade, they were literally days from going home. Chosen had acquired a bit of a reputation in the battalion, however. The previous August they had nearly been overrun at a 22-man outpost named Ranch House; at one point the enemy was so close that Chosen asked the A-10 pilots to strafe their own position. And several months later, 14 men from Chosen—along with 14 Afghan soldiers—were ambushed along a mountain trail in the same valley. Within minutes, every single man on the patrol was dead or wounded. An American unit hasn’t suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent in a firefight since Vietnam.

Israel of the Caucasus
By Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI, September 2, 2008

NATO guarantees that an attack against one member country is an attack against all are no longer what they used to be. Had Georgia been inside NATO, a number of European countries would no longer be willing to consider it an attack against their own soil.

For Russia, the geopolitical stars were in perfect alignment. The United States was badly overstretched and had no plausible way to talk tough without coming across as empty rhetoric. American resources have been drained by the Iraq and Afghan wars, and the war on terror. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it, Washington must now choose between its “pet project” Georgia and a partnership with Moscow.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili evidently thought the United States would come to his side militarily if Russian troops pushed him back into Georgia after ordering an attack last Aug. 8 on the breakaway province of South Ossetia. And when his forces were mauled by Russia’s counterattack, bitter disappointment turned to anger. Along with Abkhazia, Georgia lost two provinces.

U.S. is set to announce $1 billion in aid for Georgia
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, September 3, 2008

The Bush administration plans to announce a $1 billion package of aid to help rebuild Georgia after its rout by Russian forces last month, administration officials said on Wednesday, as Vice President Dick Cheney arrived in the region to signal support for Georgia and other countries neighboring Russia.

The aid — along with Mr. Cheney’s visit — is sure to increase tensions with Russia, whose leaders have accused the United States of stoking the conflict with Georgia over its two separatist regions, by providing weapons and training to the Georgians. President Dmitri A. Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin have also complained that humanitarian supplies delivered by the American Navy and Air Force since Russian forces routed Georgian forces and occupied parts of the country were a disguise for delivering new weapons.

Arab mismanagement? Blame colonialism
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, September 3, 2008

The agreement signed last Saturday that saw Italy apologize and pay $5 billion in compensation for its colonial rule and misdeeds in Libya was a powerful example of why it is so important to acknowledge that which many of our friends in the West constantly tell us to put behind us: history.

History matters, and endures, and its consequences constantly must be grasped, not ignored. In this case, we witness neither the end nor the resumption of history, but the neutralization of one aspect of history as a fractious force of resentment and discord.

For many in the West, history, especially the West’s colonial and imperial history in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is something to skim through in a high school class, and then to relegate to the past as irrelevant to today’s conflicts and tensions. For many people in the former colonized world, however, history is a deep and open wound that still oozes pain and distortion. Libya is a classic example of colonialism’s twisted and enduring legacy of nearly dysfunctional states governed by corrupt and often incompetent elites, whose people never have a chance to validate either the configuration of statehood or the exercise of power.

MK Eldad forms anti-Islam coalition
By Ronen Medzini, Ynet, September 3, 2008

A new front being formed by representatives of the Israeli Right and European lawmakers is threatening to ignite flames of hatred. Knesset Member Arieh Eldad (Nationa Union-National Religious Party) announced Wednesday that he would be hosting a convention in Jerusalem under the banner, “Standing Up to Jihad.”

“The spread of Islam threatens the foundations of Western civilization,” he explained, and screened a scene from a film produced by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which sparked a row in the Arab world several months ago and was banned in many places in Europe.

Iraqi army readies for showdown with Kurds
By Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, September 3, 2008

Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga forces are bracing for conflict in the disputed city of Khanaqin in the most serious threat of clashes between Arabs and Kurds since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

A delegation flew from Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish regional government, to Baghdad at the weekend to try to resolve the crisis. The two main Kurdish parties are allied and form part of Iraq’s coalition government.

However, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region, and leader of the Kurdish Democratic party, said Iraq was still living under the influence of Saddam’s regime and the central government was not serious about sharing power with Kurds. He claimed many military decisions were made without consultations with General Babakir Zebari, a Kurd who is the Iraqi army’s chief of staff.

Maliki’s growing defiance of U.S. worries allies and critics
By Leila Fadel, McClatchy, September 1, 2008

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki has been on a roll, and American officials are getting worried.

Once perceived as a sectarian Shiite Muslim leader, the U.S.-backed Maliki has won over Sunni constituents in recent months with offensives to curb Shiite militias in southern cities such as Basra and Amara and in the Baghdad Shiite slum of Sadr City.

He then turned his security forces north to wrest control of Mosul and Diyala province from Sunni extremists. U.S. forces provided strong backing, and except for Basra and Sadr City, the operations were announced in advance so that militants and insurgents had a chance to run.

Whether anyone admits it or not, Hamas appears to have won
By Daoud Kuttab, Daily Star, September 3, 2008

Whether those supporting the moderate leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas admit it or not, Hamas appears to have won. Now, before Islamists around the world start celebrating, it is important to note that the Middle East, let alone the world, is far from embracing hard-line fundamentalists. Hamas, for the record, has made some important ideological and practical changes, the most important of which was the tahdiya, or temporary cease-fire with Israel.

The signs of Hamas’ victory can be seen all over. From the success of the siege-breaking peace boats to the partial opening of the Rafah crossing with Egypt and the serious talks Hamas leaders are holding with Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence chiefs.

Part of the reason for Hamas’ success is the fact that the region and the world have little choice but to accept the reality that emerged in February 2006 and that Hamas in June 2007, with its takeover of Gaza, served notice that it was not going away.