Thoughts on Pakistan and Foreign Policy

You wouldn't necessarily know it given what passes for journalism on TV and in many of our newspapers, but there's considerable worldwide activity in foreign policy going on these days. Much of that activity is coming from the United States and much of it is happening elsewhere.

It's probably the most foreign policy activity since the Berlin Wall came down. Why is this? I shouldn't have to ask the question but in the absence of news coverage, it may be time to remind people of the obvious: for eight years (but particularly in the first four) George W. Bush did enormous damage to America's foreign policy and enormous damage to the world economy.

Since January of this year, Barack Obama and his advisers have been working to repair the damage. Worldwide, other leaders are readjusting their foreign policy and increasingly, as was happening in the last two or three years of the Bush presidency, pursuing their own agenda.

Here's just one example of foreign policy going on elsewhere:

Russia and China are closing in on a mammoth energy deal which could insure that Beijing has the fuel to run its factories and cities and Moscow has a vast new market for its natural gas empire.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday wrapped up a three-day visit to the Chinese capital, during which Russia signed dozens of commercial pacts worth $3.5 billion and set the framework for a separate, multibillion-dollar agreement to build two natural gas pipelines to China from gas fields in Russia's Far East.

But the Russians and Americans are also busy at work. Here's a story from a few days ago:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has invited U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to his private residence in suburban Barvikha for a discussion Tuesday on a broad range of issues in what one senior State Department official called a "relaxed setting."

Issues on the agenda for the two-hour meeting include the next steps on Iran, the Mideast conflict, cooperation on Afghanistan, possible joint work on a missile defense system, Russia's "neighborhood" and climate change.

Talking Points Memo has a set of photos covering Hillary Clinton's trip to Europe and Russia that ought to lay to rest that she's not an active Secretary of State (which was one of those inane stories from a media not paying close attention).

We now live in a turbulent era. In the past, the answer to turbulence was violence. Barack Obama knows this and most foreign leaders know this. No war exemplified such violence more than World War Two. It's not certain that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had much clue about the current era. In many ways, as so often happens with conservatives, they were fighting the battles of the past.

It's hard to believe that officials like Cheney were pursuing policies aimed at nothing else but creating some sort of American empire. The idea of preemptive war, unilateralism and even the notion of nuclear bunker busters that Bush proposed in June 2002 still feels alien to me when I come across the terms. In 2003, it sent a chill down my spine when a Bush official cheered the start of the Iraq War and bragged that 'we' had crossed the Rubicon. And yet, as they did with Reagan, there were right-wingers who felt George W. Bush had not gone far enough. One of those was Dick Cheney, particularly after 2004. It takes my breath away when I recall how much American policy went off the tracks during the Bush presidency.

And still there are right wingers who want more of that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh put himself on the side of the Taliban in denouncing Barack Obama's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. I know for years it has been something of a convention to consider Rush Limbaugh a clown. When he jumps up and down, he certainly looks like one. But he is dangerous. In many ways, most Americans do not share his values, though it should be pointed out that in the early 90s he had a rather large audience. The key to Limbaugh is simple: he is very angry and he wants to dominate. He is a classic example of a very aggressive social dominator.

I bring up Limbaugh because he is good at enabling some Americans to forget the disaster of the Bush years. It should not be controversial news that Bush did enormous damage to our nation. It will take years just to repair the economic damage. During the Bush years, crooks had a field day simply because no one was minding the store. But what did more damage was a business as usual approach by Bush that ignored changing conditions in such areas as energy, the climate, an excessive loss of jobs, stagnant wages, and particularly new financial instruments that greatly aggravated the economic downturn.

In foreign policy, Bush was in Afghanistan for more than seven years. And yet some people seem to have forgotten that Bush should have been out of Afghanistan by the 2004 election. But he was more interested in Iraq and put Afghanistan on a back burner. We are still there and we are tangling with problems that affect not only Afghanistan but Pakistan as well. Now I believe we need to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as we can. But there's a problem and I haven't fully sorted it out yet so I'm not comfortable with arguments from those in a hurry to leave. The problem is Pakistan and the fact that it has nuclear weapons. Here's one story from Islamabad that disturbs me:

Pakistan has sought to protect its nuclear weapons from attack by the Taliban or other militants by storing the warheads, detonators and missiles separately in facilities patrolled by elite troops.

Analysts are divided on how secure these weapons are. Some say the weapons are less secure than they were five years ago, and Saturday's attack would show a "worrisome" overconfidence by the Pakistanis.

While complex security is in place, much depends on the Pakistani army and how vulnerable it is to infiltration by extremists, said a Western government official with access to intelligence on Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Bush and some of his advisers like to point to Pakistan as one of their successes. In reality, they never fully dealt with a wide range of issues. Through incompetence, they nearly encouraged Pakistan to go to war with India back in 2002 (Colin Powell, to his credit, cleaned up the mess).

Of course, stories like this one about the Taliban and al Qaida also concern me:

Pakistan – Teams of gunmen attacked three law enforcement facilities in Pakistan's cultural heart of Lahore on Thursday, killing 18 people in an escalation of audacious terror strikes as the Taliban try to keep the government from waging a planned offensive on the militants.

Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik vowed not to let the attacks deter the government in its pursuit of Taliban and al Qaida fighters. "The enemy has started a guerrilla war," Malik told a local television station.

Afghanistan is going to require constant reevaluation. Of course, the sooner we can get out the better. But the last thing we need, remote though the chances seemingly are (and are they really that remote?), is to see the Taliban and their friends in al Qaida somehow in control of Pakistan. It's not likely to happen but I for one am cutting Obama some slack until we see a better picture.

In other areas of foreign policy, I see many signs that Obama is moving forward. He is moving away from the unilateralism of Bush and returning to international discussions. We're still the only nation that can truly lead and after eight years of neglect serious and difficult issues are being tackled. Success in many areas are going to be difficult to achieve but that's far better than what we had during the Bush years when so many people in Washington couldn't be bothered to even try.

No one should imagine that Barack Obama can undo all the damage done during the Bush years, but I'm going to make a prediction: when Barack Obama gives his State of the Union in January, many Americans are going to be surprised at the useful things that have been done both domestically and in foreign policy. Of course, we'll still see the same nonsense from the news. One day Obama will be described as all talk and no action. And the next day, pundits will whine that he's doing too much. We're in an era where readers still have to do a certain amount of their own digging.

Bush, Pakistan and the Economy

Let's summarize where we are at the end of 2007. By putting Afghanistan on the back burner from 2002 to late 2005, Bush has endangered what may have been a winnable war that was in direct response to the 9/11 attacks. Republicans, on days when it's convenient, keep peddling the myth that Osama bin Laden is irrelevant but Bush let him escape into Pakistan. Al Qaida has somewhat regrouped. Pakistan is in trouble on various fronts. Obviously the assassination of Bhutto makes things more difficult and Condi Rice's Pakistan diplomacy is in tatters. Condi Rice is a foreign policy lightweight just as her replacement as national security, Stephen Hadley, is a lightweight. Both have the advantage, however, of being loyal to Bush. Both are also easy for Dick Cheney to steamroll to some degree. We have a profoundly dysfunctional foreign policy team in the White House.

Much is made of the lessening violence against our troops in Iraq. On one level, there has been some progress. On another level, there is a profound lack of realism in America's media when it comes to understanding Iraq. All we're doing, at most, is cleaning up Bush's mess. It is still a war we did not need. More important, Iraq is an albatross around our necks imposed on us by Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney and the neocons. Iraq is slowing down our economy and inflation is finally rearing its head. The war has endangered our position in the world. It is also a factor in Afghanistan and Pakistan since we devoted far too much of our resources to Iraq. It is Pakistan that has the bomb, not Iraq or Iran. We knew that when we first went into Afghanistan. Condi Rice has tried to make up for various failures by pressuring Pakistan in ways that obviously have blown up in her face. Cowboy diplomacy, even in Rice's slightly modified form, does not work.

I don't expect Bush to suddenly discover rationality. But every Republican in Congress should stop protecting this incompetent. There are things that can be done. For example, if Cheney can't be impeached or forced to step down, it would not take much to limit the powers of his office. Cheney's powers are defined by Bush, not by the constitution. With help from Republicans in Congress, Cheney's freedom of action could be greatly reduced. Another step would be for Bush to bring into his administration high profile envoys to help the United States regain some leverage in foreign policy before things get too far out of hand. The United States needs people like Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, George Mitchell and Madeleine Albright: two Republicans and two Democrats. Will it happen? Probably not. But can our nation afford to drift another 13 months? Probably not.

The stock market went down sharply again today, almost two hundred points, for the umpteenth time in the last six months. Of course, the markets have repeatedly recovered from recent losses. But the turbulence on Wall Street is a sign of danger and weakness in the American economy. Some of that weakness can be traced to the hundreds of billions being wasted in Iraq. They can be traced to the lack of an energy policy for the last seven years. They can be traced to Republican corruption in Washington across a wide front, but particularly in the last two years when it came to holding mortgage companies accountable. Republicans depend too much on donations from the real estate industry and bankers. So obvious problems in lending practices, including outright fraud, were ignored by the Bush Administration.

Sometimes I pick up the paper and I don't know whether to laugh or weep. Today, I laughed when I read the following story by Gary Rivlin of The New York Times:

From the riverboats of the Midwest and tribal casinos scattered across the country to gambling halls in less exotic parts of Nevada, operators are reporting slowing growth rates in recent months. In a number of places, revenues are actually down, sometimes by 5 percent or more.

The differences reflect a wider disparity within the economy.

Businesses in a variety of sectors that attract the most affluent customers and take advantage of foreigners from countries with strong currencies who are drawn to the glitter of Las Vegas and Manhattan are doing very well, while those dependent largely on middle-class buyers are having a harder time.

In Las Vegas, one extra factor has been a booming Chinese economy, as wealthy Asian players are risking -- and losing -- money in record numbers inside the city's most exclusive VIP lounges.

For most Americans, even gambling is in a slump. But we're getting money back from the Chinese! That's a pitiful way to erase some of our red ink. When I started thinking about it, I stopped laughing.

Saudi Arabia and George W. Bush

Although Bush has had a close relationship with a number of powerful individuals from Saudi Arabia, his strange 'can't do' presidency has done damage to our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. Because the Iraq fiasco is in their backyard, the Saudis have particular reason to be disturbed. We continue to be allies with Saudi Arabia and several other Arab countries though of course it is a difficult relationship at times.

Several bits of news in recent days have come to my attention and they highlight the complexity of our relationships and the dangerous damage Bush has done to our foreign policy (without the president having any clue where to go next). For all of Bush's posturing, the question hangs dismally in the air: how is Bush's war on terruh going? Here's Mary of The Left Coaster reminding us that Bush's war on terror has unfortunately done an effective job of creating more terrorists:

Based on the State Department report that the number of terrorist incidents in the world were up 29% in 2006, it would appear the answer is not so good.

Then there is that report from McClatchy today that the Saudis are unhappy to find that the detainees emerging from Gitmo are more extreme than when they went in. Enough so that the Saudis are providing them extensive help including counseling, financial aid and even match-making in order to woo them away from their attachment to terrorism.

Give the article and links a read. Bush's pretentious and ultraconservative ideas about how to do things are obviously not working. But Bush is not the only president who has ever made blunders. Among various presidents who have made blunders, we have to include Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest president of the 20th century. The difference between Bush and Roosevelt is that Roosevelt was a pragmatist; if he made a mistake, he talked to some experts and tried something else until he got it right. When Bush makes a mistake, he simply repackages his policies, tries a new public relations campaign and gives us more of the same.

Saudi Arabia is not pleased with Bush and one can hardly blame them. Among other things, we have made Iran stronger in the region and that does not make the Saudis happy. Saudi Arabia's former ambassador to the US and close friend to the Bushes, Prince Bandar, appears to be in eclipse thanks to Bush's mangling of our foreign policy. Here's that part of the story from Helene Cooper and Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.

For instance, in February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.

(snip)

Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.

(snip)

Robert Jordan, a former Bush administration ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said the Saudis’ mixed signals have come at a time when King Abdullah — who has ruled the country since 1995 but became king only in 2005 after the death of his brother, Fahd — has said he does not want to go down in history as Mr. Bush’s Arab Tony Blair. “I think he feels the need as a kind of emerging leader of the Arab world right now to maintain a distance,” he said.

Arab Tony Blair? Ouch. It's appear the British Prime Minister will be appearing as a metaphor for political poodles for some years to come. That never described the Saudis, even in the best of times. One cannot ignore that our relationship with them has always been complex just as our relationships with other Arab countries on the Saudi peninsula have also been complex.

Today we read in the paper that after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the Bush Administration ignored, mishandled or botched almost a billion dollars of aid from various countries around the world. The aid from those countries included generous offers from Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Kuwait eventually acted on its own and donated large sums to the Red Cross and to the Katrina fund headed by Bill Clinton and Bush's father. Call it aid from friends, call it good public relations, it's worthy of note and should be remembered.

Even our oil relationship is becoming curiously more complex. The Saudis were not happy when Bush talked about ending our dependence on foreign oil a couple of years ago but the Saudis understand the oil situation better than anyone given that they're still sitting on the world's largest reserves and they know the numbers better than anyone. But note that a curious thing has happened in Kuwait. Years ago, the Kuwaitis raised the total of their oil reserve by a significant amount; the economists were happy with the numbers but various geologists and oil experts always considered the numbers suspect. Kuwait's recent trend towards democracy, as slow as it is, has apparently led to something of an accounting because the Kuwaitis themselves want a say in their own energy policy and they need facts to develop that policy. The result is that, practically speaking, the Kuwaitis now assume a smaller total reserve of oil left and they're pragmatically thinking, from their own point of view, of how they can stretch the time that they can make their reserves last for the benefit of their country. There are hints that the Saudi may be quietly doing the same thing: moving towards the long view instead of simply pumping as much wealth as they can as they move closer to a time when their oil production begins to significantly decline as all oil producers eventually do in a given region. The long view for the Saudis means not producing as much as they can, but holding back reserves for their own future. That may or may not be happening but it is in the interest of Saudi Arabia. Not suprisingly, if one is paying attention, that is also in the interest of the United States: it will force us make transitions in our energy policies while there is still oil to pump and a reasonably healthy economy (flawed though it is in some ways) to facilitate such a transition.

Iraq is a fiasco, and a foreign policy blunder of historic proportions, but both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to continue to pay attention to what is going on in the Middle East and particularly along the Persian Gulf. It is in our interest to keep paying attention, but it is important to be realistic and recognize we may not always get our way, particularly until the United States restores its credibility, preferably without resorting to reckless military adventurism. In fact, the time is rapidly approaching where war is far more expensive than simply working on partnerships with various countries throughout the world, whether they are friends, competitors or foes.

NY Times Review of Brzezinski's Latest Book

I keep going back to Zbigniew Brzezinski's anaylsis of the current situation in American foreign policy for the simple reason that I feel he has about the best take out there on the current world situation. The New York Times has a book review by Jacob Heilbrunn that captures several key aspects of Brzezinski's thinking in his latest book, Second Chance:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has steadily warned that American arrogance might well lead to catastrophe abroad. And unlike his ingratiating Republican counterpart, Henry Kissinger, he was an early and vociferous opponent of the Iraq war.

(snip)

If Bush senior lacked the vision and boldness to reinvent American foreign policy after the cold war, Clinton was bedazzled by the notion that globalization would bring an end to world conflict. Brzezinski awards Clinton good marks for successfully enlarging NATO. But he argues that Clinton badly erred in failing to achieve an accord between the Israelis and Palestinians. At his marathon sessions with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat at Camp David in July 2000, Clinton may have striven for peace, but there was too much “emphasis on immediately assigning blame for the parties’ failure to emerge from the meeting with an agreement in hand.” Overall, Brzezinski says, Clinton “did not leave a historically grand imprint on the world.”

So disdainful is Brzezinski of George W. Bush that he barely even pauses to discuss him. Instead, the neoconservatives surrounding Bush trigger his ire. According to Brzezinski, the Iraq war’s “only saving grace is that it made Iraq the cemetery of neocon dreams. Had the war been more successful, America by now might be at war with Syria and Iran, pursuing a policy driven more by Manichaean notions and dubious motivations than by any sober definition of its national interest.”

Had the war been more successful..... This is the observation so many people in the media and even some of the more hawkish Democrats miss. Bush's foreign policy in the Middle East, as defined and conceived by the neoconservatives, had built into it an essential flaw and that flaw can be summarized most easily by simply saying that Bush's new conception of foreign policy (or archaic, since his policy harks back to the 19th century) was defined by hubris, a hubris that had little conception of the limits of American military and economic power in the current, post-colonial era and how much Bush was overreaching with the tools he had, mainly military and diplomatic. From its inception, Bush's foreign policy was strategically flawed. His foreign policy and military policy was also hampered by a level of incompetence rarely seen in the last 75 years of American administrations. In a sense, the incompetence of the Bush inner circle prevented the larger fiasco from happening. There is, of course, still the risk of stumbling into a wider war, a war that will do absolutely no one any good and may do profound damage to the United States and also the world economy which has the potential to damage the United States even further.

My understanding of world affairs is still evolving and one thing is becoming clear: the neglect of a serious energy policy on the part of the United States for the last 30 years has put us into a situation in 2007 that undermines what we can do and not do in world affairs. We are a superpower with increasing self-inflicted vulnerabilities. Our enemies understand these vulnerabilities far more than the average American (in some respects, Cheney seems to understand those vulnerabilities as well, but his conservative ideology led him to foolhardy conclusions about how to deal with those vulnerabilities). We still produce a significant amount of oil but the fact we have to import so much at a time when world oil production is having trouble keeping pace with the demands of the next five to ten years does not leave us much room to play the dangerous games favored by Bush and Cheney; in regards to Iran and the lack of a serious effort at diplomatic talks, those dangerous games can easily backfire at any time to everyone's peril.

It is important for the sake of our national security to keep boxing in Bush and Cheney to keep them from damaging us any further. And it is important to get public discussions about energy on a much higher plane with a much greater sense of urgency. Even if Iraq stabilizes and our relations with Iran improve, we have an array of problems that have been neglected and that need to be dealt with, particularly in the area of energy.

As Bush Loses Leverage in Middle East, Democracy Going Nowhere

Was the invasion in Iraq really about democracy? I don't know the answer. Democracy certainly was never the sole reason we went to Iraq. The cynical side of me concludes more and more that it was just public relations to distract Americans from the Bush Administration's many less than admirable reasons for the invasion. And then there's the fact that several of the administration's goals were in fact contradictory. Abu Ghraib and setting up Paul Bremer as a viceroy was about as contradictory as you can get if democracy was the goal.

One sign of Bush's failed foreign policy is simply the fact that democracy is not faring all that well in the broader Middle East. There have been several pessimistic stories about Egypt in the last couple of years when it comes to democracy. Here's a post by Kevin Drum of The Washinton Monthy on the subject:

DEMOCRACY DEMOTION IN EGYPT....The Egyptian ruling party has passed a raft of constitutional changes and has set a date for a referendum to approve them: March 26, five days from now. Why so fast? Because that gives the opposition no time to mobilize protests. Marc Lynch explains the proposed modifications:

The changes are blatantly, almost absurdly, authoritarian and antidemocratic. Judicial oversight of elections will be eliminated....Contested Presidential elections will be virtually impossible....Parties based on religion would be explicitly banned....the regime, under NDP control, will retain an iron grip on the licensing of political parties...."Counter-terrorism" provisions will render a whole range of highly controversial, intrusive security practices Constitutional, making the de facto security state into a de jure security state.

One thing to keep in mind is that as America's credibility has fallen around the world, and as Bush's negative numbers have shot up in nation after nation, there is little patience in the broader Middle East these days for Bush Administration figures who wag their fingers at lack of progress on democracy or human rights. This is a big deal. We're not talking about a political cycle that will change with a Democratic president or a different kind of Republican president coming to office. The damage that Bush has done will take time to repair.

There are also growing problems in Pakistan. It's not certain which way things will go in the next year or two or three. Musharraf is not exactly a great example of democracy and yet there is a real danger that Pakistani extremists may soon gain the upper hand. Ahmed Rashid of The Washington Post writes on the growing crisis in Pakistan:

In the rapidly unfolding crisis in Pakistan, no matter what happens to President Pervez Musharraf -- whether he survives politically or not -- he is a lame duck. He is unable to rein in Talibanization in Pakistan or guide the country toward a more democratic future.

Since March 9, when Musharraf suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, public protests have escalated every day -- as has a violent crackdown by the police and intelligence agencies on the media and the nation's legal fraternity.

(snip)

Musharraf is now too weak to pursue policies that could keep his back-stabbers in check, restore his credibility at home and abroad, and pursue his agenda of remaining in power for the next five years.

It is far better that he revert to the promise he made when he seized power in 1999: to return the country to democracy. ...

It is in the interest of the United States to support such an exit strategy. The military can no longer counter the phenomenal growth of Islamic extremism in Pakistan through offensives alone. What the country needs is greater political consensus and a popularly elected government, and to replace the extortions of the mullahs with the return of day-to-day parliamentary politics. ...

I can't emphasize often enough the blunder that Bush and Cheney made by taking their eyes off of Afghanistan and putting Pakistan on the same back burner. Iraq was contained; it was Afghanistan and Pakistan that needed the attention of the Bush Administration. Now it's uncertain what's going to happen in Pakistan and what kind of government and policies will follow.

By going to Iraq, the United States has lost enormous leverage in foreign affairs.

Ending Cheney's Cold War Brinkmanship with Iran

After giving us a $2 trillion war, a foreign policy that doesn't make any sense and the lowest credibility the United States has experienced since the 19th, it's time for Congress to put restrictions on Cheney's recklessness.

Here's an article in Foreign Affairs, of all places, by Ray Takeyh that argues detente with Iran and more realistic foreign policy goals:

Over five years after the Bush administration vowed to transform the Middle East, the region is indeed profoundly different. Washington's misadventures in Iraq, the humbling of Israeli power in Lebanon, the rise of the once-marginalized Shiites, and the ascendance of Islamist parties have pushed the Middle East to the brink of chaos.

In the midst of the mess stands the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its regime has not only survived the U.S. onslaught but also managed to enhance Iran's influence in the region. Iran now lies at the center of the Middle East's major problems -- from the civil wars unfolding in Iraq and Lebanon to the security challenge of the Persian Gulf -- and it is hard to imagine any of them being resolved without Tehran's cooperation. Meanwhile, Tehran's power is being steadily enhanced by its nuclear program, which progresses unhindered despite regular protests from the international community.

This last development has put Washington in a bind. Ever since the revolution that toppled the shah in 1979, the United States has pursued a series of incoherent policies toward Tehran. At various points, it has tried to topple the regime -- even, on occasion, threatening military action. At others, it has sought to hold talks on a limited set of issues. Throughout, it has worked to box in Iran and to limit its influence in the region. But none of these approaches has worked, especially not containment, which is still the strategy of choice in the Iran policy debate.

If it hopes to tame Iran, the United States must rethink its strategy from the ground up. The Islamic Republic is not going away anytime soon, and its growing regional influence cannot be limited. Washington must eschew superficially appealing military options, the prospect of conditional talks, and its policy of containing Iran in favor of a new policy of détente. In particular, it should offer pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations. Thus armed with the prospect of a new relationship with the United States, the pragmatists would be in a position to sideline the radicals in Tehran and try to tip the balance of power in their own favor. The sooner Washington recognizes these truths and finally normalizes relations with its most enduring Middle Eastern foe, the better.

I take the article with a grain of salt and I'm not sure that containment is out of the question if we talk about a broader definition of what containment might mean. But I take the article far more seriously than anything Dick Cheney has to offer these days. In a way, it's a major slap at the vice president.

I can remember in the 60s and early 70s relatives and friends of my parents who were in the defense industry reading Foreign Policy (I know because I was back in their dens browsing through their magazines). Things have a way of coming full circle when dealing with reckless incompetents like those in the Bush Administration. It's ironic that the most aggressive American foreign policy since the early 20th century is crippling American power and America's options for the 21st century.

Symbolism of Bush's Visit to Mayan Site

The shrillness in the last few days of those who defend George W. Bush, Scooter Libby and the Republican Party suggests a growing crisis among right wing conservatives. The worst of them can't compute. They have been drinking what some critics call the White House 'Kool Aid' for so long that they either believe the nonsense that comes out of the Republican Noise Machine or they're so angry at the world that they delude themselves with word games to somehow twist things in a shape that excuses their failures and the failures of the president. Make no mistake: those who are still powerful among right wing Republicans are like wounded bears—they're desperate and they're dangerous. And their rage makes it impossible for many of them to see straight as their mythological conception of the world falls apart. We can be thankful that many independents, rational conservatives, and a few rank and file Republicans are steadily shying away from the most ideological of the right wingers (that includes, among others, the president and particularly the vice president).

To be honest, I'm not sure what rank and file Republicans think of their leaders these days and I suspect there is a range of views and that some of those views are complicated. But I found an AP article on The Huffington Post that seems symbolic of how Bush and his fellow Republicans are viewed by the world:

Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

(snip)

Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. ...

I know Republicans who will sneer at this story as irrelevant or maybe just phony showmanship and that would be their mistake, and an historic mistake at that. Ronald Reagan and the senior Bush made a mistake ignoring the Indians of Central America. In their zeal to deal with communists, Republicans have frequently failed to note that communists are about the only people who pay attention to Indians in Central America. Just as it has been bad foreign policy to have a naive view of the Middle East, it has been a bad foreign policy to ignore people who are often marginalized by those who dominate their country.

Their record was not perfect but Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Jimmy Carter understood that fighting communism during the Cold War, or taking on the other foreign policy issues of their era, required winning people over rather than just using military force to impose our demands. Without American involvement and help in post-World War II Europe, any number of countries might easily have gone communist. It was, despite Republican mythology, a cost-effective foreign policy (by the way, as intertwined as they were, it was the totalitarian and ideological nature of communist regimes that tended to come into being that always bothered me rather than specifically a somewhat impractical economic system).

In the early 90s, the senior Bush missed an enormous opportunity to help Afghanistan after the Soviet Union left in 1989; helping Afghanistan might have had far reaching effects and might have forestalled the rise of al Qaida and the Taliban. But the failure to help the Afghans, who after all had been our allies and proxies in the war against the Soviet Union, was an inevitable outcome of a kind of Republican indifference that we have seen too often, especially since Reagan came into office. Having been raised in a conservative community, I have heard Republicans over the years utter a hundred variations of "What's it to me?" or "What's in it for me?" A certain shallowness and the failure to think down the road is something the senior Bush and his son have too often shared. It's something we can no longer afford in our leaders.

But let's get back to the Mayans. Like billions of people around the world, the Mayans do not trust George W. Bush. And that does not help us. Bush's trip to South America is almost a waste of time. If he had credibility, his trip might be useful. But millions of people in South America worry about what Bush is really up to—that anxiety is real and is a direct consequence of Bush's lies and arrogance. And it is yet another sign of a profoundly flawed foreign policy and president.

Harry Reid Slams Bush's Foreign Policy

A growing number of foreign policy experts (Brzezinski comes to mind) call Bush's war in Iraq the greatest strategic blunder in American history; one of the reasons for the assessment is the enormous credibility that the United States has lost in the last four years, particularly when it comes to our word, thus making it difficult for us to accomplish things in other areas of our foreign policy.

Now Democrats in the leadership are finally speaking up and stating the obvious in more explicit terms. CNN, unwilling as usual to recognize the obvious, nevertheless covers what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has to say:

After months of heated rhetoric slamming President Bush's Iraq policy, the Senate's top Democrat moved into new terrain by declaring the Iraq war a worse blunder than Vietnam.

"This war is a serious situation. It involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

"So we should take everything seriously. We find ourselves in a very deep hole and we need to find a way to dig out of it."

Asked whether he considers it a worse blunder than Vietnam, Reid responded, "Yes."

Most Americans are only now beginning to understand that, in Iraq, Bush led us into a war we did not need. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the mainstream media's sluggishness in covering critical issues of the day, most Americans still do not fully understand that Bush's incompetence and recklessness could lead us into yet another war we do not need, this one with Iran.

In fact, most Americans still do not understand that Bush passed up at least two opportunities for negotiations with Iran; also, the diplomatic effort launched by Condi Rice last year isn't much of a diplomatic effort and pales when compared with real diplomatic efforts of the past. And more Americans need to know that the same right wingers urging war with Iran are very often the same right wingers who years ago sneered at diplomacy with our enemies and sought major war with the Soviet Union. We won the Cold War without a nuclear exchange or an all-out conventional war because we had a chain of reasonably able people in Washington, sometimes conservative, sometimes liberal, who didn't pay much attention to the right wing fringe; our foreign policy wasn't perfect, but these able people engaged in serious and effective diplomacy and often ran a reasonably smart foreign policy far superior to anything we have seen from the neoconservatives in the last six years. This is the only time the right wingers have truly been in charge of our foreign policy, and they are a proven disaster. Bush and Cheney have failed so badly that they are working overtime to blame others for their incompetence. It's a dangerous situation.

Another war is not a certainty but if Americans make it clear that we do not need another fiasco on our hands, we can make war less likely. Keeping in mind that the war in Afghanistan is now more than five years old and needs to be finished—and should have been done a long time ago—try to imagine Bush and Cheney running three wars when they obviously can't run two.

Things are changing in Washington; slowly perhaps, but they are changing. A few Republicans in Congress appear to be disassociating themselves from Bush's foreign policy. More Republicans may follow. The end of the line is in sight but Americans must continue to speak up.

The Cold War Versus the Current Era

Republicans are moaning about how difficult things are these days. This is curious. The Bush Administration went around in circles for five years huffing and puffing on North Korea and essentially came back to the policy that existed at the end of Clinton's presidency. After 9/11, we had to deal with Afghanistan and that would have kept the Bush Administration plenty busy, but they chose to give us a war in Iraq that we didn't need. It isn't just foreign policy that is difficult for Bush; he botched the response to Hurricane Katrina and then claimed he needed a law that allowed him to call in the military which was nonsense since the real problem was an underwhelming use of the resources he had.

Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly links to a story by Paul Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times who punctures the new mythology:

IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a "less complex time" and saying he was "almost nostalgic" for its return.

(snip)

The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it's true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other's biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.

Kennedy debunks the 'easy' days of the Cold War and properly so. On several blogs, including Donkey Path, there have been posts reminding us how disastrous it would have been, as just one example, to have had a president like George W. Bush handling something as 'predictable' as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don't want to minimize what's going on these days. Things are changing and we have an ideological administration with its head stuck on old ideas about the world; and some Republicans (Wolfowitz as an example) are even shocked that people in the third world aren't behaving like stereotypical natives in old Hollywood movies. In some respects, Bush has been handling the wrong problems while ignoring a wide range of issues, including genocide, human rights, labor rights, Global Warming and the need to deal with energy issues on a much broader basis. And certainly things are going on in parts of the world we don't know very well, but part of the problem is that there are too many people in our current administration (and Congress, for that matter) who don't want to know what's going on in the world, let alone learn, for example, what the difference is between Sunnis and Shiites. In the end, the problem is that the American people elected an incompetent marketing executive for president and a paranoid lever puller for vice president. We need competent people in this era who are driven more by pragmatism than ideology. We stayed out of trouble during the Cold War because by and large we did have competent people.

Condoleezza Rice Job Report

In terms of sheer ability, Colin Powell was much more capable of being Secretary of State than Condoleezza Rice but he blew it when he threw in with the biggest strategic failure in American history. In the period 2002-2003, he had to know that Condoleezza Rice was a lightweight. That meant if Bush's foreign policy was to make any sense, he was the one who had to put the brakes on Bush's reckless rush to war in Iraq or resign while making his reasons clear to the public. He did neither; I give him a generous C-, largely for recognizing his blunder afterwards and for cleaning up some brushfires, the biggest being potential problems concerning Pakistan. Colin Powell might have been a great secretary of state, but he signed up with the wrong president.

The Raw Story carries a Bloomberg article on the fading star of Condi Rice:

In February 2005, Rice, already the star of the Bush cabinet, described for reporters on her maiden cross-Atlantic trip as secretary ``the tremendous opportunities ahead of us,'' including spreading ``freedom and liberty to places they've never been.''

Two years later, few of those goals have been realized. Iraq, and possibly Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, are sliding into civil war, Iran is pursuing its nuclear ambitions unchecked, Russia is ignoring demands for political and economic openness, and China is building ties with U.S. adversaries.

Rice's public approval rating is slipping, and she is getting more of the flak for the prosecution of the Iraq war than ever before.

(snip)

There has been an exodus of high-level officials. Among the most prominent departures was Robert Zoellick, who resigned as deputy secretary of state in June. Rice's counselor, Philip Zelikow, who provided many of the ideas on North Korea, returned to academia, and her communications strategist, Jim Wilkinson, left for the Treasury Department.

Robert Joseph, undersecretary for arms control and international security, and John Hillen, the assistant secretary for political-military affairs who was just starting a Persian Gulf security initiative, also have quit. Neither publicly gave a reason for leaving.

In areas beyond Iraq, Rice has struggled to achieve foreign- policy objectives.

If anything, the Bloomberg article is too generous. Condi Rice will most be remembered for ignoring problems until it was too late; her performance before 9/11 was not her shining moment. She still has a small chance of redeeming herself with negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians but no one expects much. Talks with North Korea are back on track but we are simply trying to get back to where we were before Bush called North Korea part of the axis of evil. The big challenge for Condi Rice is whether she can gain ascendancy over Dick Cheney, avoid facilitating an expanding war and get some real diplomatic work done, particularly in regard to Iran. The reality is that Condi Rice has accomplished little since the beginning of the Bush Administration and she has often been eclipsed by Cheney and Rumsfeld. If she accomplishes anything from here to January 2009, she will exceed expectations. If we include her time as national security adviser, her performance over the last six years earns a generous D-, but only because Bush is particularly deserving of an F; in the end, Rice's final grade depends on what happens in the next 23 months.

George Soros and the Neocons

One thing I have grown to dislike about neoconservative ideologues is the pretense that they had some worthwhile ideas about bringing democracy to the Middle East while refusing to deal with the impact of issues likes Abu Ghraib. George Soros, no friend of neoconservatives, is a worthy critic of the Bush Administration and has said some interesting things from time to time; I would quote him more but I'm not always comfortable with his language and analogies. But Steve Clemons of The Washington Note reminds us that methods of helping other countries achieve democracy has existed in several peaceful forms:

Soros is worth something around a couple or few tens of billions of dollars and donates through his charities half a billion dollars a year, most of this to help cultivate civil society development in former Soviet bloc countries. Recently, he has broadened his arena of concerns -- particularly in the area of global warming/climate change and doing something to help shore up global resistance to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has also invested a lot in trying to help us to get rid of or to get beyond the Bush presidency.

But the right wing hates George Soros. And the NeoCons (on the right or the left) hate him more.

I just don't get it though because he has actually helped change societies successfully and is a hero in much of the world. The necons too have wanted to change the world -- albeit with guns, while Soros did it through education and political and civil institution buildng. One must surmise then that they are both jealous of his success and have a counterproductive obsession with military-driven social change, something that rarely if ever works.

Inattention to the balance between means and ends can have profound consequences as we are witnessing every evening as we watch the news coming out of Iraq. At the end of the day, the neoconservatives are nothing more than what they always were: Cold War intellectual warriors looking for a new fight to exercise their military and foreign policy fantasies on.

As Clemons reminds us, the intellectual neoconservative movement isn't purely a Republican or conservative movement. In his first two years, Bill Clinton had James Woolsey working for him as the head of the CIA; and Woolsey, when it comes to international issues, is sometimes as neoconservative as they come and apparently, if something I read recently is accurate, a Democrat. Few neoconservatives pushed the notion of WMDs in Iraq more than Woolsey, despite evidence to the contrary. I highly recommend reading Scott Ritter more closely. Without question, the Republicans are primarily responsible for the fiasco in Iraq but there are threads going back into the 90s that suggest that both Republicans and Democrats were inattentive to a number of foreign policy issues and how those issues were manipulated in the media (mainly by the Republican Noise Machine) until they became 'conventional wisdom.'

There's no question both sides of the aisle need to do a better job of working together—and working together is important—but a calculated bipartisanship is worthless if it allows—unchallenged—false assertions, false analysis and false stories. I don't think we've heard the end of this saga that more or less began with the fall of the Soviet Union. If we're to understand the failures of our post-Cold War foreign policy, at some point we're going to have to take a look at the years before George W. Bush's failed presidency. I'll leave that for another day—or to someone else.

Iran and the Continuing Bush Fiasco

The Bush Administration continues to talk out of both sides of its mouth on Iran. It says one moment that there is no plan to attack Iran and the next moment it cranks up the rhetoric and never, never contradicts its friends in the right wing media who are itching for war as a way....; well, no one is sure what they're trying to do.

Reuters has the story on Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:

The United States is not planning for a war with Iran but is determined to stop Iranians supplying bombs for deadly attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Friday.

The Bush administration has stepped up its rhetoric against Iran in recent weeks, prompting speculation it could be laying the ground for a military attack.

The United States has also sent a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf region, a move widely seen as a warning to Iran.

But Gates said the United States was pursuing a purely diplomatic path....

A purely diplomatic path. Wow, Robert Gates didn't take long to step into the Bush bubble. He does realize doesn't he that he's dealing with a team of incompetents who are driven more by domestic politics than a serious foreign policy? Diplomacy. If Bush were serious, he'd be hiring some heavyweight envoys by now. Are we running the risk of a third war so an incompetent president can look tough while his incompetent secretary of state pursues bungled diplomacy with little credibility? Or are we heading for a third war so an incompetent president can blame his fiasco on others? It's a very thin line between the two possibilities and neither are acceptable (one quick note: I supported the war in Afghanistan but one reason I came out against the war in Iraq is that I kept reading about a great deal of civilian bungling that was going on in Afghanistan; sometimes a president has to show that he can truly win one war before he starts a second).

Those still defending the president, whether they work for him or are in Congress or in the media, better get their act together and ask the obvious question: what are the American people getting out of Bush's incompetent handling of not one but two wars with the potential of a third war? Americans do not doubt the abilities of our military but they have good reason to doubt the abilities of politicians—not just Bush and his inner circle by the way—who seem to pay more attention to pleasing their base than getting the job done. And conservatives who fantasize that an attack on Iran will somehow win the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and give us something useful in Iran to boot don't belong in world affairs. The Republican radical right wing agenda is dead and has nothing useful to offer. Democrats and the few rational Republicans left in Congress need to nail the door shut against any further nonsense.

James Fallow in The Huffington Post has more thoughts on Iran:

If we could trust the Administration's ability to judge America's rational self-interest, there would be no need to constrain its threatening gestures toward Iran. Everyone would understand that this was part of the negotiation process; no one would worry that the Administration would finally take a step as self-destructive as beginning or inviting a war.

But no one can any longer trust the Administration to recognize and defend America's rational self-interest -- not when the President says he will carry out a policy even if opposed by everyone except his wife and dog, not when the Vice President refuses to concede any mistake or misjudgment in the handling of Iraq. According to the constitutional chain of command, those two men literally have the power to order a strike that would be disastrous for their nation. The Congress has no official way to prevent them from doing so -- it is interesting, and alarming, to think that in practice the safety valve might be the professional military, trained to revere the chain of command but faced with what its members would recognize as ruinous instructions.

What the Congress can do is draw the line. It can say that war with Iran is anathema to the interests of the United States and contrary to the will of its elected representatives. And it should do that now.

Congress has been patient with Bush, too patient in fact. More than five years of war with little concrete results is pathetic. Launching a war in Iraq we did not need with a deliberately misleading case for that war is impeachable. We are indeed constrained by political realities that make impeachment difficult but Congress has a responsibility to our nation to draw a clear line that holds Bush to account (and that line can be more concrete than what Fallows seems to suggest). Any Republican who will not check the recklessness of George W. Bush is simply avoiding resposibility. Real diplomacy can still take place and when it happens, the world will have no difficulty recognizing it, but what we are now seeing is mush; it is not credible and looks far too much like cover for Bush's incompetence.

Brzezinski to Speak Before Senate Foreign Affairs Committee

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a strong but patient critic of Bush's Iraq policy for roughly the first two years of the war and then largely threw up his hands as mistakes piled on mistakes. What does one do when a president's gut instinct is uninformed and he's incapable of listening or admitting mistakes (very late public relations admissions don't count; that's too much like the cookie thief finally admitting to his parents, "Oh! There a cookie in my hand. My mistake!")?

Brzezinski is going before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to explain his view tomorrow. Steve Clemons of The Washington Note has posted a copy of Brzezinski's statement; here's some highlights:

It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:

1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.

2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.

(snip)

Deplorably, the Administration's foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on ... sloganeering. Vague and inflammatory talk about "a new strategic context" which is based on "clarity" and which prompts "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" is breeding intensifying anti-Americanism and is increasing the danger of a long-term collision between the United States and the Islamic world. ...

One should note here also that practically no country in the world shares the Manichean delusions that the Administration so passionately articulates. The result is growing political isolation of, and pervasive popular antagonism toward the U.S. global posture.

(snip)

The quest for a political solution for the growing chaos in Iraq should involve four steps:

1. The United States should reaffirm explicitly and unambiguously its determination to leave Iraq in a reasonably short period of time.

Ambiguity regarding the duration of the occupation in fact encourages unwillingness to compromise and intensifies the on-going civil strife. ...

(snip)

[from point 2] It is necessary to engage all Iraqi leaders -- including those who do not reside within "the Green Zone" -- in a serious discussion regarding the proposed and jointly defined date for U.S. military disengagement because the very dialogue itself will help identify the authentic Iraqi leaders with the self-confidence and capacity to stand on their own legs without U.S. military protection. Only Iraqi leaders who can exercise real power beyond "the Green Zone" can eventually reach a genuine Iraqi accommodation. ...

(snip)

It is also time for the Congress to assert itself.

Just to amplify his point concerning the Green Zone, Brzezinski might have mentioned prominent Iraqi officials and politicians who don't even bother to reside in Iraq and live in places like London. In the last sixty years, there have been many examples of propped up governments that simply do not survive the departure of the foreign government that had been occupying the country. Legitimacy cannot be imposed. Even when Germany and Japan were occupied, there were legitimate institutions still in place that formed much of the core that replaced nazism and fascism. We can leave forces in the vicinity and develop multilateral resources to help with the transition and do the necessary regional talks, but Iraq needs to find its own legitimacy.

Russia, China, India: Trilateral Axis?

One of the major signs of Bush's failed foreign policy is that he has driven Russia, India and China into each other's arms. It is probably true that new alliances were going to be formed eventually but Bush's aggressive foreign policy speeded up events by years, if not decades.

Here's the latest development on this story from India's Tribune:

India and Russia today supported their trilateral axis with China, but opposed Beijing’s January 11 testing of an anti-satellite missile saying that they were against militarisation of space.

President Putin went on to the extent of saying that some powers (read the USA) were trying to militarise space. “We should not let the genie out of the bottle. That is our position,” Mr Putin said at a joint press interaction with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after their formal talks.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin held the seventh Indo-Russian summit with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Hyderabad House here this afternoon, it was clear that the two giant countries’ decades-old-strategic ties were taken to a significantly higher level.

We have business with Russia, China and India but Bush doesn't do much. We have business with our allies in Europe and Japan and Bush doesn't do much. We clearly have business with our enemies and that business may be the most important of all and still Bush doesn't do much (actually he doesn't do anything but he expects our remaining friends to do something). Our position in the world is weakening, our credibility is sagging and still George W. Bush sits on his hands when it comes to diplomatic talks and real leadership in world affairs. And President Bush still has right wing friends singing his praises in the media. Time is growing short. The only question is how many Republicans will join Democrats into pushing President Bush back into America's role as the world's diplomat and changing course before he gives us a wider war.

Foreign Policy Developments: North Korea, Iran and China

I once worked for a man who was fairly good at solving problems and in fact he got a lot of accolades for solving the problems. The catch? Most of the problems were ones he had created in the first place. Be very careful in coming days or months if the Bush Administration starts claiming successes that are not entirely deserved.

The fundamental problem of the last six years is that Bush broke the foreign policy that our nation had been using for some sixty years. During those sixty years, we had Republican and Democratic presidents but, despite their differences, there was enough continuity in our foreign policy that it wasn't difficult for other nations to have a basic idea of what to expect from us. There were breakdowns from time to time but there were usually procedures in place for quickly dealing with the breakdowns. There were exceptions but they were manageable exceptions. Nevertheless, Bush decided on a very different course. However, the radical foreign policy changes of the Bush Administration did not produce the results Bush and Cheney expected. Iraq is clearly the proof of that. A number of other things went wrong. And North Korea and Iran started gambling that a nuclear program might get us to back off (and why not? We left Pakistan untouched despite its troublesome role in the proliferation of nuclear programs and the funding of the Taliban).

There are several strange news stories tonight. Here's the story on North Korea from The Boston Globe:

North Korea said on Friday that it had reached a "certain agreement" with the United States in talks earlier this week in Berlin, praising the rare direct dialogue between the U.S. envoy Christopher Hill and the North's Kim Kye-gwan ended three days of unprecedented discussions on Thursday in the German capital. But neither side in Berlin suggested there had been any breakthrough on the communist state's nuclear weapons program.

"The talks took place from January 16 to 18 in a positive and sincere atmosphere and a certain agreement was reached there," the North's Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by official KCNA news agency. He did not elaborate.

"We paid attention to the direct dialogue held by the DPRK and the U.S. in a bid to settle knotty problems in resolving the nuclear issue," he said, using the acronym for the North's official name.

But Hill, arriving in South Korea to brief officials in Seoul, appeared puzzled by the reference to a deal.

"I'm sorry, I'm not really sure what he's referring to," Hill told reporters, but added: "We had very useful discussions."

Keep in mind that the Bush Administration broke off the deal that was worked out during the Clinton Administration. Also keep in mind that the North Korean missile tests last summer and the recent nuclear tests did not appear to go all that well.

Now here's a story in The New York Times about developments in Iran:

Iran’s outspoken president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be under pressure from the highest authorities in Iran to end his involvement in its nuclear program, a sign that his political capital is declining as his country comes under increasing international pressure.

Just one month after the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran to curb its nuclear program, two hard-line newspapers, including one owned by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called on the president to stay out of all matters nuclear.

In the hazy world of Iranian politics, such a public rebuke was seen as a sign that the supreme leader — who has final say on all matters of state — might no longer support the president as the public face of defiance to the West.

It is the first sign that Mr. Ahmadinejad has lost any degree of Ayatollah Khamenei’s confidence, a potentially damaging development for a president who has rallied his nation and defined his administration by declaring nuclear power Iran’s “inalienable right.”

There are signs (not proof) that Iran's nuclear program is not as developed as some in the Bush Administration have been claiming. Another development related to Iran is that we might have had a deal with Iran four years ago. Here's the story in The Denver Post:

An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told the BBC in a program that aired Wednesday night. But Wilkerson said Cheney vetoed the deal.

"We thought it was a very propitious moment" to strike a deal, Wilkerson said. "But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the vice president's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil' ... reasserted itself."

It's my understanding that Iran made another offer to improve relations a year earlier before the famous axis of evil nonsense but the Bush Administration passed on that as well.

And finally, the Chinese seem to be reminding the United States that we should not take our military might too much for granted. Here's that story from The Boston Globe:

The United States, Australia and Canada have voiced concerns to China over the first known satellite-killing test in space in more than 20 years, the White House said on Thursday.

"The U.S. believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. "We and other countries have expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese."

The Bush Administration has broken several treaties in the last six years, including arms treaties and has talked openly about the possible use of nuclear weapons as bunker busters and even as tactical weapons. The Chinese are important trade partners but perhaps the test is a reminder that the United States is not the only country in the world that can change the military equation. Even the Russians, with their new status as an oil nation, are not inclined to listen as closely to the United States as they once did.

It's long past time for Bush to hire a more realistic foreign policy team and to sit down with a number of nations to reformulate the global situation and return to a healthier foreign policy dynamic. We've had far too much hubris and arrogance out of Washington for the last six years. We need less posturing by the White House and more serious dialogue.

"Doomsday" Clock Closer to Midnight

After mentioning the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last night, it shouldn't really be a surprise that they're in the news today. Keeping in mind that the "Doomsday" clock is primarily a symbol of the danger nuclear weapons pose to the world and that the purpose of the Bulletin is to alert people to changing conditions when it comes to nuclear weapons (and sometimes other problems), the magazine has moved the minute hand closer to midnight.

Here's the story from Tom Zeller Jr. of The New York Times:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which 60 years ago began keeping tabs on humanity’s temporal distance from self-annihilation with the concept of a “Doomsday Clock,” apparently found things sufficiently dire to nudge the minute hand forward two clicks, indicating that we are now “five minutes to midnight” — or Doomsday.

(snip)

Rather than bore you with more exposition, however, we figured we’d we’d render a graphic for your viewing pleasure. So with no further ado, here’s a very rough sketch of how the experts interpreted our distance from the bitter end over the last 60 years....

Given the seriousness of what's going on, Zeller's sarcasm isn't particularly useful and doesn't reflect well on The New York Times. But take a look at the graph anyway.

Here's the announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) is moving the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight. It is now 5 minutes to midnight. Reflecting global failures to solve the problems posed by nuclear weapons and the climate crisis, the decision by the BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.

BAS announced the Clock change today at an unprecedented joint news conference held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC, and the Royal Society in London. In a statement supporting the decision to move the hand of the Doomsday Clock, the BAS Board focused on two major sources of catastrophe: the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2000 of them ready to launch within minutes; and the destruction of human habitats from climate change. In articles by 14 leading scientists and security experts writing in the January-February issue of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists (http://www.thebulletin.org), the potential for catastrophic damage from human-made technologies is explored further.

(snip)

By moving the hand of the Clock closer to midnight — the figurative end of civilization — the BAS Board of Directors is drawing attention to the increasing dangers from the spread of nuclear weapons in a world of violent conflict, and to the catastrophic harm from climate change that is unfolding. The BAS statement explains: "We stand at the brink of a Second Nuclear Age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth."

The BAS statement continues: "The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause irremediable harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival."

Stephen Hawking, a BAS sponsor, professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of The Royal Society, said: "As scientists, we understand the dangers of nuclear weapons and their devastating effects, and we are learning how human activities and technologies are affecting climate systems in ways that may forever change life on Earth. As citizens of the world, we have a duty to alert the public to the unnecessary risks that we live with every day, and to the perils we foresee if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change."

From its inception, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has always had big names in the field of science associated with the organization. These issues must be taken seriously. The Bush Administration pays lip service to the issues but does a poor job of handling them. Many of Bush's Republican supporters explicitly refuse to take the issues seriously and have obstructed useful things that might have been done over the last six years. Leaving these issues to Bush and his Republican friends is something Americans cannot afford.

Bush Losing Ability to Persuade

President Bush is no longer getting the bounce in the polls that he once did after a major speech. No doubt Cheney and Karl Rove are worried that Bush's right wing agenda may no longer have traction. S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion says some Republicans are analyzing Bush's failing ability to communicate but he has a post that offers a more accurate take on the president's problem:

...Bush’s verbal communications skills leave a great deal to be desired. His down-home, sometimes sentence-fragment approach to speaking, taken against his record and results, serves as verification to some that failure to speak well reflects a failure to think well.

But more significant, both as cause and effect, is that Bush has so often spoken to mislead — to deny facts, to hide, bend, twist and shade truth — even to flat-out deceive. That is a very deliberate, purposeful, failure to communicate well. It’s a kind of failure most people, past some point of having been taken in, are unwilling to forget. It’s a kind of failure that results in lack of credibility, which is one of a president’s most valuable assets.

One of the reasons I would like Congress to slow down President Bush and hold him accountable is that it's very difficult to accomplish anything in the foreign policy field if the president has little or no credibility on the international stage and little interest in talking. But, if left unchecked, it's relatively easy for the Bush Administration to continue committing blunders; the recent hangings remind us of how fiasco after fiasco seem to follow in the wake of Bush's policies. Allowing Bush to dig a deeper hole without major corrections in his presidency is not a solution.

Worldwide, America's reputation has suffered and much of it can be traced to a growing distrust of our president and, more specifically, to Bush's many misleading and unsubstantiated claims and also his failure to uphold democratic principles despite some of his speeches praising democracy. Compounding Bush's lack of credibility is his seeming belief that military action can somehow restore his credibility. That is a delusion the United States can no longer afford.

British Troop Levels Expected to Decline

Steadily, our coalition partners over the last two have been leaving or reducing their troop levels. Our biggest partner, the British, had some 40,000 troops in Iraq at one time. Those levels have fallen as we hear from Alan Cowell of The New York Times:

Britain, which had been America’s closest and most pliant ally in Iraq, said Thursday that it would not follow the United States in raising troop levels there and signaled that it would proceed with plans to hand over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces in the south.

Britain has about 7,000 troops in Iraq, most in the southern city of Basra, and says the situation there is far less dire than in Baghdad.

Officials here dismissed as speculation, though, a report in The Daily Telegraph on Thursday that those numbers would be cut by 3,000 before the end of May.

British officials offered a cautious welcome for President Bush’s announcement but made clear that it would not distract them from trying to reduce British forces.

Overall numbers for coalition forces are dropping and Bush wants us to believe sending 20,000 more of our troops will actually make a difference in his failing policy. I have already mentioned that Bush appears to be fumbling Iraq into the hands of the next president. Personally, I suspect that part of the purpose of the troop surge is to set up conditions so that the blame will fall on the Iraqis rather than Bush when it becomes obvious that continuing Bush's fiasco is no longer acceptable. But blaming the Iraqis is a sideshow compared to blaming the Syrians and Iranians and using that as an excuse to expand the war. We are in very dangerous territory.

Yes, the Iraqis have to accept responsibility for their country in years to come but don't anyone pretend that Bush's war hasn't done serious damage to the United States and that the damage is somehow separate from the fundamental flaws in the assumptions the Bush Administration made in going to war. Unilateralism is a bust. The preemptive strike principle as defined by Bush never made any sense. Imposing democracy at the point of a gun is a profound moral contradiction. And threatening to lower the threshhold for the use of nuclear weapons should be explicitly recognized for what it is: an extremist doctrine that has no place in American foreign policy. Democrats and Republicans need to unite in putting an end to Bush's profound moral recklessness.

Richard Clarke on Problems Bush Is Neglecting

There are any number of people out there, both experts and ordinary people observing the world, who increasingly talk about the number of problems Bush is neglecting, particularly in foreign affairs. In The Washington Post, Richard Clarke, who worked for several presidents, points out some of the problems being overlooked because of Bush's obsession with Iraq (hat tip to Talking Points Memo):

In every administration, there are usually only about a dozen barons who can really initiate and manage meaningful changes in national security policy. For most of 2006, some of these critical slots in the Bush administration have been vacant... ... ...with the nation involved in a messy war spiraling toward a bad conclusion, the key deputies and Cabinet members and advisers are all focusing on one issue, at the expense of all others: Iraq.

(snip)

...beyond al-Qaeda and the broader struggle for peaceful coexistence with (and within) Islam, seven key "fires in the in-box" national security issues remain unattended, deteriorating and threatening...

Global warming: When the possibility of invading Iraq surfaced in 2001, senior Bush administration officials hadn't thought much about global warming, except to wonder whether it was caused by human activity or by sunspots. Today, the world's scientists and many national leaders worry that the world has passed the point of no return on global warming. If it has, then human damage to the ecosphere will cause more major cities to flood and make the planet significantly less conducive to human habitation -- all over the lifetime of a child now in kindergarten. British Prime Minister Tony Blair keeps trying to convince President Bush of the magnitude of the problem, but in every session between the two leaders Iraq squeezes out the time to discuss the pending planetary disaster.

Clarke goes on to discuss other neglected areas, including "Russian revanchism," "Latin America's leftist lurch," "Africa at War," the "Arms Control freeze," "transnational crime," and the "Pakistani-Afghan border." America is paying a heavy price for Bush's obsession with Iraq. We need to cut our losses and rebuild our foreign policy before more damage is done.

Criticism of Condoleezza Rice Growing

The policy blunders of the Bush Administration are many and the consequences of those blunders continue to compound the failures, making Bush's last two years difficult unless he makes serious changes. To turn things around will not only require making policies changes, it will require a good foreign policy team fully capable of negotiations and implementing a real foreign policy. Bush does not have such a team.

The president's national security adviser Stephen Hadley is more a right wing policy wonk than a serious implementer of rational national security policy; in other words, he's largely ineffectual. Condoleezza Rice was not an effective national security adviser and has been disappointing as secretary of state. And John Bolton's abrasive style as our UN ambassador did not gain us much. If Bush does not beef up his foreign policy team and if he continues to believe that our problems can largely be solved with military force and more photo ops, we are in for a long two years. Diplomacy and political solutions are the best route to mitigate his strategic errors in Iraq.

Of course, some argue that we've been seeing Cheney's foreign policy and that he's still in charge (along with his mysterious foreign policy/national security team), but, however great his influence happens to be, his dark vision and empire nonsense over the last six years are a disaster and if he really is in charge, it is unlikely that he will change. Bush, however, is the president. Bush has the ultimate responsibility, not Cheney. Changes can take place if Bush so chooses to make them. Being president is not exclusively a public relations job though Bush has often behaved as such during the last six years. I wouldn't mind Congress finding a way to remind President Bush of that fact.

Here's an article on Yahoo by David Millikin who reviews Condi Rice's first two years (hat tip to The Huffington Post):

The violence in Iraq, and the Bush administration's refusal to bring rivals Syria and Iran into efforts to stabilize the country, are widely blamed for the broader failure of US policy in the Middle East -- where Lebanon teeters on the brink of civil war and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts languish.

Elsewhere, Rice's globe-trotting -- 37 overseas trips totalling nearly 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) -- has yielded little concrete success, with her few diplomatic victories clouded by poor or no follow-up.

(snip)

US foreign policy experts said Rice must shoulder much of the blame for the lackluster diplomacy.

"Great secretaries of state have compelling views of the world and/or are effective negotiators -- Secretary Rice has so far demonstrated neither," said Aaron Miller, who advised six secretaries of state before joining the Woodrow Wilson Center think tank in Washington.

Even staunch supporters acknowledge that Rice, weighed down by the failed policy in Iraq, has little that is positive to show for her work so far.

"I don't know that there have been concrete advances" under Rice's diplomacy, said Joshua Muravchik of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, though he nevertheless went on to give her "high grades" for faithfully implementing Bush's policy agenda.

Hmmm. Muravchick can't think of any accomplishments but gives Rice high grades for implementing Bush's strategic blunders? Of course, the American Enterprise Institute have fired people for talking rationally about the shortcomings of the Bush Administration.

In the real universe, here's where we're at: if Bush begins to understand that his public relations games aren't working anymore and that his talk of 'surge' is wasting everyone's time, and if he decides that he cannot continue on the same disastrous course he's been pursuing for over three years, and if, in the process of evaluating how to get back to a real foreign policy, he decides to keep Condi Rice, he at the very least needs to bring in some big name help for her foreign policy team. Yeah, I know, that's a lot of ifs. So here's the question: can our nation afford two more years of incompetence and foreign policy drift? We may soon know the answer.