Indian forces battle pockets of militants
By Keith Bradsher and Somini Sengupta, New York Times, November 29, 2008

As the crisis in Mumbai neared its 48th hour, Indian commandos were battling to overcome stubborn resistance by militants on Friday, seeking to end the bloody assault on India’s financial and entertainment capital that has shaken the nation and raised perilous regional tensions with Pakistan.

Shortly before night settled over the stricken city, the police said the death toll had reached 143 with the discovery of 24 bodies in the luxury Oberoi hotel, where guests were set free on Friday after being holed up in their rooms as security forces re-asserted control of the building. But officers did not explain why the operation to flush out a handful of assailants in other places had taken so long.

Commandos slid down ropes from a hovering Army helicopter on Friday morning as they stormed a Jewish center that had been seized. The blue-uniformed troopers landed on the roof and soon made their way inside Nariman House, home to the Hasidic Jewish group Chabad-Lubavitch. The caution and pace of their maneuvers suggested the authorities were keen to avoid civilian casualties. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — For the individual gunmen involved in this attack their motives may have been personal and diverse. Time reports: “A gunman, holed up in Mumbai’s Oberoi Trident hotel where some 40 people had been taken hostage, told an Indian news channel that the attacks were revenge for the persecution of Muslims in India. ‘We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?’ he asked via telephone.”

Given that the tactical choice of using guns instead of bombs meant that the perpetrators inevitably risked capture, it seems possible that this team of gunmen may have been made up of groups of two, three or four men each of which had its own ideological agenda and none of which shared or necessarily were aware of the agenda of their sponsors. Even so, the broad character of the operation — it’s focus on Mumbai’s internationalism, its novelty, and its potential to have a far-reaching geopolitical impact — all of this strongly suggests that this was not simply a blood-curdling cry of vengeance from a group that sees itself standing up for India’s oppressed Muslims. Were it such, the target would have unambiguously been Hindus.

Attributes suggest outside help
By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, November 28, 2008

Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Analysts said this week’s attacks surpassed previous plots carried out by domestic groups in terms of complexity, the number of people involved and their success in achieving their primary goal: namely, to spread fear.

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.” [continued…]

India says trawler may have delivered attackers
By Krittivas Mukherjee, Reuters, November 28, 2008

An Indian-owned fishing trawler may have been used to deliver militants who attacked Mumbai from the sea, a top coast guard official said on Friday.

“Whether the trawler was hijacked or not is being investigated, but some of the things found on the trawler are bad news,” he said, declining to be named. “The boat was used to drop off men.” Indian investigators say the militants who attacked Mumbai, killing around 120 people, arrived by sea in rubber dinghies, but are trying to trace the ship which ferried them close to the city.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pinned the blame for the attacks on militants based in a neighbouring country, usually meaning Pakistan. [continued…]

India’s suspicion of Pakistan clouds U.S. strategy in region
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, November 28, 2008

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two big, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.

Those steps could quickly be derailed, with deep consequences for the United States, if India finds Pakistani fingerprints on the well-planned operation. India has raised suspicions. Pakistan has vehemently denied them.

But no matter who turns out to be responsible for the Mumbai attacks, their scale and the choice of international targets will make the agenda of the new American administration harder. [continued…]

Claims emerge of British terrorists in Mumbai
By Angela Balakrishnan, The Guardian, November 28, 2008

It is too early to tell whether British-born Pakistanis were among the Mumbai terrorists, Gordon Brown said today in response to claims at least two Britons were involved.

The Foreign Office is investigating reports on the Indian channel NDTV that quoted Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying there were British links to the attacks. [continued…]

City under siege
By Dr. Shashi Tharoor, The Daily Beast, November 28, 2008

Today, the platitudes flow like blood. Terrorism is unacceptable; the terrorists are cowards; the world stands united in unreserved condemnation of this latest atrocity. Commentators in America trip over themselves to pronounce this night and day of carnage “India’s 9/11.” But India has endured many attempted 9/11s, notably a ferocious assault on its national Parliament in December 2001 that nearly led to all-out war against the assailants’ presumed sponsors, Pakistan. This year alone, terrorist bombs have taken lives in Jaipur, in Ahmedabad, in Delhi and (in an eerie dress-rehearsal for the effectiveness of synchronicity) several different places on one searing day in the state of Assam. Jaipur is the lodestar of Indian tourism to Rajasthan; Ahmedabad is the primary city of Gujarat, the state that is a poster child for India’s development, with a local GDP growth rate of 14%; Delhi is the nation’s political capital and India’s window to the world; Assam was logistically convenient for terrorists from across a porous border. Mumbai combined all four elements of its precursors: by attacking it, the terrorists hit India’s economy, its tourism, and its internationalism, and they took advantage of the city’s openness to the world. A grand slam.

Indians have learned to endure the unspeakable horrors of terrorist violence ever since men in Pakistan concluded it was cheaper and more effective to bleed India to death than to attempt to defeat it in conventional war. Attack after attack has proven to have been financed, equipped and guided from across the border, the most recent being the suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an action publicly traced by American intelligence to Islamabad’s dreaded military special-ops agency, the ISI. The risible attempt to claim “credit” for the Mumbai killings in the name of the “Deccan Mujahideen” merely confirms that wherever the killers are from, it is not the Deccan. The Deccan lies inland from Mumbai; one does not need to sail the waters of the Arabian Sea to the Gateway of India to get to the city from there. In its meticulous planning, sophisticated coordination and military precision, as well as its choice of targets, the assault on Mumbai bore no trace of what its promoters tried to suggest it was: a spontaneous eruption by angry young Indian Muslims. This horror was not homegrown. [continued…]

Keeping Robert Gates as secretary of defense is a great idea
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, November 26, 2008

If the reports are true that Robert Gates will stay on as President Obama’s defense secretary, the move is a stroke of brilliance—politically and substantively.

In his nearly two years at the helm of the Pentagon, Gates has delivered a series of speeches on the future direction of military policy. He has urged officers to recognize the shift in the face of warfare from the World War II legacy of titanic armored battles between comparably mighty foes to the modern reality of small shadow wars against terrorists and insurgents.

More than that, he has called for systematic adjustments to this new reality: canceling weapons systems that aren’t suited to these kinds of wars and building more weapons that are; reforming the promotion boards to reward and advance the creative officers who have proved most adept at this style of warfare; rethinking the roles and missions of the individual branches of the armed services; siphoning some of the military’s missions, especially those dealing with “nation building,” to civilian agencies. [continued…]

Iraq backs deal that sets end of U.S. role
By Alissa Rubin and Campbell Robertson, New York Times, November 28, 2008

With a substantial majority, the Iraqi Parliament on Thursday ratified a sweeping security agreement that sets the course for an end to the United States’ role in the war and marks the beginning of a new relationship between the countries.

The pact, which still must be approved by Iraq’s three-person presidency council, a move expected in the next few days, sets the end of 2011 as the date by which the last American troops must leave the country.

Its passage, on a vote of 149 to 35, according to a parliamentary statement, was a victory for Iraq’s government as well as for the often fractious legislative body, which forged a political compromise among bitterly differing factions in 10 days of intense negotiations. [continued…]

Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns
By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2008

Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia — an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or “malware,” apparently designed specifically to target military networks. [continued…]

Some in Arab world wary of Clinton
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, November 23, 2008

There is possibly no person President-elect Barack Obama considered for secretary of state who is more reliably pro-Israel than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the woman to whom he appears likely to give the job sometime after Thanksgiving.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton said the United States could “obliterate” Iran if it launched a nuclear attack on Israel. She said the United States should not negotiate with Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, unless it renounced terrorism. “The United States stands with Israel, now and forever,” Clinton told AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, at its conference in June.

Yet Clinton is also the former first lady who famously broke with her husband’s administration in 1998 and said Palestinians should have a state of their own. Ten years later, the comment seems unexceptional, but at the time it prompted the White House to make clear she was speaking only for herself.

Clinton’s foreign policy views will be scrutinized closely in the weeks ahead, but as her past statements on the Middle East illustrate, she has a considerable track record that provides evidence for several plausible explanations of how she might try to focus U.S. diplomacy. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Much of the debate around the wisdom (or lack of it) in selecting Hillary Clinton as secretary of state seems to imply that by putting her in that position Obama will be delegating foreign-policy making to her. In other words, as Bob Woodward claims, Obama has been persuaded to “give Hillary and Bill the world.” I find this highly implausible. Moreover, the gaping hole in much of this discussion so far is the fact that we simply do not know why Obama has picked Clinton, but maybe some context can shed some light.

A campaign is underway to make the Saudi-initiated Arab League peace plan (first presented in 2002) the central framework upon which a resolution to the Middle East conflict can be negotiated. It’s too early to tell whether this campaign is aimed at persuading Obama to put this at the top of his foreign policy agenda, or whether he’s already on board and the efforts of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, Shimon Peres and others are simply groundwork in preparation for a presidential initiative.

If it’s the latter, then it’s reasonable to assume that when Obama offered Clinton SoS, he alerted her to the fact that she would have an important role to play in pushing the Arab peace plan forward. The fact that she’s perceived as a hawk and strongly pro-Israeli would then become assets — not deficits — if she fully supported Obama’s initiative.

So much for the speculation. What should not be lost sight of is that, as The Post says: “she would be responsible for implementing a foreign policy established in the end by Obama.” The Clintons are not about to be given the world.

Obama to take on torture?
By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, November 22, 2008

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. “At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened,” said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved “waterboarding” and other controversial practices.

Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That’s one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). “If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA. [continued…]

The ‘good war’ isn’t worth fighting
By Rory Stewart, New York Times, November 23, 2008

Afghanistan does not matter as much as Barack Obama thinks.

Terrorism is not the key strategic threat facing the United States. America, Britain and our allies have not created a positive stable environment in the Middle East. We have no clear strategy for dealing with China. The financial crisis is a more immediate threat to United States power and to other states; environmental catastrophe is more dangerous for the world. And even from the perspective of terrorism, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are more lethal.

President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community.

We invaded intending to attack Al Qaeda and provide development assistance. We succeeded. By 2004, Afghanistan had a stable currency, millions more children in school, a better health system, an elected Parliament, no Al Qaeda and almost no Taliban. All this was achieved with only 20,000 troops and a relatively small international aid budget.

When the decision was made to increase troops in 2005, there was no insurgency. But as NATO became increasingly obsessed with transforming the country and brought in more money and troops to deal with corruption and the judiciary, warlords and criminals, insecurity in rural areas and narcotics, it failed. In fact, things got worse. These new NATO troops encountered a fresh problem — local Taliban resistance — which has drawn them into a counterinsurgency campaign. [continued…]

Militants and military brace for a winter of war in Afghanistan
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2008

In recent years, the first snow falling on the jagged mountain peaks of Afghanistan has ushered in a seasonal slowdown in fighting between insurgents and the Western forces that overthrew the Taliban in 2001.

This winter looks to be different. Snow and icy terrain aside, both sides have made it clear that they plan to keep fighting, each contending that the harsh conditions favor them more than their enemy.

“We’ll be pursuing them, and pursuing them aggressively, whatever the conditions, and they know this,” said Canadian Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, chief spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, a vow amplified by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. David D. McKiernan, in a speech in Washington on Tuesday. [continued…]

Ringed by foes, Pakistanis fear the U.S., too
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, November 23, 2008

A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.

That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.

“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”

That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored. [continued…]

In Somalia, piracy and state breakdown
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star, November 22, 2008

You know we’re in trouble when much public sentiment in the Arab world probably backs the Somali pirates who recently captured a Saudi Arabian supertanker carrying $100 million of crude oil. If there is a single incident that captures the strange dynamics that have defined our region for the past 50 years or so, this is it: Lawless brigands of a collapsed, poverty-stricken and often violent state grab the paramount symbol of the modern Arab world – an oil tanker heading for the West! – and the rest of the Arab world remains mostly silent and indifferent.

This week in Beirut and on a working visit to Jordan, I asked people for their views of the seizure of the Saudi tanker. I heard three striking and frightening responses: mostly shrugs of the shoulder, some perfunctory expressions of distaste for criminal piracy, and an occasional wicked sense of glee by a few stressed people whose daily lives were increasingly becoming a losing battle to make ends meet, and who experienced vicarious thrills in the daring defiance of the pirates.

Somali piracy has suddenly captured international attention, because global sea-borne assets are now threatened, though the suffering and death of Somalis remain strangely invisible to the outside world. The global response has been a colossal failure in understanding what all this really means. Most comments I have heard focus on the need for greater security cooperation, a sort of “surge-at-sea” strategy to defeat the pirates militarily. This is probably futile in the long run if it only focuses on defeating criminality without addressing the underlying causes of state collapse that gave birth to the piracy phenomenon in the first place. [continued…]

To do: Somalia
By Jonathan Stevenson, The New Republic, November 21, 2008

The fraught 1992-93 U.S.-led humanitarian intervention, U.S. backing for Ethiopia, and civilian casualties caused by recent American counterterrorism strikes have eroded Somali respect for the United States. But Obama’s singular status as the first African American president substantially renews American diplomatic credibility with all Africans, including Somalis.

Expending political capital on such a knotty problem–over a dozen transitional governments have tried and failed over the past 17 years–might seem imprudent at first blush. But the Somalis’ very recalcitrance has yielded such low expectations that very little would actually be at risk. Moreover, an earnest attempt at conflict-resolution in Somalia would enable Mr. Obama to showcase the differences between him and his predecessor.

Mr. Bush was a self-described “gut player,” uninterested in the cultural subtleties of other peoples, and it showed in a foreign policy that was often ineffective on account of its insensitivity. By contrast, Mr. Obama is surrounding himself with true regional experts, including Africanists who have made it their business to understand Africans and their politics in all their complexities. Somalia’s notorious clan system makes for extreme political atomization, and makes any power-sharing solution an especially daunting prospect. Yet the clan network also disperses power from the bottom up, and, properly harnessed, could systematically limit the trajectory of a top-down movement like radical Islamism. [continued…]

Somali Islamists ‘hunt pirates’
BBC News, November 21, 2008

Somali Islamist insurgents have begun searching for the pirates who hijacked a giant Saudi-owned oil tanker last Saturday, reports say.

A spokesman for the al-Shabab group, Abdelghafar Musa, said hijacking a Muslim-owned ship was a major crime and they would pursue those responsible.

The pirates are thought to be trying to obtain a multi-million dollar ransom. [continued…]

Is it OK to be liberal again, instead of progressive?
By Michael Lind, Salon, November 21, 2008

If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?

In the last two decades, Democratic politicians, including Barack Obama, have abandoned the term “liberal” for “progressive.” The theory was that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — and Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Buchanan — had succeeded in equating “liberal” in the public mind with weakness on defense, softness on crime, and “redistribution” of Joe the Plumber’s hard-earned money to the collective bogey evoked by a former Texas rock band’s clever name: Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Dope.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with this rather soulless and manipulative exercise in rebranding, for a number of reasons. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — To my mind, neither liberal nor progressive are particularly useful terms. “Progressive” seems a rather hollow slogan when self-applied. If an agenda can objectively be described as being progressive, all well and good, but when its own proponents say it’s progressive it says little more than we know about a product when it gets branded “new and improved.”

On the other hand “liberal” has the connotations of personal freedom, but in America liberty is pretty much a bipartisan value. To be liberal, as in open-minded, is a good thing, yet who — whatever the facts might otherwise indicate — sees themselves as closed-minded? Then again, from a conservative point of view, liberal can connote the hedonistic libertine. Thus the culture wars get framed as pitting those Americans who have values against those who supposedly lack them.

What unambiguously distinguishes the left from the right is our view of the relationship between the individual and society. For the right, the interests of society are best served by protecting the interests of the individual; for the left it is the reverse. Our core value is that we are in this together. We believe in the common good. We believe that an understanding that “we share a common destiny” is more than a social ideal; it has become a global imperative.

Middle East priorities for Jan. 21
By Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Washington Post, November 21, 2008

The election of Barack Obama to be the 44th president is profoundly historic. We have at long last been able to come together in a way that has eluded us in the long history of our great country. We should celebrate this triumph of the true spirit of America.

Election Day celebrations were replicated in time zones around the world, something we have not seen in a long time. While euphoria is ephemeral, we must endeavor to use its energy to bring us all together as Americans to cope with the urgent problems that beset us.

When Obama takes office in two months, he will find a number of difficult foreign policy issues competing for his attention, each with strong advocates among his advisers. We believe that the Arab-Israeli peace process is one issue that requires priority attention. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — It’s good to see two foreign-policy heavyweights, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advocate that the Arab-Israeli conflict should receive priority attention by President Obama. Their argument, in diplomatically tempered language, is however a bit tepid. Not only does the issue need to be among those at the top of Obama’s agenda but the current administration’s policy of promoting division among Palestinians needs to be explicitly reversed. To say that “if the peace process begins to gain momentum, it is difficult to imagine that Hamas will want to be left out,” is to imply that Hamas’ current isolation is self-imposed.

The issue that needs to be grasped by the incoming administration as well as the next Israeli government is that Palesinian unity will not merely serve the interests of the Palestinian people; it is the only basis upon which a viable peace agreement can be built. The effort to destroy Hamas through a war of attrition in which Gaza has been placed under siege for the last two years, has failed.

Recognition of Israel’s right to exist, and renunciation of violence, need to be seen not as necessary preconditions for entering into political negotiations but seen instead for what they realistically are: the reward for the successful completion of those negotiations.

Recasting the war on terrorism
By Spencer Ackerman, The Washington Independent, November 20, 2008

Buoyed by high expectations for the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, an informal coalition of progressive national-security and civil-liberties experts are urging the president-elect to redefine the war on terrorism.

Eight years of the Bush administration’s approach to counterterrorism have yielded two open-ended and bloody wars; a massively expanded security apparatus, and spending on defense far outpacing outlays on domestic programs, even during a crisis-plagued economy.

Yet while liberals have spent much of this time opposing the Bush administration’s agenda, many of their proposals for Obama go beyond merely rolling back President George W. Bush’s policies — withdrawing from Iraq, shuttering the Guantanamo Bay detention complex, abolishing torture — to offer new areas of emphasis, like stabilizing Afghanistan, an Arab-Israeli peace and a re-envisioned balance between security and liberty. [continued…]

Fighting terrorism fairly and effectively
Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2008

Over the past seven years, the US government’s consistent disregard for human rights in fighting terrorism has diminished America’s moral authority, set a negative example for other governments, and undermined the goal of reducing anti-American militancy around the world. The use of torture, unlawful rendition, secret prisons, unfair trials, and long-term, arbitrary detention without charge has been both morally wrong and counterproductive. [Read the report]

Liberty and security: recommendations for the next administration and Congress
The Constitution Project, November 18, 2008

“Liberty and Security: Recommendations for the Next Administration and Congress reflects the ongoing, collaborative efforts of a coalition of more than 25 leading organizations and 75 individuals to provide policymakers with a framework for addressing liberty and security issues. The catalogue includes recommendations drawn from the shared knowledge and experience of a broad coalition of groups devoted to exploring the intersection of civil liberties and national security. [continued…]

Waxman ushers in new era
By Mike Lillis, The Washington Independent, November 20, 2008

On Capitol Hill’s Rayburn office building, in the private chambers of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, hangs an enormous satellite photograph of the planet earth. Beneath the picture is a couch, where, according to sources familiar with the committee, long-time Chairman John Dingell is fond of sitting. From that couch, they say, the venerable Michigan Democrat, who has served for 53 years, has been known to point up to the photo and say, “That is the jurisdiction of this committee.”

Now, Dingell is no longer in control of the world.

House Democrats Thursday morning took the remarkable step of ousting Congress’s longest-serving member as head of the powerful energy panel. They replaced Dingell with the more liberal Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal.), whose energy plans are more in-line with those of President-elect Barack Obama.

The vote — 137 to 122 — marked a stunning defeat for the party’s seniority system.

Environmentalists, though, are thrilled. For decades, Dingell has fought successfully against efforts to adopt stricter emissions rules and force Detroit’s automakers in the direction of greater fuel-efficiency. With the arrival of an Obama administration next year, many climate-change groups had wondered how the new president would sneak his ambitious energy plans past the powerful head of the energy panel. Now he won’t have to. Waxman, a fiery environmentalist who has butted heads with Dingell on these issues, is seen to symbolize the end of Dingell’s obstructionism. [continued…]

Fear stalks the world’s economies
By Alan Beattie and Michael MacKenzie, Financial Times, November 20, 2008

Fears of a severe recession gripped financial markets on Thursday as dire US unemployment figures helped drive long-term interest rates to record lows.

Economic news across the world was almost uniformly bad as slumping Japanese exports threatened to push the economy deeper into recession and the Swiss central bank unexpectedly slashed interest rates by a full percentage point. [continued…]

The lame-duck economy
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 21, 2008

Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In 2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in voters’ minds, both discredited the G.O.P.’s free-market ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.

There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now.

It’s true that the interregnum will be shorter this time: F.D.R. wasn’t inaugurated until March; Barack Obama will move into the White House on Jan. 20. But crises move faster these days. [continued…]

Report sees nuclear arms, scarce resources as seeds of global instability
By Peter Finn and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 21, 2008

The drive for dwindling resources, including energy and water, combined with the spread of nuclear weapons technology could make large swaths of the globe ripe for regional conflicts, some of them potentially devastating, according to a report released by the National Intelligence Council yesterday.

The report, Global Trends 2025, covers a range of strategic issues, including great-power rivalry, demographics, climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy and natural resources. It makes for sometimes grim reading in imagining a world of weak states bristling with weapons of mass destruction and unable to cope with burgeoning populations without adequate water and food.

“Those states most susceptible to conflict are in a great arc of instability stretching from Sub-Saharan Africa through North Africa, into the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and South and Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia,” the quadrennial report says.

At the heart of its deepest pessimism is the Middle East, which it suggests could tip into a nuclear arms race if Iran goes ahead with such weapons. [continued…]

Killing of al-Qaida smuggler in Syria was joint Syrian, U.S. effort
By Richard Sale, Middle East Times, November 21, 2008

Washington has long run a back channel to Damascus through Syria’s air force intelligence, the Idarat al-Murkabarat al-Jawiyya, U.S. sources said.

On Oct. 26, Syrian intelligence alerted U.S. forces in Iraq to Abu Ghadiyah’s whereabouts, at which time, U.S. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) operatives began to track him, probably through his satellite telephone.

Four Blackhawk helicopters took off for the northeastern Syrian village of al-Sukkiraya, about five miles from the Euphrates river, an area where a compound of new homes was being built, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

At this point, the raid went wrong. As the U.S. Special Forces poured out of the aircraft, shots were fired and a gunfight broke out that lasted for 10 to 15 minutes. Abu Ghadiya was to have been captured and flown to Iraq for interrogation. Instead he was killed in the fighting, along with seven Syrian civilians, including four children, most of them members of the same family.

“There weren’t to have been any civilian casualties, no collateral damage,” a U.S. intelligence official said. “We wanted the [expletive] alive.” The U.S. raiding team carried off two captives for interrogation.

“The problem with these kinds of tactics lies with the fact that so many things can go wrong, and they usually do,” said Middle East expert Tony Cordesman. “You don’t want to solve one problem only to create a dozen others.”

But the praise of U.S. officials for Syria’s part was deeply appreciative. “The Syrians were perfect; they gave us the works,” said one U.S. official familiar with the incident. [continued…]

Judge orders five detainees freed from Guantánamo
By William Glaberson, New York Times, November 21, 2008

In the first hearing on the government’s justification for holding detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, a federal judge ruled Thursday that five Algerian men were held unlawfully for nearly seven years and ordered their release.

The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in Washington, also ruled that a sixth Algerian man was being lawfully detained because he had provided support to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

The case was an important test of the Bush administration’s detention policies, which critics have long argued swept up innocent men and low-level foot soldiers along with high-level and hardened terrorists. [continued…]

Al Qaeda coldly acknowledges Obama victory
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, November 20, 2008

In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide about the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who would continue a campaign against Islam that Al Qaeda’s leaders said was begun by President Bush.

Appealing to the “weak and oppressed” around the world, the Qaeda deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, said in a video released Wednesday that the “new face” of America only masked a “heart full of hate.”

For years, the terrorist network sought to fuel anti-Americanism with prolific audio and video recordings vilifying President Bush as the leading American “crusader” against Muslim nations. The election of Mr. Obama, a black man who spent part of his childhood in Indonesia and whose father was from a Muslim family, has muddied Al Qaeda’s message. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — So, the big story is that Ayman al-Zawahiri insulted Obama by calling him a “house negro.”

The best retort to that I’ve come across was from Mary Mitchell: “Obama isn’t going to the White House to serve the man. He is the man.”

But as everyone has glommed on to the race element in the al Qaeda missive, there’s another part that seemed to get missed: Zawahiri played the Muslim card straight down the GOP line.

He said of Obama:

You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand in the ranks of the enemies of the Muslims, and pray the prayer of the Jews, although you claim to be Christian, in order to climb the rungs of leadership in America.

Just as some scare-mongering Obama critics suggested, al Qaeda appears to be casting Obama as an apostate.

Hillary Clinton justifiably got jumped on when she said Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know.” Zawahiri seems to be using an even more thinly-veiled insinuation when he says “you claim to be a Christian.” Likewise, Zawahiri compares Obama with Malcolm X not just to make an unfavorable contrast between one black leader and another but to imply that one was being a true Muslim and the other not. In other words, that Obama has betrayed both his race and his faith.

My guess is that Adam Pearlman had a hand in drafting this message, not simply because of the English subtitles but because in part it seems to have been aimed at those white Americans who still believe Obama is a secret Muslim.

Giving up on God
By Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, November 19, 2008

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Even though I’m neither a Republican nor a Christian, I can’t resist pointing out that Kathleen Parker seems to have got it the wrong way around: the GOP doesn’t need to dump God; the evidence — at least if one accepts Rev Arnold Conrad’s impeccible reasoning — is that God already dumped the GOP.

“You raise up leaders and you pull them down,” Rev Conrad solemnly said to God while praying at a McCain rally in early October. No doubt Conrad has since pulled out that universal escape clause — God works in mysterious ways — but I’d like to know what he (Conrad, not God) is really thinking now.

O Lord, what made you make McCain pick Sarah Palin? And why couldn’t the financial crisis have come in November instead of September? You liked Bush well enough to get him elected twice, so why are you now casting us out into the wilderness? O Lord, why have you forsaken the GOP?

I guess the only council I can offer is to say, when it comes to politics, don’t bet your life on a swing voter — especially the ultimate swing voter. He’s clearly the most capricious of them all.

Did U.S. push detention of American without charges?
By Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, November 17, 2008

An American Muslim subjected to several years of intense FBI scrutiny and questioning about links to terrorism has been held without charges, access to a lawyer or contact with his family for nearly three months by the security services of the United Arab Emirates.

The case of Naji Hamdan, coupled with FBI interrogations of an American citizen secretly detained without charges in East Africa, raises the question of whether the Bush administration has asked other nations to hold Americans suspected of terrorism links whom U.S. officials lack the evidence to charge.

That allegation is central to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union was planning to file Tuesday in federal court in Washington against President Bush, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

“If the U.S. government is responsible for this detention and we believe it is, this is clearly illegal because our government can’t contract away the Constitution by enlisting the aid of other governments that do not adhere to the Constitution’s requirements,” said Ahilan Arulanantham of the ACLU’s southern California office. [continued…]

Iran said to have nuclear fuel for one weapon
By William J Broad and David E Sanger, New York Times, November 20, 2008

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

The figures detailing Iran’s progress were contained in a routine update on Wednesday from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been conducting inspections of the country’s main nuclear plant at Natanz. The report concluded that as of early this month, Iran had made 630 kilograms, or about 1,390 pounds, of low-enriched uranium.

Several experts said that was enough for a bomb, but they cautioned that the milestone was mostly symbolic, because Iran would have to take additional steps. Not only would it have to breach its international agreements and kick out the inspectors, but it would also have to further purify the fuel and put it into a warhead design — a technical advance that Western experts are unsure Iran has yet achieved. [continued…]

Twenty reasons why we’re not consuming
By Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, November 20, 2008

This week’s news about October retail sales (-2.8% relative to the previous month and now down in real terms for five months in a row) confirm that the U.S. has entered its most severe consumer-led recession in decades. At this rate of free fall in consumption, real gross domestic product growth could be a whopping 5% negative or even worse in the fourth quarter of 2008. And this is not a temporary phenomenon: Almost all of the fundamentals driving consumption are heading south on a persistent and structural basis.

Consider the many severe negative factors affecting consumption. One can count at least 20 separate or complementary causes that will sharply reduce consumption in the next several years: [continued…]

The Pentagon’s argument of last resort on Iraq
By Tom Englehardt, TomDispatch, November 20, 2008

It’s the ultimate argument, the final bastion against withdrawal, and over these last years, the Bush administration has made sure it would have plenty of heft. Ironically, its strength lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes of Iraqi politics, the relative power of Shiites or Sunnis, the influence of Iran, or even the riptides of war. It really doesn’t matter what Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or oppositional cleric Muqtada al-Sadr think about it. In fact, it’s an argument that has nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with us, with the American way of war (and life), which makes it almost unassailable.

And this week Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen — the man President-elect Obama plans to call into the Oval Office as soon as he arrives — wheeled it into place and launched it like a missile aimed at the heart of Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan for U.S. combat troops in Iraq. It may not sound like much, but believe me, it is. The Chairman simply said, “We have 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. We have lots of bases. We have an awful lot of equipment that’s there. And so we would have to look at all of that tied to, obviously, the conditions that are there, literally the security conditions… Clearly, we’d want to be able to do it safely.” Getting it all out safely, he estimated, would take at least “two to three years.” [continued…]

Is Obama a Middle East ‘splitter’?
By Gideon Rachman, Financial Times, November 17, 2008

Historians are sometimes divided into lumpers and splitters. The splitters like to chop problems up into lots of small bits. The lumpers like to link them altogether.

Would-be Middle East peacemakers can be categorised in the same way. The lumpers want a “comprehensive peace settlement” that links together all the problems in the region – Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel-Palestine, even Iran. The splitters want to deal with all these problems separately….

I think, as a matter of practical politics, Mr Obama will have to be a splitter. The state of the American economy is going to eat up most of his working day. When he turns to foreign policy, the Israeli-Palestinian problem will come fairly low down his list of priorities – behind, in rough order of urgency, Iraq, Afghanistan, climate change, Iran, international economics and Russia. He will see the Iranian nuclear issue as too important to await progress on Israel-Palestine. Withdrawal from Iraq is a central pledge of his administration, regardless of what is happening with Israel. If an Obama administration sees chances to make progress on Lebanon, or with Syria, it will take them as they arise.

European diplomats who have dealt with the new American team say that they have been assured that Mr Obama does regard the Israel-Palestine problem as a priority and something that the new administration intends to start work on quickly. (It is generally held that President Bill Clinton left the Middle East peace process until too late in his second term and that this mistake has been repeated by President George W. Bush.) A “serious” commitment by Mr Obama need not mean launching immediately into an important global conference. Simply appointing a high-profile envoy would be regarded as a good earnest of intent.

Mr Obama may well oblige on the envoy front. But I doubt he will want to spend much political capital and time on the Middle East peace process when there are so many other priorities clamouring for his attention.

A decision to put the Israeli-Palestinian question on the back burner would, however, be a shame. That is not because it necessarily holds the key to solving all the other problems of the Middle East. It is because the situation – although relatively quiet at the moment – remains dangerous, unstable and a disaster for the population. Ignore the Palestinian problem when things are quiet and it is liable to force its way back on to the agenda – by blowing up at an even more inconvenient time. [continued…]

Top Obama aide denies report president-elect will back Arab peace plan
Haaretz, November 18, 2008

A senior adviser to Barack Obama on Sunday denied reports that the U.S. president-elect plans to throw his weight behind the 2002 Arab peace plan, which calls for Israel to withdraw from all territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War in exchange for normalized ties with the Arab world.

The British Sunday Times said Obama expressed this sentiment during his visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories last July.

Dennis Ross, Obama’s adviser on Middle East policy, issued a statement Sunday, saying “I was in the meeting in Ramallah. Then-senator Obama did not say this, the story is false.” The Times cited a senior adviser who quoted Obama as telling Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israelis would be crazy not to accept this initiative. It would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.”

According to the Times, Obama, who is due to take office as the U.S. president on January 20, has been urged by leading bipartisan figures in the American foreign policy establishment to embrace the plan, which was first proposed by Saudi King Abdullah in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The multipronged lobbying effort that is clearly underway right now is not necessarily aimed at trying to push the Middle East peace process to the top of Obama’s foreign policy agenda — a goal that would be unrealistic when Iraq and Afghanistan require so much attention. Rather, this seems like an attempt to grasp the opportunity to set aside Oslo, the Road Map, and Annapolis and reframe the peace process in terms of a comprehensive solution. In and of itself, this is a useful exercise because it implicitly acknowledges that the current process is dead without undiplomatically declaring its failure.

Hamas, Israel trying to rewrite truce
By Karin Laub, AP, November 17, 2008

A June truce between Israel and Gaza’s Hamas rulers comes up for renewal next month and it looks like both sides are trying to dictate more favorable terms.

That would explain why Israel and Hamas have been trading rocket fire and air strikes for two weeks, even as they keep saying they’re interested in a continued cease-fire. But the attempt to establish new ground rules could easily spin out of control, especially if there are civilian casualties.

Domestic concerns further complicate the situation.

Israel is holding general elections Feb. 10 and the cross-border violence has become campaign fodder. [continued…]

When will Obama give up the Bin Laden ghost hunt?
By Robert Baer, Time, November 18, 2008

In a talk to the Atlantic Council this week CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden said Osama bin Laden is alive. I’ll take his word for it. But bin Laden’s strange disappearance makes one wonder what exactly happened to him. The last relatively reliable bin Laden sighting was in late 2001. A video that he appears in last year shows him with a dyed beard. More than a few Pakistani intelligence operatives who knew bin Laden scoff at the idea he would ever dye his beard. They think the tape was manipulated from old footage, and that bin Laden is in fact dead. But then again, they would have an interest in making us believe bin Laden is dead, since it would relieve American pressure to find him by any means necessary, including going into Pakistani territory.

And what about all the other audiotapes bin Laden has put out since 9/11? Experts will tell you that off-the shelf digital editing software could manipulate old bin Laden voice recordings to make it sound as if he were discussing current events. Finally, there’s the mystery why bin Laden didn’t pop up during the election. You would think a narcissistic mass murderer who believes he has a place in history would find it impossible to pass up an opportunity to give his opinion at such a momentous time, at least dropping off a DVD at the al Jazeera office in Islamabad.

I asked a half dozen of my former CIA colleagues who have been on bin Laden’s trail since 9/11. What surprised me was that none would say for certain whether he is alive or dead. Half assumed he is dead, the other half assumed he is alive. I suppose a lot of their timidity has to do with the still open wounds about the CIA’s missing an event like Saddam’s destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It would be so much easier to miss the death of a single man. [continued…]

Russia to cut oil export duty by third
By Isabel Gorst, Financial Times, November 17, 2008

Russia plans to cut its oil export duties by a third next month, offering much-needed relief to companies that have been making a loss on their crude exports.

Exporting oil from Russia, the world’s second biggest producer, has become unprofitable as a result of the fall in the price of crude and heavy taxation.

Oil companies had been warning they were being forced to cut their exports, intensifying the financial crisis engulfing Russia.

The Russian government has been calling on the companies to sustain their exports, and indicated on Monday that there would be a steep cut in oil duty to reflect the fall in oil prices. [continued…]

The tribal fallacy
By Nicholas Schmidle, The Atlantic, November 13, 2008

The Pakistani government has flirted with divide-and-conquer tactics in the past by taking sides in internecine squabbles in the tribal areas. But rather than siding with tribes against the Taliban, Pakistan often tries to play one Taliban faction off another. It distinguishes between “good” and “bad” Taliban: the “good” ones focus on fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the “bad” ones target Pakistani troops and politicians. Baitullah Mehsud and Maulana Fazlullah of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan are both “bad.” In April 2007, a mini-civil war in South Waziristan pitted “good” Taliban fighters from the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe, under the command of Maulvi Nazir, against several hundred “bad” Uzbek militants belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and to al-Qaeda. The Uzbeks had killed scores of Pakistani tribal chiefs. When the fighting began, the Pakistani army sided with the Taliban and provided helicopter- and artillery-fire. The ranking general later told me that he ordered soldiers to strip off their uniforms, don a shalwar kameez, and lead the “good” Taliban to victory. (The incident, while encouraging, highlighted the degree to which Washington and Islamabad’s security priorities are mismatched. Among the rash of recent drone attacks in the tribal areas, several missiles have targeted “good” Talib Maulvi Nazir and his associates in South Waziristan.)

Meanwhile, the Pakistanis have had little success enlisting ordinary tribesmen to rebel against the Taliban. Their failure should be worrying. Without the support of ordinary tribesmen in Iraq, the Anbar Awakening and the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq would have been unthinkable. The same holds true in northwestern Pakistan. Yet the Pashtun tribes have been understandably reluctant to join the government. During Musharraf’s regime, sporadic, overhyped military offensives failed to dislodge the Taliban, and any malik, or tribal chief, suspected of sympathizing with the government was branded a spy and slaughtered. Khalid Aziz, a former political agent in North Waziristan, told me that, in the past, “If a malik or his family was attacked, we used to do everything to redeem the malik’s honor. The current administration has unfortunately disowned these policies.” [continued…]

A pact with the devil
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, November 18, 2008

The big bang is not that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s majority Shi’ite/Kurdish 37-member cabinet in Baghdad has approved the draft of a security pact with the George W Bush (and Barack Obama) administrations allowing the US military to stay in Iraq for three more years; it’s that the 30-strong Sadrist bloc will move heaven and Earth – including massive nationwide protests – to bloc the pact in the Iraqi National Assembly.

The proposed Status of Forces Agreement not only sets a date for American troop withdrawal – 2011 – but also puts new restrictions on US combat operations in Iraq starting on January 1 and requires a military pullback from urban areas by June 30. The pact goes before parliament in a week or so.

Sadrist spokesman Ahmed al-Masoudi stressed this Sunday that the pact “did not mean anything” and “hands Iraq over on a golden platter and for an indefinite period”.

Masoudi is right on the money when he says the overwhelming majority of popular opinion is against it and the Sadrists and many Sunni parties insist a popular referendum to approve it is essential. [continued…]

Iraqi and American critics of security pact speak up
By Campbell Robertson and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, November 18, 2008

Iraqi and American critics of a security agreement governing American troops in Iraq voiced their objections on Monday, a day after the Iraqi cabinet approved the pact and sent it to Parliament for ratification.

In Iraq, opposition has created an unlikely association between the followers of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who rejected the agreement out of hand, and some Sunni politicians, including ones who support the deal but are trying to wrest concessions from the Iraqi government.

Ghufran al-Saadi, a Sadrist lawmaker, said opponents had collected 115 signatures, primarily from Sadr supporters and members of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, demanding that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and several cabinet members appear in Parliament to answer questions about the agreement, which governs the presence of American troops in Iraq through 2011. Parliament has 275 members. [continued…]

Government near to collapse, says Somalia leader
By Xan Rice, The Guardian, November 17, 2008

President Abdullahi Yusuf of Somalia has admitted that his government is on the verge of collapse and that Islamist groups now control most of the country.

In a speech to Somali MPs gathered in the Kenyan capital Nairobi at the weekend, Yusuf said that the government only had a presence in the capital Mogadishu and in Baidoa, “and people are being killed there every day. Islamists have taken over everywhere else.”

His frank admission confirms what is known but seldom publicly acknowledged by those with a stake in Somalia’s future, from Ethiopia, whose continued occupation unites the different Islamist groups against a common enemy, to the UN and western countries, which have backed the warlord-heavy government for years. [continued…]

Turkey could be good mediator with Iran: Erdogan
AFP, November 15, 2008

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday Ankara could play a positive part if it were to act as a mediator in the stalled negotiations with Iran over its suspect nuclear program.

“If Turkey plays such a role, it could have a positive impact on the process,” Erdogan told a press conference in Washington after arriving to take part in the summit of G20 leaders on the economic crisis.

He said Turkey would be able to exert some influence on the dragging dossier because it was Iran’s neighbor. [continued…]

Bill’s $500,000 Kuwait lecture
By Salameh Nematt, The Daily Beast, November 18, 2008

The National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) has paid $500,000 to Bill Clinton for a single lecture he delivered in Kuwait City on Sunday on his assessment of Barack Obama’s foreign and economic policies. It was delivered the day after the Kuwaiti stock market resumed trading after it was suspended by order of a Kuwaiti court on Thursday to avoid a total collapse.

Without mentioning reports that Clinton’s finances were coming under close scrutiny as his wife, Hillary Clinton, is being vetted for the job of secretary of state, the Arab-language Kuwaiti newspaper Awan published a front-page story under the headline “Clinton’s lecture at NBK cost $500,000.” [continued…]

Cabinet post for Clinton roils Obamaland
By Ben Smith, Politico, November 18, 2008

Barack Obama’s serious flirtation with his one-time rival, Hillary Clinton, over the post of secretary of State has been welcomed by everyone from Henry Kissinger to Bill Clinton as an effective, grand gesture by the president-elect.

It’s not playing quite as well, however, in some precincts of Obamaland. From his supporters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, to campaign aides of the soon-to-be commander-in-chief, there’s a sense of ambivalence about giving a top political plum to a woman they spent 18 months hammering as the compromised standard-bearer of an era that deserves to be forgotten.

“These are people who believe in this stuff more than Barack himself does,” said a Democrat close to Obama’s campaign. “These guys didn’t put together a campaign in order to turn the government over to the Clintons.” [continued…]

Study finds ex-Guantanamo prisoners broken
By Bob Egelko, San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 2008

The first extensive study of prisoners released from the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, finds that many of them are physically and psychologically traumatized, debt-ridden and shunned in their communities as terrorist suspects.

“I’ve lost my property. I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost my will,” said an Afghan man, one of 62 former inmates in nine countries interviewed anonymously by UC Berkeley researchers for a newly released report.

Another man, jobless and destitute, said his family kicked him out after he returned, and his wife went to live with her relatives. “I have a plastic bag holding my belongings that I carry with me all the time,” he said. “And I sleep every night in a different mosque.”

The report, “Guantanamo and its Aftermath,” also found that two-thirds of former prisoners interviewed between July 2007 and July 2008 suffered from psychological problems, including nightmares, angry outbursts, withdrawal and depression. [continued…]

Obama on 60 Minutes
CBS News, November 16, 2008

Watch CBS Videos Online

US acknowledges it held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo
By Mike Melia, AP, November 17, 2008

The U.S. has revised its count of juveniles ever held at Guantanamo Bay to 12, up from the eight it reported in May to the United Nations, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.

The government has provided a corrected report to the U.N. committee on child rights, according to Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. He said the U.S. did not intentionally misrepresent the number of detainees taken to the isolated Navy base in southeast Cuba before turning 18. [continued…]

Why Guantanamo must be closed: advice for Barack Obama
By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post, November 17, 2008

On Sunday, in his first television interview since winning the Presidential election, Barack Obama repeated his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to ban the use of torture by US forces. Speaking on 60 Minutes, he explained, “I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture. And I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

Ever since Obama began meeting with his transition team, leaks, gossip and rumors concerning the new administration’s plans to close Guantánamo, and the hurdles they will have to surmount, have been filling the airwaves and the front pages of newspapers. In an attempt to separate fact from fiction and to provide useful information to the President-Elect, I’d like to offer my advice, based on the three years I have spent studying Guantánamo in unprecedented detail, as the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the prisoners, and as a commentator and analyst responsible for numerous articles on Guantánamo in the last 18 months. [continued…]

The audacity of patience
By Mark Schmitt, The American Prospect, November 17, 2008

The conventional wisdom about the presidency is very much the same as the advice Obama was given in the primaries: Move quickly. Overwhelm the forces of the establishment. Use the momentum of the election to achieve the biggest things possible. You’ll never be more powerful than on Jan. 21.

If Obama ignores this conventional wisdom, he will not do so because he’s crazy or lazy but because he’s taking the same approach to governing as he took to the election. It will mean he’s taking the long view, gambling on patience, and carefully putting into place the pieces that win lasting majorities for progressive policies, just as he won a majority of delegates and a majority of votes in the election.

On the day after the 2004 election, George W. Bush declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” He announced that he would privatize Social Security and revamp the tax system by the following spring. In Bush’s version of the conventional wisdom, the presidency was a rapidly depreciating financial asset, and he had to act quickly.

But Bush was wrong. The error was fatal. The collapse of his own presidency, the Republican brand, and the McCain candidacy can be traced to that moment of macho strutting as surely as to the “Mission Accomplished” moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln. The fact was Bush had earned no political capital; he had no mandate for the policies he now intended to pursue. All he had won was the raw institutional power of the presidency and control of Congress. He pushed that power further than any president before him, including Richard Nixon. And in doing so, Bush found its limits. The institutional power of the presidency, combined with a compliant one-party Congress, can start wars, enrich predatory capitalism, and destroy long-established norms, but alone it cannot do what Karl Rove aspired to, which was to build a new and lasting political order. That work requires patience and diligence. [continued…]

The case for putting a Mideast peace agreement first
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, November 14, 2008

The list of crises facing Obama starts with the economic collapse, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But as he’s said, “A president has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”

Immediate, high-profile engagement with Israel and the Palestinians would be the clearest proof to frustrated American allies in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world that the Bush years of American unilateralism are over. Reaching an agreement would end the tension between American support for Israel and maintaining warm ties with moderate Arab regimes. It would eliminate one of the main causes of anti-Western resentment in the Arab world, reducing the influence both of Iran and of radical Sunni Islamicists.

By acting quickly — addressing the issue before he formally takes office and perhaps in his inaugural address, and by visiting the region early next year — Obama can exploit the awe that his election inspires. A small example: The daily Ha’aretz, normally a frighteningly staid newspaper, covered its entire front page on Nov. 4 with a photo of Obama, one hand held high, facing what looked like a pillar of cloud in the distance, as if he were Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The headline, in English, was “Yes We Can.” In January, Obama will still be a symbol of transformation. If he waits two or three years, he will be a shopworn president. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Anyone who read this article in The Sunday Times would conclude that the decision has already been made. The article opens:

Barack Obama is to pursue an ambitious peace plan in the Middle East involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, according to sources close to America’s president-elect.

Obama intends to throw his support behind a 2002 Saudi peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League and backed by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima party.

Unfortunately, like a lot of the other headline-grapping reports that The Times comes up with, this seems like a case of reporting possibility as fact.

Tzipi Livni, far from doing what would genuinely be news — backing the Arab peace plan — on Sunday had this message for the incoming administration and its approach to the Middle East: “You don’t need now to do nothing dramatic about it. The situation is calm. We have these peace talks.”

Report suggests Obama press Israel over nuke program
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz, November 17, 2008

The Middle East is in danger of accumulating large stocks of nuclear material over the next decade that could be used to produce over 1,700 nuclear bombs, a U.S. research center has projected in a newly released report.

The Institute for Science and International Security, headed by David Albright, one the world’s top experts on nuclear weapons and the prevention of nuclear proliferation, recently released its report urging president-elect Barack Obama to take a number of measures to avoid such an outcome, including convincing Israel to halt production of its nuclear weapons.

“The Obama administration should make a key priority of persuading Israel to join the negotiations for a universal, verified treaty that bans the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear explosives, commonly called the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT),” the institute argued. “As an interim step, the United States should press Israel to suspend any production of fissile material for nuclear weapons. Toward this goal, the United States should change its relatively new policy of seeking a cutoff treaty that does not include verification. The Bush administration’s rejection of the long-standing U.S. policy of requiring verification was a mistake that the incoming administration needs to rectify.” [continued…]

Hillary vetting includes look at Bill
By Peter Baker and Helene Cooper, New York Times, November 17, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama’s advisers have begun reviewing former President Bill Clinton’s finances and activities to see whether they would preclude the appointment of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, Democrats close to the situation said Sunday. [continued…]

Depression 2009: What would it look like?
By Drake Bennett, Boston Globe, November 16, 2008

Over the past few months, Americans have been hearing the word “depression” with unfamiliar and alarming regularity. The financial crisis tearing through Wall Street is routinely described as the worst since the Great Depression, and the recession into which we are sinking looks deep enough, financial commentators warn, that a few poor policy decisions could put us in a depression of our own.

It’s a frightening possibility, but also in many ways an abstraction. The country has gone so long without a depression that it’s hard to know what it would be like to live through one.

Most of us, of course, think we know what a depression looks like. Open a history book and the images will be familiar: mobs at banks and lines at soup kitchens, stockbrokers in suits selling apples on the street, families piled with all their belongings into jalopies. Families scrimp on coffee and flour and sugar, rinsing off tinfoil to reuse it and re-mending their pants and dresses. A desperate government mobilizes legions of the unemployed to build bridges and airports, to blaze trails in national forests, to put on traveling plays and paint social-realist murals.

Today, however, whatever a depression would look like, that’s not it. We are separated from the 1930s by decades of profound economic, technological, and political change, and a modern landscape of scarcity would reflect that.

What, then, would we see instead? And how would we even know a depression had started? It’s not a topic that professional observers of the economy study much. And there’s no single answer, because there’s no one way a depression might unfold. But it’s nonetheless an important question to consider – there’s no way to make informed decisions about the present without understanding, in some detail, the worst-case scenario about the future. [continued…]

How to ground The Street
By Eliot L. Spitzer, Washington Post, November 16, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama will soon face the extraordinary task of saving capitalism from its own excesses, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt had to do 76 years ago. Up until this point in the crisis, policymakers have appropriately applied the rules of triage — Band-Aids and tourniquets, then radical surgery — to keep the global financial system alive. Capital infusions, bailouts, mega-mergers, government guarantees of unimaginable proportions — all have been sought and supported by officials and corporate chief executives who had until now opposed any government participation in the marketplace. But put aside for the moment the ideological cartwheel we have seen and look at the big picture: The rules of modern capitalism have been re-written before our eyes.

The new president’s team must soon get to the root causes of the mistakes that have brought us to the economic precipice. Yes, we have all derided the explosion of leverage, the failure to regulate derivatives, the flood of subprime lending that was bound to default and the excesses of CEO compensation. But these are all mere manifestations of three deeper structural problems that require greater attention: misconceptions about what a “free market” really is, a continuing breakdown in corporate governance and an antiquated and incoherent federal financial regulatory framework.

First, we must confront head-on the pervasive misunderstanding of what constitutes a “free market.” For long stretches of the past 30 years, too many Americans fell prey to the ideology that a free market requires nearly complete deregulation of banks and other financial institutions and a government with a hands-off approach to enforcement. “We can regulate ourselves,” the mantra went. [continued…]

Karzai offers passage to Taliban leader for talks
By John F Burns, New York Times, November 17, 2008

Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, said Sunday that he would guarantee the safety of the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar if Mr. Omar agreed to negotiate for a peaceful settlement of the worsening conflict in the country.

Mr. Omar, a fugitive with a $10 million American bounty on his head, has been in hiding since the Taliban were toppled from power in 2001, and is believed by Western intelligence agencies to be living somewhere in the region of Quetta in western Pakistan. [continued…]

On the front line in war on Pakistan’s Taliban
By Jason Burke, The Observer, November 16, 2008

Ali Hussein, a sergeant in the Sindh Regiment of the Pakistani Army, peers over the lip of his sandbagged machinegun pit to see the following: a muddy patch of farmland divided into a chaos of individual fields, a row of slender birch trees, a dry river valley and, almost invisible among the trees half a mile away, a village called Khusar. Over his head, shells screech through the air towards its half-dozen mud-walled houses.

A rocket-propelled grenade cracks out in solitary, futile response, leaving a trail of spiralling smoke in the chill dawn air. There is the continual crackle of small-arms fire, the distant thud of a mortar.

Khusar lies in Bajaur, a 500-square- mile jumble of valleys and hills high on Pakistan’s north-western border with Afghanistan. Few outside Pakistan had heard of Bajaur until recently. But now the fighting here – the biggest single clash of conventional forces and Islamic militants anywhere – is being watched closely around the globe.

The battle of Bajaur has huge local and international implications. Locally, it is a critical test for the new Pakistani civilian government of Asif Ali Zardari, the controversial widower of Benazir Bhutto. The recent bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad is thought to be a response to the Bajaur offensive. Regionally, the battle is a chance for the Pakistani Army to rebut allegations that it is dragging its feet in the fight against international extremism. Internationally, the fight is crucial for the 40-nation coalition fighting in Afghanistan. Not only will its result determine who controls the supply route that crosses the Khyber Pass just to its south – where militants hijacked a 60-vehicle Nato convoy last week – but it will also show if the semi-autonomous ‘tribal agencies’ that line the mountainous zones on the Pakistan side of the frontier can be stabilised. It is there that al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban leadership are hiding. Peace in Afghanistan will remain a distant prospect until the frontier is calmed. [continued…]

Operation enduring disaster
By Tariq Ali, TomDispatch, November 16, 2008

Afghanistan has been almost continuously at war for 30 years, longer than both World Wars and the American war in Vietnam combined. Each occupation of the country has mimicked its predecessor. A tiny interval between wars saw the imposition of a malignant social order, the Taliban, with the help of the Pakistani military and the late Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister who approved the Taliban takeover in Kabul.

Over the last two years, the U.S./NATO occupation of that country has run into serious military problems. Given a severe global economic crisis and the election of a new American president — a man separated in style, intellect, and temperament from his predecessor — the possibility of a serious discussion about an exit strategy from the Afghan disaster hovers on the horizon. The predicament the U.S. and its allies find themselves in is not an inescapable one, but a change in policy, if it is to matter, cannot be of the cosmetic variety.

Washington’s hawks will argue that, while bad, the military situation is, in fact, still salvageable. This may be technically accurate, but it would require the carpet-bombing of southern Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, the destruction of scores of villages and small towns, the killing of untold numbers of Pashtuns and the dispatch to the region of at least 200,000 more troops with all their attendant equipment, air, and logistical support. The political consequences of such a course are so dire that even Dick Cheney, the closest thing to Dr. Strangelove that Washington has yet produced, has been uncharacteristically cautious when it comes to suggesting a military solution to the conflict. [continued…]

War on Taliban sparks refugee crisis
By Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, November 16, 2008

Hundreds of thousands of once prosperous Pakistani villagers are stranded in freezing tented refugee camps after being compelled to leave home by their own forces in a ferocious battle against the Taliban along the Afghan border.

Yesterday 300,000 Pakistani men, women and children, many of them driven from farms in the Bajaur region, were sheltering in eight makeshift camps on the outskirts of their nearest city, Peshawar. [continued…]

Pakistan and U.S. have tacit deal on airstrikes
By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick, Washington Post, November 16, 2008

The United States and Pakistan reached tacit agreement in September on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries. In recent months, the U.S. drones have fired missiles at Pakistani soil at an average rate of once every four or five days.

The officials described the deal as one in which the U.S. government refuses to publicly acknowledge the attacks while Pakistan’s government continues to complain noisily about the politically sensitive strikes. [continued…]

The climate in Pakistan
By Steve Coll, The New Yorker, November 14, 2008

About three weeks ago, militants in Pakistan delivered a copy of a Pashtu-language jihadi magazine called Tora Bora to the Peshawar office of the Daily Times, a newspaper, headquartered in Lahore, that is run by two friends of mine, a husband and wife team, Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin. The magazine’s lead article, Jugnu wrote to me this week, lists five Pakistani journalists as “C.I.A. enemies of jihad,” and it exhorted readers to silence the offenders. Najam was first on the list; the others named included Ahmed Rashid, the intrepid journalist and chronicler of the Taliban, whose recent book, “Descent Into Chaos,” lays out a detailed history of the Taliban’s recent revival. Najam and Ahmed already live under police protection in Lahore, being recipients of repeated threats of this character. Some of the threats have come from vigilantes describing themselves as the “mujaheddin of Waziristan,” who have attached photographs of beheaded journalists to illustrate their warning letters. [continued…]

An African crisis for Obama
By Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, November 16, 2008

While world leaders gathered here to unleash soothing words on the financial tsunami swamping their economies, the daring “responsibility to protect” doctrine adopted by U.N. members three years ago was being buried in the killing fields of eastern Congo.

For the sake of your bank account, hope that the international community can protect dollars, euros and yen more successfully than it protects the lives and safety of people who happen to live in failed or rogue states.

In three years, “never again” has become “sorry about that.” Humanitarian intervention — proudly proclaimed as a universal mission by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other Third Way leaders and eventually adopted at the 2005 U.N. summit — has fallen into serious disrepair. [continued…]

Five million dead and counting
By Michael J. Kavanagh, Slate, November 14, 2008

In the North Kivu province of eastern Congo, people are living in ditches along the sides of roads. They’re filling up the floors of churches and schools. Displaced people are surrounding the compounds of bewildered U.N. peacekeepers. Young boys and men are hiding in the forest to avoid being killed or forced into armed groups.

“There are only girls left in the schools in my village,” one 13-year-old boy told me. The day before, he and three friends had run from rebel soldiers who’d come to kidnap them.

There are now more than 1 million displaced people scattered throughout the province. In the last 10 years of fighting, more than 5 million people have died in the Congolese conflict—mostly civilians who haven’t had access to enough food or health care because of the fighting. And let’s be clear: That’s 5 million and counting. [continued…]

Congo’s riches, looted by renegade troops
By Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, November 16, 2008

Deep in the forest, high on a ridge stripped bare of trees and vines, the colonel sat atop his mountain of ore. In track pants and a T-shirt, he needed no uniform to prove he was a soldier, no epaulets to reveal his rank. Everyone here knows that Col. Samy Matumo, commander of a renegade brigade of army troops that controls this mineral-rich territory, is the master of every hilltop as far as the eye can see.

Columns of men, bent double under 110-pound sacks of tin ore, emerged from the colonel’s mine shaft. It had been carved hundreds of feet into the mountain with Iron Age tools powered by human sweat, muscle and bone. Porters carry the ore nearly 30 miles on their backs, a two-day trek through a mud-slicked maze to the nearest road and a world hungry for the laptops and other electronics that tin helps create, each man a link in a long global chain.

On paper, the exploration rights to this mine belong to a consortium of British and South African investors who say they will turn this perilous and exploitative operation into a safe, modern beacon of prosperity for Congo. But in practice, the consortium’s workers cannot even set foot on the mountain. Like a mafia, Colonel Matumo and his men extort, tax and appropriate at will, draining this vast operation, worth as much as $80 million a year.

The exploitation of this mountain is emblematic of the failure to right this sprawling African nation after many years of tyranny and war, and of the deadly role the country’s immense natural wealth has played in its misery. [continued…]

Iraq cabinet approves troop agreement with U.S.
By Adam Ashton, McClatchy, November 16, 2008

Iraq’s cabinet today approved a security pact that calls for Americans to withdraw from the country within three years. That action sets up a final vote on the agreement in Iraq’s parliament.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki built political momentum for the agreement through the weekend, declaring his support and helping persuade leading Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani to give it the green light on Saturday.

Representatives of Maliki’s Dawa party framed the deal as a means to end America’s occupation of Iraq while phasing out the assistance coalition forces provide. He reportedly bargained for concessions late last week before endorsing it Friday.

The agreement faces an uncertain outlook in parliament. [continued…]

A new twist in Iraq’s Shi’ite power struggle
By Rania Abouzeid, Time, November 16, 2008

Eighteen months after the U.S. troop surge aimed at creating the security necessary for Iraqis to resolve their political conflicts, those political conflicts are threatening to become even more complicated. Besides the Arab-Kurd and Sunni-Shi’ite divides, there has long been a struggle among rival political parties for supremacy among the Shi’ites. Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki recently called for amendments to Iraq’s constitution to strengthen the central government’s power at the expense of the country’s 18 provinces. This week, Maliki’s rivals in the southern Shi’ite bastion of Basra submitted a petition demanding a referendum in the oil-soaked province aimed to turning it into a semi-autonomous federal region akin to Kurdistan. [continued…]

Al-Sadr throws down the gauntlet on US-Iraq talks
By Rania Abouzeid, Time, November 14, 2008

The terms and timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq are as much a matter of politics in Baghdad as they are in Washington. As the Iraqi cabinet prepares for Sunday’s discussion of the vexing draft of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which provides a legal basis for U.S. military operations in Iraq after Dec. 31, firebrand Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday threw down the gauntlet: he threatened to resume attacks against U.S. troops if they don’t leave Iraq “without retaining bases or signing agreements.” Al-Sadr’s unilateral cease-fire, declared more than a year ago, has been generally acknowledged as a key factor in tamping down violence in Iraq over the period, but it remains unclear whether his Mahdi Army militia has the means to make good on his threat. [continued…]

Holocaust’s unholy hold
By Avraham Burg, Los Angeles Times, November 16, 2008

Even today, when economic storms are shaking markets around the world, posing a threat to the stability of entire countries and societies, Israel continues to conduct its business far from the turmoil, as if swimming in a private ocean of its own. True, the headlines are alerting the public here about the crisis, and the politicians are hastily recalculating their budgets. But none of this is dramatically changing the way we think about ourselves.

To Israelis, these issues are mundane. What really matters here is the all-important spirit of Trauma, the true basis for so many of our country’s life principles. In Israel, the darkest period in human history is always present. Regardless of whether the question at hand is of the future relations between Israel and our Palestinian neighbors in specific and the Arab world in general, or of the Iranian atomic threat and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it always comes down to the same conversation. Every threat or grievance of major or minor importance is dealt with automatically by raising the biggest argument of them all — the Shoah — and from that moment onward, every discussion is disrupted.

The constant presence of the Shoah is like a buzz in my ear. In Israel, children are always, it seems, preparing for their rite-of-passage “Auschwitz trip” to Poland. Not a day passes without a mention of the Holocaust in the only newspaper I read, Haaretz. The Shoah is like a hole in the ozone layer: unseen yet present, abstract yet powerful. It’s more present in our lives than God.

It is the founding experience not just of our national consciousness but of more than that. Army generals discuss Israeli security doctrine as “Shoah-proof.” Politicians use it as a central argument for their ethical manipulations. [continued…]

The choice for Obama lies on the road to Jerusalem
By Philip Stephens, Financial Times, November 13, 2008

[The Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is the issue that more than any other shapes attitudes in the [Middle East] towards the US. On almost everything else, probably the best the incoming president can hope for is to damp the fires. A deal between Israel and the Palestinians would change the game.

Yet here Mr Obama has promised least. True, he has made the right noises about throwing his authority behind a two-state solution. There is talk of the appointment of a special US envoy to take a permanent seat at the negotiating table. As yet, however, Mr Obama has given little sign that he is ready to invest the energy and political capital to broker a deal.

You can see why. The Annapolis process, the belated effort by the Bush administration to secure an accord, has gone nowhere slowly. This week the outgoing administration all but abandoned hopes of progress before Mr Bush leaves the White House.

Tony Blair, the United Nations’ special envoy to the region, displayed all his trademark optimism by insisting that a “platform” was in place for a final settlement. We have heard that one before.

The polls suggest that the Israeli elections are unlikely to deliver a coalition with the authority to strike a land-for-peace bargain with the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Likud leader, may emerge as prime minister. During his last spell in office Mr Netanyahu sought to derail the Oslo accords. I have heard it said that the one meeting that went badly during Mr Obama’s tour of the Middle East and Europe this year was his encounter with Mr Netanyahu.

For their part, the Palestinians remain divided in spite of the best efforts of Egyptian mediation. Hamas has so far refused to offer the recognition of Israel demanded by the international community. In the absence of a committed interlocutor on the Israeli side, it is hard to see what would prompt Fatah and Hamas to settle their differences.

So why should Mr Obama risk his reputation in such a cause? The answer comes in several parts.

The early years of his presidency will be his best, and quite possibly the last, chance to broker a two-state solution. Facts on the ground – demography, the West Bank barrier, Israeli settlements across swaths of the West Bank, Palestinian radicalism in Gaza – are steadily undermining the bargain that would give Israel security and the Palestinians a state.

For all the formidable obstacles to an agreement, Mr Obama’s heritage and the nature of his victory has bestowed as much authority among Israelis, Palestinians and in the wider Arab world as any US president can ever expect. This precious political capital will diminish over time.

A serious and even-handed effort to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians would disarm the most serious charge against US policy in the region: that everything it does is rooted in double standards.

A deal would not settle all the problems and conflicts. Nor, of itself, would it repair the relationship between the west and much of the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates would find plenty of other reasons to attack America. Yet the creation of a Palestinian state would change profoundly the dynamics of the Middle East. It would make possible much that now seems beyond all reasonable reach.

Brokering such an accord would be tough and thankless. Mr Obama might well fail in the attempt. But there lies the existential choice for Mr Bush’s successor. Does he want to patch things up? Or does he want to redraw the strategic map of the Middle East and thereby set a new direction for America’s role in the world? That, in the final analysis, is what will mark out the difference between a competent and a transformational presidency. [continued…]

Settlers who long to leave the West Bank
By Ethan Bronner, New York Times, November 14, 2008

Surrounded by hostility, living on land most of the world wants turned over to Palestinians for a state, they meet quietly in Jewish settlements like this one, plotting the future. But these besieged West Bank settlers, widely viewed as an obstacle to peace, want only one surprising thing: to get out.

While the vast majority of settlers vow never to abandon the heart of the historic Jewish homeland — these ancient and starkly beautiful hills whose biblical names are Judea and Samaria — thousands of other settlers say they want to move back to within the pre-1967 borders of Israel.

They say the West Bank settlement enterprise — at least that part beyond the barrier of wall and fence Israel has been building — is doomed and their lives are at risk. Many say something else as well: The Israeli occupation of land claimed by the Palestinians is wrong and they want no part of it. But their houses are worthless, and they are stuck. They want help. [continued…]

Islamists continue advance through Somalia
By Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, November 14, 2008

Islamist militias in Somalia on Thursday continued their steady and surprisingly uncontested march toward the capital, Mogadishu, capturing a small town on the outskirts of the city.

Several dozen Islamist fighters poured into Elasha Biyaha, which is 11 miles southwest of Mogadishu, after government-allied militias fled. No shots were fired, but residents feared it was only a matter of time.

“Many people are now on the verge of fleeing,” said Yusuf Abdi Nur, a shopkeeper in Elasha Biyaha.

The tense but bloodless capture of Elasha Biyaha was a carbon copy of what happened in Merka, a strategic port town, on Wednesday, when hundreds of heavily armed Islamist militants took over the town after government-allied troops beat a hasty retreat. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Somalia represents one of the most glaring failures of the war on terrorism. In the name of opposing terrorism, the Bush administration helped undermine the first sign of stability that had appeared in that grief stricken state in over a decade — the prospect of the end of civil war was of no inherent value in the eyes of Washington if Somalia’s government was going to be Islamist. But the result of opposing the Islamic Courts Union was to strengthen the more extreme wing, the Shabab.

Just before the election, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times:

During the cold war, the American ideological fear of communism led us to mistake every muddle-headed leftist for a Soviet pawn. Our myopia helped lead to catastrophe in Vietnam.

In the same way today, an exaggerated fear of “Islamofascism” elides a complex reality and leads us to overreact and damage our own interests. Perhaps the best example is one of the least-known failures in Bush administration foreign policy: Somalia.

Today, Somalia is the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, worse even than Darfur or Congo. The crisis has complex roots, and Somali warlords bear primary blame. But Bush administration paranoia about Islamic radicals contributed to the disaster.

Somalia has been in chaos for many years, but in 2006 an umbrella movement called the Islamic Courts Union seemed close to uniting the country. The movement included both moderates and extremists, but it constituted the best hope for putting Somalia together again. Somalis were ecstatic at the prospect of having a functional government again.

Bush administration officials, however, were aghast at the rise of an Islamist movement that they feared would be uncooperative in the war on terror. So they gave Ethiopia, a longtime rival in the region, the green light to invade, and Somalia’s best hope for peace collapsed.

“A movement that looked as if it might end this long national nightmare was derailed, in part because of American and Ethiopian actions,” said Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia expert at Davidson College. As a result, Islamic militancy and anti-Americanism have surged, partly because Somalis blame Washington for the brutality of the Ethiopian occupiers.

“There’s a level of anti-Americanism in Somalia today like nothing I’ve seen over the last 20 years,” Professor Menkhaus said. “Somalis are furious with us for backing the Ethiopian intervention and occupation, provoking this huge humanitarian crisis.”

Patrick Duplat, an expert on Somalia at Refugees International, the Washington-based advocacy group, says that during his last visit to Somalia, earlier this year, a local mosque was calling for jihad against America — something he had never heard when he lived peacefully in Somalia during the rise of the Islamic Courts Union.

“The situation has dramatically taken a turn for the worse,” he said. “The U.S. chose a very confrontational route early on. Who knows what would have happened if the U.S. had reached out to moderates? But that might have averted the disaster we’re in today.”

The greatest catastrophe is the one endured by ordinary Somalis who now must watch their children starve. But America’s own strategic interests have also been gravely damaged.

The only winner has been Islamic militancy. That’s probably the core reason why Al Qaeda militants prefer a McCain presidency: four more years of blindness to nuance in the Muslim world would be a tragedy for Americans and virtually everyone else, but a boon for radical groups trying to recruit suicide bombers.

CIA chief says Qaeda is extending its reach
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, November 13, 2008

Even as Al Qaeda strengthens its hub in the Pakistani mountains, its leaders are building closer ties to regional militant groups in order to launch attacks in Africa and Europe and on the Arabian Peninsula, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday.

The director, Michael V. Hayden, identified North Africa and Somalia as places where Qaeda leaders were using partnerships to establish new bases. Elsewhere, Mr. Hayden said, Al Qaeda was “strengthening” in Yemen, and he added that veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had moved there, possibly to stage attacks against the government of Saudi Arabia.

He said the “bleed out” from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also extended to North Africa, raising concern that the countries there could be used to stage attacks into Europe. Mr. Hayden delivered his report in a speech to the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, and it offered a mixed assessment of Al Qaeda’s ability to wage a global jihad.

He drew a contrast between what he described as growing Islamic radicalism in places like Somalia and what he said had been the “strategic defeat” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — the network’s affiliate group in Iraq. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Al Qaeda is as strong as the policies of the Bush administration helped make it. If Hayden had not been such a willing party to the administration’s strategic and tactical mistakes he might now have the honesty and humility to acknowledge that America will soon be free from the threat posed by its greatest security liability — the current administration. And had the director of the CIA a broader mind he might also acknowledge that the threats posed to America by climate change and economic turmoil, dwarf those posed by a few thousand violent fundamentalists.

The worst is not behind us
By Nouriel Roubini, Forbes, November 13, 2008

It is useful, at this juncture, to stand back and survey the economic landscape–both as it is now, and as it has been in recent months. So here is a summary of many of the points that I have made for the last few months on the outlook for the U.S. and global economy, as well as for financial markets:

–The U.S. will experience its most severe recession since World War II, much worse and longer and deeper than even the 1974-1975 and 1980-1982 recessions. The recession will continue until at least the end of 2009 for a cumulative gross domestic product drop of over 4%; the unemployment rate will likely reach 9%. The U.S. consumer is shopped-out, saving less and debt-burdened: This will be the worst consumer recession in decades.

–The prospect of a short and shallow six- to eight-month V-shaped recession is out of the window; a U-shaped 18- to 24-month recession is now a certainty, and the probability of a worse, multi-year L-shaped recession (as in Japan in the 1990s) is still small but rising. Even if the economy were to exit a recession by the end of 2009, the recovery could be so weak because of the impairment of the financial system and the credit mechanism that it may feel like a recession even if the economy is technically out of the recession.

–Obama will inherit an economic and financial mess worse than anything the U.S. has faced in decades: the most severe recession in 50 years; the worst financial and banking crisis since the Great Depression; a ballooning fiscal deficit that may be as high as a trillion dollars in 2009 and 2010; a huge current account deficit; a financial system that is in a severe crisis and where deleveraging is still occurring at a very rapid pace, thus causing a worsening of the credit crunch; a household sector where millions of households are insolvent, into negative equity territory and on the verge of losing their homes; a serious risk of deflation as the slack in goods, labor and commodity markets becomes deeper; the risk that we will end in a deflationary liquidity trap as the Fed is fast approaching the zero-bound constraint for the Fed funds rate; the risk of a severe debt deflation as the real value of nominal liabilities will rise, given price deflation, while the value of financial assets is still plunging. [continued…]

Depression economics returns
By Paul Krugman, New York Times, November 14, 2008

The economic news, in case you haven’t noticed, keeps getting worse. Bad as it is, however, I don’t expect another Great Depression. In fact, we probably won’t see the unemployment rate match its post-Depression peak of 10.7 percent, reached in 1982 (although I wish I was sure about that).

We are already, however, well into the realm of what I call depression economics. By that I mean a state of affairs like that of the 1930s in which the usual tools of economic policy — above all, the Federal Reserve’s ability to pump up the economy by cutting interest rates — have lost all traction. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly….

To pull us out of this downward spiral, the federal government will have to provide economic stimulus in the form of higher spending and greater aid to those in distress — and the stimulus plan won’t come soon enough or be strong enough unless politicians and economic officials are able to transcend several conventional prejudices.

One of these prejudices is the fear of red ink. In normal times, it’s good to worry about the budget deficit — and fiscal responsibility is a virtue we’ll need to relearn as soon as this crisis is past. When depression economics prevails, however, this virtue becomes a vice. F.D.R.’s premature attempt to balance the budget in 1937 almost destroyed the New Deal.

Another prejudice is the belief that policy should move cautiously. In normal times, this makes sense: you shouldn’t make big changes in policy until it’s clear they’re needed. Under current conditions, however, caution is risky, because big changes for the worse are already happening, and any delay in acting raises the chance of a deeper economic disaster. The policy response should be as well-crafted as possible, but time is of the essence.

Finally, in normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, it’s much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation — but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small there’s nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly. [continued…]

Obama on faith
Barack Obama interviewed by Cathleen Falsani, March 27, 2004

BARACK OBAMA:
Alongside my own deep personal faith, I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I am a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I mean, I’m a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law. I am a great admirer of our founding charter, and its resolve to prevent theocracies from forming, and its resolve to prevent disruptive strains of fundamentalism from taking root ion this country.

As I said before, in my own public policy, I’m very suspicious of religious certainty expressing itself in politics.

Now, that’s different form a belief that values have to inform our public policy. I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that I want my government to be operating for all faiths and all peoples, including atheists and agnostics, while also insisting that there are values that inform my politics that are appropriate to talk about.

A standard line in my stump speech during this campaign is that my politics are informed by a belief that we’re all connected. That if there’s a child on the South Side of Chicago that can’t read, that makes a difference in my life even if it’s not my own child. If there’s a senior citizen in downstate Illinois that’s struggling to pay for their medicine and having to chose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer even if it’s not my grandparent. And if there’s an Arab American family that’s being rounded up by John Ashcroft without the benefit of due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

I can give religious expression to that. I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, we are all children of God. Or I can express it in secular terms. But the basic premise remains the same. I think sometimes Democrats have made the mistake of shying away from a conversation about values for fear that they sacrifice the important value of tolerance. And I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive.

FALSANI:
Do you think it’s wrong for people to want to know about a civic leader’s spirituality?

OBAMA:
I don’t’ think it’s wrong. I think that political leaders are subject to all sorts of vetting by the public, and this can be a component of that.

I think that I am disturbed by, let me put it this way: I think there is an enormous danger on the part of public figures to rationalize or justify their actions by claiming God’s mandate.

I think there is this tendency that I don’t think is healthy for public figures to wear religion on their sleeve as a means to insulate themselves from criticism, or dialogue with people who disagree with them.

FALSANI:
The conversation stopper, when you say you’re a Christian and leave it at that.

OBAMA:
Where do you move forward with that?

This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and proselytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell.

FALSANI:
You don’t believe that?

OBAMA:
I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.

That’s just not part of my religious makeup. [continued…]

Obama’s plans for probing Bush torture
By Mark Benjamin, Salon, November 13, 2008

With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented “blanket pardon” for people involved in his administration’s brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush.

The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the proposal. The plan would not rule out future prosecutions, but would delay a decision on that matter until all essential facts can be unearthed. Between the time necessary for the investigative process and the daunting array of policy problems Obama will face upon taking office, any decision on prosecutions probably would not come until a second Obama presidential term, should there be one.

The proposed commission — similar in thrust to a Democratic investigation proposal first uncovered by Salon in July — would examine a broad scope of activities, including detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, the practice of snatching suspected terrorists off the street and whisking them off to a third country for abusive interrogations. The commission might also pry into the claims by the White House — widely rejected by experienced interrogators — that abusive interrogations are an effective and necessary intelligence tool. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — If Bush grants a blanket preemptive pardon to everyone who might have committed a crime while conducting the war on terrorism, all well and good. The truth is worth more than convictions and having been pardoned, the guilty will not be able to hide behind the Fifth Amendment when they are called to testify.

When the vice president alerted this nation to the fact that it’s government would move to “the dark side,” everyone who said, “OK, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do,” became complicit. Dick Cheney, John Yoo and David Addington might have been the leading criminal conspirators, but everyone who felt safer not knowing what was being done in their name needs to understand that America as a nation — not just those at the top — has been stained by the crimes of the war on terrorism.

An independent public inquiry needs to be conducted and those questioned should not just include the principals inside the Bush administration, but also those members of Congress who were briefed about interrogation procedures, along with the tortured, the torturers, guards, medical and legal counselors. The goal should not be to hold individuals with ultimate responsibility but rather to expose in all its intricacy the web of complicity.

In this matter, a sense of collective responsibility will be of greater political consequence and more lasting value to society, than the satisfaction that so many of us would feel if we were to see Cheney and his cohorts thrown in jail.

Bush, out of office, could oppose inquiries
By Charlie Savage, New York Times, November 13, 2008

When a Congressional committee subpoenaed Harry S. Truman in 1953, nearly a year after he left office, he made a startling claim: Even though he was no longer president, the Constitution still empowered him to block subpoenas.

“If the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a president after his term of office has expired,” Truman wrote to the committee.

Congress backed down, establishing a precedent suggesting that former presidents wield lingering powers to keep matters from their administration secret. Now, as Congressional Democrats prepare to move forward with investigations of the Bush administration, they wonder whether that claim may be invoked again.

“The Bush administration overstepped in its exertion of executive privilege, and may very well try to continue to shield information from the American people after it leaves office,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who sits on two committees, Judiciary and Intelligence, that are examining aspects of Mr. Bush’s policies. [continued…]