Walter Russell Mead calls them Jacksonian Americans. Anatol Lieven calls them pugnacious nationalists. I call them "Fuck Yeah Americans."

If you missed Team America: World Police, you need to watch this music video.

BUT WAIT! This clip is very, very vulgar -- some full body nudity, erotic sex, but lots of apple pie, Mom, NASCAR, tanks, and patriotic images too.

You have been warned. Here, now, is the music video clip.

But anyone who didn't fully understand what I was talking about when I analyzed the outcome of the Presidential election in terms of a new breed of "Fuck Yeah Americans" will get my point after watching this.

Some of my friends and many of my second and third cousins are 'Fuck Yeah Americans' and proud of it. I don't quite fit the mold.

These could be the swing voters in 2008. Sobering.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note: Many thanks to WMS for forwarding this to me.)

Folks will have to bear with me today. I have a rotten head cold, and my temperament is set on the "difficult curmudgeon" setting this morning -- sort of like William Safire on most days.

There is so much that can be said about William Safire, and many in the progressive community are saying them. But let me venture into the mine fields for a moment to say some good things about this curmudgeon at the New York Times. And before folks jump on me, just know that I realize he has been irresponsible in his past commentary regarding Hillary Clinton, something which he mostly admits now; and he is far too much a flack for Ariel Sharon.

I'm an anecdote guy -- so I will share one. When I moved to Washington, I came here as the first executive director of what was then called the Nixon Center for Peace & Freedom, later just the Nixon Center. I spent a year out at the Nixon Library getting this project off the ground and then opened the offices here in D.C. before realizing that I was much less a Nixon-groupie than most of the people I was working with. I then went to work in the U.S. Senate for Jeff Bingaman.

I came into contact with Safire in my role at the Nixon Center and discovered that he had real problems with Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew's style of authoritarianism combined with a strong market economy. Lee and then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir popularized this brand of leadership and governance, "Asian Values."

Safire called them both thugs.

Because Lee Kuan Yew had just sued and run out of Singapore a friend of mine, Christopher Lingle, who had intimated in an International Herald Tribune article (and not actually written) that some Asian governments (read Singapore) did not have independent judiciaries, the Singapore government began hunting Chris Lingle down by trying to bankrupt and then incarcerate him.

Safire wrote something about Lingle, and then I decided to feed Safire more material, which he used for several follow-on articles.

Where this gets much more interesting though is that around the time I had decided to leave the Nixon Center, I had been planning on having a major conference that would debate the "Asian Values" theology promoted by Lee and Mahathir and was in the process of inviting the Singapore Senior Minister to come to a forum that would wrestle (in a fair and balanced way) with this question. I sent Safire the outline of my plan because I wanted Safire to moderate or chair the meeting.

Then one morning, I hear from our receptionist, "Steve, William Safire is on the phone for you" (and she whispered, "he doesn't sound happy.")

I picked up the phone, and after a nanosecond of courtesy, Safire said, "I have just one thing to say. If you provide a stage for Lee Kuan Yew, I will blast Lee, I will blast the Nixon Center, and I will blast YOU."

It's a strange feeling to know that Safire's canon was, in part, directly pointed at my head. He had misunderstood the material I had sent as my lauding Yew's "Asian Values" ideology, rather than critiquing it. After a long and disjointed explanation, I was able to convince Safire that paying tribute to Lee was not my intention, but what I did want to do was make him accountable in Washington for his views.

I told Safire that I was leaving the Nixon Center in any case and that I didn't expect the meeting to go forward.

A few months after I went to the Senate, however, I learned that the Nixon Center had kept the invitation to Lee Kuan Yew alive -- and had in fact turned a conference that was about policy and substance into a fundraising dinner at which Lee Kuan Yew would be presented the Nixon Center's first "Architect of the New Century Award."

I got early word of the dinner and decided that if Safire heard about this dinner -- even if I was no longer at the Center -- I ran the risk of that canon blast again.

So, I decided to be a bit Nixonian in my response. I was very irritated that this dinner which could have been about an important policy debate about models of political and economic development had morphed into yet another example of the kind of structural corruption of corporate America before powerful thugs like Indonesia's Suharto, Malaysia's Mahathir, and Singapore's Lee.

When I had been at the Nixon Center, I had encouraged Chalmers Johnson to serve as a member of the Center's Advisory Council. Knowing he would be as outraged as I was that the Asian Values conference had been retooled into an Asian Values kow-tow fundraiser, Chalmers Johnson resigned from the Nixon Center Advisory Council with a good fiery letter of protest.

This news, combined with the publication of a new important paper by Gary Rodan by the Japan Policy Research Institute (which I co-founded with Chalmers Johnson) titled "Information Technology and Political Control in Singapore," gave me the news hooks that I thought might entice Safire to write something.

He did. He actually wrote two article.

Here are the original articles, but note that in the second one, the URL for the Rodan paper and Chalmers Johnson's email address are no longer accurate:

The New York Times, October 21, 1996

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

I will now stop using Nixon postage stamps. That's because the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom is raising money by honoring Lee Kuan Yew, the dictator of Singapore.

That's why we must expose and root out the insidious networking of the Clintons and their billionaire Indonesian wheeler-dealers. And that's why all good Nixonites should absent themselves from a fund-raiser doing honor to a dictator who despises a free press and individual liberty.

Here is a follow-up piece, after the Nixon Center responded to his first blast at the Lee Kuan Yew dinner.

New York Times, November 14, 1996

If Lee blocks access, Singaporeans, try E-mail: cjohnson@ucsd.edu. But be careful, global business executives: the Architect of the New Century may be monitoring everything you download.

I have a very good relationship with the Nixon Center today, by the way. It was through the Center's good auspices that I was invited to the Francis Fukuyama dinner where I saw so clearly a brewing neocon civil war.

But I liked what Safire did. He was a former Nixon speech-writer and had loyalties to various players in Nixon legacydom, but he did not let those loyalties constrain his commentary about Lee and those who wanted to kow-tow to him and his brand of illiberal rule.

The other reason I like Safire is that he wrote a fun novel, Scandalmonger, which provides a fictional account of the early days in America of political pampleteers.

The main focus of his novel is James Callendar, who was in some ways a combination of Matt Drudge and Josh Marshall, and maybe Wonkette, combined. Callendar, of course, was the gossip writer who broke both the scandals of Alexander Hamilton's extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds as well as the allegations that Thomas Jefferson was having children with his slave-mistress Sally Hemings.

Safire's novel is really about America's first op-ed writers, and also its first would-be bloggers.

Safire deserves a lot of the criticism that has been directed his way, but he has also written some powerful and important commentary that deserves a salute.

Besides, I'm in a curmudeonish mood this morning, with a cold that won't stop, and Safire's outlook seems more understandable to me from my current miserable vantage point.

-- Steve Clemons

In the film, Guarding Tess, Secret Service Agent Doug Chesnic (played by Nicholas Cage) shoots the foot of the man who kidnapped the President's widow (Shirley MacLaine).

Chesnic makes the bad guy (Austin Pendleton) think that he won't hesitate to shoot him dead right there, and then the kidnapper confesses and reveals the place where the former first lady is hidden. The fans cheer Chesnic rushing over this moral and legal line and crushing the resistance of this evil-doer.

I remember feeling happy that Shirley MacLaine's character would live to see another day -- but also felt conflicted as obsessive policy junkies are prone to. As I saw this theatrical assault on due process and on the civil rights of a person who happened to be a criminal, I remembered a brilliant insight that a political science teacher of mine, Hans Baerwald, once taught me.

Hans Baerwald was (and still is) one of the titans of American academia in understanding the nuts and bolts of Japan's political process -- and one of the complicated realities of Nihon no seiji (Japanese politics) is that what one sees happening on the surface is rarely what is really driving things.

Baerwald taught me that the best time to understand the genuine norms of a political and social system is when it is under stress. When things are calm, all sorts of behaviors are possible -- but stress raises the cost of being committed to a core set of principles that may be less easy to adhere to when a political system feels threatened.

9/11 pushed America into a stressful period, and some of the norms that we have held sacrosanct as a nation, particularly the civil rights of individuals accused of crimes, have been undermined by those who are less committed to our ideals in both good times and bad.

Doug Chesnic shot the foot of the bad guy to save a former President's widow -- and apparently, allegedly, American intelligence has concocted an elaborate system designed to evade U.S. laws as it promotes the torture of some it does not trust.

Read this piece from the Boston Globe today.

Here are the first few grafs:

Most here know Hill & Plakias as a family law firm that handles real estate and civil squabbles for the residents of this Boston suburb.

Yet, "extraordinary rendition," one of the earliest tools employed in the war against terror, has outraged human rights activists and former CIA agents, who say it violates the international convention on torture and amounts to "outsourcing" torture.

America's intelligence services seem to be using this single aircraft (and maybe more) to ferry a vast cadre of bad guys around the world to places that will put the screws to them in ways that we won't (well at least not since Abu Ghraib).

Read on:

In recent weeks, the practice has become nearly synonymous with the white, 20-seat, private Gulfstream jet, numbered N379P and registered in Massachusetts.

Sightings of the plane at refueling stops in Ireland and in Karachi, where it reportedly picked up another suspect have been published in newspapers across the globe and on the Internet. Records at the US Army Aeronautical Services Agency show the civil aircraft has a permit to land at US military bases worldwide.

America should be able to charge and prosecute its enemies in the light of day, and we should not fear the ability of any of these criminals to marshall a defense -- in fact, their attempt to defend themselves is our chief protection of abuse of our own civil liberties by potentially reckless and abusive national government authority.

There are too many cowboys, Doug Chesnic-style, in the Pentagon -- probably working with or around Douglas Feith -- who don't realize that "Guarding Tess" was fiction, a silly movie and not the template for a new era of criminal acts by government hidden within the shadows and nooks of American law and norms and the absence of such standards abroad.

Congratulations to Farah Stockman at the Boston Globe and the others who helped dig out this story of more nefarious deeds by our government. At this point, if I were working in the White House, I would be worried about war crimes liabilities as well.

We don't need to abandon our laws and commitment to liberty to win this war -- and if we do abandon everything that makes us a great nation to save ourselves in these dark times, then we lose anyway.

-- Steve Clemons

Many of you who stop by to read The Washington Note are very familiar and may have even begun your journey to my site through Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo.

His site turned four years old on November 12th, but he forgot until today to note his anniversary -- which we too want to salute.

My own foray into blogging would have been impossible without Josh Marshall's strong nudging and logistical help.

So, congrats Josh -- and thanks for getting me into this.

-- Steve Clemons

I gave a talk at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany a few days ago and was impressed with the city and the quality of thinking demonstrated by the students.

While my talk was billed as one in a series looking at transatlantic challenges and America's relationship with Europe, I focused on the foreign policy impacts of the election, blind spots of this administration -- particularly in the economic arena, and pondered whether this administration would be able to proactively avert some of the crises visible ahead -- or whether the U.S would be driven more by ad hoc responses to shocks. My comments about transatlantic relations were built around these three principle concerns.

I think that my talk was well-received, at least in the emails I have received from some as follow-ups. However, there was a yearning among some for greater commentary on the transatlantic relationship itself rather than on broader challenges that lie beyond the classic contours of EU-US relations.

I guess I'm one of those who is not overly sentimental about transatlantic relations and don't try to prop them up for the sake of doing so -- but think that strong EU-US relations make sense because of the myriad problems facing Americans and Europeans elsewhere in the world.

America's blindspot about the current account deficit and generally poor economic policy management will harm European interests; our ability or inability to proceed in a new direction in the Israeli-Palestinian standoff after Arafat's death is also of paramount European interest; Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapon systems is of major interest to both Europe and the U.S.; China's emergence as a responsible global power that works collaboratively with other nations is of consequence to Americans and Europeans. I could continue to draw a very long list of challenges that we each face -- but there is this demand frequently for navel-gazing at the health or lack thereof of transatlantic relations.

There are lots of folks out there who can provide better material on whether Europe will hold together or fragment, or whether it is in America's interests to encourage or discourage European cohesion. I'm one who believes that Charles Kupchan is probably right and that European and American interests are incrementally diverging -- and that Europe will ultimately spend time and political capital trying to constrain American power rather than to unite in common purpose with it to achieve noble ends.

This will take time though, and within the near to mid-term, Europe and the United States have far greater common problems to work on if they so choose -- but few lie within the dynamics of the transatlantic relationship itself and really lie in challenges in the Middle East, in Asia, in global financial and currency policy, with international development policy, and so on.

I refer folks back to Brzezinski's proposal on revitalizing the transatlantic relationship. He proposes three efforts that can give new purpose to the transatlantic relationship that involve establishing a Palestinian state, internationalizing (and de-Americanizing) troop presence in Iraq, and providing incentives to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.

This is the kind of thinking that will pump up the current pathetic stock value of the US-EU relationship. Brzezinski's plan is but one that does a worthy job of finding important tasks that American and European interests can become co-entangled and converge in common interest again. This kind of effort is probably the right kind of habit to re-learn.

Thanks to the students and faculty at Bucerius Law School, the only private law school in Germany, and particularly to the school CEO, Markus Baumanns and Transatlantic Forum advisor Michael Werz for inviting me.

Thanks also to Emily and Martin for the walking tour of Hamburg.

For those of you who can read German, if you scroll down a bit on this German web magazine, ChangeX, there is an article about think tanks in America and the New America Foundation written by Joerg Hackeschmidt.

-- Steve Clemons

Peter Bergen, my colleague who interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1997 and wrote the book Holy War Inc.; Karen Greenberg of the Center on Law and Security at New York University; and I have been working for some time on a conference that is pulling several of the world's leading experts on transnational terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism together for a conference taking place this next Thursday in the Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington.

It is open to the public, and those of you who are in town, or nearby, are welcome to attend. Just make sure that you RSVP to Jennifer Buntman at the New America Foundation as noted below, or send me an email at steve@thewashingtonnote.com.

Here is the announcement of the conference:

The New America Foundation
and
The New York University Center on Law & Security
present

6:00 p.m.
Conference Adjourned

The program is a marathon session, and I'll be there all day keeping the trains moving on time.

For those of you who have asked, we hope that C-Span will cover and broadcast the entire meeting, but that will not be confirmed to us until Wednesday.

-- Steve Clemons

In January 1998, Federal Reserve Board Deputy Governor Laurence Meyer gave a talk at the Economic Strategy Institute titled "The Economic Outlook and Challenges Facing Monetary Policy."

Commenting on the what some then called America's 'miracle economy,' Meyer said that the country's phenomenal economic strength over the last decade had been the result of "an era of positive shocks." He presciently warned that it was beyond the bounds of reason to expect a never ending spiral of positive circumstances and that negative events were probably on their way.

Today, with an unraveling dollar and other nations' central banks flirting with a reshuffle of their dollar-denominated holdings, America may be soon feeling the economic pain resulting from irresponsible economic policy management and the "dependence" part of global financial interdependence.

Stephen Roach in the New York Times welcomes the decline of the dollar as something that will discipline American overconsumption and compel other nations to loosen their labor markets and take measures to spur their own domestic demand. He may be right, but I see the declining dollar as more the manifestation of the absence of strategy and policy than the result of one.

If he sees the dollar's decline as a welcome shock that will compel better economic housekeeping in Washington, I'm not sure I feel the same sense of relief. Rather, I have the instinct that the plummeting dollar, China's positioning that it may be less interested in purchasing treasury bonds, and general global disdain for American foreign policy and President Bush are converging, gathering speed, and becoming economic forces beyond control.

Alan Greenspan's comments about the dollar recently are several years too late and appear to be more political, cover-his-ass moves than prognostications regarding wise policy.

I hope that Roach is right and that the decline in the dollar will order our accounts in such a way that there is not a destabilizing financial quake along some of the world's most seriously imbalanced economic fault lines. I fear, however, that this normal economic pessimist is far too optimistic.

Even if his scenario takes its best course, many in America and abroad will lose jobs and feel more poor tomorrow than they do today. To some degree, standards of living will fall as the dollar is less able to pay for the lifestyles Americans enjoy.

Major currency tsunamis may hit some developing economies, particularly in Southeast Asia, as American purchasing capacity dries up, and financial positions held by hedge funds and other global investors may rapidly unwind as the unexpected scenario of the collapse of American demand becomes a real nightmare.

And what is really scary is that this could all get much worse than even imagined.

-- Steve Clemons

I have just arrived back in the U.S. from a trip from Hamburg that took me through Frankfurt, then JFK Airport, then had an interesting taxi cab ride to La Guardia -- and then the bumpiest flight I've had in years from La Guardia to Reagan National. But, I'm back.

I have a lot to be thankful for, but I know that there are many folks having a tough time with this economy right now -- and many on the front lines of this Iraq mess to whom we owe a great deal of gratitude. We need to focus on bringing these people home.

We also need to focus on terminating Tom Delay's tenure in the House, and we need war-profiteering hearings in the Senate. There is much to do after this holiday.

Read Tom Friedman's New York Times piece today that I thought was utterly strange and showed that Tom's ego is getting in the way of his commentary on public policy and ethics. But that can happen to all of us.

I did sort of like the last graf:

. . .then I want to be just a simple blue-state red-state American. I want to take time on this Thanksgiving to thank God I live in a country where, despite so much rampant selfishness, the public schools still manage to produce young men and women ready to voluntarily risk their lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to spread the opportunity of freedom and to protect my own. And I want to thank them for doing this, even though on so many days in so many ways we really don't deserve them.

I do think it is amazing that there are so many soldiers willing to sacrifice all for the nation when America has such self-dealing going on among members of Congress and some in the administration -- and I mean in both parties. Much to think about today.

To all out there, you and your friends and families -- have a great Thanksgiving.

-- Steve Clemons

Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson have a must-read double hitter on the CIA on the TomGram today. Chalmers Johnson's article, "HOW TO CREATE A WIA: A WORTHLESS INTELLIGENCE AGENCY," follows Engelhard's thougtfully provocative introduction.

After reporting what has been widely reported about Porter Goss's politicization of the intelligence staff and their objectives, Johnson reminds us that this is not in fact a new behavior for CIA chiefs.

Chalmers Johnson writes:

This approach is not new, even though former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman declares that "the current situation is the worst intelligence scandal in the nation's history."[2]

The same is likely to be true today and the outcome is likely to be similar. Just as thirty years ago, an administration refused to pay attention to its own internal intelligence assessments and lost the Vietnam War, so another administration has again wrapped itself in a fantasy bubble of wishful thinking and so is losing the war it started in Iraq.

Here are some other zinger lines that bring some historical context to the debate about The Agency:

Regardless of what it most enjoys doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing the president with accurate information to enable him to avoid a surprise attack and protect the national security.

Over the years the powers of the DCI to compel a president to read an intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted, and when information supplied to the president about a possible attack or any other matter under the CIA's imprimatur has been leaked to the public, both the Agency and the intelligence have become politically radioactive.

George Bush already has serious problems in receiving feedback about the consequences of his policy choices. He acknowledges that he doesn't read much, certainly not the major papers. He is purging the administration's civil service and political appointee ranks of those considered disloyal.

As Tom Engelhardt writes in his opening graf:

It's well known that Washington was originally built on a pestilential swamp. Right now, the Bush administration is in the process of draining its own "swamp" of potential critics and doubters of any sort and installing "family" members, many from George's (and Karl's) old Texas days, others "adoptees" like Condoleezza Rice, ever more firmly in positions of ever greater power.

I have had some luck in reaching some people from the intelligence sector who want to share their view on what is happening on the inside. So, stay tuned for that.

However, it is increasingly clear to me that if Bush's intel operations are no longer going to provide the kind if intelligence necessary to make the tough choices in America's security policy, others in the non-covert, non-cleared world are going to have to supplant this intelligence with sound thinking and good material in the public sphere.

The only way it seems to me to operate in this kind of environment is for private players -- public intellectuals, solutions oriented think tankers, NGOs, journalists, public policy intellectuals, and others -- to focus on embarrassing the idiotic assessments and decisions of a government that has made itself blind.

The second step, perhaps the most important one, is to put better ideas on the table.

-- Steve Clemons

If there is one gap between Americans and the rest of the world that I immediately notice whenever I travel and talk politics, it is that the rest of the world is often irritated by and envious of American self-confidence.

Others see Americans as walking boldly through the world without regard for constraints, whereas citizens and nations through the rest of the world are all too aware of the constraints on themselves, their hopes and actions.

To some degree, America has a domestic version of this tense battle brewing now -- between neoconservatives who believe that America should be about making sure that the right values are generated and pursued inside other countries that matter to us and that there are few costs too high to pay to achieve that goal vs. those who think that before venturing off on values-driven crusades abroad, core American interests need to be better off at the end of the effort than they were before.

There are some Americans, including myself, who see the Iraq War as already too costly in terms of casualties and financial costs but also in the damaging negative impact on the 'mystique of American power.' The Iraq escapade has shown the limits of American power, and that's not a good thing when most of the rest of the world is irritated with American behavior.

In my view, we are about to be taught a lesson by a world that wants America to be tethered down. And the world is going to hit America where it has a serious blindspot at the moment -- on the economic front. We are on our way to becoming a much poorer, on relative terms, superpower with the Chinese, Japanese and Europeans using currency management and debt dependency to constrain our options.

The International Herald Tribune today ran a piece by Eric Pfanner today about the Russians possibly juggling their reserve currency portfolio and offsetting the dollar-denominated parts of their reserves by adding more euros.

American economists and central bankers seem to scoff at the notion of the U.S. dollar losing its reserve currency status. But in revolutionary times, when everything seems to be changing, these sorts of anachronistic attitudes about permanence seem to be very wrong-headed. What is clear is that the Euro has become increasingly important in global transactions, and its vector is pointed up. The dollar's vector is pointed down. We need to take stock of what that means -- and what it may mean is that the bad behaviors America has been able to get away with for so long in terms of piling up debt and maintaining an irresponsibly high current account deficit may soon be impossible to maintain.

Yesterday, there was a piece in the Financial Times that I cannot link that argued that China was holding its own vs. the United States in the debate about currency revaluation. What is clear here is that China recognizes it has some latitude over U.S. actions now -- and seems willing to say this publicly. During the many years that America went through the charade of debate China's most favored nation status and trying to weigh human rights violation concerns with economic priorities, America never really came close to using any of the leverage it had over China through this annual MFN debate. But already, China has learned that it has leverage over U.S. actions.

Alan Greenspan is now saying that the current account rising as fast as it is is a bad thing and that the dropping dollar should concern us. Some of us are ticked off that Alan Greenspan is three years too late, and that this is Greenspan covering his ass -- not good public policy commentary.

This economic charade from the White House has been going on for some time and lots of commentators -- even manic neoliberals like Martin Wolf of the FT -- have been worried about the compounding effect a rapidly growing American current account deficit combined with some kind of currency shock.

America cannot afford what it is buying from the rest of the world -- it's as simple as that. That is why the dollar is falling -- but with the Chinese yuan falling at a rate equal to the falling dollar, we can't but help keep buying from them, and the Chinese help financing our ability to buy their products. This can't continue -- and when it ends, the reality will be that Americans broadly will see their living standards fall.

So, America is walking blindly into an economic morass of constraints that it has largely inflicted on itself, and other key nations will not be able to help themselves from helping to fasten a tether here and there to further tie down the America that it wants to walk less boldly through their world.

-- Steve Clemons

I am traveling right now and feel a bit disconnected from the major news -- particularly the latest from Fallujah and also Istook-gate (Congressman Istook's attempts to make any American citizen's tax returns easy prey for peeping Toms on Congressional Appropriations Committees).

But on the trivial but interesting, I wanted to report that while U.S. airlines no longer provide stainless steel knives but instead give travelers plastic, Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa use good old sturdy knives with a good sharp edge. Maybe they aren't box-cutters, but it seems odd for folks to keep having their small Swiss army knives taken when something so much bigger is available on the airplane.

IMPRESSIVE THEFT: DAIMLERCHRYSLER CEO HAS CAR STOLEN

Some of you may not know the name Juergen Schrempp, but he is the feisty CEO of DaimlerChrysler. His million dollar armored limousine was just stolen in Stuttgart, the home base for the auto manufacturer.

This car has homing devices on it, and they still haven't been able to locate it. Perhaps they just have put an old-fashioned 'club' on the steering wheel.

I don't know if this says much about Schrempp or the questionable theft-protection systems of a fancy Mercedes-Benz, but it does tell us that Stuttgart thieves know what they are doing.

More to come after I get situated in Hamburg.

-- Steve Clemons

I have to admit to needing more information before I 'take sides' in the ongoing CIA wars. Changing the culture of any institution is a complicated and messy process, but it looks like I will have an opportunity to meet more than one agent/analyst from the inside who will share some views with me.

Such meetings only provide snapshots, not grand landscapes of understanding. Some of you have posted that meeting covert agents and analysts who work on classified material may leave me vulnerable to their spin, and that is true. I just need to absorb as much public and anecdotal material as possible to write further about what may be going on in America's intelligence bureaucracy.

David Kaplan and Kevin Whitelaw have more pieces of the puzzle, however, and provide some intriguing insights about the odd departure of super-spy Stephen Kappes. This just appeared in today's issue of U.S. News & World Report.

Here is the enticing opening to a very interesting article:

To those who worked with him, Stephen Kappes seemed the perfect choice to lead the covert side of the CIA in the midst of the war on terrorism. Appointed in June, Kappes, a former marine, is a veteran CIA case officer who served in dangerous and difficult postings in Moscow and Pakistan. More recently, he reported directly to President Bush as the CIA's point man in secret high-stakes negotiations with Libya that ended the rogue state's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

As the nation fights wars on multiple fronts, the episode has left many questioning Goss's weeks-old reign and his ability to manage the far-flung intelligence community on the front lines of the nation's defense.

I leave this evening for Hamburg, Germany where I am delivering one of the Transatlantic Lectures at the Bucerius Law School there. The meeting is at 7 p.m., Wednesday, 24 November, and is open to the public for those who are tripping through Hamburg this week. I will be giving a talk titled, ""New Transatlantic Visions or a New Round of Nightmares? Considering the Impact of November's U.S. Presidential Election."

-- Steve Clemons

I just read Jim Pinkerton's "Coalition of the . . ?" on TechCentralStation.com and liked the jump into the future and then look back approach to thinking about this war.

Pinkerton's back-looking comments on Fallujah:

Within hours of Bush's victory, many leading American hawks raised the issue of Fallujah, Iraq, which had come to symbolize American frustration over with the handling of Operation Iraqi Freedom in the previous 20 months. Retired Army Colonel Ralph Peters called the American failure to destroy the city in April 2004-in the wake of the orgiastic murder of four American contractors-a "fateful mistake"; but then, with the election done with, Peters declared that the time had come for bold action:

But while the kill ratio for al-Fajr proved to be highly favorable to American arms, the operation failed -- not only to catch Zarqawi, but also to engage the bulk of insurgent forces. Indeed, even the enemy "body count" proved difficult to ascertain, since women and children had joined in the anti-American fighting. Did a dead ten-year-old count as "collateral damage" or as a "dead terrorist"? So in the battle of world public opinion, the US lost. Once "Willing" allies faded away from the Coalition; meanwhile, across the rest of Iraq, guerilla attacks intensified.

The entire article is interesting and worth absorbing -- but mostly I think it is useful to think about how the future will look at us and the decisions we are collectively making.

-- Steve Clemons