Month: September 2009

Marc Lynch lists several diplomatic moments that Obama "failed to capitalize on."

Take the exemplary June speech in Cairo, where Obama delivered a brilliant speech which captivated international and Muslim attention.  It offered a real opportunity to reset American relations with the Islamic world, and to begin a new kind of relationship and engagement.  But after the speech… almost nothing followed.  Few new programs, few new initiatives, few efforts to capitalize on that moment. (And don't tell me about the number of text messages or twitter tweets sent during the speech — could there be a more pointless metric for success?)  I'm told that a number of new programs are in the works, but it's far too late — they should have been "shovel-ready" on June 5.  Now, the Cairo speech might as well have happened in the Jurassic period and the momentum of that one-time-only speech has been squandered.

Sometimes the lower profile is intentional, and correct. The administration was absolutely right to not take the lead during the Iranian electoral protests, helping to prevent the regime from making the U.S. the issue. It has also done a great job of quietly de-emphasizing al-Qaeda, rarely referring to it (except in the AfPak zone) and deflating rather than exaggerating its threat. But in so many other areas, better public diplomacy and strategic communications could make a real difference in shaping the conditions for foreign policy success.

The third actor is totally Philip Seymour Hoffman:

(Hat tip: BF)

Steve Coll scopes out the situation in Afghanistan:

To try to take and control the entire land mass of Afghanistan in the present climate might require as many as five hundred thousand troops, police, and militia, some military specialists believe; in any event, it would take more troops than are currently available, even if Obama goes all in…The revival of an urban-dominated “ink spot” strategy for the defense of a weak Afghan state may be the best of a series of bad military choices…

Even if an ink-spot campaign is successful, the Taliban will still own sizable chunks of the Afghan countryside for years. Their forces will be able to move fairly freely at night and in the mountains, as they do now; they will be able to carry out ambushes on the roads; they will attempt to penetrate city defenses to undertake spectacular car bombings and raids; and they will continue to move back and forth across the border with Pakistan, resourced by leadership and financing networks located there. Perhaps, in time, if the proposed McChyrstal strategy succeeded, and a archipelago of relative peace and normalcy were established, and the factionalism within the current Kabul government subsided, and Afghan forces grew and improved, and at least some local Taliban opponents were converted into quiescent local powers, the Afghan state would then be able to push out gradually into the countryside, widening its ink spots.

Those are a lot of ifs.

Read it all.

This strikes me as a vital data point:

“We are against any sanctions against our nation,” Mousavi said in a statement posted on Rouydadnews reformist website. He said sanctions “will impose agonies on a nation who suffers enough from miserable statesmen.” He added: “The country is on the verge of crises which will mostly hurt the poor as a result of wrong and adventurous foreign policies of the government from which our people suffer. “We might have simplistically thought this is an advantage for our green movement, but it is not,” said Mousavi, who along with his green-wearing supporters regard President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election as “illegitimate.” “Which one of them can be expected to care about the agony their behaviour imposes on people?” he asked of Iran’s current leaders. “If we don’t care about what harms those living in this land, nobody will.”

The core goal of Iran policy should, in my view, be empowering the opposition. That means listening to them. Mousavi follows Karroubi in this stance. Their advice should be taken to heart. These people have risked their lives for their freedom. We should take our cues from them, not the other way round.

Politico surveys the GOP base and finds Palin-mania still strong. I think she perfectly represents a form of protest cultural politics that has no interest in actually governing. And what's fascinating about the various quotes from local GOP machers is that none of them refers in any way to policy. She is not supported because of what she allegedly believes, or what she says she'll do. She is supported because she shares an identity, real or imagined, with white, angry alienated conservatives. She is identity politics personified. And so the loony right's transformation into a mirror image of the loony left of the 1980s accelerates.

Las Vegas, Nevada, 9.38 am

Andrew Bacevich proposes a policy of containment against radical Islam:

When confronting the Soviet threat, the United States and its allies erected robust defenses, such as NATO, and cooperated in denying the communist bloc anything that could make Soviet computers faster, Soviet submarines quieter or Soviet missiles more accurate. Containing the threat posed by jihad should follow a similar strategy. Robust defenses are key — not mechanized units patrolling the Iron Curtain, but well-funded government agencies securing borders, controlling access to airports and seaports, and ensuring the integrity of electronic networks that have become essential to our way of life. As during the Cold War, a strategy of containment should include comprehensive export controls and the monitoring of international financial transactions. Without money and access to weapons, the jihadist threat shrinks to insignificance: All that remains is hatred.

It seems to me that pre-emptive war is an option that should be kept in a small box in a glass cage that should be broken only in the direst emergencies. The one recent example of it, Iraq, has been a catastrophe that has not yet reached a conclusion. Very few foreign policy initiatives did more to destroy American power than that open wound still sucking in money and lives and attention. Containment, a policy that, in contrast, has had huge success in the past and was once backed by a bipartisan majority remains under-rated. I suspect that containing Islamism is far more effective than giving it oxygen by attempting to defeat it in its own lands, where its popularity is sinking anyway under the weight of its own brutality and nihilism.

We didn’t invade the Soviet Union to destroy communism. We were self-confident enough to let it destroy itself, while never relenting on exposing its moral bankruptcy, political poison and economic failure. In Iran today, there exists a more vibrant and empowered popular opposition than ever existed in the Soviet heartland. And yet we remain fixated on military options and stay unmoved by the possibility of a nuclear stand-off in the Middle East between Israel and Iran.

The right has abandoned its previous support for deterrence, the benefits of mutually assured destruction, the maintenance of a moral high ground, and the slow power of containment. It’s time conservatives looked at these options again.

I've been invited to appear on Fox News in prime time only once in the past decade, about a decade ago. Sean Hannity used the occasion to say that "homosexuality has never contributed anything to society." Fox's agenda has always been to suppress actual conservative dissent, and to reiterate the GOP talking points of the day against Potemkin "liberals" who, when they don't seem positively scrofulous, tend to look like beauty queens. So it's encouraging to see Bruce Bartlett actually able to make his case on Fox. Cavuto, of course. You don't want your viewers to actually be challenged in prime time – just pandered to. But it's something.

On Europe’s right, that is:

Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations.

Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.”

Of course, when I look at Britain, I’m on the right of the current Tory party.

I’d like to get government out of direct management of healthcare, ownership of hospitals and direct employment of doctors and have it merely guarantee health insurance. I’d prefer a flat tax to progressive taxation. I favor a steadily rising carbon tax to cap and trade. I’d favor bringing the government’s share of the economy down to around a third, instead of a half (as it now is in New Labour’s Britain). I’d like to craft public finances so they have to show a small surplus through the usual business cycle. You get the picture.

So what does it tell you about the state of the contemporary right in America that these positions are now described as Marxist, communist or fascist? It tells you that Sam Tanenhaus is right: conservatism is over in America as a coherent governing philosophy in America. It is now an atavistic, militarist, paranoid, reactionary religious movement with no constructive proposals for addressing the actual world we live in.

And like most contemporary movie-zombies, its own death seems to have galvanized its aggression, passion and relentless march toward ever more extremes. Going rogue indeed.