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…]

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…]