Month: October 2007

The World We Cannot Control

Americans are becoming more anxious about US foreign policy and much more skeptical that we can do anything much to affect the rest of the world:

The public not only doubts that U.S. foreign policy is working, but they’re increasingly skeptical about whether anything can turn the situation around. The public shows an increasing loss of faith in many policy options, while public approval in almost every policy area has declined.

This decline in confidence seems to occur whether the proposed strategy is “hawkish” or “dovish,” whether it involves "hard power" or "soft power" or whether or not the public put much stock in it in the first place. In some cases, confidence has declined slowly over two years, while in others it has dropped sharply in the past six months.

I know the feeling.

Clinton’s Latest Spin

Wesley Clark:

In supporting legislation that seeks to exert diplomatic pressure on Iran, Senator Clinton is standing up to the Bush administration, which has recklessly refused to talk to Iran about its clandestine nuclear program. In voting for a non-binding resolution that urges the administration to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, she is forcing the Bush administration to apply diplomatic pressure.

Kyl-Lieberman is standing up to the Bush administration? The lies have already started, haven’t they?

Bush and Cuba

A reader writes:

Babalu Blog completely misses the point on Bush’s Cuba speech.  It’s not that Bush is wrong about Cuba — clearly, he’s right.  But unlike Reagan in 1987, Bush in 2007 has as much credibility lecturing about the human rights of prisoners as the Catholic Church would have advising schools on how to prevent child molestation.

Imaginationland Ctd

A reader writes:

I was finally moved to write you in response to today’s "Imaginationland" post. I think you’ve connected a couple of very important dots here, and it reminded me of something I read more than a year ago in a Washington Post book review of Ron Suskind’s "One Percent Doctrine."

Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

The time frame here is mid-2002 and, according to Suskind, Abu Zubaydah was the first guinea pig for these techniques. In that case, it seems unlikely that an October 2001 bomb scare would be based on information derived from torture (or at least U.S. torture; the info could always have come from less scrupulous sources overseas). But by Suskind’s account, the dynamic you describe has been distorting U.S. policy for at least five years now.

The Risk Of Obama

Ross makes the case:

Hillary may not be the best choice for the Democrats, but she’s definitely the safest; I think nominating her more or less guarantees the party 48 percent of the vote, since she’s sufficiently tested and savvy and all the rest of it to make a Dukakis or Dole-style wipeout almost completely unimaginable. And in a year when things will (probably) be going the Democrats’ way anyway, there’s a lot to be said for nominating a known quantity and assuming that, in spite of what Jonah rightly calls the "irreducible core" of anti-Hillary sentiment, the political landscape alone will ensure that her guaranteed 48 percent rises to 51-53 percent by November ’08. Whereas Obama and to a lesser extent Edwards both have a higher ceiling, but also a much lower floor, since neither has been through the fire already the way Hillary has (indeed, Obama has never run against significant GOP opposition of any kind), and either one could flame out disastrously in the heat of a general-election campaign.

I don’t disagree. Clinton is the hardest candidate to sell but equally the hardest candidate to beat. I think the salient questions are: how dangerous do you think the world now is? And how dangerous is the polarization that Clinton – with say a brutally divisive, Bush-style 51 percent victory – will, to my mind, inevitably deepen in that context? Those are the themes of my essay coming out in the next Atlantic, so I’ll shut up now until people can read and respond to the full case for Obama I try to make.