Obama to explore new approach in Afghanistan war
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, November 11, 2008

The incoming Obama administration plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran — and looks favorably on the nascent dialogue between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, according to Obama national security advisers.

President-elect Barack Obama also intends to renew the U.S. commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a priority the president-elect believes President Bush has played down after years of failing to apprehend the al-Qaeda leader. Critical of Bush during the campaign for what he said was the president’s extreme focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, Obama also intends to move ahead with a planned deployment of thousands of additional U.S. troops there.

The emerging broad strokes of Obama’s approach are likely to be welcomed by a number of senior U.S. military officials who advocate a more aggressive and creative course for the deteriorating conflict. Taliban attacks and U.S. casualties this year are the highest since the war began in 2001. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The one phrase in this report that is encouraging is “regional strategy.” As for the rest, it simply demonstrates that campaign rhetoric provides a lousy foundation for crafting a policy that may never lend itself to populist language.

There’s a simplistic logic to the idea that if Iraq was a “distraction” and resulted in military forces being pulled out of Afghanistan too quickly, then the corrective is to pull troops out of Iraq and send them back to Afghanistan. The problem is that for as long as there are Western troops propping up a weak government in Kabul, that government will naturally be perceived as a puppet regime — especially when it can do so little to prevent those forces from killing civilians. Moreover, when it comes to a contest over which side can drive the other to exhaustion, the home side always has an inherent advantage. In addition to that they are now able to claim that America’s economic decline is the product of its military misadventures. In every respect, the Taliban is now in the strongest position it has been since 2001. No wonder there is little sign that they are eager to sit down and negotiate.

What the Obama administration needs to do is look east and west with the goal of creating a coalition between Iran, Pakistan and India. An indispensable step in that process would be a US-brokered resolution to the conflict in Kashmir — and prior to that every effort to make sure that the Pakistani economy does not collapse.

If an alliance can be forged between these three regional powers, then they rather than Nato, could serve as much more durable protectors for a gradually strengthening Afghan government.

If Osama bin Laden is alive — and that’s a big if — the goal of hunting him down is not one that’s worth trumpeting. If he can be caught — all well and good. But to imagine that the fact that he has not be found so far is the result of the Bush administration’s lack of focus, seems — at least to me — to be a bit naive.

POSTSCRIPT: What might be a more constructive policy regarding bin Laden would be — so long as their is no hard intelligence indicating otherwise — to publicly declare the al Qaeda chief is “presumed dead.”

If he is dead, the US government should not be assisting al Qaeda by perpetuating the myth that he has outsmarted the Americans. And since proving that someone is dead is much harder than proving that they are alive, the onus should be on al Qaeda to prove that they are not hiding an inconvenient truth.

Presuming that bin Laden is dead does nothing to diminish the importance of shutting down al Qaeda. What it most likely does is undercut the propaganda value of allowing him to be seen as having successfully eluded capture.

Absent an authentic video in which OSB has something to say about Barack Obama winning the election, I for one think it’s safe to assume (as does former CIA operative Robert Baer) that America’s number one nemesis is gone for good.

On the other hand, if presuming him dead becomes the official position of the US government yet the presumption is wrong, it might still serve the useful purpose of forcing him into public view.

Obama leans toward asking Gates to remain at Pentagon for a year
By Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his position for at least a year, according to two Obama advisers. A senior Pentagon official said Mr. Gates would likely accept the offer if it is made.

No final decision has been made, and Obama aides said other people are also under serious consideration for the defense post, one of the most highly coveted in any new cabinet. Several prominent Democrats, including former Clinton Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and former Clinton Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, are also being considered. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Keep Gates for a year and then replace him with someone willing to ruthlessly slash the Pentagon’s budget beginning by scrapping the missile defense program and suspending upgrades to nuclear weapons.

Can we save the planet and rescue the economy at the same time?
By Al Gore, Mother Jones, November/December, 2008

These are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits, and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment. The survival of the United States as we know it is at risk. And even more—if more should be required—the future of human civilization is at stake.

Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse. Gasoline prices have been increasing. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies, and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. The war in Iraq continues, and now the war in Afghanistan appears to be getting worse.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis is growing more dire—much faster than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing beneath the north polar ice cap have warned that there is now a good chance that within five years it will completely disappear during the summer months. And by the way, our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it?

Yet when we look at these seemingly intractable challenges, we can see the common thread running through them. Our dangerous overreliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all of these challenges—the economic, environmental, and national security crises. We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. [continued…]

Bush spy revelations anticipated when Obama is sworn in
By Ryan Singel, Wired, November 10, 2008

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won’t just get a new president; they might finally learn the full extent of George W. Bush’s warrantless domestic wiretapping.

Since The New York Times first revealed in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on citizens’ overseas phone calls and e-mail, few additional details about the massive “Terrorist Surveillance Program” have emerged. That’s because the Bush administration has stonewalled, misled and denied documents to Congress, and subpoenaed the phone records of the investigative reporters.

Now privacy advocates are hopeful that President Obama will be more forthcoming with information. But for the quickest and most honest account of Bush’s illegal policies, they say don’t look to the incoming president. Watch instead for the hidden army of would-be whistle-blowers who’ve been waiting for Inauguration Day to open the spigot on the truth. [continued…]

Fed defies transparency aim in refusal to disclose
By Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald, Bloomberg, November 10, 2008

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

“The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that’s a big problem,” said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. “In a liquid market, this wouldn’t matter, but we’re not. The market is very nervous and very thin.”

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure. [continued…]

Kremlin opts for charm over strong arm on missile defence
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, November 10, 2008

Russia switched deftly from threats to charm yesterday in an effort to exploit indications that Barack Obama could be persuaded to scrap Bush administration plans to deploy a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Speaking after meeting the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in Sharm el-Sheikh, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was expecting a more flexible approach from the US once Obama took office.

“We have paid attention to the positions that Barack Obama has published on his site. They inspire hope that we can examine these questions in a more constructive way,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.

Although consultations with the Bush administration on missile defence and the renewal of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty would continue, Lavrov suggested new agreements were unlikely until after Obama entered the White House. [continued…]

Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees
AP, November 10, 2008

President-elect Obama’s advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a “sad chapter in American history” and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama’s camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts. [continued…]

“As President, I will close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions” — Barack Obama
Close Gitmo, ACLU, 2008

Dear President-elect Obama,

Nothing would make me prouder than to see you act on your first day in office to restore America’s moral leadership in the world.

With one stroke of your pen, you can close Guantánamo Bay prison, shut down military commissions, and ban torture.

The restoration of American freedom is in your hands. Give us back the America we believe in. [continued…]

Obama’s new Middle East? Don’t hold your breath
By Tony Karon, The National, November 8, 2008

Barack Obama’s stunning election victory represented a profound revolution in America’s self-identity, but many abroad seem to have mistaken it for a portent of profound changes in the foreign posture of the US. I was flabbergasted, for example, by an e-mail from a South African friend wondering if Obama would free the five Cubans currently serving long prison terms for spying on the US (in fact, he probably won’t even end the US embargo of Cuba).

Obama was propelled to victory by a broad popular antiwar movement, and that sense of the consummate outsider (a black man) running an insurgent campaign against the political establishment (John McCain and, before him, Hillary Clinton) that had backed the Iraq war has encouraged people to project all sorts of fantasies on to a man whose own stated policy positions are decidedly centrist.

Obama’s first appointment helped to douse fevered expectations of any revolutionary change, You could hear the collective groan of anguish from the Middle East when Obama named Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. Emanuel’s father was a member of Israel’s Irgun militia in the 1940s, and he himself served as a volunteer on an Israeli military base in 1991. Moreover, as a Congressman, Emanuel had written letters to the Bush Administration accusing it of being too tough on Israel (a view not widely shared in the Middle East). In Washington, his appointment drew wry comments from Republicans, who noted that the legendary political brawler hardly epitomised the new politics of civility promised in Obama’s “change” rhetoric. The response from an Obama insider is worth noting: “Obama is the change,” the official said, referring to his being the first black President. “Right now what America is looking for in a cabinet is competence, expertise and credibility.” In other words, continuity.

And continuity is exactly what the Middle East should expect from a President Obama, at least initially. Asked about Iran during his first press conference as President-elect, he reiterated US talking points about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and demanding that it end support for terrorism. For the rest, he’ll wait to formulate a new approach – presumably until after next year’s Iranian presidential election. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — In assessing the significance of Rahm Emanuel’s appointment as chief of staff, what is likely to count for more? The fact that he served in the IDF and his father was in Irgun, or the fact that he and Obama are close friends, know each other from Chicago and that he has a lot of power in Congress? (That’s meant to be a rhetorical question.)

When it comes to predicting how Obama’s Middle East approach is likely to shape up, we should be paying more attention to whether he appoints a Middle East envoy, who that is, and how much authority he is given. With the right pick, with sufficient authority and a clear mission, it could turn out that the fact that Obama had already placed an Israeli (Emanuel) in such an influential position inside the White House is a way of buttressing the president from attacks from the Israel lobby. Rather than Emanuel being the Israel lobby’s Trojan Horse inside the White House, he may turn out to be Obama’s envoy inside the lobby.

Most of all, despite the extent to which Obama will be hemmed in by circumstances and despite his mild manner, I have no doubt that he will assume a role that for President Bush was more of a posture: he will be the decider. As a decision-maker who has availed himself of all the facts and who has the intellect required for making sound judgments, he understands that as president he will be fully accountable. But among all those whose support for him was contingent upon the expectation that he would emphatically stand behind their particular agenda, the fact that he is someone who does not like “ideology overriding fact,” will no doubt be cause for a string of disappointments.

‘He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual’
By Jonathan Raban, The Guardian, November 8, 2008

On Tuesday, dodging the hubbub of election parties, I watched the results come in with two close friends and my teenage daughter. We might have been patients showing up at a hospital for a surgical procedure, nervously joking over the early returns from Vermont (predictably, Barack Obama) and Kentucky (predictably, John McCain). When, at 8:01pm, Pacific time, CNN called the race for Obama, we collapsed in one another’s arms. Even my dry tear ducts did their job, and, for a few moments, the room swam out of focus. The champagne, whose presence in the fridge I had thought to be ominously bad karma, was opened. No toast. Just “Thank God, thank God, thank God”, spoken by four devout atheists. There was little triumph in our emotion, only an overpowering wave of relief that, after eight years of manic derangement, America had at last come to its senses.

Inevitably, Wednesday’s headlines were all about Obama’s skin colour and the historic milestone of the first black presidency. For the United States and the rest of the world, that is a fact of huge symbolic importance, but it is the least of Obama’s true credentials. What America has succeeded in doing, against all the odds, and why we cried when it happened, is to elect the most intelligent, canny and imaginative candidate to the presidential office in modern times – someone who’ll bring to the White House an extraordinary clarity of thought and temperate judgment. [continued…]

Obama adviser: No commitment on defense shield
CNN, November 8, 2008

US President-elect Barack Obama has made “no commitment” to plans for a missile defense program in eastern Europe, despite a report on the Polish president’s Web site, an Obama adviser said Saturday.

Obama spoke to President Lech Kaczynski over the phone about continuing military and political cooperation between the two countries and possibly meeting in person soon, both sides said.

Obama “had a good conversation with the Polish president and the Polish prime minister about the important U.S.-Poland alliance,” said Denis McDonough, Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser.

However, Kaczynski’s office says on its Web site that during the same conversation, Obama told Kaczynski that he intends to continue plans for a missile shield in eastern Europe.

Obama’s adviser denied the report.

“President Kaczynski raised missile defense, but President-elect Obama made no commitment on it. His position is as it was throughout the campaign: that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable,” McDonough said. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — If Obama wants to really grasp what should be a budgetary imperative — scrapping a defense program that has amounted to one of the grossest waste of tax dollars in history — the first step is to underline what the Bush administration has always been eager to obscure: that missile defense technology has yet to convincingly demonstrate it can work.

Just suppose that three decades after Kennedy had announced his mission to land a man on the Moon, it hadn’t happened and NASA was saying, “we’re working on it and we’re making great strides — we just need a few billion more dollars.” The program would rightly be seen as a farce and be cut back or suspended.

Missile defense deserves no more credibility, but shifting the narrative from “indispensable” to “white elephant”, merely requires stating the obvious: it doesn’t work. But not only that, even if all the technical obstacles could be overcome, the risk of nuclear weapons being delivered by missiles should really be among the least of our fears.

Obama is not about to make a bold move but at least he seems to be inching in the right direction.

Obama positioned to quickly reverse Bush actions
By Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, November 9, 2008

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office. [continued…]

‘Do what you got elected to do’
By Jason L Riley, Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2008

Asked what Barack Obama was elected to do, and what legislation he’s likely to find on his Oval Office desk soonest, Mr. Emanuel didn’t hesitate. “Bucket one would have children’s health care, Schip,” he said. “It has bipartisan agreement in the House and Senate. It’s something President-elect Obama expects to see. Second would be [ending current restrictions on federally funded] stem-cell research. And third would be an economic recovery package focused on the two principles of job creation and tax relief for middle-class families.”

The last time a Democratic president’s party also ran Congress was 1992. Just two years later, however, voters changed their mind about that arrangement and gave the GOP control of the House and Senate. Mr. Emanuel said he’s not at all concerned that the party will overplay its hand this time. He insisted that his caucus is mindful of what happened to Democrats in 1994 and the Republican Congress in 2006.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Emanuel defended President Clinton’s decision to push through a tax increase in 1993 — “a tough call” — after having campaigned on a middle-class tax cut. He also denied that it had much impact in the midterm elections a year later. Instead, he cited issues like “gays in the military” as more damaging politically. “It’s not what we campaigned on,” said Mr. Emanuel. And as an example of Republicans losing their way, he cited the Terri Schiavo episode in 2005, where President Bush and the Republican-controlled congress intervened in a case involving a brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube.

In both instances, “the lesson is to do what you got elected to do,” said Mr. Emanuel. “Do what you talked about on the campaign. If you got elected, that’s what people expect. Don’t go off on tangents where part of your party is demanding an ideological litmus test. Neither of those things was part of the campaign.” [continued…]

CEO in chief
By Nina Easton, Fortune, November 7, 2008

Americans like to put governors in the White House – Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush. Unlike U.S. Senators, governors have experience running large, complex organizations. The only major organization Obama has ever run is his own campaign.

By all accounts it was an impressive enterprise – consistent yet innovative, disciplined yet nimble, and strung together with one overriding rule: No jerks allowed. With egos expected to be checked at the door, there was little of the dissension and drama that typically dog presidential campaigns. Senior aides who helped the candidate craft all those policy proposals he campaigned on say he likes to hear from a range of experts before reaching a decision.

“He really questions his advisors aggressively,” says Harvard’s Liebman. “He wants to see disagreements aired in front of him. He likes to have the actual experts in the room.”

Obama told Fortune last June, “I don’t like ideology overriding fact. I like facts, then determining what we need to do. I believe in a strong feedback loop. Companies that are successful do that.” Obama has said the one book, besides the Bible, that would be a staple of his White House is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. The book chronicles President Lincoln’s decision to include political opponents on his White House team, the better to keep his enemies close and eavesdrop on the sound of dissenting voices. [continued…]

The U.S. has power. What it needs is authority.
By Ron Suskind, Washington Post, November 9, 2008

Moral authority.

What is it? Do you have any? Would you like to lend some to the U.S. government?

Because that will be the holy grail for President Barack Obama: Finding moral authority — the quicker, the better.

The rap against the United States is well known by now: Over the past eight years, we have embraced a reckless unilateral posture of action over analysis, discarding the “good process” of prudent, evidence-based policy debate in favor of the Nike Doctrine — just do it, and clean up the mess later.

But seven years later, glorious victories, from Iraq to Afghanistan, have been slow in coming. Secret prisons, torture, putting U.S. citizens and foreigners under surveillance — or sending armies into civilian populations to tease out friend from foe at the muzzle of a gun — don’t work very well. That’s why, over the centuries, they’ve been discarded one by one.

But what happens next? If ever there were a president who could credibly claim to signify a clean break from his predecessor, that commander in chief is Obama. But the United States also needs a plan that shows that what’s coming won’t be business as usual.

The core conundrum: How does a nation with so much power, both military and economic, go about restoring moral energy, the source of true clout in the world? [continued…]

‘Muts like me’
By Patricia J. Williams, The Daily Beast, November 8, 2008

It was surely meant as a wry aside when, speaking about his daughters’ search for a puppy, Barack Obama observed that most shelter dogs are “mutts like me.” My first thought, however, was: “Ain’t I a mutt, too?”

In fact, of course, we’re all mutts. As humans, we’re all descended from a common African ancestor, and have been mixing it up ever since. And as Americans, we’ve been mixing it up faster and more thoroughly than anyplace on earth. At the same time, we live in a state of tremendous denial about the rambunctiousness of our recent lineage. The language by which we assign racial category narrows or expands our perception of who is more like whom, tells us who can be considered marriageable or untouchable. [continued…]

U.S. acknowledges 37 Afghan civilians killed in fighting last week
By M. Karim Faiez and Laura King, Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2008

The U.S. military acknowledged Saturday that 37 civilians were killed and 35 injured during fighting last week in Kandahar province between insurgents and coalition forces.

Although the American statement stopped short of taking direct blame for civilian casualties in a southern province that is one of the country’s most active battlefields, it demonstrated an unusually swift public response to claims of mass casualties made by Afghan officials.

The finding came just three days after provincial officials and the Afghan president’s office asserted that three dozen people had died in an errant U.S. airstrike on a wedding party in a village outside the city of Kandahar. [continued…]

Israeli spies linked to murder of Hezbollah chief
By Uzi Mahnaimi, The Sunday Times, November 9, 2008

Two brothers held in Lebanon as Israeli spies are linked to a team responsible for the assassination of a notorious terrorist leader, Lebanese security sources have claimed.

Ali Jarrah, 50, a Lebanese citizen, and his brother Youssef, from Marj in the Bekaa valley, were arrested last week by the Lebanese army, which charged them with espionage. A third suspect has also been held, sources close to the investigation said. All three face the death penalty.

The spy ring has been linked to the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading figure in Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite militia, who was killed in a bomb blast in Damascus in February. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, blamed Israel for the attack and vowed to take revenge. [continued…]

Georgia claims on Russia war called into question
By CJ Chivers and Ellen Barry, New York Times, November 6, 2008

Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has characterized the attack as a precise and defensive act. But according to observations of the monitors, documented Aug. 7 and Aug. 8, Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area. The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to question one of Mr. Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack. [continued…]

Time to appoint a Middle East envoy
Editorial, Financial Times, November 6, 2008

In speech after spell-binding speech, Barack Obama made clear throughout his campaign his intention to restore America’s reputation in the world; that, as he told the vast crowd at his Chicago victory rally, “America’s beacon still burns as bright”. In the Middle East and throughout broad swathes of the Muslim world, that beacon is invisible after eight years of the Bush administration’s bungling. President-elect Obama has a unique chance to rekindle it.

He should signal his intent by naming soon a special envoy for the Middle East with plenipotentiary powers to mediate and negotiate on behalf of his incoming administration. That would be change and it would quickly be perceived as such. Bill Clinton, the former president, is probably the best man for the job.

The debacles of the Bush era, from the invasion of Iraq, through the reckless Anglo-American support of Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war, to the US adoption of an attitude rather than a policy towards Iran, have created a dangerous political vacuum in the region. True, the past year has seen limited conflict resolution managed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. While all this should be viewed positively as “local ownership” of regional strategic problems, these efforts may turn out to be band-aids.

The US really is indispensable to the resolution of the region’s most intractable problems – as long as it rediscovers the transformative power of hard-nosed diplomacy.

That means an even-handed final effort to secure a two-states solution offering security to Israelis and justice to the Palestinians. And that can only be obtained through the creation of a viable Palestinian state on nearly all the occupied West Bank with Arab east Jerusalem as its capital, with agreed and equal land swaps, and fair treatment for 4.4m Palestinian refugees, largely through compensation.

That is the essence of the 2002 Arab League peace plan put forward by King Abdullah – who will be in New York and Washington next week with a top-level Saudi delegation – as well as the “parameters” drawn up by Mr Clinton in December 2000, after the collapse of that summer’s Camp David summit.

The Obama team should make clear now that this is also its vision of how to resolve this conflict, at the heart of the region’s combustibility. It might even tilt Israeli voters towards the peace camp in February’s elections. They did, after all, throw out the irredentist Yitzhak Shamir in 1992 after he incurred the displeasure of George H.W. Bush. Yitzhak Rabin, the slain peacemaker, was elected in his stead. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Whether or not Bill Clinton would be the best pick as Middle East envoy is questionable, but the suggestion that now is the time to push the 2002 peace plan should be firmly grasped. The Israelis are on the brink of being ready. The real challenge — and the one that all Western powers have so far ducked — is to play a constructive role in rebuilding Palestinian political unity.

Grasping that nettle would probably easier for someone whose ego and public profile would be much less likely to get into the way. This is a job for a professional diplomat with a deep understanding of the region. If throwing a big name at the task held much promise, you’d think by now we would have heard a bit more from The Quartet’s illustrious envoy, Tony Blair.

Evangelical foreign policy is over
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Boston Globe, November 6, 2008

With Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, the evangelical moment in US foreign policy has come to an end. The United States remains a nation of believers, with Christianity the tradition to which most Americans adhere. Yet the religious sensibility informing American statecraft will no longer find expression in an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.

Like our current president, Obama is a professed Christian. Yet whereas George W. Bush once identified Jesus Christ himself as his favorite philosopher, the president-elect is an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, the renowned Protestant theologian.

Faced with difficult problems, conservative evangelicals ask WWJD: What would Jesus do? We are now entering an era in which the occupant of the Oval Office will consider a different question: What would Reinhold do?

During the middle third of the last century, Niebuhr thought deeply about the complexities, moral and otherwise, of international politics. Although an eminently quotable writer, his insights do not easily reduce to a sound-bite or bumper sticker.

At the root of Niebuhr’s thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, “cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest.” Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness – never an American strong suit – poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. [continued…]

Obama’s victory: a change the world should believe in
By Philip Stephens, Financial Times, November 6, 2008

The world did not have a vote in the US election. It understood, though, that it had a vital interest in the outcome. John McCain had earned the respect of many leaders around the world. But among most electorates, a victory for the Republican candidate would have been greeted with a collective cry of anguish. Instead, many scores of millions have celebrated America’s choice.

Some, in Mr Obama’s phrase, were huddled around radios in “the world’s forgotten corners”. They see a president-elect of Kenyan ancestry; a politician whose character was formed by childhood years in Indonesia; and a man whose middle name bears testimony to his Muslim forbears.

Europeans see another Mr Obama. Black, certainly, but a product also of America’s familiar east coast: intelligent, urbane and, above all, someone who shares their sensibilities about the necessary balance between power and persuasion in world affairs; Europe’s kind of president.

There, you might say, lies Mr Obama’s genius: abroad as well as at home, he has proved one of those rare politicians who invites others to discover in him their own priorities and preoccupations.

What his overseas admirers share is a sense that in choosing Mr Obama, the US has rediscovered the virtues and values that long underpinned its moral authority. In recent years, the anti-Bushism born of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo has hardened into visceral anti-Americanism. The election confounds the prevailing image (always something of a distortion) of a nation described only by its arrogance and indifference. [continued…]

America’s voters make history
By Paul Woodward, The National, November 7, 2008

“History will record that on Nov 4, 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the first black president of the United States. It is impossible to overstate what that means to this nation,” wrote the Newsweek columnist, Anna Quindlen.

“America is as much a concept as it is a country, but it is a concept too often honoured in the breach. The Statue of Liberty welcomes with the words ‘Give me your tired, your poor’. Yet generation after generation of immigrants arrived here to face contempt and hatred until the passage of time, the flattening of accents, turned them into tolerated natives. The Declaration of Independence states unequivocally that all men are created equal. Yet for years the politicians and the powerful seemed to take the gender of that noun literally and denied all manner of rights to women.

“But no injustice or prejudice brought to bear by this country against its own people can compare with how it has treated black men and women. Humiliation, degradation, lynchings, beatings, murders. The rights the United States pretended to confer upon all were unthinkingly and consistently denied them: the right to the franchise, to representation, to protection by the justice system….

“As President-elect Obama said when he gave a speech about race earlier this year, speaking of systemic poverty, bad schools and broken families, ‘Many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow’.

“But Obama said something else in that speech, something both simpler and more profound that has special resonance now that his improbable candidacy has prevailed. He made the political spiritual. ‘In the end, then,’ he said, ‘what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.’ He asked the American people to be fair and just, to be kind and generous, to put prejudice behind them and be one people because that is, not a legal or social imperative, but a moral one.” [continued…]

Obama and the dawn of the Fourth Republic
By Michael Lind, Salon, November 7, 2008

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency may signal more than the end of an era of Republican presidential dominance and conservative ideology. It may mark the beginning of a Fourth Republic of the United States.

In the past generation Bruce Ackerman, Theodore Lowi and I, in different ways, have used the idea of “republics” to understand American history. Since the French Revolution, France has been governed by five republics (plus two empires, a directory and a fascist dictatorship). Since the American Revolution, we Americans have been governed by several republics as well. But because we, like the British, pay lip service to formal continuity more than do the French, we pretend that we have been living under the same government since the federal Constitution was drafted and ratified in 1787-88. Our successive American republics from the 18th century to the 21st have been informal and unofficial.

As I see it, to date there have been three American republics, each lasting 72 years (give or take a few years). The First Republic of the United States, assembled following the American Revolution, lasted from 1788 to 1860. The Second Republic, assembled following the Civil War and Reconstruction (that is, the Second American Revolution) lasted from 1860 to 1932. And the Third American Republic, assembled during the New Deal and the civil rights eras (the Third American Revolution), lasted from 1932 until 2004. [continued…]

The prospect of an odd couple
By Kevin Peraino, Newsweek, November 1, 2008

One morning this past summer, Barack Obama sat down around a conference table in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel with Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Israel’s Likud Party. Neither man ran a country but both had high hopes. The talk was “like a hypothetical business discussion” among “two people who knew they might be working together,” says a Netanyahu associate who was present but requested anonymity to speak freely. But that’s where the similarities stop. Netanyahu, 59, is an unreconstructed hawk, raised in the cold war’s shadow. Obama listened politely, but the gap was obvious. “Obama, clearly, is a product of a new age,” says the Israeli.

The Jewish state, on the other hand, may be on the verge of slipping into an older one. Israel’s doves are struggling. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced last week that she had failed to form a government; lawmakers set elections for February. The biggest benefactor is likely to be Netanyahu, who’s now even with Livni in polls. The Likud leader seems the most American of Israeli politicians. His uncompromising rhetoric would probably mesh well with a McCain administration. Yet at a moment when both Israeli hawks and American neoconservatives have been chastened, Netanyahu’s rebirth appears slightly incongruous, even atavistic. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — If Benjamin Netanyahu becomes Israel’s next prime minister, are the prospects for the rehabilitation of the Middle East peace process as dim as they have been for as long as George Bush has been president? I suspect not.

Netanyahu might delight in preening his feathers as Israel’s uber-hawk as he issues dire warnings that it’s 1938 — a rerun that’s already lasted two years — but he’s also a political opportunist par excellence. He’s an operator dressed in ideologue’s clothing.

Come February, if he ends up being elected, a trip to the White House will no doubt come close to the top of his agenda. But if the Hamas ceasefire is still holding in Gaza (as it promises to do), rather than the hawkish Prime Minister Netanyahu trying to cajole the dovish President Obama into a strike on Iran, Obama will be the one with more political leverage.

For a new American president to invest political capital in trying to resolve the Middle East conflict while two wars and a financial crisis clamor for his attention, he’ll need persuading that his efforts will not be wasted by an Israeli government that persists in business as usual. For Netanyahu, calm in Sderot is not something he casually toss out just for the sake of looking tough. If he sees that it serves his interests the hawk will pivot into a pragmatist. If Obama presses Netanyahu to start treating the 2002 Saudi initiative seriously (a move that Olmert, Livni and others have already suggested), the Israeli prime minister may grudgingly conclude he has no credible alternative.

Guess who’s coming to dinner
By Frank Rich, New York Times, November 2, 2008

… should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all. [continued…]

Rejoin the world
By Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, November 2, 2008

An unscientific poll of 109 professional historians this year found that 61 percent rated President Bush as the worst president in American history.

A couple of others judged him second-worst, after James Buchanan, whose incompetence set the stage for the Civil War. More than 98 percent of the historians in the poll, conducted through the History News Network, viewed Mr. Bush’s presidency as a failure.

Mr. Bush’s presidency imploded not because of any personal corruption or venality, but largely because he wrenched the United States out of the international community. His cowboy diplomacy “defriended” the United States. He turned a superpower into a rogue country. Instead of isolating North Korea and Iran, he isolated us — and undermined his own ability to achieve his aims.

So here’s the top priority for President Barack Obama or President John McCain: We must rejoin the world. [continued…]

Five questions about America this election may answer
By Peter S. Canellos, Boston Globe, November 2, 2008

While Barack Obama enters the final days of the presidential campaign with a clear lead in the polls – but not so big as to rule out a surprise victory for John McCain – the impact of the 2008 presidential campaign will depend not only on who wins but also on whether the results signify a deeper realignment in American politics.

“We like to tell the election story through the candidates,” said Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “But this time there are larger forces in play.”

And while Obama’s lead, between three and seven percentage points in most national polls, is big enough to make him the favorite going into Tuesday, the other big questions of the election are all too close to call.

Is the “Reagan Revolution” over? Going down the stretch, McCain is campaigning heavily on Obama’s comment that he wants to “spread the wealth.” And McCain has even discovered a seven-year-old radio interview suggesting that Obama may believe in “redistributive” economics.

During the heyday of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition, which dominated politics from 1932 until 1980, the idea of spreading the wealth around was hardly political poison – it was the backbone of the party’s economic philosophy. Since 1980 and the “Reagan Revolution,” however, using tax policies to redistribute income has been widely viewed as an outmoded approach that chokes off economic growth.

Obama hasn’t fully embraced ’60s-style tax-and-spend liberalism, but he hasn’t run away from it as much as other Democratic presidential nominees since 1984 have done. [continued…]

An all-out attack on ‘conservative misinformation’
By Jacques Steinberg, New York Times, November 1, 2008

They are some of the more memorable slip-ups or slights within the news media’s coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.

A Fox News anchor asks whether Senator Barack Obama and his wife had greeted each other with a “terrorist fist jab.” Rush Limbaugh calls military personnel critical of the war in Iraq “phony soldiers.” Mr. Limbaugh and another Fox host repeat an accusation that Mr. Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Indonesia.

Each of these moments might have slipped into the broadcast ether but for the efforts of Media Matters for America, the nonprofit, highly partisan research organization that was founded four years ago by David Brock, a formerly conservative author who has since gone liberal.

Ripping a page from an old Republican Party playbook, Media Matters has given the Democrats a weapon they have not had in previous campaigns: a rapid-fire, technologically sophisticated means to call out what it considers “conservative misinformation” on air or in print, then feed it to a Rolodex of reporters, cable channels and bloggers hungry for grist. [continued…]

How we fuel Africa’s bloodiest war
By Johann Hari, The Independent, October 30, 2008

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness”. It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.

Every day I think about the people I met in the war zones of eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards were filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers – drugged, dazed 13-year-olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn’t try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.

I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 -year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa, who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive. [continued…]

As Taliban overwhelm police, Pakistanis hit back
By Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times, November 2, 2008

On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.

The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.

Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed their quarry. A video made on a cellphone showed the six militants lying in the dirt, blood oozing from their wounds.

The stand at Buner has entered the lore of Pakistan’s war against the militants as a dramatic example of ordinary citizens’ determination to draw a line against the militants.

But it says as much about the shortcomings of Pakistan’s increasingly overwhelmed police forces and the pell-mell nature of the efforts to stop the militants, who week by week seem to seep deeper into Pakistan from their tribal strongholds. [continued…]

Al-Maliki stressing US departure
By Robert H Reid, AP, November 2, 2008

Iaq’s prime minister is pushing the idea that the U.S. departure is in sight in a bid to sell the security deal with Washington to Iran.

To reinforce the message, the Iraqis are asking for changes to the deal that would effectively rule out extending the U.S. military presence beyond 2011.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his allies are also describing the agreement not as a formula for long-term U.S.-Iraqi security cooperation — the original goal when the talks began earlier this year — but as a way to manage the U.S. withdrawal.

It’s unclear whether this will be enough to win over the Iranians and Iraqi critics — or whether the U.S. will go along with the demands submitted by the Iraqi Cabinet this week. [continued…]