The Backpedal Begins

I'm not sure who is in charge of "message" in the Obama campaign, but this smacks of silliness:

WASHINGTON — With his experience and leadership credentials under sharp criticism, Senator Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to clarify what has emerged as a central tenet of his proposed foreign policy: a willingness to meet leaders of enemy nations.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to emphasize, as he and his aides have done continually over the last few days, the difference between avoiding preconditions for talks with nations like Iran and Syria, and granting them automatic discussions at the presidential level.

While Mr. Obama has said he would depart from the Bush administration policy of refusing to meet with certain nations unless they meet preconditions, he has also said he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all.

Let me get this straight: after six months of chiding from Clinton, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Richardson, and now, John McCain, someone in Barack Obama's campaign finally woke up at 2 AM a couple of nights ago, slapped his forehead and said "HOLY SHIT! "NO PRECONDITIONS"???? WHAT ARE WE, IDIOTS?"

Now, "no preconditions" means "no preconditions," unless you are putting preconditions on the word "preconditions". Sort of like, "Depends on what your definition of 'is', is."

Apparently, it didn't really mean "no preconditions".

This is a rookie campaign being run by highly inexperienced operatives, and I can almost bet that by Denver (if not, after), Obama will be asked to make some serious changes to his senior staffing.

Or, to put it in flip flop terms, he was FOR appeasing Iran BEFORE he was against it:

This week, Mr. Obama said that he was still considering meeting with Iranian leaders, though he would not necessarily guarantee a direct meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“There is no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad before we know that he is actually in power,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “He is not the most powerful person in Iran.”

Last week, Mr. Obama offered a similarly nuanced explanation about meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba, saying he would do so only “at a time and place of my choosing.”

The caveats belie the simple answer Mr. Obama gave during a debate last summer, when the issue was first raised in a major public forum. Without hesitation or qualification, Mr. Obama said he would hold direct talks with America’s enemies, drawing strong and immediate criticism from his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” asked Stephen Sixta, a video producer who submitted the question for the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

Mr. Obama, the first candidate to respond, answered, “I would.”

Several aides immediately thought it was a mistake and sought to dial back his answer. But on a conference call the morning after the debate, Mr. Obama told his advisers that he had meant what he said and thought the answer crystallized how he differed from his rivals.

“I think that it is an example of how stunted our foreign policy debates have become over the last eight years that this is an issue that political opponents try to seize on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is actually a pretty conventional view of how diplomacy should work traditionally that has fallen into disrepute in Republican circles and in Washington.”

Even after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called his position naïve, Mr. Obama refused to shy away from it, at times speaking explicitly in terms of a potential meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

In other words, it would give Ahmadinejad a lot more credibility with the world community than it would with the US government and would do more for Iran than it would do for America, which is an awful way to go about diplomacy, which has long been defined as the art of letting someone get your way.

Now, at no time during this or any subsequent debate or Q&A on this point has Obama ever amended this statement: attack the conventional way of diplomacy and "no preconditions" to meeting world leaders.

So apparently, Senator Obama has come to his senses and joined the "reality based" community of conventional realpolitik!

Now if only the Democratic party would come to its senses...

Appease Porridge Hot, Appease Porridge Cold

Not sure I understand Bush's point here:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday decried his critics' calls for negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as comparable to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler before World War Two.

Bush's comment in a speech to Israel's parliament appeared to be a swipe at Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama, who has advocated meeting leaders of traditional U.S. foes such as Iran and Cuba without preconditions.

It also followed a visit to the Middle East by former President Jimmy Carter in which he met Hamas leaders, who are shunned by Israel and Washingtion, and urged efforts to draw the militant group into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

[...]Bush, who has refused any contact with Ahmadinejad, said the Iranian president "dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map", and lumped him together in an anti-Israel camp with Hamas, Hezbollah and Osama bin Laden.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said.=

I'm not sure I've heard Obama say that, necessarily, or anyone on the left. I know I don't think that's a good idea, either.

But....

What IS a good idea is what President Bill Clinton...you remember the guy, brightest President to sit in the White House since Jefferson, greatest President of all time, husband of candidate Hillary Clinton and someone Barack Obama has gone out of his way to paint with strokes of hatred and jealousy?...did during his tenure: reach out to Iranians moderates and try to establish a dialogue regarding what THEY want.

It's true, Ahmadinejad would probably leap at the chance to have face time with a President Obama, but it's not very likely that would amount to anything, unless it was preceded by many rounds of talks among lower level operatives and with opposition leaders in Iran, such as they are.

Remember, despite Ahmadinejad's posturing, Iran is a fairly moderate country with an educated population, a decent economy, and more important, some freedoms that other Muslim nations do not have.

To suggest that even the rookie Senator from Illinois would be foolhardy enough to justify Ahmadinejad's posturing in the face of that populace belies a deep disregard for the intellectual curiousity of both Iranians and Americans: we'd see through that in a heartbeat. Look what happened when Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia.

The comparisons to Nazi Germany are a bit outre as well. Germany was controlled by Hitler. Ahmadinejad can't take a dump without the religious council ratifying it. And there's where the talking with Iran might bear some fruit. Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Rafsanjani, pragmatic reformers who have some sway with the council would be valuable players here.

Bush, thankfully, has rendered himself irrelevant prematurely. My suspicion is, someone in his administration watched "The West Wing" and tried to arrange a graceful exit for him like Jeb Bartlett's, and creating relevancy for the lamest of ducks in recent memory.

Proving A Point

There's a curious dynamic involved in this story, one I haven't fully contemplated yet:

Iraqis returned to the streets of Baghdad after a curfew was lifted and the southern port city of Basra appeared quiet on Monday, a day after the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for his followers to stop fighting and in turn demanded concessions from Iraq’s government.

Mr. Sadr’s statement, released Sunday afternoon, came at the end of six days in which his Mahdi Army militia had held off an American-supported Iraqi assault on Basra.

OK, the most obvious bit of information we can glean from this story is that al-Sadr is establishing that he is firmly in control of the Shi'ite faction in Iraq. Is this a prelude to his taking over the parliament? Or worse? Is this a signal that Sayyid al-Sistani is preparing to rule over Iraq the way Ayatollahs in Iran have for decades, as "Expwert Jurist"?

After all, he's basically turned on, and then turned off, the faucet of violence, keeping American and British troops dancing in the background while he held off allied-armed Iraqi forces to a standstill.

Clearly, he wanted to demonstrate that the nation will dance to his tune.

He also demonstrated the abject impotence of the American-chosen president, Nuri Maliki, who apparently couldn't crush an uprising any more effectively than the American-led Coalition of the Bribed!

There is an allegory about the lion and the fly, which applies to Iraq: In a fight between a lion and a fly, the fly cannot land a killing blow, while the lion cannot fly.

So it goes with Iraq and the insurgency: we are fighting a fight that we cannot win, despite our overwhelming force, and the Shi'ites know this lion cannot fly.

The ironic thing about this is, this was a fight, and still is a fight, that we didn't have to fight. The sponsors behind this fight, the Iranians, are perhaps the most sophisticated democratic government in the area, just behind India. Yes, the Ayatollah in Iran has supreme power, but if you look at society, even Khameni hasn't been able to stifle all dissent, or make women wear the burqa, or...well, you choose the field, and Iran has advanced fairly far in it, comparatively speaking.

That's not to say we should be holding them up as a model of the Middle East we'd like to see, but we could try working with them to bring them into the fold, so to speak.

Ahmadinejad may come off as a fucking loon, but if you carefully look at the ripples that he sends out, there's a very deep logic to his insanity and it is very profitable to Iran and to its peer nations. And I have no doubt that he speaks for the Ayatollah.

Not Visiting The Grave

(Posted with aBEEG SHMILE! BEEG SHMILE!)
Following up on my post yesterday, where I pointed out that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had the courage to confront a hostile crowd (and apparently, it took its toll, if news reports are to be believed), both President Bush and President Ahmadinejad will speak today at the opening of the United Nations.

By luck of the draw...koffkoff...Bush will speak first, then disappear long before Ahmadinejad gets up.

So you'd imagine this is an opportunity for Bush to launch some pre-emptive rhetorical strikes against a country he has called a "grave threat" to our national security.

Right?

Wrong:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President George W. Bush is set to announce new U.S. sanctions against Myanmar over human rights as the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders gets under way on Tuesday.

Bush is one of the first speakers on a list that later features Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and diplomats will be watching to see if the leaders of the two bitterly hostile countries cross paths or exchange words.

But despite the United States leading efforts for more U.N. sanctions against Iran to curtail its nuclear program, Bush will only make a brief mention of Tehran in his speech, the White House said.

"The speech is not about Iran," spokeswoman Dana Perino said. "The speech is about liberation and how liberation from poverty, disease, hunger, tyranny and oppression and ignorance can lift people up out of poverty and despair."

Oh really? Darfur, Ms. Perino? Ring a bell? Nigeria? IRAQ?!?!?!?! (feel free to chime in if I missed any).

Now, that's not to say Myanmar isn't a troubled area and doesn't need some of the world's attention:

YANGON (Reuters) - Chanting "democracy, democracy", 10,000 monks marched through the heart of Myanmar's main city on Tuesday in defiance of a threat by the ruling generals to send in troops to end the biggest anti-junta protests in nearly 20 years.

The streets were lined with people clapping and cheering and there were no overt signs of police or soldiers and no trouble as the campaign against 45 years of military rule swelled in size and scope.

But after the demonstrators left the area around the Sule Pagoda in central Yangon, the focus of a week of marches by the revered maroon-robed monks, riot police and troops moved in.

Eight trucks arrived with police carrying shields, batons and rifles, a Reuters witness said. Eleven army trucks packed with soldiers also drove in, suggesting the junta was filling up the city centre to counter any attempt at a repeat.

In another possible sign of looming confrontation, a well-placed source said detained democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi was moved to the notorious Insein prison on Sunday, a day after she appeared in front of her house to greet monks.

Yes, this long-festering conflict appears to be ready to boil out.

You might recall, or maybe not...it didn't get a whole lot of attention in the States with Bush the Elder in office...in 1988, nearly 3,000 Myanmaris were killed by government troops cracking down on pro-democracy factions.

Bush's solution? Sanctions...which worked nicely against Saddam Hussein basically until Bush's cronies in the oil business started circumventing them.

Not to worry, of course: Myanmar has no oil to speak of, producing only 9,500 barrels a day. It does have some fairly sizable natural gas reserves, however (283 billion cu m), as well as major jade, precious gem, and timber industries.

So we're talking "C" list on the economic impact scale: large enough that local governments and politicians can live nicely by Western standards, but not enough for America to bother invading and raping.

Geopolitically, there's no real advantage to be gained in supporting the pro-democracy forces in Myanmar...the ruling junta has no real allies (China comes closest, but even they keep an arm's length), aside from a "See? We really DO support free people!" posturing.

Which raises the question, "Why is Bush bothering to spotlight this crisis?"

Well, it's clear he's ashamed to face the international community on the 800 lb gorilla in his closet: Iraq. The last thing he wants is to remind people of how his "Coalition of the Bribed Willing" fell apart this past year and how it's been five years and only now are we starting to see even a plateau in the level of violence, much less a consolidation and unification of Iraq under a democratic government.

In other words, he's going to avoid his "miserable failure" like the plague.

So why not Iran, Mr. President? Why not talk about arguably a real threat to the world's security, something the UN might want to actually get involved with, ahead of some insane aggression you would want to indulge your G I Joe fantasies over?

Surely it can't be that you're afraid to say in person to Ahmadinejad's face that which you've plastered all over CNNinternational and every major newspaper in the world?

Hell, even Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, had bigger grapefruits than that!

Or are you? All your life, you've ducked controversy after controversy and then refused to face up to your critics and victims in a confrontation.

Can you say "passive aggressive"?

You've refused to go to Viet Nam, and then refused to work your full shift in the namby pamby detour that your daddy arranged for you. You've failed in every single business you've gotten involved with, needing family and friends to bail you out, even to the point where you took the Texas Rangers from last to even worse: the laughing stock of the American League.

And here, now, as President, rather than engage in dialogue with anyone who might disagree with you, all signs point to the fact that if you don't have toadies and chimpanzees doing your bidding, you fire them or make life so miserable for them, they leave.

This is not the mark of a President. Hell, it's not even the mark of a good gang leader!

So go. Talk about Myanmar until the heat gets too great and you have to leave the kitchen.

America and the world will be much better off once you're out of the driver's seat and in our rear view mirror.

Words, Words, Words...

...as the Bard said.

An odd confluence of words is at the heart of world events today.

First, finds us contemplating the appearance of, as the Daily News today describes it "evil"Ahmadinejad is scheduled to make an appearance at Columbia University to speak to a forum there, where undoubtedly he will face hostile questions after his remarks and undoubtedly, barring a miraculous maturity on the part of the protestors, some trouble will erupt:

Plans for him to speak at New York's Columbia University have drawn protests from some who say the university should not give a platform to a Holocaust denier accused by Washington of supporting terrorism

Speak he will, however, and I wonder that it's not a good thing that he does.

We (and by we, I mean the American dialogue) spent decades demonizing Saddam Hussein to such an extent that he became an easy mark once we had an excuse to go after him (you'll notice that when an adult was in office, while he was still demonized, that adult was willing to contain him to his crib).

I wonder how willing we would have been to go to war with Hussein if he had spoken, even once, before a hostile American audience or indeed, in front of the United Nations? We as a people would have been able to hear his words and judge him for what he was-- a pompous fool with delusions of grandeur.

Too, with Ahmadinejad, let us hear what he has to say to us. I have no doubt he'll have polished up his words to placate Americans (and to show Iranians back home that he can be conciliatory ahead of an election there), but in front of a hostile, a truly hostile crowd, I have no doubt his views will be fully explored.

Columbia, after all, isn't Liberty University.

More to the point, even just showing up in front of a hostile crowd will make Ahmadinejad twice the man our alleged President is, which brings me to our second set of words:

“She's [Hillary Clinton] got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary,” Bush tells author Bill Sammon in the bombshell book, EVANGELICAL PRESIDENT, set for release Monday. “And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated.”

(no link to the book)

One wonders what febrile seizure clamped onto Bill Sammon's brain to make him do what journalists worldwide would tell you is a no-no: "pipe" a quote, or put words in the mouth of someone in your article/book.

Unless you are marking it as "fiction," and considering that Sammon is a Fox News correspondent, one wonders if that line has become blurred in Sammon's smoked mind.

I mean, come on, Sammon! Bush? Multiplicity???? He probably thinks that's a town just north of New Orleans!

"Big Stretch" Sammon, you might recall, was the reporter at Bush's press conference last week who asked Bush about the Moveon.org ad, which allowed Bush to end his press conference with a savage attack...about a newspaper advertisement.

Must be slow on the right wing these days. "Big Stretch"...an appropriate nickname for Sammon.

I'd prefer "Red Herring" but that's just me.

Contrast, tho, the styles of the two "world leaders", both of whom are ineffectual in their own lands, save for a small but rabid minority who would die rather than admit the liberalization of their countries. Ahmadinejad would face down his critics, and confront them.

Bush hides behind the skirts of "Big Stretch" and others who are dumb enough to take the potshots that ultimately make their way to Bush's feet anyway.

Poking The Hornet's Nest With A Penis

Stories like this one tend to make me think there's some credence in the rather outré belief that the Bush Administration, despite this action flying in the face of logic and fact, might just be stupid enough to do a crazy thing: fight a war with Iran:

MANAMA (Reuters) - Mounting tensions between Iran and the West have accelerated war games the U.S. navy is conducting in the Gulf, a spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet said on Wednesday.

A second U.S. aircraft carrier began exercises in the Gulf on Tuesday -- the first time two such vessels have been sent to patrol Gulf waters since the U.S.-led war on Iraq in 2003.

The U.S. exercises come amid rising tension with Iran over its nuclear program and its capture of British sailors.

"The planning accelerated in conjunction with what was going on, but it was absolutely not the sole determinant ... We are here exercising every day," said Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet based in the Gulf island of Bahrain.

Translation: We had this in mind for when things calmed down in Iraq a little, but we believe in striking while the iron's hot

Which worries me. Iraq spoke the truth about WMDs before we invaded them. Iran has sent mixed messages about their nuclear enrichment program, but all signs point to cooler heads than Ahmadinejad running the negotiations.

Why do I say this? There's an offer on the table for immediate, nearly unfettered inspection access to Iranian facilities. There's civil unrest over Ahmadinejad's soapboxing. Granted, much of this has occured in the wake of US pressure on Iran, but it's probably more because China and Russia have taken the ayatollahs aside and told them to make inroads to peace.

Iran needs nuclear power, of that there can be no doubt. Iran hit peak oil production around the same time the United States did, and Iran is a modern economy, which means its energy needs have only expanded over the past thirty years. Iran makes enormous amounts of money off its sales to China, so it's not about to cut exports to slake its own crude thirst.

Too, by having an Iran that is weaned from fossil fuels, we could conceivably see an example of how the United States can successfully kick the oil habit as well.

"Trust, but verify," Reagan put it simply, and that philosophy had been a bulwark of American foreign policy through the Clinton administration and guess what? We only had to fight one war and even then, we had the backing of the world.

And it's not a bad philosophy, as simplistic bromides go. However, now we've lost the trust of the world that we would do the right thing as best as we could with this abomination that is our Iraq invasion, and we're paying a heavy price for it in the negotiations with Iran and to some extent, North Korea. Although we did just sign an agreement with them through the six party talks, if you examine that agreement carefully, it doesn't vary much from the agreement the Clinton administration signed, thirteen years ago.

When it mattered more.

Antagonistic actions like sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf region is not going to get Iran to the table any faster and may, in fact, bolster Ahmadinejad's faction: fear will do that, cause us to look to the strongest figure who is espousing the simplistic course of action that defends us at the expense of anything else.

How else do you think Bush was able to keep the 2004 election close enough that he could steal a win? Do you remember the bi-monthly "terror alert"?

I expect we'll see the equivalent response from Iran: trot out Ahmadinejad to spew some anti-western rhetoric, throw in a few hegemonic slogans, and end it with a vow to never give in.

The real test comes after that. What will the Iranian people say, with two aircraft carriers parked off the coast? I suspect they may be a bit more defiant of the west this time around, practically begging for the attack to come, if for no other reason than to stop living in uncertainty.

snarkasm, snarcasm, snarky

Bush
Iran
Ahmadinejad