One of the mistakes of American foreign policy over the last several decades was to not heavily invest in, build, and fortify serious multilateral security and economic institutions among Asian nations.

America has not really taken APEC seriously and on the security front has long chosen to rely on bilateral arrangements between the U.S. and every nation we care about in Asia rather than trying to sew them together in a broader network. One exception to this has been occasional military exercises involving U.S., Japanese, Australian, and occastionally Korean forces -- but generally, America's strategy has been to secure stability in Asia through a set of robust bilateral arrangements rather than a multilateral structure, as in NATO.

One of the interesting consequences of this strategy is that it puts little pressure on the governments in these regions to mature very far beyond their dependence on U.S. forces. It also allows them to bully each other over long term cultural and historical disputes, knowing that at the end of the day that they can get away with various manipulations of the historical record -- and this goes for Japan, China, and Korea -- because America provides an ultimate buffer between them when it comes to any hot conflict.

China, however, may be leap-frogging America's anachronistic and inefficient set of bilateral deals by rooting the first serious efforts in some time of a China-centric multilateralism in the region. China has called for an annual East Asian Economic Summit and the establishment of and East Asian Community that could very well become the dominant structural fabric of Northeast and Southeast Asia.

Yes, there are other networks and forums -- including the ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN plus three, and there have been efforts at economic insitution-building like former Malaysian Prime Minister's East Asian Economic Caucus. And of course, there is APEC that seems to be barely kicking anymore.

But China seems to know that there is a genuine opportunity in instituion-building among a great cross-section of regional stakeholders. Frankly, this kind of diplomacy -- as we once forged together in Europe -- is exactly what Asia has needed for a long time, and in my view, the U.S. should have been at the helm of this process. Unfortunately, we have been tethered down by the constraints of our own bilateral relations, afraid of becoming less significant to our partner countries if alternative arrangements were introduced.

Here is an interesting excerpt from a Washington Post article titled "China's Quiet Rise Casts Wide Shadow" by Edward Cody. It's a long tract, so I won't italicize:

**********
The shift in status, increasingly clear over the past year, has changed the way Chinese officials view their country's international role as well as the way other Asians look to Beijing for cues. In many ways, China has started to act like a traditional big power, tending to its regional interests and pulling smaller neighbors along in its wake.

The new Chinese role has been evident recently in international efforts to deal with North Korea's declared nuclear arsenal. When Kim Jong Il's government declared Feb. 10 that it was suspending participation in Chinese-sponsored six-nation nuclear talks, the question that arose immediately in Asian capitals and beyond was: What will China do about it?

Japan, whose economy surpasses China's by a large margin, in some ways has been the Asian country most uncomfortable with China's rising stature. The oil sources and sea lanes increasingly seen as vital by China and its traders have long been viewed the same way by Japan. In that light, Japan's government has tightened strategic cooperation with the United States, and in December, it issued a 10-year defense program that identified China as a potential threat.

Chinese officials and foreign policy specialists emphasized in interviews that they had no intention of challenging the U.S. role as Asia's main military power, a fact of life here since World War II. U.S. power was on vivid display in East Asia after the Dec. 26 tsunami in southern Asia, with a U.S. carrier group dispatching helicopters to deliver food and medicine to hard-hit Indonesian towns while China's navy was nowhere on the horizon.

But with 1.3 billion people, 3.7 million square miles of territory and a $1.4 trillion economy, China is the rising regional leader in other fields. This view has come into focus particularly over the last year, when U.S. diplomacy has seemed preoccupied with Iraq or anti-terrorism and China increasingly has asserted its pre-eminence.

"There is now this feeling that we have to consult the Chinese," said Abdul Razak Baginda of the Malaysian Strategic Research Center. He added, "We have to accept some degree of Chinese leadership, particularly in light of the lack of leadership elsewhere."

From Outsiders to Insiders

China's leadership has become visible in small but telling ways. Premier Wen Jiabao was clearly the star, for instance, at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit conference in Laos in November. Lower-ranking ASEAN diplomats have begun to turn to Chinese colleagues for guidance during international meetings, according to a senior foreign diplomat with long experience at such Asian gatherings.

"I was struck by how naturally, even at the working level, the other Asians looked to China and how naturally China played that role," the diplomat said, noting that only a few years ago, Chinese diplomats were viewed as outsiders.

The change also comes across in bigger and more formal ways. In particular, China has taken the lead in organizing an East Asian summit conference for next November that, according to Chinese and other observers, will formalize Chinese regional leadership in several aspects.

A senior Chinese diplomat said it had not been decided whether the United States will be invited to attend and, if so, in what capacity. That the question of U.S. participation is even on the table dramatizes the shift in Asia's diplomatic landscape.

As envisioned by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the summit deliberately frames participation on a country-by-country basis, dispersing ASEAN's combined weight and enhancing China's role as first among equals. "It's very subtle, but it could be very important," the senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official said.

The ASEAN countries -- Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- increasingly have begun to deal with China individually rather than as a bloc. As a result, an association that began with U.S. encouragement in 1967 in large measure to fend off Communist Chinese influence has evolved into a forum through which China exercises its regional leadership.

Other examples of Chinese leadership include the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security forum comprising China, Russia and four former Soviet republics along China's northwest borders. As a part of this grouping, China's formerly standoffish military recently held anti-terrorism exercises with Kazakhstan and plans exercises next fall with the Russian military.

But China's new face has been most apparent in its dealings with the ASEAN countries, mainly because of the economic equation. At China's initiative, for instance, ASEAN countries and China in December agreed to create a free-trade zone by 2010, which would further integrate neighboring countries into China's orbit. (end)
******

I don't believe that China's diplomatic success should necessarily be feared or should inspire a new round of Project for the New American Century-style letters calling for containment of China.

But it would be a serious mistake to underestimate China in today's global climate, and secondly -- what has been missing in my view from Bush's foreign policy is a serious and coherent strategy that is going to promote principled and stabilizing American engagement with the world.

Engagement means more than fighting wars and occupying small nations. There is a long list of other tools of diplomacy and "global presence" that need serious attention from this administration and the Congress.

And the Millennium Challenge Fund is not the silver bullet.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note: I cannot hyperlink many items to this post because of the place I am writing in Hawaii and will try to add them later. SCC)

I like watching tennis and particularly enjoy watching Roger Federer and Andre Agassi play, as long as my tennis-fanatic friend is with me to explain the points and all the bad calls by judges.

But this match in Dubai makes my head spin. It's certainly dramatic to play a game of tennis on a building's top floor heliport in a small Middle East country. But how can this kind of exhibition game do anything but inflame the passions of Middle East "have-nots" against the arrogance and indifference of the "haves" throughout the region?

Isn't this kind of theatre just a bit over the top given the convulsions going on in that part of the world?

Just struck me as intensely out of touch with the "hearts and minds" challenges we have in that region. But maybe I'm missing something.

-- Steve Clemons

Thanks to all of you who signed the Gunner Palace petition requesting that the Motion Picture Association of America revise its "R" rating of the film to "PG-13".

This is a big win for Michael Tucker who shot this documentary and the soldiers whose story he helps tell in their words.

The New America Foundation hosted 400 people to see the film at a recent screening in DC at which the film producer and several of the soldiers attended. E-mail reactions sent to me have been overwhelmingly positive and supportive about Gunner Palace and its themes. See it if you can.

I am sort of stunned that the good guys actually won one. Neat.

-- Steve Clemons

I am just wrapping up an interesting conference in Kauai sponsored by the BMW Foundation which assembled about 50 alumni of the foundation's various young leaders programs over the last decade. We had a bunch of Russians here, Germans, Chinese, Americans, and some individuals from Singapore, Canada, the Netherlands, and India. Fascinating group of people.

One of the dignitaries that spent yesterday morning with us was Stan Shih, founding Chairman & former CEO of Acer, one of the largest computer firms in the world and based in Taiwan. He spoke on the subject of "Building Identity and Trust in Business," and when he concluded, I asked him a question.

I said that in my previous experience as Executive Director of the Japan America Society of Southern California in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, I noted that the most difficult challenge Japanese multinational firms that invested in America had was that they often had repugnant personnel policies when it came to women and minorities and found themselves sued left and right.

I asked whether his firm and other major Asian firms -- particularly those that were rooted in China and Taiwan -- had modified their cultures to take advantage of the strengths in diversity, particularly with regard to women, ethnic minorities, and gay people.

Stan Shih then rambled on for about ten minutes without ever mentioning the word "woman", the word "gay" or the word "minority". He completely avoided the question. . .so a colleague in the conference, Joyce Davis, former Deputy Foreign Editor at Knight-Ridder, asked him again point blank what his views on Acer's corporate culture and women and minorities were.

While acknowledging that his wife (who was in the room) had helped him start Acer, Stan Shih stated that "the problem is not with companies but with Chinese society -- and in Chinese society, the role of women is to take care of the family."

On the one hand, I'm glad Shih didn't gloss-up his views about this subject. And he's probably right, overall, that Chinese firms are going to be fairly hostile environments for women. He didn't get to minorities and didn't elaborate. Time was up.

But like is happening in Japan today, I imagine that the very best female talent in China is going to escape that country as soon as possible.

Stan Shih is not just any ordinary CEO. He is one of Asia's top two or three best known corporate personalities. He is a regular at the Davos World Economic Forum and fits the bill for what Sam Huntington has called 'Davos Man.'

With all of the prosletyzing America is doing recently about democracy and human rights, particularly women's rights, perhaps we should require some diversity training for Asian-based CEOs who want to operate firms in America or partner with U.S. firms operating abroad.

I realize that that this proposal is facetious -- but I have to admit to being somewhat floored by Shih's first non-response and then blunt response to a question about modern management policies.

I certainly don't have any "trust" in that kind of corporate or political culture he described.

-- Steve Clemons

A few weeks ago, I happened to be included at a dinner at the home of the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Singapore Embassy, Susan Sim, who invited a small handful of people together to toast a mutual friend. One of the other guests was a senior Pentagon official who covers East Asia & Pacific Affairs.

I told him that it seemed to me that the distraction of Iraq was harming American interests in several ways. First, America had shown the world its limits -- financially and militarily -- with the Iraq invasion and occupation. The consequences of this are enormous as it erodes the confidence that allies have in our ability to stand with them in times of crisis and incentivizes the world's bad actors to maximize their objectives during a time when the American response will be more bluster than bite.

Secondly, the Iraq conflict has distracted America from many other important foreign policy questions. American leadership seems invisible in global trade policy today. The White House also seems to have informally kicked USTR out of the Cabinet -- with the White House statement that all cabinet level appointments had now been concluded, implying cryptically that USTR and the Environmental Protection Agency were now demoted departments.

As I have written previously, China has been on a major charm offensive in the Asia Pacific region -- while Japanese ministers have been pleading for the last 18 months for the U.S. not to let its level of visibility and engagement in Asia slip any further. Our absence at Asia-Pacific forums of various kinds had created a void which Chinese diplomacy was quickly filling.

Furthermore, I told him the old joke that "America fought the Cold War, but Japan won" -- and said that the next one-liner would be that "America fought the war on terror, but China won."

China looks like the oasis of stability amidst global turmoil, receiving more than $50 billion a year now in foreign direct investment. Just last month, China surpassed the United States as Japan's largest trading partner -- and China too has surpassed Japan as America's largest overseas trading partner (second to Canada).

China's leadership realizes that the war in Iraq has been good for its interests. We have needed China's cooperation on global terror, on nuclear proliferation questions, on putting some pressure on Kim Jong Il and North Korea. China finances America's gluttonous consumption habits and helps keep American inflation down by exporting cheap products and competing with us with its far cheaper labor.

John Negroponte and Porter Goss should be worrying that no matter whether one favors engagement with China (which I do) or containment (more of a Richard Perle line), China may work covertly to keep America as distracted as possible with its Middle East agenda and obligations.

The neocons have never been comfortable with our recent closeness and cooperation with China -- and if one studies the roster of PNAC letters and commentary closely, before 9/11 -- there were actually more written and produced items on the threat China represented than all of those focused on Israel and broader Middle East concerns.

This senior Pentagon official told me to wait a few weeks; he said that a new comprehensive China initiative was on its way.

And it has arrived -- and is fascinating. Japan has for the first time ever publicly declared stability within the Taiwan Straits and on Taiwan itself as within its security interests and declared its intention to support U.S. forces if any conflict were to take place with China over Taiwan.

This is not completely new news. Previous National Security Advisors to the President for East Asia Douglas Paal (who advised President George H.W. Bush) and Sandra Kristoff (who advised President Clinton) made off-the-record comments years ago that our understanding was that Japan "would be with us" in any conflict involving Taiwan.

But going public is a big deal. I have a variety of suspicions on why Japan did make their support of America's Taiwan defense policy overt. Such a declaration makes inter-operability more of a reality, and helps tie U.S. forces to Japanese defense capabitility as much as the other way around.

But America probably compelled Japan's declaration for several other reasons. First, America wanted Japan to loudly declare its allegiance to America -- and its general opposition to China's Taiwan pretensions and broader regional security ambitions. With China looming ever larger -- and now larger than the U.S. -- in the Japan's economy, there are worries that Japan's politics will tilt away from the U.S. and toward China. John Foster Dulles worried about that exact problem after World War II and went to great lengths to not only rebuild Japan's powerhouse economic base after the war but embedded it deeply into the U.S. economy to keep Japan from slipping back into a Chinese orbit and courtship.

Second and perhaps most obvious, America wanted this Japan declaration to warn China not to escalate its growing buildup of forces adjacent to Taiwan.

Third, I think America is trying to punish China for failing to keep North Korea reigned in.

In Europe, President Bush has brought one negative item of contention in what otherwise has been a cosmetic love-fest, and that was his opposition to Europe lifting its arms export ban to China.

Rumsfeld as well has said that America needs to revisit and review the terms of its engagement with China.

On the trade front, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the AFL/CIO are lining up to get U.S. government support for another assault on China's cheap yuan strategy.

On one hand, I'm glad that Washington seems to be paying attention to other potential problems in the world while it is trying to manage its Iraq quagmire.

But a lot of what is unfolding from the Bush administration on its seemingly new China policy is puffery and seems to be a lot like the gopher game, in which we jump from one issue we hit on the head until we are distracted by another.

China may be just the distraction of the moment -- something to keep the mind fuzzy and out of focus while Members of Congress give the President his full $82 billion request for America's Afghan and Iraq operations.

But China is not the kind of challenge that should be so trivially managed. Its clear that America has initiated a new comprehensive strategy of pressuring China -- and is using our agent in Asia, Japan, to help in that effort.

But the bottom line is that China knows beneath the surface commotion, America has few options to pose a serious challenge to its interests right now. This is something we need to fix.

Those who are blindly calling for America to stay the course in Iraq -- through thick and thin -- and expenditures of some $80-$90 billion a year really need to investigate the costs to America because of our inability to credibly deter bad behavior in any other part of the world.

And what is so frustrating is that those policymakers who ultimately agree with me on the costs as I've described them just blindly jump into line to provide more troops and mountains of additional money to a globally stretched Pentagon that doesn't provide the security deliverables it should be providing now.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note: I am traveling and unable to hyperlink items to this post -- will do so at a later time)

I'm at a foreign policy conference in Kauai today that is going to preempt my posting anything until tonight -- but I will be back later today with thoughts on America's revived bravado vs. China.

-- Steve Clemons

With all of the recruiting our military services do among our country's youth -- it is outrageous that the Motion Picture Association of America would try and bar youth from seeing Gunner Palace. This documentary is about as honest and unbiased a documentary on the realities of a soldier's life in Baghdad as I could imagine.

I just signed this electronic petition to MPAA President Dan Glickman that reads:

We the undersigned demand that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) immediately change the voluntary movie rating assigned to the upcoming Iraq War documentary film "Gunner Palace" from "R" (Restricted) to "PG-13".

The appeal will be decided Thursday this week -- so whether you supported this war or not, this collage of soldier's stories -- in their own, unedited words -- deserves to be seen broadly in America.

I hope you will sign the linked petition -- and get your friends, brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, local national guard units and soldiers -- to sign too.

Thanks.

-- Steve Clemons

I posted a comment the day before yesterday on a New America Foundation sponsored screening that I helped host (with my colleague Jenny Buntman) of Gunner Palace.

There were some interesting folks in the audience, including the mother of one of the memorable characters in Michael Tucker's documentary. I think his name was Sargent Beasley, but I may have the name wrong. This was her first time seeing the film -- and meeting her, seeing her reactions to the environment her son lived in day after day in Baghdad, added a dimension of gritty humanity to the evening and viewing.

In the film, Beasley (if I have his name right) said that Americans had no idea what was going on over in Iraq. He said they wouldn't tune in if they could and said that even if people did see Michael Tucker's film, they'd forget it by the time the evening sitcoms were on. We wouldn't remember him, he said.

It's been a few days for me though, and this film keeps churning around in my head. It's important to see and ought to be required viewing for all members of Congress and the administration who are making decisions about our troops.

This note below was sent to me by Brady Van Engelen, one of the soldiers profiled in the Time Magazine person of the year issue in December 2003. He was shot in the head by a sniper a few months later -- and survived. He spent his recovery time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I shared with him that many readers of this blog had made phone card and financial donations to help the soldiers and their families at Walter Reed.

Brady Van Engelen wrote:

Mr. Clemons,

Brady Van Engelen

This war veteran -- a very young man -- has it exactly right (except that he really needs to call me Steve).

We should see what is happening with our tax dollars and we should engage in a principled and serious debate about this war has wrought, good and bad, and whether those who led us in this direction should be praised or criticized and removed from the helm of foreign policy making.

Michael Tucker's film provides a somewhat haunting collage of memorable faces and personalities of young men and women doing what they were ordered to do in Baghdad -- and I have to think that as intensely unique and human each of these soldiers in the 2/3 Field Artillery was on the screen, Tucker could have found these kinds of people throughout the ranks of those deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meeting them, particularly John Powers and Brady Van Engelen (and his fiance), just underscores for me why it is so important to hold our political leaders accountable for their successes and failures -- and Captain John Powers said it best the other night when he reported that he and many other soldiers no longer know what our objectives in Iraq are.

-- Steve Clemons

Glen Fukushima has just been announced President of Airbus Japan. This is huge, earth-shaking news for US-Japan trade types.

Glen Fukushima, who is a member of the Board of Directors of the Japan Policy Research Institute which I co-founded with Chalmers Johnson, has been an American trade policy official and businessman committed to prying open Japan's markets to American products and services. He would have been a great U.S. Trade Representative himself or even a brilliant U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

Though, I'm pretty sure Glen started off as a Republican -- working under Carla Hills years ago at USTR, he gravitated left politically, at least until he got to the sensible center, and like many of us pined for a president who took economic issues seriously. Bill Clinton flirted with economic strategy -- and Bob Rubin actually chose a course of manic neoliberalism, which undermined much of what people like Glen and I had been arguing for at the micro-economic level, but still. . .it was strategy.

Glen has headed up AT&T's operations in Japan, as well as Cadence Electronics. He recently was chief at NCR's operation -- before this Airbus opportunity opened up.

My sense is that Airbus must have offered Glen a pretty lucrative set of incentives to join them. (Glen -- next time, the coffee in the Orchid Room is on you; actually, it always has been. He's a great host). Fukushima has been a tireless warrior for American political and economic interests -- but now he's gone to work for the Europeans.

Of course, the line we all parroted was if we opened up markets for American goods and services, it was good for the world. Now, Glen will be able to say that his success for Europe will also mean success for competition writ large -- and for American interests.

A few years ago, I visited the Airbus operation in Toulouse, France and walked through their mock new superjet. The first one off the line sold to Singapore Airlines.

Airbus told me that they knew that Boeing had a nearly impenetrable fortress around Japan, Korea, and Taiwan when it came to airplane sales because of the complicity between American defense policy interests and Boeing sales -- but they planned to go right into the shogun's den, so to speak, and set up an office in Tokyo -- and try and seduce some of those Japanese airlines away from their lock-step obligations to the U.S. and Boeing.

They have selected an extremely capable and well-connected guy to do that. What's more is that the President of Boeing Japan is also on the Board of Directors of the Japan Policy Research Institute and an old friend -- and one of Fukushima's oldest and best friends, Skipp Orr. Dinners with Skipp and Glen are going to be the hot ticket in Tokyo.

I imagine that part of Fukushima's calculus is that there is no international economic strategy out of the White House any longer -- except the absence of strategy. And thus, his self-adopted ethic of fighting for American political and economic leverage in Japan makes no sense when the President and his cabinet hardly give a damn about Japanese markets or market-opening abroad generally any longer.

Very interesting news.....and just to give him appropriate credit, Chris Nelson's Nelson Report had this in its gossip sheet a month ago -- but then retracted it. Fukushima, I think, is a subscriber.

Good job Chris.

-- Steve Clemons

A good friend at a local news bureau just shared with me his office's standard letter for requesting a "hard pass" for access to the White House press corps.

Jeff Gannon/James Guckert could not get this kind of pass -- and instead got a daily pass which had to be secured by faxing a slightly more simple request to the White House -- lower press office -- with full name, date of birth, and social security number. These day passes are apparently easy to secure. However, Gannon/Guckert would have had to have someone approving him on the inside and/or regularly waiving him in with a "request for meeting."

There is even less security screening for those going to such meetings if the White House staffer has indicated to the guards to waive someone in.

Here is the standard request letter:

January 24, 2005

XXXXXX XXXXXXX
Bureau Chief

-- Steve Clemons

SPC Stuart Wilf is a character that I'm going to have a hard time forgetting. He was one of the soldiers profiled in the documentary, Gunner Palace, soon to be released across the country. He's from Colorado Springs -- and might be President someday.

Wilf was a kid -- joined the military out of high school -- and is clearly into video games, hard-grinding electric rock, and having fun times. By the end of the film, he is far more sober about everything -- and he and his fellow gunners are counting the days to get out of the military and making us much of the hell hole they are in as they can -- with their improv rap and the occasional party in Uday Hussein's former palace.

The New America Foundation and The Washington Note hosted a rather well-attended screening of Gunner Palace last night and invited about 400 wonkish friends and journalists to see it. This was my second time.

The first time through I thought what I was seeing was a collage of day-in-the-life vignettes of young kids with guns who were way over their heads in the complex culture of good and bad Iraq. But this time, I tried to watch the film as if I were a strong proponent of the war.

Michael Tucker, the Director, has an interesting product in this film because I'm convinced that while he is giving his viewers insights into the realities of soldiers who are on the front-line patrolling nasty Baghdad neighborhoods, those who see this film will see their biases reinforced. With my head wired to be a pro-Bush, pro-war American, I saw brave soldiers doing what needed to be done for an idealism worth dying for (and some of them did indeed die).

But as someone opposed to this war from the beginning, I saw a clash of cultures and objectives that was never going to be softened and an enormous chasm between troops who were heavy in armour and guns and the Iraqi population heavy in complexity, religion, and opaque social norms. I felt terrible for some of the Iraqis in this film whose homes were destroyed when the soldiers had to break in -- but you could see in their eyes a powerful sense of disdain for the Americans and a confidence that the Iraqis, no matter what their plight, would be there long after the Americans were gone.

There were Iraqis arrested in this film for suspected bomb-making and terror-cell financing and sent off to Abu Ghraib. Michael Tucker documents that no evidence was found in one of these cases -- and yet those arrested, including a self-identified Iraqi journalist, were sent off to Saddam Hussein's former evil prison -- one that America made no less evil.

One really sees the insanity and fragility of our presence in Iraq. The soldiers -- for whom I have enormous respect -- are there on the front line not knowing what their objectives are anymore. My sense is that most of them don't know why we are there anymore, and according to one soldier who appeared in the film and spoke afterword, 8 out of 10 soldiers who can get out of the service are leaving.

To be fair, we had another recently returned soldier in the audience who was a strong advocate for our presence there and thought that the CA-units (civil authority units) on our side were doing great things for the communities in which they worked but that there was little recognition of this.

After the screening, I asked Michael Tucker, the producer and director of the film and the one who embedded himself in the lives and circumstances of these particular soldiers, about the disconnect he felt between Washington policymakers and pundits and the story he was helping to tell on the film. He reported, as he has elsewhere around the country, that he wanted to "keep the politics out of the film and just show things as they were."

Seeing things as they were was enough to convince me that success is going to be extremely difficult to achieve there -- and after thousands of lives lost and after spending nearly $12,000 per Iraqi on this invasion and occupation -- one wonders what success, if achievable, will cost in lives and treasure.

But the two highlights of the evening for me were meeting former Captain Jonathan Powers and former 1st Lietenant Brady van Engelen. Both of these gentlemen were part of the unit that Gunner Palace profiled. Powers appears in the movie -- and I think, though am not sure, that Engelen came on later.

Van Engelen replaced Ben Colgan, who was one of the personalities in the documentary later killed by snipers.

Van Engelen happened to be profiled in the Time Magazine Person of the Year issue in December 2003 -- and was subsequently shot in the head by snipers and survived. His story is here. He was quiet, with his fiance, and we didn't talk all that much,. However, I learned enough from him that he felt it was very important for Americans to see the reality of what our troops are living with in Iraq and what sacrifices they are making -- as we watch in comfort our favorite weekly sitcoms.

Jonathan Powers was amazing though -- and eloquent. While "Wilf" whom I noted above commented that he might just end up as President one day (and he has the charisma to possibly pull off something like that), Powers does have a good sense of politics -- and is exactly the opposite of Director Michael Tucker when it comes to the question of politics and war.

Powers wants politics in it -- and wants the politicians, the pundits, and the thinkers and journalists to be there on the front line so that the political calculus that created the environment at Gunner Palace gets the feed-back of both the good and the bad of what these military men and women are experiencing.

He made the very good point that on the same day that there was a bombing with dozens killed -- that story ended up buried in the paper whereas the front page of USA Today featured how much money Americans were spending dressing up their pets.

Powers was also brazen and said something very important at the end of the evening -- just before we broke up the public part of the event and went to a local bar. He seemed angry about the financial scandals regarding the lost $9 billion. He said we shouldn't be fighting and wasting energy about Social Security reform. We should be dealing with real issues.

The issue he said mattered was that the missing $9 billion wasn't missing at all. He said that he had had a lot to do with financial management issues and the distribution of money in Baghdad -- and CPA and the military knew exactly where that money went and into whose hands. They were shoveling it out to the people American authorities wanted to have it.

I think Captain Powers has some interesting and potentially legally important stories to tell.

I recommend watching the documentary. It's the most real depiction I've yet seen of what this war and occupation really look like.

-- Steve Clemons

I just knew that if I posted my travel plans, interesting items would surface. I just learned that the RAND Corporation, one of the biggest think tanks in the world with more than $175 million in annual revenue, has an operation in Doha, Qatar called the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute.

The Institute defines its roles and objectives as:

The Institute is a home for analysis of subjects key to the economic and social development and the stability of the region-education, health care, effective governance, labor markets and human resource development, demographics and population dynamics, information and communications technology, transportation, water resources, physical and institutional infrastructure, environmental protection, economic policy, and regional security, to name a few. The objective of this analysis is to provide public and private decisionmakers with practical information about the options they face and the consequences of pursuing alternative policies.

I have an open mind about these sorts of operations but would really like to know whether the Institute is offering useful policy counsel to any of the less-rich parts of the Middle East.

Has anyone seen research products or briefs from this Institute?

Interesting. I plan to visit.

-- Steve Clemons

(ed. note: Thanks to LF for this information)

One of the intimidating parts of writing a blog is that if one is lucky, lots of people read it -- and those people are scattered pretty far around. Last time I was in London, my significant other and I struck up a conversation with some folks at a pub who said that the two blogs they read were Talking Points and The Washington Note. I know. . .that pic is really not very good.

In any case, I am hitting the road again. I am participating in a couple of conferences -- but the real reason for these longish travels is to get a working action plan to launch a serious new competitive movement to unseat neoconservatives. That requires time, thinking, list development, and some writing.

I am publishing these destinations and dates in case any of you see any good that I can do while in these regions. But don't worry -- I will be a "virtual presence" in Washington.

February 21 - February 25
Kuaui, Hawaii

February 25 - March 5
Honolulu, Hawaii

March 22 - March 26
London, United Kingdom

March 26 - April 1
Doha, Qatar

I will be obssessed with finding wifi spots -- so tips appreciated.

-- Steve Clemons

(Feb. 28, 2003 WH press conference on C-SPAN)

Eric Boehlert has this piece in Salon that pulls together some super-sleuth reports proving that Jeff Gannon/James Guckert had access to White House press briefings before Talon News was even up and running.

Someone helped this guy.

Boehlert writes:

There's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias "Jeff Gannon," once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, "published regularly," in itself an extraordinarily low threshold.

That means he wasn't working for any other news outlet in February 2003 when he was spotted by C-Span cameras inside the White House briefing room. And that means Guckert was ushered into the White House press room in February 2003 for a briefing despite the fact he was not a journalist.

Whereas it was once suspected that White House press officials in charge of doling out coveted press passes went easy on Guckert, a Republican partisan working for an amateurish news outlet who would routinely ask softball questions, it now appears those same unnamed White House officials simply ignored all established credential standards -- including detailed security guidelines -- and gave Guckert White House access, even though he had no professional standing whatsoever.

For more than a week White House officials have refused to answer any of Salon's questions regarding the credential process used for Guckert's press passes.

Boehlert's super sleuths are noted here and here. But don't forget who did the hard core sleuthing.

In any case, this is not something for the left to get giddy about. It's an opportunity to begin turning some of the worst anti-fair-press traits of this White House around.

Think strategically. Have someone contact Gannon/Guckert and have him call me, or write. I'm in the book in D.C., or call the New America Foundation at 202-986-2700.

-- Steve Clemons

The other day, I was moved by this Colbert King column that made the link betweeen the W.E.B. Du Bois-led civil rights movement at Niagara Falls 100 years ago and the pursuit of equal rights for gays and lesbians and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Beyond the drama of 29 black intellectuals deciding that they were going to shape history, rather than be steamrolled by it, I was struck by this comment on the racism they experienced from hotels on the U.S. side of the border:

At the dawn of 20th-century America, those black men journeyed to Niagara Falls, N.Y., to prepare a militant statement on race and inequality that was to stand in sharp contrast to the conciliatory and accommodationist stance of Booker T. Washington -- white America's favorite black man at the time. Hotels on the U.S. side of Niagara Falls wouldn't let them register, however. So their demands were drafted in a hotel on the Canadian side of the falls.

In this case, Canadians seem to have helped serve as a conscience for evolving American morality -- and may be doing so again.

This is Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's eloquent and powerful statement yesterday on Canada's Civil Marriage Act.

I recommend the entire statement that I only wish someone like John McCain, Colin Powell, Howard Dean, Mark Warner, Bob Dole, or some other icon or icon-wannabe would make, but I particularly liked this section:

. . .some have counseled the government to extend to gays and lesbians the right to "civil union." This would give same-sex couples many of the rights of a wedded couple, but their relationships would not legally be considered marriage. In other words, they would be equal, but not quite as equal as the rest of Canadians.

Put simply, we must always remember that "separate but equal" is not equal. What's more, those who call for the establishment of civil unions fail to understand that the Government of Canada does not have the constitutional jurisdiction to do so. Only the provinces have that. Only the provinces could define such a regime - and they could define it in 10 different ways, and some jurisdictions might not bother to define it at all. There would be uncertainty. There would be confusion. There would certainly not be equality.

And in today's Kent County News, published in Chestertown, Maryland and a direct descendent of the Chestertown Spy established in 1793 -- John Schratwieser was quoted in response to viewing the HBO documentary film Iron Jawed Angels at the 85th Birthday Celebration of the Kent County League of Women Voters in the historic Prince Theatre, as saying that the film "showed what the power and true purpose of a Constitutional Amendment is."

It's just very clear to me after reading Colbert King, hearing Paul Martin's address, and watching this new film on women's suffrage what leadership is, and what it is not.

-- Steve Clemons

John Aravosis told me last night that the only person who seems to be able to reach Jeff Gannon/James Guckert is Michelangelo Signorile, who previously interviewed Gannon/Gukcert in a two-hour interview.

Gannon/Guckert seems, in part, driven by the spotlight -- and he could really rehabilitate his image and do something good for the politics of this town if he (1) identified the person in the White House who helped him with a couple of years of day passes for press briefings; and (2) identified the person or persons who shared with him classified intelligence regarding Valerie Plame's CIA role.

Gannon/Guckert has a chance, now, to get ahead of this controversy and turn the embarrassment about his side-line hustler business into something that could turn him into a celebrity. I imagine his other options at this point are pretty bleak.

Jeff/Jim, my email is steve@thewashingtonnote.com -- and I'd be happy to have an offline, off-the-record exchange with you about this. There are costs and benefits to any action, and you should think them through.

The story has moved from the Howard Kurtz column to new articles in the New York Times by Frank Rich and the Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal (and probably elsewhere -- but haven't done a full scan yet).

I have to agree with Frank Rich that there is a broad cast of complicit characters in the Gannon/Guckert scandal, and just a portion of these in the White House.

Rich writes:

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could possibly be an objective and accurate free press.

Might that memo have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first place? The anchor didn't go there.

Gannon/Guckert could call this sham what it is, write about it, speak about it, expose the hypocrisy at play here.

-- Steve Clemons

I just got off the phone with Jacob Heilbrunn from whom I received permission to post this excellent and educational article about the large neo-Nazi demonstration in Dresden this past week.

Heilbrunn deftly delineates between the two former parts of Germany and how each managed its historical memory challenges. I have seen similar tendencies in Japan, China, and other parts of the world to deny or re-write history. And this has also occurred in the U.S.

I am going to reprint the entire article, without italicization.

Here it is -- from today's Wall Street Journal:

Honecker's Children
by Jacob Heilbrunn
16 February 2005
The Wall Street Journal Europe

The spectacle on Sunday of thousands of neo-Nazis marching to protest the 60th anniversary of the allied bombing of Dresden has left Germany's political class reeling. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is weighing banning the far-right National Democrats, while others express concerns about an emerging sense of German victimhood about World War II.

The distress is understandable, but the upsurge in neo-Nazi activity in eastern Germany should come as no surprise. It is not simply high unemployment or the memory of the Third Reich that is the culprit, but something else that is frequently overlooked because it's seen as impolite, especially in European socialist circles, to mention: the anti-Semitic legacy of the former East German communist dictatorship.

Unlike West Germany after the war, the totalitarian regime represented continuity, not a break, with the Nazi past. Though the East German communists based their rule on the myth of anti-fascism, they had played a key role in bringing the Nazis to power in 1933 by undermining the democratic Weimar republic. The communists even directly collaborated with the Nazis during the 1932 Berlin Transport Workers' strike to cripple Weimar.

Yet after World War II, the communists claimed to represent a noble tradition of opposing Nazism and argued that West Germany, supposedly ruled by the same capitalists who created Hitler, was a new version of Nazism. Even as they denounced the West Germans, however, the communists drew upon leading Nazis to create the National People's Army and the Stasi, or secret police. It was no accident that the army wore the former Wehrmacht's field-gray. Former Nazis were used as cadres in factories, the universities, and the press. The Communist Party also was open to former Nazis. In this regard, the communists did not differ radically from the West Germans, who also tapped former Nazis to run the judiciary and military.

What did distinguish East Germany was its obstinate refusal to recognize the Holocaust. In schoolbooks and scholarly texts, the regime suppressed the truth about the murder of the Jews. Instead, it focused almost exclusively on communists who perished in the concentration camps. Memorials throughout the country were dedicated to communists, but never alluded to Jews. The same went for concentration camps; at Dachau, just outside the city of Weimar, there was no real mention of the Jews. What's more, East Germany participated in the anti-Semitic purge trials that swept across Eastern Europe in the early 1950s and, at the same time, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was used by the Soviets to murder tens of thousands of German POWs.

The communists also refused to acknowledge the existence of Israel. The East German government not only supported the Palestinians, but helped to harbor and train terrorists. Carlos the Jackal -- his real name was Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez -- and Abu Daoud, a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, often traveled to East Berlin. Libya also had agents stationed in East Berlin. It was all, so the thinking went, part of the struggle against the West's fascism, which Israel supposedly personified.

This cult of anti-fascism and sense of victimization lasted until the death throes of the regime in 1989. In Dresden, the famous Zwinger palace had an inscription denouncing the "Anglo-American bombers" -- echoing Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels condemnation of "Anglo-American terror bombings." The East German government even claimed that the western powers sought to annihilate Dresden and other cities to prevent the Soviet Union from inheriting functioning factories.

Today, the young eastern German neo-Nazis are the inheritors of the communist tradition. The National Democrats, who entered the Saxony state parliament last September, marched out of a ceremony recognizing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp. And they assert that Germans were the true victims of World War II in places like Dresden.

A motley crew of octogenarian right-wingers like Gerhard Frey, a publisher in Munich, and Franz Schoenhuber, a former SS officer, showed up at the rally in Dresden. But they are dinosaurs from the past, while the historical lies peddled by the communists are now being regurgitated by a younger generation in eastern Germany. The current spate of demonstrations against the Holocaust offers a reminder that Nazism and communism weren't die-hard foes, but kissing cousins.

---
Mr. Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times.
(end of article)

This short essay is important and may be controversial because it deals with historical amnesia in a country trying to get beyond the problems of the past. Japan struggles with some of these same kinds of unreconciled nightmares, and, as I have written previously, America shares some responsibility for Japan's historical memory deficiencies.

If there is real hope in the standoff between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is going to be important for the major national stakeholders, including Germany, to do a great deal to get their societies to digest historical realities. It's not easy; not even in the U.S.

I found this useful and hope others do as well.

-- Steve Clemons

The C.V. Starr Center for the American Experience at Washington College, founded in 1782 and located in Chestertown, Maryland, just released this interesting polling data and comment:

If George Washington returned from the dead and attempted to recapture the presidency of the United States, he would beat the incumbent President Bush by nearly 20 percentage points, according to a new national poll conducted for Washington College by the public affairs research firm of Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. Asked to choose between George Washington and George W. Bush, Republicans in the survey supported Bush by a margin of more than 2 to 1, while Democrats and independents overwhelmingly favored Washington.

Self-identified Republicans chose George W. over George Washington 62% to 28%! Bush has done a pretty spectacular job at consolidating his base if Republicans don't really prefer the first and real George W.

Click here to get the entire news release as well as the tabulations, which I finagled a bit early.

But there is more to the story -- and much of it is not heartening as many Americans seem to be losing touch with the chief founding father.

The survey found that:

-- Only 46 percent of the 800 adult Americans surveyed could identify him as the general who led the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War.

-- When asked who they thought was America's greatest president, only 6 percent named George Washington, ranking him seventh, behind Abraham Lincoln (20 percent), Ronald Reagan (15 percent), Franklin D. Roosevelt (12 percent), John F. Kennedy (11 percent), Bill Clinton (10 percent), and George W. Bush (8 percent)

-- Younger Americans are far less likely to know basic facts and legends about Washington and his era. Of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29, only 57 percent knew the tale of Washington and the cherry tree (compared to 91 percent of respondents over 50)

-- Just 45 percent of younger respondents identified Martha Washington as our nation's first First Lady.

-- A mere 4 percent of younger respondents knew that President Washington's first inauguration was held in New York City

-- In response to a multiple choice question asking younger respondents to identify the name of Washington's residence, only 49 percent of young Americans picked Mount Vernon; 23 percent picked "Gettysburg," 15 percent picked "Monticello," 3 percent picked "Graceland," and 2 percent picked "Neverland Ranch."

Ted Widmer, a brilliant guy who has recently published a biography of Martin Van Buren and is Director of the C. V. Starr Center, said:

As the results indicate, we have some way to go. While most Americans remember the myth of the cherry tree, fewer and fewer Americans under the age of 50 can identify any of the pertinent facts of his life. And let's face it, "First in war, first in peace, and seventh in the hearts of his countrymen," doesn't sound very impressive.

Washington College is a wonderful small liberal arts college that I visit frequently. The College was founded in 1782 and calls itself "the first college of the new nation," meaning after the Articles of Confederation were adopted.

Interestingly, George Washington was really involved with the school.

While Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were constantly seeing to Virginia's state interests, it seems that Hamilton, one of the essential founding fathers who had no state of his own but intertwined himself with New York, and General George Washington were examples of true early national-oriented magnanimity. Washington College was the only institution of higher learning that the first president (who himself never attended college) patronized during his lifetime.

Washington donated 50 guineas to the college (about $50,000 today) and according to the press release "gave his consent for it to be named in his honor, served on its Board of Visitors and Governors, and visited Chestertown to receive an honorary degree in 1789."

A Virginian helping to fund a liberal arts college in Maryland must have been rather rare in the early days of the nation.

This survey was undertaken to help raise interest in George Washington before President's Day this next Monday and to unveil on Saturday, February 19, a new prize, "The George Washington Prize" honoring the year's best book on George Washington, the American Revolution, or the early Republic.

The George Washington Prize is sponsored jointly by Washington College, Mount Vernon, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, and will award the winner $50,000, making it one of the largest book prizes in the nation.

C-Span's Brian Lamb will also be helping to punctuate the celebration of this new George Washington Prize and will be there at Washington College on Saturday to receive and Honorary Doctor of Public Service distinction. The info is in the links if you want to trek out to the Eastern Shore and Chestertown for several free and interesting events commemorating America's first president.

I will be up at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland this weekend so will miss the festivities -- but if you head in, stop in at the best coffee shop in town, "Play it Again Sam," and tell Peggy that I sent you.

-- Steve Clemons

Howard Kurtz has a very long column today profiling Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. Most of what Kurtz writes on is the excellent investigative work of John Aravosis, but he makes some other important points.

Kurtz writes:

The contretemps sparked questions about why the White House had regularly cleared him for briefings, especially since he had been denied a press pass on Capitol Hill, where reporters control the credentialing process.

Yes, yes, yes. Why was he given a pass 'regularly' when Capitol Hill credential officials refused? Was there an insider helping him?

Kurtz, I think, slightly misses the point here but then by quoting Aravosis brings the key question back into focus:

More than anything, though, it is Gannon's personal online activities that has kept the story churning. Cliff Kincaid, editor of the Accuracy in Media report, wrote on the conservative group's Web site: "The Gannon 'scandal' would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Gannon's personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s, had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political left trying to dig up dirt. The campaign against Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left."

But Aravosis said: "If you were just looking at this as a matter of his hypocrisy, the story's over now that he's gone. The larger issue is how did someone like this get access to the White House."

And the last graf seems important too. Whenever I have been to the White House or been anywhere near the President, I had to supply full name, birthdate, and social security number. I assume that Secret Service then does some kind of thin screening process that either triggers red flags or not. According to this graf, Gannon/Guckert used his real name at the White House:

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the trade publication Editor & Publisher that he didn't know Gannon was using a pseudonym until recent weeks and that he was cleared into the White House on a daily basis using his real name. "People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors," McClellan said.

If that is the case, then the White House security team failed to catch various red flags about Gannon -- the questionable news opreration he worked for, his outstanding State of Delaware liens, and his male prostitution activities -- that all seemed pretty easy for Aravosis to find.

I think some of us should try and see if we can get into the White House press gaggles now -- and see whether we are stopped, or whether we need lots of blaring red warning signs in our past to help us get through.

Kurtz is wrong, by the way, that Gannon's nude pictures are what is keeping this story going. What is important is the revelation that the "leaker" in the White House pushed the Valerie Plame story on Gannon.

As an example, David Brock used to work for the more thuggish wing of the Republican right, and came around of his own accord. He now runs "Media Matters" and seems to be doing a great job.

Perhaps those who want to get to the bottom of the Plame scandal should try and turn Gannon. If he said what he knew, he'd become a star -- on every talk show and reality sitcom -- and probably make a fortune. That may be incentive enough.

Maybe rather than villifying this guy, we who want to know who undermined American national security and divulged the CIA identity of Joe Wilson's wife should help him repent and reform and help him get on a better path.

Some of you will think this is silly -- but it's not.

-- Steve Clemons

I had a minor intellectual skirmish a few years ago with Tadashi Yamamoto. We were arguing about whether Japanese civil society had matured to a level to be considered a genuine democracy.

The mere fact that Yamamoto's Japan Center for International Exchange was investing heavily in study groups, working papers, and books on the subject of non-governmental organization development and civil society maturation in Japan was a testament, in part, to official Japan's own insecurity about the subject.

We were meeting at the old official residence of Japan's Ambassadors to the U.S., which sits just next to its newer embassy, and being there was a reminder of how different Japan was today in terms of democratic governance than it was in the decades before December 1941.

That said, I questioned Tadashi Yamamoto on whether Japan's then-recently passed NGO law had given any more legal stature to NGOs, to small entities, to clusters of citizens, or to individual citizens that hoped to fight more powerful and more rich entities in Japanese courts. He responded that he was unaware of any such adjustments in Japan's legal codes, which seem to stack the deck in favor of powerful (and often corrupt) players in Japan's political economy and give little hope to those who are simple victims.

My measure of a democracy is, in part, whether or not a small and relatively weak entity or citizen can bring to its knees a major corporate entity or an individual wealthy in terms of finances and political connections. I realize that many on the left will declare that America doesn't fit my own measure as rich, powerful interests often prevail over the weak -- but that's just not true, at least not always true, in my view.

Americans tend to focus on ballot boxes and elections as measures of democracy. But I think that the real character of a democracy is measured in its institutions and in the ability for David & Goliath stories to be realized in the courts.

Today, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg reversed a judgement in Britain and upheld the rights of two individuals to challenge (and harrass) McDonald's Corporation. The case may force the United Kingdom to update and revise its ridiculous libel laws as well.

Remember when Richard Perle threatened to sue Sy Hersh. . .in British courts? He would have done it using these controversial laws that helped McDonald's win the now-overturned case against Helen Steel and David Morris.

I have to admit that I like the fact that individuals pursued their interests in European courts and won against one of the world's largest and most powerful corporations. I am not anti-corporate, and I don't advocate that all individuals ought to always prevail over corporations in all cases. But this case seemed ridiculous -- and McDonald's was idiotic to sue these two citizens for libel under such controversial laws.

What is important about this case is that it demonstrates an important aspect of democracy often neglected by the pundits. The weak have to be able to pursue justice against the strong in courts. This kind of judgment ought to be embraced by Americans and Europeans as part of the tool kit of democracy-building and democracy-inspiring that the Bush administration purports are its goals.

In my mind, Japan is mostly democratic, democratic enough anyway -- but it falls short when it comes to the rights of citizens in its courts. America gets a lot right in our own democracy -- but doesn't focus on institutional justice when it comes to identifying what is and what is not a democracy.

But this case in Europe seems right on target. I hope that governments in the Middle East inspired by President Bush's words on democracy are paying attention to what actually constitutes real rather than cosmetic democratic governance.

-- Steve Clemons

I have to admit that I feel awkward and uneasy posting comments about Jeff Gannon, his role as a shill for the White House, and his alleged extracurricular activities as a gay-sex hustler.

But I have just read about a dozen or so stories on the case and can't avoid commenting on what could and should become a huge scandal inside and around George & Laura Bush's White House. Here is one from Howard Kurtz that seems to be more about bloggers and the scandal but is still useful.

In these high-fear, paranoid times regarding White House security, it seems unimaginable to me that any decent background checks on Gannon would not have turned up about a thousand red flags.

John Aravosis did a background check on the guy posing on a daily basis as a reporter in the White House press gallery and uncovered an unbelievable (and frankly, disgusting) trove of information on this character.

I am going to link Aravosis's material -- but note, there are graphic male nude photos linked to the Aravosis post. There are 'blockers' over sexual organs in the link I am providing -- but be warned that the links to the Aravosis post are the full and real thing. Do Not Click the link if you are offended by such material. I am posting this because I think it's important to see who and what the White House not only allowed into its midst but the fact that the White House Communications Director so frequently "played ball," so to speak with this fake journalist but very real sex hustler.

Here is a link to more on Jeff Gannon's identity problem.

I do not have the whole story yet, but from what I can tell, there is evidence that Jeff Gannon was one of the reporters that the White House pushed the Valerie Plame story to. He has been subpoenaed by the grand jury, which assures that the Valerie Plame scandal is going to be front page again.

I want to know who helped Gannon get access to the White House.

Mr. President, you better start looking your team in the eye and ask, "Who let this guy in? Why didn't our security team find out what John Aravosis did? Was there something illicit in the relationship between his White House connection and Jeff Gannon/Guckert? Who leaked Valerie Plame's identity to the press? Who did it -- and why isn't anyone stepping forward accepting responsibility?"

The key grafs in Aravosis's post are these:

Why does this matter?

Let him talk to Patrick Fitzgerald.

Timing is everything. Had this story broken before the election, well. . .you know the rest of that story.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. Here is a link to a Congressional FOIA request on Gannon/Gukhert.

When I was more youthful, less cynical, and thought that some of the world's most severe problems could be solved if every American just gave a dime, or a quarter, or a dollar, I had no idea how expensive fixing some of the world's problems could be.

George W. Bush has just asked Congress -- as of late last night -- for another $82 billion to fund our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If approved, our total direct spending on these wars -- according to the Congressional Research Service -- will be $275 billion. (If you count opportunity costs because of the dramatic damage to the mystique of American power -- the costs may be incalculable).

The American population is slightly larger than 275 million people -- but the cost per person, in this country is about $1,000.00 a head for the Afghan and Iraqi Wars and Iraq Occupation. That's a lot of money -- particularly when roughly a third of the American population are not yet working or are retired. If we adjust out those at the young and old range, the burden of these wars on working age Americans is about $1,500.00 per person.

If one computes how this looks from Iraq's perspective, we have spent about $11,500.00 on each Iraqi citizen, if focusing just on Iraq.

If one computes the per capita expenditures of this war given the number of "working age" Iraqi citizens, then the cost to America has been $19,643.00 a person.

Iraq's purchasing power parity GDP per capita is only $1,500.00. And if one is honest, these figures vastly overstate the real per capita GDP in a country where doctors were, on average, making $90-100 a month before the war.

This may sound crass, but enticing the citizens of Iraq with other instruments than those we chose might have been more effective and less costly in finances and lives lost on both sides of the conflict.

Larry Lindsey, President Bush's first National Economic Advisor, proved to be wrong after all. He seems to have seriously underestimated the costs of the war -- even though the White House fired him (in part) for pushing out the $200 billion figure to the press.

It is interesting that the White House seems never to have removed Lindsey's bio from its website. Might they welcome him back?

-- Steve Clemons

I am sorry to see that my pal Grant Aldonas has fallen out of the rumour mill on who might be the next U.S. Trade Representative.

Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report gives a glimpse of the latest jockeying, both for USTR and the next Director General of the World Trade Organization.

He writes:

Trade gossip...with USTR Zoellick's confirmation hearing as Deputy Secretary of State tomorrow, assumption is his successor will be announced quickly. Rumor mill of late has been all Gary Edson.

The US is presumed to back former EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy. For those still counting on a Doha Development Round, the final choice is deemed critical.

-- Steve Clemons

I have posted in the past several items on the question of forced anthrax vaccinations among our military ranks. What I have found interesting in this debate are the lengths that DoD civilian leaders are willing to go to obfuscate for and hide from Congressional oversight what the key intelligence is that justifies these vaccinations.

I don't have time at the moment to write the kind of piece I want to on this -- and I have a couple of comments posters who seem to be working for the "anthrax vaccines are ok" lobby. I don't have anything against these folks -- but I do have some questions.

There is fear among the ranks about these vaccines. And there are many cases where people feel that the vaccines seriously disabled them. I have seen no effort by the military to allay the fears of the public or to provide alternative explanations for some of the tragic reactions troops have had to the vaccine.

Here is one scary ABC News Report on a soldier's reaction to the vaccine. (This is a video pop-up.)

More on this before long.

-- Steve Clemons

My friend and colleague Peter Bergen is headed back from Saudi Arabia's first international terrorism conference in Riyadh.

He writes:

In the sprawling desert city where Osama bin Laden was born almost half a century ago, last week the Saudis held their first international counterterrorism conference. A couple of days after the conference ended, Riyadh was the first city to vote in the only nationwide elections that have been held since the modern Saudi kingdom was founded three quarters of a century ago. Neither the conference nor the election -- which was for only half of the seats on Riyadh's municipal councils -- was anything more than an incremental step along the road to an honest self-assessment about how al Qaeda was incubated within the kingdom, but both are indicative of a gradualist Saudi glasnost that may mark the beginnings of democratization and an enlarged civil society no longer amenable to the breeding of terrorists.

In his letter from Riyadh, Bergen notes that the thorniest issues of responsibility for Al Qaeda-brand terrorism were left beneath the rug, so to speak, but points to several trends which collectively may point to real change in the Saudi Kingdom.

While the House of Saud has a reputation for total inflexibility regarding social and political norms (inside the kingdom), there seems to be some triangulation under way.

I'm one who agrees with Brent Scowcroft that "one election a democracy does not make." But I think that rejecting the potential an election may bring is also wrong-headed. The Saudis may be incrementally adjusting the climate of the ecosystem they have managed so long and which served as the breeding ground for bin Laden and his closest adherents.

They are maintaining power and control at the same time because of the general fear of chaos that Saudi elites have -- and all they need to do is to point to Iraq as a manifestation of the worst fears of those inside the Kingdom.

But frankly, what gives me some hope from Peter Bergen's letter is the complex sophistication of the Saudi Kingdom's seeming anti-terror efforts. They seem to be addressing the need to both interdict terrorists and the need to win back the affections of citizens that bin Laden has been winning over. (I realize that "affections" may very well be the wrong word here in a politically illiberal kingdom.)

I do believe that this latter task is the hardest -- and is the challenge towards which America has been recklessly underperforming.

-- Steve Clemons

Josh Marshall gave me the nudge to start my own blog and then moved off to New York where he has been ferociously battling Bush's Social Security privatization campaign.

But though I talk to Josh a lot, email him, and do a lot of instant messaging, I haven't actually seen him in a while.

Then, one of my photographer friends snapped this picture at Al Franken's studio when Josh was supposedly there doing an "Air America" bit.

After more investigation, I learned that this was Simon, Josh's talented dog -- who is apparently as opposed to Bush's privatization schemes as Josh. Reports are that Simon gives great anti-SS privatization remarks and has been blogging away about this at TPM.

But where then is Josh?

Simon, let him out.

-- Steve Clemons

Something is up in Asia. North Korea finally, overtly acknowledges it has nuclear warheads -- and Japan announces it wants to cut what it spends supporting U.S. forces on its islands.

Japan apparently plans to tell the U.S. that intends to cut its omoiyari yosan (its so-called "sympathy budget," meaning -- as Chalmers Johnson once put it, "sympathy for the poor Americans who cannot afford their foreign policy").

George Bush can't seem to give a press conference without mentioning his buddy Prime Minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi and the miracle of Japan's democracy, but even that does not seem to be enough to keep the Japanese government from pulling back some of its support of America's globally sprawling military superstructure.

Part of the truth is that the United States nearly always asks for an increase in the "sympathy budget" and Japan always seems to lobby Washington with its intentions that the amount will be decreased, since Japan seems to want to get permission from the White House that the decrease is ok. So much for Japanese sovereignty.

But there is something else more important going on. Unfortunately, I cannot attribute the following quote to the individual who said it because of the non-attribution rules of the Council on Foreign Relations. But let's just say that this statement was made by a very senior international policy hand, way high up in Democratic circles. Gender makes the person a he. This person said:

Even the most ferocious neoconservatives today would admit that America's Afghan and Iraq operations have pushed the nation to its military and economic limits.

He then went on to argue that there would be no way that we would trip into an Iran incursion because it was logistically impossible to do. I argued with him a bit on that as I see no evidence that the neocons have any sense at all of the constraints of the moment. I take that back, they did call for 25,000 more troops a year -- but rephrased, I haven't seen an acknowledgement by any neocons (other than Francis Fukuyama) that we are at the limits of our capacity and ought not to ride off to fight other wars right now.

The essential truth of the moment is that we are at our limits. And our friends will not count on America stretched as thin as we are. And our enemies will maximize their situations when we can do little about it.

Iran and North Korea know that America's bark is loud but bite is probably pretty soft right now. And the Europeans are doing their best to take on a global strategic dilemma -- their very first -- without the U.S. in the lead.

And the Japanese want to spend more funds on their own forces, which they can count on, rather than America's about which they have increasing doubts.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. -- I wonder whether any American media will refer to these Japanese funds for U.S. forces by their correct name -- the "sympathy budget"?

Note to TWN Readers: I'm not a funny guy, and I tell jokes badly. I'm not very good at sassy, bitchy, ironic, snarly prose (or blogging) -- but I'm going to try and recount some very humorous anecdotes from a DC heavyweight dinner the night before last -- from which I think I am still recovering.

Perhaps because Peter Beinart really liked what I wrote about him signing the PNAC letter the other day, I found myself invited to join the New Republic table at the Washington Press Club Foundation's 61st Annual Congressional Dinner.

Ryan Lizza and his wife were there in addition to Peter as well as the TNR President & Publisher Stephanie Sandberg and Associate Publisher Richard Parker. We had an extra seat -- and next thing I knew Fran Drescher (yes, "the Nanny") stopped by to hang out at the seat and grab it for one of the lobbyists for the Creative Coalition. She warmed up the seat for this very nice guy, Hughie, and then moved to a neighboring table -- and made the whole affair, which I thought was going to be stuffy (I was wrong), immediately intriguing.

Peter Beinart -- who is off to Brookings to work away on a book for which he is rumored to have received an advance in the six digits (and really close to seven digits) -- and I did get a chance to talk some politics and discuss his thesis that Democrats in all sectors have to redefine their goals in the war against global jihadism. I don't agree with Peter's general line -- but I think that the debate is extremely important and think he has shown guts for getting something bold out there for discussion. But Fran Drescher was there -- and somehow discussing with her redrawing the lines of feminism, gay rights, and the battle against censorship within the terms proposed by Peter Beinart didn't seem that much fun. So, we talked Hollywood, said that broadcasters needed some backbone, expressed disdain that Tom DeLay was sitting (then, quietly) at the dais, and gave her lobbyist pal the extra chair.

That kind deed got us all invited to a very cool, upper crust dance bar that had been put together and hosted by Congressional Quarterly at the very top of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in the Reagan Building. Harry Hamlin was there -- but he didn't seem to appreciate my thanking him for his brave kiss in the 1982 film, Making Love. Harry never really looked happy that night -- but he did hang around until very late.

Joe Pantoliano was having fun, said hi look he knew me and then said hi to some others leaving me real fast. But Fran Drescher was the best. We road in the same elevator -- danced briefly (she danced -- and I looked stupid). I then later learned that she danced with Travolta in Saturday Night Live and didn't feel so badly.

But then it was back to political stuff and watching Harry Hamlin scowl most of the evening. Margaret Carlson, Carl Hulse, Matt Cooper, well....everybody was having fun, and drinking. Margaret Carlson was loading up on lots of mineral water and juice. Beinart is a dedicated vegetarian. It seemed like all the Hollywood or Senator wannabes were the ones imbibing alcohol -- and all of the serious talent were savoring their Perrier.

But the unbelievable part of the evening was that TOM DELAY WAS HILARIOUS. I am not inclined towards Tom DeLay (search this blog and you'll get a sense of how much of an understatement that is) and was ticked off when I learned that he was with Richard Durbin one of the featured speakers of the night.

There has got to be some other good commentary on the night -- and I'll link some of it here -- but I immediately began scrambling for a pen and scribbled in every open space on my program when I heard how good DeLay was.

Among the things he did was look at the similarities between Sponge Bob Square Pants and Jesse Helms. He said that when he reviewed the leading Republican contenders for the White House -- Arnold, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain -- he said that he wasn't satisfied that he had found among his own ranks anyone sufficiently pro-life, pro-religion, and for the war against terror. And then he revealed that the one person who fit the bill and whom he would support for President was Hillary Clinton who had really surprised everyone with her stands on abortion, religion in the public space, and her hardline on terrorists.

DeLay thanked the press for making him such a star. The nickname "The Hammer," he said had made people begin to see him in a way other than his warm, docile, cuddly self and that 1500 media references to "The Hammer" in the press had gotten him the position of Republican House Whip. 3,000 references to "The Hammer" in the press got him to the position of Leader -- and he projected on a graphy that if he could get 5,000 references, he'd be Speaker; 7,000 then Senate Republican Leader; 8,000 Senate Democratic Leader too -- and then to the White House. But he admonished the media that even he could admit that the last thing they would want is Tom DeLay "in the White House..."

He noted that when his name is "googled" with the words "strong-arming" 332 references come up; "ruthless" nearly the same; "the hammer" a huge number of google references; "rat" even higher. But the highest google count came when googling "Tom DeLay" and "fear" together. He then showed his mug shot next to a rat and said that he could discern a few differences but understood the confusion. It was hilarious self-deprecation.

He noted that James Dobson was already preparing to picket the White House for that slobbery kiss that Bush planted on Joe Lieberman at the State of the Union address. He said that Frist had nothing on him. Frist might be a surgeon but offered that he (DeLay) was the "only living heart donor." He thanked the media for giving him the kind of reputation that made him so effective with freshmen Congressmen. He said "Honestly, I can't tell you how much easier it is to squeeze votes out of these freshmen (Congressmen) or money out of big donors when they think if they say 'no,' I'm going to put a horse head in their bed or something."

He said that he believed that these kind of dinners were technically torture -- but Al Gonzales had assured him they weren't.

DeLay showed a campaign billboard that said in bold letters: HILLARY AND THE HAMMER IN 2008.

He then mentioned that the one guy in Congress whom he thought was the future of the country, never run a federal seat before, went right into the Senate and into the limelight was that other Senator from Illinois, Barak Obama. He then introduced Illinois' Senior Senator Richard Durbin.

Durbin got in some good laughs too. His best was his first.

He told DeLay, "Even if you weren't funny, you'd change the rules to say you were."

He said DeLay was one of the few forces that could unite the Democratic Party. He said that the Dems were getting tougher and noted that despite Rahm Emanuel having been a ballet dancer, he said "Don't let that fool you. He wears ballet shoes with steel toes." "Don't even ask about the Nutcracker."

Durbin then confided in us that at the Democratic National Convention, he had seen Obama -- nervous as hell about having been selected out of obscurity by John Kerry to give one of the most important speeches at the Convention, the world on his soldiers. Durbin said that Obama's wife had pleaded several times for him to go assure Obama that things would work out.

So he went into a holding room to talk with Obama who kept going over his speech, sweating profusely, and just sure that his speech was not going to cut it. So, in closing, Durbin told us that he said to Obama, "here kid, take my speech."

The place was roaring. DeLay, whom I really detest and who I hold accountable for the breakdown of the system of checks and balances in our country, was nonetheless....really, really funny. We should still fire him, sue him, sanction him. But invite him to dinners when he is no longer in Congress.

More later -- but I wanted to share some of the highlights of a very fun evening. Thanks to the New Republic, Stephanie Sanders, Peter Beinart, Richard Parker, Ryan Lizza -- for letting me hang out with them.

Fran -- give me a call.

-- Steve Clemons

These almost sound like John Grisham titles -- but they are respectively the new London Review of Books article 'title' on the future of the Supreme Court I recommended a few days ago -- and mention of the author, Bruce Ackerman.

It's a very instructive and important article. Here is the link.

-- Steve Clemons

$720 billion for that drug benefit through 2015? The cost was already too high at $400 billion.

It's clear that whereas the Bush administration has been trying to scare the public about Social Security insolvency 75 years out -- they have been downplaying, obfuscating, and misleading about this Medicare cost -- over which they have had control.

The problems in our long-term fiscal portfolio are out-of-control Medicare costs and rising interest payments on debt. These are the two accounts that we must bring under control because they are the ones constraining other choices -- not social security.

-- Steve Clemons

I like this thoughtful, long expose by Marty Sieff on what Dean's takeover of the Democratic Party helm means for Hillary Clinton's political life.

I'm much more of a believer in Dean than most of my friends on both sides of the aisle (and even those in the middle). Dean was never as liberal as the media and his party brethren (and Karl Rove) made him out to be. I am overdue with some of my own punditry on this subject -- but my friend Mark Goldberg defends Dean here amidst a chorus of other American Prospect voices less enthusiastic about DNC Chairman Dean.

The interesting thing Marty Sieff does is to begin to look at what Dean's possible political course means to other leading Democrats. Maybe others have written with greater complexity about Dean's next role, but I haven't seen much of it.

Sieff writes:

Howard Dean's capture of the Democratic National Committee chair is not the devastating setback for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., that many have assumed. On the contrary, it is likely to play dramatically into her hands if she chooses to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

But it is still a full four years until the next presidential election, and for the next two of them Dean's and Clinton's political career tracks are going to be very different and look unlikely to conflict. After November 2006 they may even come together surprisingly effectively.

On Hillary and Howard's endgame, Martin Sieff concludes Hillary can't lose no matter how Howard performs:

For Clinton, therefore, having Dean radicalize the Democratic Party now poses no threat to her at all. Whether he succeeds or fails, she is looking at re-election in a walk for her second Senate term.

Or he may succeed brilliantly, and thereby establish himself as the prophetic precursor of a dramatic new era in U.S. political life. Either way, Clinton stands to reap the benefit.

I think Sieff's prognostications are sound, and interesting.

I should add, in the spirit of full disclosure, that my great friend and colleague at the New America Foundation, Laurie Rubiner, is starting this very day as Hillary Clinton's new legislative director. Rubiner ran New America's Universal Health Care Program and previously worked for the late Senator John Chafee.

She has an amazing mind -- and is shrewd in all the good ways, and focused. Clinton just managed to hire for herself one of the town's biggest policy guns who sits smack dab in this town's radical center. It will be interesting to see if Hillary knows it.

Good luck Laurie.

-- Steve Clemons

The London Review of Books will soon publish one of the best pieces I have read on the politics of the next Supreme Court appointments.

Bruce Ackerman basically takes a subtle, game-theoretic approach to thinking through the likely set of choices Bush might make and considers how Democrats and progressives should respond. Because of Bush's likely opportunity to make multiple appointments, the calculus of appointment and opposition becomes very interesting.

This article will not be published for a couple more weeks, but I am going to post a couple of short excerpts here. (I will not italicize the excerpts to make them easier to read.)

Ackerman lays out the White House challenge:

***A series of openings will force George Bush, the Senate and the American people to confront a new set of choices. When the last vacancies arose during the 1980s and early 1990s, liberalism was still a dynamic force on the court. But the last liberal justices retired more than a decade ago. Nobody on the bench is interested in reviving the strong egalitarianism of the 1960s, when the Warren Court was in its heyday. The present judicial spectrum ranges from moderate liberals to radical rightists, and Bush will be aiming to nominate candidates who will push the court's centre of gravity further to the right.

There are two very different kinds of conservative. The worldly statesman, distrustful of large visions and focused on the prudent management of concrete problems has long been familiar. But Bush has more often relied on neo-conservatives with a very different temperament. They throw caution to the winds, assault the accumulated wisdom of the age, and insist on sweeping changes despite resistant facts. Law is a conservative profession, but it is not immune to the neocon temptation. The question raised by the coming vacancies to the Supreme Court is whether American law will remain in conservative hands, or whether it will be captured by a neo-con vision of revolutionary change.

The issue is not liberalism v. conservatism, but conservatism v. neo-conservatism.

The coming struggle over the Supreme Court has been gathering momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond
him, striking down laws protecting workers and the environment, supporting the destruction of basic civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and engaging in a wholesale attack on the premises of 20th-century constitutionalism. Or then again, Bush may hesitate. Despite his professed admiration for neo-con jurists such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, he may offer up genuine conservatives, such as Sandra Day O'Connor, who reject radical change as a matter of principle.***

Commentary on the choices Bush will have:

***Bush has three options when the next vacancy to the Supreme Court comes up: he can nominate a seasoned conservative, a stealth candidate or a plain-speaking neo-con.

The president has one fewer senator than Bill Clinton had: 55 Republicans in 2005, 56 Democrats in 1993. But his strategic position is the same. He doesn't have the 60 votes needed to override a determined filibuster by the opposition, so nominating a neo-con will be risky.

Since no one can predict what will happen in Iraq, he may well come to regret a decision to precipitate another cycle of bitter partisan warfare on the home front.***

Arguing that Democratic opposition to a stealth candidate or neocon appointment as Bush's first appointment to the bench is vital, Ackerman writes:

***As soon as Bork II ascends to the Supreme Court, neocons will be crowing about their famous victory. Just as Reagan's success in appointing Scalia encouraged the nomination of the more extreme Bork, the ascent of Bork II will encourage the nomination of a more extreme Bork III. In any event, it is wrong to succumb to a short-term perspective.

The fate of the court depends on the success of progressives in convincing the country that the neo-con Constitution is wrong in principle. Once Senate Democrats concede that Bork II's vision is acceptable, it will be very difficult for them to regain the initiative in future debates. The time for principled opposition
is now.***

Ackerman, of course, is a liberal critic of Bush and his likely appointments -- but his reasoning about the 'game' that will ensue between the left, right, and mushy middle over the next set of Supreme Court appointments should educate anyone anywhere on the political spectrum.

I recommend that you get the London Review piece when it appears.

-- Steve Clemons

When Senators Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Representatives Harold Ford (D-Tn.), Thomas Petri (R-Wis.), Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), and Phil English (R-Pa.) are all on the same bill in this humorless Congress where bipartisanship is rare, we should probably see what's drawing them together.

What's more is that today a conservative voice in the New York Times and a progresive voice in the Washington Post write articles in the same groove that suggest to President Bush that as his Social Security privatization plan crashes and burns that he consider embracing a plan that would help seed asset-building among those born without assets.

These members of Congress have supported the ASPIRE Act (conceived by my colleague Ray Boshara) to help establish accounts for kids at birth and an effort to try and seed an "asset mentality" among those who are born with little or no financial assets.

Others have been at this too, including former Senator Bob Kerrey, whose KidSave plan also tried to aggressively spread the nuggets of financial assets among America's newest citizens.

David Brooks has a terrific piece today in the New York Times on this -- proposing to President Bush that he get to work sharing the wealth in a way that might make a structural change in the growing distance between haves and have-nots.

Brooks writes:

President Bush said he was open to other people's ideas on how to fix Social Security, so I hope he'll listen to mine.

My idea starts with a blunt political observation. Personal accounts -- as they are currently envisioned - are going to be hard to pass. Every important Democrat opposes them. Jim McCrery, the Republican who is chairman of the House Social Security subcommittee, says the president's plan will have to fundamentally change if it is to have a chance.

So my idea is this: If the president's current version of personal accounts stalls, he should consider another version - one that is more likely to win broad support, and that achieves all the goals of an "ownership society."

The personal accounts I'm thinking of would be inspired by a proposal called KidSave, which was floating around in the late 1990's. KidSave was championed by Bob Kerrey when he was a Democratic senator from Nebraska, but in its different iterations it attracted support from a range of Democrats (Lieberman, Moynihan and Breaux) and Republicans (Gregg, Grassley and Santorum).

Ray Boshara had a similarly-targeted piece in the Washington Post today. Boshara writes:

Perhaps a good way to begin debate on President Bush's bold and commendable ideas for an "ownership society" would be to ask, "Who owns America?" After all, if ownership policies further concentrate the ownership of assets for those who already own a lot, while doing little for those who own nothing, what's the point?

He also offers:

While we shouldn't penalize those who've done well -- in fact, we should continue to reward hard work, creativity and initiative -- there's little for our nation to gain by further concentrating wealth. And there is an enormous amount to be gained by broadening it. Wealth begets wealth; the real challenge is to have it in the first place.

He continues:

In fact, the forthcoming ASPIRE Act would do exactly that. And the broad, surprisingly bipartisan sponsorship of that bill. . .(see above). . .suggests that a progressive ownership agenda might be one of the few things our deeply divided Congress can agree on in coming years. Britain is rolling out its bold, and similar, "Child Trust Fund" this year; the United States would be wise to do the same.

Naturally, any policies that build wealth for millions of Americans could cost billions of dollars. But it would be money well spent. The Homestead Act and the GI Bill, both rightly cited by the president at his inauguration as great ownership society programs, generated huge financial returns and remain the foundation of our middle class. Fully one-quarter of adults today can trace their legacy of asset ownership to the Homestead Act, and the GI Bill has returned $7 to the nation for every $1 invested.

Both are worth looking at.

And both are better ideas than privatizing Social Security.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. For more information on the Aspire Act, this is a good resource. SCC

Chris Nelson's Nelson Report is just too good not post in its near entirety. (I will not italicize for easier reading)

He gives Condi credit on her quick action on the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, but then slams her on Iran and the administration's absence of strategy regarding nuclear non-proliferation.

Chris Nelson hits all the buttons:

***2. For today, let's see where we stand on Iran, and Israel/Palestine: the "big news" today is that Rice has thrown her personal support to a hastily scheduled Israeli/Palestinian "truce summit" tomorrow, but will stand back herself. Instead, Ms. Rice made an interesting move, appointing a Special Envoy...but not "the" long awaited US Special Envoy...rather, a general tasked with helping the Palestinians with their internal security and border situations.

-- in that, Ms. Rice sends an important message of reassurance to Israel and Prime Minister Sharon, that the US understands that without dramatic progress in ending attacks by pro-Palestinian terrorist elements, talk of reactivating the "road map", much less a "final settlement" is simply not possible.

3. The new "security coordinator", Gen. William Ward, was part of what certainly looks like a carefully orchestrated set of signals from the White House to help set the psychological atmosphere for Tuesday's Sharon/Abbas meeting in Egypt, hosted by President Mubarak and attended by Washington's favorite king, Abdullah of Jordan

-- first, President Bush invited both Sharon and "President Abbas" to visit this Spring...and commentators immediately noted that Abbas was granted an honorific never accorded Yassir Arafat...a point Bush reinforced by also calling Abbas "trustworthy";

-- second, she and Bush made a point of talking about "Palestine", rather than the less committed formulation of a "Palestinian entity" or a future "Palestinian state". So today it became "Palestine", as in "now".

-- third, with anticipated screams from the Israeli right and its supporters in the US in mind, both Bush and Rice spoke of mutual "obligations" which the US expects Israel and Palestine to meet: real effort and demonstrable progress by Abbas to stop militant attacks on Israel; and for Sharon not to fool around with new settlements on the West Bank, or pinching land in East Jerusalem.

-- fourth, financial backing also will be provided, Rice announced, an additional $40-million to the $350-million pledged last week by Bush, which she said would go to a "quick action program" to meet two critical internal Palestinian needs...jobs and infrastructure. The idea is to help give Abbas some tools to meet the immediate "test" which the Israeli's demand on stopping the attacks.

4. Of course, no one seriously thinks Abbas can turn a switch, especially since his political opponents, and their supporters in Syria, Iran, and elsewhere, will have every incentive to try and undermine the current progress...hence Gen. Ward's mandate on "security coordination", with his task being to focus on "greater security" as an essential precondition for any future chance at re-starting the road map.

-- one on-going task for Sharon (and the US) will be to try and reach an acceptable accommodation or definition of "good enough". Sharon has spoken of requiring a "100% effort" by Abbas...clearly not the same thing as 100% success. Sharon knows that requiring perfection is the same thing as guaranteeing failure.

5. Sharon's opponents, in Israel and in the US, also fully realize the same thing, and so will fight to impose just such an impossible "test." All know that if bombs and killings continue, Sharon's domestic political task gets even more complicated...and it's already quite bad enough, with some elements in the armed forces clearly unhappy about the prospect of being used to haul settlers off Gaza, a spectacle which will provide no end of temptation to emotional TV coverage, and hysterical Knesset debate.

-- the one positive element here in Washington is that the normally obstructionist allies of Israeli rejectionists, the Christian fundamentalists happen mainly to populate the House Republican caucus, led by the fearsome evangelical scourge, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, will instead find themselves forced to try and behave, while their own party's president rests in the White House. Not for the first time since 9/11 is is worth pondering "what if Gore/Kerry" had won?

6. Anyhow, that's an attempt to outline the potential "good news". What about Iran? Rice really stunned everyone with her press conference remarks last week, not just the resumption of emotional, personal rhetoric about the nature of Iran's mullahs, but her apparently flat rejection of a serious US-Euro working partnership in the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

-- the net, pending further developments, is to assume one of two things still governs US policy: first, continuation of the policy impasse within the Administration which has kept it from doing what former Secretary of State Powell and the "Scowcroft wing" wanted...direct negotiations with the Iranian government;

-- or, second, that there is no impasse, and the "real" Bush policy is to refuse to join in negotiating with the mullah government, and to take literally the President's State of the Union language that the US stands ready to "stand with the people" of Iran...a remark which certainly sounded like a call for revolution, if relatively mildly stated.

7. Rice's language and posture on Iran were doubly surprising, as it had been assumed by Administration critics that at the very least, the Bush team wants to avoid falling into the trap on Iran that it created for itself with N. Korea...being blamed by US allies and trading partners for an eventual crisis.

-- the Europeans have been as blunt as the Chinese and South Koreans in warning the White House of their displeasure at the current impasses, and their increasing discomfort at what they fear is a deliberate US stance, one founded on a determination by Bush that if the US refuses to seriously play, that, somehow, there will be a soft collapse of the Iranian and N. Korean regimes.

8. We don't need to get into the obviously dangerous aspects of all this for tonight, except to note that some serious observers of Bush policy now argue that the "reality" is that Bush does not oppose nuclear armaments being developed by the likes of Pakistan and India, despite the risk to peace on the Subcontinent, because both regimes are basically US friends, even allies.

-- it now looks like the only Bush non-proliferation policy seriously in play is to deny nuclear weapons to Iran, and N. Korea (obvious contradiction notwithstanding). In other words, it isn't about non-proliferation, it's about the nature of the regimes proliferating. Tyrannies are not to be allowed the Bomb...others, including Brazil (?), we are prepared to accommodate.***

Steve Clemons back on line now.

My only comment is that one needs to remind Secretary Rice that the best outcome is getting things right with Abbas and Sharon as well as Iran. If either gambit fails, then there will be no real success in the other.

-- Steve Clemons

Christopher Hitchens is clearly controversial and elicits either the deepest adoration from or seething hatred in people. We have enjoyed discussing big thoughts when we ran across each other at various birthday parties that went too late in Adams Morgan and Kalorama-ish homes in Washington. He also visits the New America Foundation from time to time to listen to other speakers (a rare thing for celebrity writers to do actually -- listen to others).

I have to admit that I find myself intrigued with him. He is off to do a London Tour with David Horowitz.

Ok, I'm surprised.

I'm all for odd bedfellows -- but that's pretty intense, until I was digging through email and saw that I had been invited to "Children's Hour" at AEI last month. The anti-gay, anti-abortion Michael Novak put an event together including Bill Kristol and Christopher Hitchens that must have given the kids some intense nightmares.

Here is the program:

The Children's Hour
A Reading of New and Classic Children's Poetry
Tuesday, January 25, 2005 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM

Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI

Children's poems in Washington! To remind ourselves that not everything in the District of Columbia absolutely must concern politics, Michael Novak has invited Joseph Bottum and friends to read new and classic poems for children at AEI. Bring your kids, young and old, and join us for an evening of tragedy, comedy, sentimentality, goofiness, and fun!

5:30
Welcome: Michael Novak, AEI

5:40
Readings:
Joseph Bottum, books and arts editor of The Weekly Standard and poetry editor of the journal First Things; his most recent book is The Pius War.

Mary Eberstadt, a consulting editor to Policy Review and the author of Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and celebrated poet and critic, whose latest volume is Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture.

Christopher Hitchens, a widely published essayist, columnist for Vanity Fair, and author of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.

Tim Kelleher, an actor, writer, and director in Los Angeles and New York, whose film credits include the role of Ted Sorenson in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days.

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and well-known political commentator for national television.

7:00 Adjournment

I am too cynical to think that this was all just for the sake of spending a fun evening with kids.

I know Chris Hitchens supported the war in Iraq and may have made the AEI crowd his new best friends, but this has got to be a new way for him to spend his evenings.

Could this be young neocon recruitment?

OK, I know I'm overthinking this -- but seriously, who would you rather leave your kids with for an evening? A gay Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts (who seemed upstanding enough) or Michael Novak & this gang?

-- Steve Clemons

About eighteen months ago, I was invited to a small dinner at the home of the German Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington, Peter Gottwald, who is a very good guy by the way but not someone who seems to enjoy debate around his dinner table.

I don't remember what the occasion was but there were some other alumni of German-American young leaders programs including a person whose name I cannot mention who works in the White House as a close advisor to the President, and in my view, keeping the President out of jail. My friend is non-partisan and a very thoughtful policy guy who really disdains the loaded partisanship that surrounds him.

But that night at dinner, Guantanamo came up, and I had just read what the American Civil Liberties Union had compiled in the early days on Guantanamo -- and it sounded even then like a disaster. One of the other guests brought up the detention facility, and two or three others quickly chimed in that the ACLU and other reports were sensationalizing matters. My friend then said he had been down there, had a look, and was convinced that the detainees were being treated humanely and had somewhat "luxurious" facilities as far as being prisoners went.

I am not going to divulge the identity of this person who works in the White House. I'm learning a few things from Hersh. But I know that this individual reads this blog, and I want to remind him of this dinner conversation at Gottwald's home. The whole evening became rather heated (sort of like the comment sections on this blog) because I wouldn't accept at face value the public assurances from the Pentagon that the human rights of detainees were being carefully protected.

Even though the Germans and many other embassies in town had problems with Bush administration policy, it was clear to me that the dinner party circuit was dominated by those sympathetic to Bush and unwilling to question the legitimacy of our actions. Since the foreign embassies could not make public pronouncements at odds with their governments and needed to have linkages into conservative circles, particularly inside the administration, these dinners became enclaves of transatlantic consensus-building that nothing the administration was doing was nearly as bad or reprehensible as NGOs and the media were alleging.

I would like my friend in the White House to figure out how to deal with the fact that he was either seriously misled by the authorities at Guantanamo, or (and I hate to say this) he misled those of us at that dinner party.

I'm inclined to think it was the former -- which means he has to come to terms about deception between a branch of the government -- in this case, the Pentagon -- and the Executive Office of the President.

Because these grafs in today's column by Bob Herbert puts that entire Peter Gottwald-hosted dinner in a new light:

During the whole time we were at Guantanamo," said Shafiq Rasul, "we were at a high level of fear. When we first got there the level was sky-high. At the beginning we were terrified that we might be killed at any minute. The guards would say to us, 'We could kill you at any time.' They would say, 'The world doesn't know you're here. Nobody knows you're here. All they know is that you're missing, and we could kill you and no one would know.'"

The horror stories from the scandalous interrogation camp that the United States is operating at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are coming to light with increased frequency. At some point the whole shameful tale of this exercise in extreme human degradation will be told. For the time being we have to piece together what we can from a variety of accounts that have escaped the government's obsessively reinforced barriers of secrecy.

This is all being done in the name of fighting terror. But the best evidence seems to show that many of the people rounded up and dumped without formal charges into Guantanamo had nothing to do with terror. They just happened to be unfortunate enough to get caught in one of Uncle Sam's depressingly indiscriminate sweeps. Which is what happened to Shafiq Rasul, who was released from Guantanamo about a year ago. His story is instructive, and has not been told widely enough.

I am not posting this to embarrass a friend, but some major contradictions that we run into inside this political and policy frenzy require attention on occasion.

All I can say publicly is that it was clear to me at the time of this dinner that someone close to the President had investigated matters at Guantanamo and had found nothing amiss and reported this informally to others. He didn't have to tell us a word, and he's the kind of person who is discreet but not deceptive.

I think if I was in his shoes, I would not be sleeping well.

-- Steve Clemons

I told you I knew nothing of football.

I went to high school in Japan. Sumo we can discuss.

-- Steve Clemons

The National Bureau of Asian Research runs a really terrific list-serve on Japan that covers Japanese political, historical, economic, and cultural questions in (sometimes excruciating but nonetheless interesting) detail.

To subscribe, click here.

This morning, an entry by my former Japanese politics professor Hans Baerwald came over the line. Hans is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UCLA but now thinks great thoughts and lives a great life tending blue oaks and his growing vineyard in Pope Valley in Napa County, California. He was one of the most important mentors in my intellectual and personal development.

He also served in Government Section in MacArthur's SCAP (Supreme Command Allied Powers) during America's occupation of Japan and was responsible for helping to administer the purge of Japanese political, military and cultural leaders who had been proponents of Japan's war-time aggression. Baerwald wrote the definitive book on the purge titled The Purge of Japanese Leaders Under the Occupation, which I think holds important lessons for us today regarding any nation America tries to occupy again (since it didn't heed any of these lessons in the Iraq case).

This is what he wrote for the NBR Japan Forum yesterday. I know it will sound complicated to those who don't know Japanese history -- but I'll explain:

Two programs in postwar Japan that may be worth mentioning in this connection (the thread is on Japan's history of 'intellectuals and the left') are: The "Public Information Media Purge" initiated in January 1947 as part of the "Political Purge" supervised by Government Section SCAP, but with criteria that reflected a good deal of Japanese Government input in their formulation, and "The Education Purge" administered by Civil Information and Education Section (CIE) SCAP (therefore totally separate from the "Political Purge") with substantial input by the Japanese Government's Ministry of Education.

By then, both SCAP and the Japanese Government had embarked on what came to be called gyaku kosu (reverse course). In any case, this shift in American Government policy played a significant role in bringing Japanese self-reflection to an end. Japan's "Old Order" had triumphed, but with our official help.

Without going into mind-numbing detail about the institutions and details of the particular purge categories Baerwald notes above, what is important to note is that American authorities did have a somewhat sophisticated understanding of the components of Japanese society, particularly the part that was hard-wired to generate a militaristic intellectual and political environment.

SCAP (which while it included Allies was primarily an American gig) did depend on Japan's still-standing bureaucracies to help promulgate and implement the purge as well as many other initiatives. Baerwald and others have argued in the past that this dependence on Japan's government ministries and civil servants had benefits and costs -- most of the costs being that policies that the Japanese really didn't want to pursue, they wouldn't -- or at least they would drag their feet or obfuscate matters.

In contrast, though, I don't think we ever had such a fix on the civil bureaucracy that still existed in pieces, here and there, in Iraq. Our purge of Baathists was so extensive that we knocked out talent that could otherwise have been quickly ideologically redirected.

I think it would be very useful if some of those in the Coalition Provisional Authority began to think about writing about what went well and poorly in Iraq, from a nuts and bolts perspective, to create some worthwhile comparisons with America's occupation experiences in Japan.

Of course, the other notable item in Baerwald's brief comment is that Japan's various prime ministers wavered on how cooperative they were with the U.S. government on implementing purges of Japan's intellectuals who had helped legitimate Japan's war machine.

Interestingly, Yoshida's government was the least cooperative with SCAP authorities -- but he is the bureaucrat that America helped install as Japan's prime minister after purging Ichiro Hatoyama, who would have been Japan's prime minister after its first post-war election. Yoshida, though, allied himself with John Foster Dulles and other anti-progressive forces in both the Truman administration and what would be the future Eisenhower administration. Working together, Yoshida and a faction of American elites worried more about the growing threat of Communism from the Soviet Union and inside China than building democracy and a credible system of checks and balances in Japan.

Japan eventually made its way towards representative democracy -- but America's role was very spotty, and more indirect than direct.

President Bush recently stated, in his most recent press conference:

I don't want to rehash something that I'm sure you got tired of hearing me talk about on the campaign trail, but it is -- the decisions we make today can affect how people live 30, 40 or 50 years from now. And I bring up, once again, my example about working with Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan. And it wasn't all that long ago that Japan was a bitter enemy. And today, because Japan is a democracy and a free country, the Japanese are strong allies with the United States of America and we're better off for it.

Bush needs to be careful of trumpeting too much about our experience democratizing Japan -- as we were frequently on the side of the anti-democrats. To some degree, Japan democratized despite our promotion of a profound model of structural corruption there -- and the Japanese public and civil society institutions deserve credit. But Bush, as of late, has been warping this history.

Baerwald points out that different prime ministers in Japan interacted with America and implies that they played different factions of the administration off one another (I may be reading this in to his statement because I know his views somewhat well).

It is worth remembering that the man we purged in May 1946 on the eve of being Japan's first true post-war, democratically selected prime minister came back to depose the semi-American-installed Shigeru Yoshida in 1954 and promptly began to work on thawing relations with the Soviet Union.

Hatoyama's moves were a bit of classic blowback, though minor in this case. But blowback overall, is something that American strategists need to be far more circumspect about. Here is one of the most prescient volumes about blowback, appearing about 18 months before 9/11.

For those interested, Baerwald published a fascinating insider's account of our Occupation bureaucracy in this Japan Policy Research Institute working paper. Mayumi Itoh, a scholar at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas, also wrote this set of chapters and book on respectively Hatoyama's purge and de-purging as well as the Hatoyama political dynasty.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm told that the Superbowl is on today. I haven't seen Matthew Yglesias post on the big game today -- but his earlier exposes on big guys chasing a ball in the cold have intimidated me regarding my ignorance of the game.

Jim Plunkett and his wife once gave me a Plunkett/L.A. Raiders Christmans ornament for my tree -- but as best I can tell, not that many people remember Plunkett, at least not in my circles. I went to two years of elementary school and one year of junior high school in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania -- just outside of Philadelphia -- and then spent a magnificent year at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH -- where I delivered the Boston Globe and where our high school band often played at New England Patriots games in Boston. So, since my barely self-realized loyalties are divided, I'm indifferent to the outcome today.

But in the lead up to the game, those of us who can't take football mania have been watching C-Span, and apparently, I've been yacking away on two C-Span stations and football-phobics have been watching and writing to me today.

In one of the broadcasts, I am moderating a meeting with Harlan Ullman, author of Finishing Business: Ten Steps to Defeat Global Terror (with foreward and afterword respectively by Newt Gingrich and Wesley Clark) Ullman is actually the guy who was the chief conceptualizer of "Shock and Awe" as a military doctine -- and who has since been a conservative critic of the Department of Defense and Bush administration for failing to organize effectively for the kind of threat Osama bin Laden represented. I'll never forget how angry Ullman was that the DoD labeled its invasion of Iraq one inspired by "Shock and Awe" because he argued then that few of the core elements of the true 'shock and awe' doctrine were applied to the effort -- and instead the administration used his concept as a bumper sticker slogan and as camouflage to lead the nation's military into a distraction of resources and quagmire.

In the other program, I am a panelist in a meeting organized by the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies discussing the impact of the President's inaugural remarks and evolving foreign policy on his upcoming trip to Europe.

One of the things that came over the transom because of these C-Span shows was an email reference to this interesting website: www.newdemocracy.org. As best I can tell, this site tries to create a format in which the public can vote on legislation and initiaves that the Congress is pondering.

I think that the site's designer has some challenges ahead in simplifying the process. Anything that involves legislation, bills, amendments, etc. is clunky -- but I like the concept a lot. In a way, Josh Marshall suggested that the public somehow get the opportunity to see and critique legislation so that idiotic amendments (like the Istook Amendment) get some kind of feedback and screeching whistles by the public before passed.

There is a lot of Michael Moore-bashing in vogue now, in both parties. But I'd say that one of Moore's most successful blows in Farenheit 9/11 was that legislators rarely read (and according to John Conyers, never read) the bills they are voting on.

David Johnson is going to make a major push for his New Democracy site after the President's annual budget proposal is released, and we wish him luck.

-- Steve Clemons

I hope that the film re-make of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is a blockbuster. It will star Sean Penn, Jude Law, Patricia Clarkson and Kate Winslett.

If they market it right, they'll make it a metaphor about the corruption of Congress by Tom DeLay and his minions -- whom I think have just gone too far.

Today in the lead editorial from the Washington Post:

WE HAVE, it seems, once again underestimated the speaker of the House and the lengths to which he is willing to go to neuter the ethics process and protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). When it looked in December as if J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was prepared to dump the inconveniently activist chairman of the House ethics committee, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), we published an editorial headlined "Ousting the Umpire."

It turns out we didn't give the speaker enough credit for thinking big. On Wednesday -- and we're sure it was mere coincidence that it happened to be the day of the State of the Union address -- Mr. Hastert finally announced the new lineup for the ethics panel in the 109th Congress. Not only did he can Mr. Hefley, as expected; he also purged the two most recalcitrant -- we would say responsible -- other Republican committee members, Reps. Kenny Hulshof (R-Mo.) and Steven C. LaTourette (R-Ohio).

Mr. Smith and Mr. Cole could well be called on to judge Mr. DeLay's conduct, because the committee postponed any action on Mr. DeLay's fundraising activities during the state probe. It will be incumbent on them, and on the panel's new chair, to demonstrate their diligence and independence despite the intense political pressure they are likely to face.

I would love to be surprised but Mr. Smith and Mr. Cole don't seem to be the types of representatives appointed to this important ethics job to preserve and protect the institution of Congress and our democracy, but rather there to be agents of Tom DeLay -- who is clearly the nastiest malignant tumor Congress has had to struggle with in some time.

-- Steve Clemons

There were parts of the President's State of the Union address that impressed me -- and parts that I thought were duplicitous. One of the new initiatives he mentioned has received little attention in the press -- and that is more investment in DNA evidence processing in capital punishment cases.

I support this initiative by Bush because I think it is clear that America in the past has executed prisoners innocent of their crimes and has not done enough to assure that such tragic mistakes are not a regular feature of our justice system.

President Bush stated:

Because one of the main sources of our national unity is our belief in equal justice, we need to make sure Americans of all races and backgrounds have confidence in the system that provides justice. In America we must make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit -- so we are dramatically expanding the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful conviction. (Applause.)

Soon I will send to Congress a proposal to fund special training for defense counsel in capital cases, because people on trial for their lives must have competent lawyers by their side. (Applause.)

But then I got thinking about these new round of cabinent confirmations, particularly Al Gonzales as Attorney General.

Could Bush's new found interest in death row justice be camouflage for the clear deficits in due process managed by his closest legal advisor in Texas and the Oval Office?

According to one report:

On execution day in Texas, it was the job of Gonzales to give Bush a summary of the case. The summary was the last information standing between an inmate and lethal injection. Gonzales provided 57 summaries to Bush. Gonzales intended for the memos to be confidential, but author Alan Berlow obtained them under Texas public information law.

In his summary to Bush about Washington, Gonzales played up the murder and almost entirely omitted the evidence that cried out of a miscarriage of justice. Washington's final 30-page petition for clemency was centered on the issues of ineffective counsel and retardation. On execution day, all that Gonzales presented Bush was a three-page memo in which the only mention of the petition was that it had been rejected by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

About Attorney General Gonzales, the New York Times reminds us:

Mr. Gonzales testified that he agreed with the substance of the original torture memo, and he still takes the view that the president can declare himself to be above the law. In written responses to senators' questions, Mr. Gonzales argued that intelligence agents could "abuse" prisoners as long as they did it to foreigners outside the United States.

Bush's DNA and legal initiative for those facing execution in this country is a good first step. Getting out of the torture business is also a good thing for the President to suggest to his people.

But Al Gonzales's views on America's chief citizen being above the law, or federal treaties not applying to the Republic of Texas (as he once wrote), or torture by agents of the U.S. being acceptable beyond our geographic borders, makes Gonzales a very ominous presence in Bush's new cabinet.

I'm sorry to see that so many moderate Republicans didn't step forward to block someone whose legal interpretations and prescriptions they detest. To them, Gonzales represents all of the dangers of corrupt, unrestrained, powerful government that meddles in the lives of its citizens.

-- Steve Clemons

I know that George Bush -- after a few days of study, contemplation, and strategic thinking following the December 26th tsunami disaster -- decided to weigh in "Big Time" with American aid and support for victims in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Western Africa.

I was dismayed by the slowness of the American response and thought that there was a vital role the U.S. could play in helping to alleviate the near, mid and long-term consequences of this enormous tragedy.

Since so many in the region were Muslims, I thought that showering these communities with support would be an interesting lesson for Muslims skeptical of American intentions in the Middle East. We have sent troops, aid workers, supplies, and money -- and in a very large scale -- but the central, pivotal role we might have played in engaging in this region's problems seems never to have quite materialized in my view.

We had a great chance to demonstrate the compassion of our nation -- and our commitment to long-term problem-solving in this region. But from my vantage point, despite what we did send, we quickly let concern for tsunami victims become a backburner item in our national consciousness (though kudos to those aid workers and NGOs and U.S. military officials who are and were there).

But not a word in the President's Inaugural Address or his State of the Union Address. The word "tsunami" did not appear. The fact that America was collaborating arm in arm with many other great nations of the world to respond to one of the great disasters of modern memory did not make it into Bush's two big prime time moments.

Was it on purpose? Or did he forget on purpose the victims and how this might be a useful benchmark of good U.S. foreign policy?

Treasury Secretary John Snow just did the live "Ask the White House" interaction hour today at 3 p.m. I submitted my question which was:

One would think that if President Bush really wanted to make an impression on the "hearts and minds" part of our foreign policy portfolio, he would have mentioned the victims of the terrible tsunami about a month ago -- and America's role responding. He failed to mention anything about this disaster and its aftermath either in his Inaugural speech or last night in his State of the Union address....not one word. Was this a mistake? Or was it on purpose?

Steve Clemons
Washington, DC

Here is the transcript of the questions the White House accepted.

Unfortunately, Secretary Snow either never got to my question or decided to ignore it.

-- Steve Clemons

P.S. I just received a few minutes ago a magazine in the mail called "India Review" published by the Embassy of India (February 2005). The photo on the front is of President Bush signing the condolence book for the tsunami victims at the Embassy of India in Washington on January 3rd. Former Presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush as well as Laura Bush are there too. (a version of the picture can be seen here.)

These kinds of gestures matter significantly to those nations who are less well off than America -- and that is why the cover of this magazine shows the President's photo. It really is too bad that he neglected these victims, their villages, their nations, and the many who empathize with their plight in his major political addresses.

-- Steve Clemons

I have written before that America has its head in the sand when it comes to its quickly deteriorating economic portfolio.

On the one hand, I hate to see America pointing itself in a direction which will make the nation overall a much poorer country -- but there are days when my frustration that Congress is failing to curtail the naturally expansive powers of the White House that seeing the dollar fall through the floor might be the only constraint the President pays attention to. It's tough to support George Bush's pretensions in the world while so dependent on foreign financiers, particularly China, to keep our economy chugging.

Economist David Hale has just sent me his latest paper, "Economic Risks in 2005." It is not available online, but I am going to post a long-ish excerpt from this superb survey of potential economic potholes ahead on the East Asian Central Banks.

Here is the excerpt:

The East Asian Central Banks

The east Asian central banks now have $2.4 trillion of foreign exchange reserves or over 66% of the global total compared to 30% in 1990. They have accumulated these large foreign exchange reserves partly for defensive reasons after the 1997-1998 financial crisis and partly to help stabilize their currencies against the U.S. dollar.

If the Fed has a chairman who clearly favors significant currency depreciation, it will be more difficult for the Asian central banks to resist market pressures without massive intervention. The Feldstein appointment could thus be a catalyst for both an exchange rate realignment and a rise of U.S. bond yields large enough to reduce the external deficit by restraining domestic consumption.

There is a large economic faultline between the United States and Asia, and the tension building must be relieved or managed at some point. John Maynard Keynes worried about any large economy defecting from a system of global economic interdependence -- and what he considered defection was a nation that chronically under-consumed (Japan's case) or chronically over-consumed (America's case). Big structural imbalances between any players in the global economic system needed to be addressed.

Feldstein, if appointed, may pursue an ever weaker dollar strategy that finally breaks the dam, raising the cost to Americans of Chinese goods -- but it will also create significant pain in Europe and lower the quality of life for Americans used to the narcotic of cheap goods abroad.

I don't see many ways out of America's economic mess that don't negatively impact the living standards of average Americans -- but I do think that we need something from the Bush administration that looks and sounds like serious economic strategy.

-- Steve Clemons

James Woolsey and Richard Perle were testifying yesterday before the House Intelligence Committee. They both seem to be thriving despite a mountain of evidence that both are inappropriately financially profiting from America's "war on terror."

Woolsey is parroting a line that runs in the groove recently carved out by Peter Beinart's article "A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism" that says that the way forward for progressives on foreign policy is to make everything (from feminism to racial politics) about fighting Islamic fundamentalism. Woolsey is with Beinart on this -- or maybe, rather, Beinart is with Woolsey on this.

Here are the opening grafs of Shaun Waterman's good piece yesterday on Woolsey and Perle:

Woosley: Cold War approach to new threats
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

"It was guilt by association," he said.

I am attending the monthly Left & Right Luncheon organized by Ruy Teixeira and hosted by the Century Foundation and Hoover Institution today -- and the instigators of debate this afternoon will be Peter Beinart and the American Prospect's Michael Tomasky.

The big question Teixeira poses for discussion is:

Must liberals abandon "the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004" and wage "a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace" such as Michael Moore and MoveOn?

Should be an interesting debate -- but I plan to raise with Beinart and others there the PNAC letter many of them signed as well as Woolsey's suggestion that we need to set up a new registration system for those Islamists and Islamist-like people in America, and maybe those who just raise questions about the legitimacy of the government compiling such enemies lists again.

Bill Clinton made a huge mistake appointing Woolsey as CIA Director -- but I do understand why Clinton never really wanted to spend time with the guy.

-- Steve Clemons

I don't want to get into the details of this right now, but there is a time I had an interesting phone conversation with former President George H.W. Bush. Some interested parties in Japan were approaching him to come to Japan after the conclusion of his presidential term and were offering him $2 million.

I was approached by a larger Japanese news conglomerate who wanted me to approach Bush -- so I called his newly established private office. It was clear to me that Bush and his secretary were the only ones in his new office because they had tried to send a fax to me as if it were from another Bush-handler, but I just had the feeling the person wasn't in Texas yet. When trying to get this particular person identified on the fax (who was responding for Bush to me) on the phone, Bush himself got on the phone -- and it was a memorable and fascinating conversation.

He was being represented by the Harry Walker Agency and wanted to make sure that Harry (Harry's son now runs that business) got his fair cut -- and put me in touch with him. But Bush was interested -- but wanted just $1 million. Reagan had in direct compensation and in the overall cost of his trip had enjoyed a Japan excursion that cost about $8 million total, paid for by Fujisankei Communications. Bush wanted none of that controversy.

I wasn't being compensated to play a middleman role in all of this but was trying to be helpful -- and wanted to learn how these things moved along. I ended up meeting Harry Walker in New York -- great guy actually -- and he wanted to start a business line with me lining up some of the nation's top political talent for Asian deals. I politely wiggled out of that expectation and stayed in the less lucrative public policy business.

I don't think Bush ever took that trip. The sponsors wanted 8 speeches from Bush, and they were clearly syndicating him around Japan and lining up other sponsors and trying to use President Bush as the bait to make money themselves. Bush wanted just one speech and maybe a couple of other appearances -- and was willing to go as far as two speeches for the million dollars. But in the end, the package fell apart, until the sponsors lined him up a few years later.

I mention this because despite the large amount of money involved, Bush demonstrated some judiciousness about his role and the degree of crassness he would permit regarding selling his stature for compensation. Bill Clinton seems much more willing to speak for large fees, but I don't know his going rate. I see that he is represented by Harry Walker as well -- and at the time Bush told me that Walker's take on each speech was 20%.

I liked Bush and talked to him again, in person, at Richard Nixon's funeral. He remembered the conversation, and we spoke briefly about the awkward tension he felt between making a living speaking at gigs around the world and not wanting to inappropriately or excessively benefit from his stature as a former president. Some reading this will scoff at these comments from Bush given the lucrative family relationships the Bush family has enjoyed with the Saudis and many other monied interests around the world -- because of their stature -- but if you were there with me in person, you might have read what I did in Bush's comments -- that he genuinely felt awkward about it.

Since then, I have always been interested in the financial conflicts that high profile politicians, pundits, and media stars might encounter. James Fallows wrote about this in a brilliant short book called Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine Democracy. Fallows' book is even more relevant today given the Armstrong Williams scandal and the fact that the Bush administration has tried to buy off a number of journalists.

A previously unreported incident that runs along these lines occurred when agents representing Rodrigo de Rato contacted me in the weeks preceding his formal appointment as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund.

Rato was among those at the top of the list jousting to run the IMF, and as it became increasingly clear he would get the job, a speaker's agent offered him to the New America Foundation. We were asked to pay a speaker's fee to Rato -- and I was told that I could confirm all of this with Rato by phone if I needed to check the credentials and status of these agents. I stupidly let all of this drop, though I did speak with the agent several times.

But it seemed profoundly unethical to me that the IMF Managing Director to be would market himself for a fee because his stock had just risen in the eyes of those concerned with international economic policy. There are laws in the U.S. about jacking up prices of goods during natural disasters -- and Rodrigo de Rato's agents were crossing a line too.

Just to be fair to Rato, I never did call him -- and know that there exists the possibility that these agents were just being entrepreneurs and trying to line stuff up without his formal endorsement. But still the tale deserves to be told as I've presented it.

I actually told a guy at the IMF about this attempt to extort speaker's fees for Rato when it happened -- and he encouraged me to divulge the story then. Unfortunately, The Washington Note was still at the conceptual stage.

But here is some data I just came by that can't help but make people scratch their heads wondering why these civil servants (and members of the media) feel entitled to such imperial levels of compensation.

Here are the compensation figures (about to be officially announced -- but the information on Ridge, Thompson, Evans and Armitage is still pre-publication):

Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge
$40,000 for East Coast appearances

Former Commerce Secretary Donald Evans
approximately $25,000 (still negotiations between Evans and his agents)

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage*
$25,000

*(TWN Note: Armitage is worth much more as he is the guy who really did stop a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India about 90 minutes before the missiles began to fly. . .no joke)

Tom Brokaw
$60,000 for New York City appearances

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
$100,000 plus first class expenses for two to include a Lear 60 Jet

Let me just be clear that bloggers, even those who are celebrities, fly cattle class and are lucky to get breakfast.

-- Steve Clemons

President Bush keeps mentioning Japan and his buddy-buddy relationship with Junichiro Koizumi at press conferences as well as the fact that Japan is a stunning example of evil foe turned into fast friend and robust democracy.

I don't think that George Bush has the foggiest idea how Japan became democratic, and our role in that process was questionable in my view. In fact, the United States saw to it that the first prime ministerial victor after the first democratic elections in Japan was purged on the eve of his ascension. This was the brilliant Ichiro Hatoyama who founded and built the Liberal Party in Japan and later merged it with the Democratic Party in 1955. Both parties were conservative -- and founded the long-time ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Instead of letting Hatoyama ascend to the PM position, some in Douglas MacArthur's world feared he was too leftist, and others thought that he was a closet right-winger. He was, in fact, a 'radical centrist.'

America, instead, had installed a bureaucrat -- Shigeru Yoshida. This was not democracy.

But we did get some things right, and some of the people who helped lead the charge on democratization and demilitarization of Japan deserve to be remembered well for their accomplishments. One of these was Charles Kades, who headed the Government Section team drafting Japan's Constitution -- which while problematic -- has stood as Japan's organizing law for nearly sixty years.

America had no such supreme authority in Iraq -- despite L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer's best efforts -- but the one guy who comes close to being the Charles Kades of Iraq, kind of a less-naieve but equally dashing 21st century version of Lawrence of Arabia is Noah Feldman who worked as a member of Bremer's staff with all of the contending parties in the Iraqi Governing Council to hammer out a 'constitutional road map.'

Feldman believes that democracy can be rooted, or root itself, in the Middle East but does not excoriate or scoff at critics whose realism compels them to be skeptical of that ideal. He is a believer, but he knows that the path to a stable democratic order is treacherous.

I think Feldman's Financial Times piece yesterday is a fair accounting of the elections in Iraq -- what went right, what went wrong, and what problems still lie ahead. It's exactly the kind of cautionary brief that I hope the President's screeners let him read.

Here are the first few grafs:

The Iraqis who braved violence to vote on Sunday in the country's first free election in 50 years were, like voters everywhere, expressing democratic belief in ownership over their political future. Many also believed, in accordance with the teaching of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the moderate Iraqi Shia leader, that voting was a religious obligation. If, as seems likely, the Shia parties associated with Mr Sistani have taken a substantial majority, elected officials who describe themselves as Islamic democrats will, for the first time, actually get the opportunity to govern after taking office.

Many headlines in the wake of Sunday's poll have focused, rightly, on the continuing question of basic security. Nearly 40 Iraqis died as a result of violence on election day, and security remains the dominant issue on the Iraqi scene. Although voters turned out in large numbers in Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad, insurgent violence, coupled with a substantial Sunni boycott, seems to have ensured that the impressive final turn-out in the election nonetheless does not reflect an accurate demographic cross-section of the Iraqi population. As a result, although Kurds and Shia may consider the election legitimises the 275-member National Assembly that has now been selected, many Sunni Arabs will not see it the same way. Their disenfranchisement, though largely self-inflicted, now stands as the greatest challenge to the creation of stable and peaceful government in Iraq and the eventual withdrawal of significant numbers of US and UK forces.

Noah Feldman articulates quite bluntly what a successful democratic outcome will require:

What Iraq needs is a constitution that not only specifies individual rights and reconciles democratic principles with an official role for Islam, but that will also function as a kind of peace treaty, guaranteeing the Sunni minority - accustomed to running Iraq under Saddam Hussein and before - a real role in shaping the country's future. For this to happen, the Sunnis must have representation in the negotiations over the shape of the constitution, despite their absence in large numbers from the National Assembly. Not only that, a significant number of Sunnis must be prepared to stop supporting the insurgency and swing their support behind a political resolution.

Achieving this will not be easy. The substance of the guarantees is easy to imagine. Sunnis will want a guarantee of equal distribution of resources, such as currently exists in Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law. They will want an amnesty for insurgents, something that would almost certainly be granted at this stage.

I am not as confident as Feldman that the U.S. can be the primary change-agent and mentor of democracy that he suggests here:

The next six months, then, will amount to the toughest test that can be faced by any government of any kind, Islamic or otherwise: the creation of order out of disorder, and of broad legitimacy out of support that is today only partial.

The odds against success are daunting. But the alternative to a federal, power-sharing Islamic democracy in Iraq is no longer old-fashioned military dictatorship: it is chaos. The US and all its allies involved in Iraq owe it to those who will form the new government to give them all the assistance they can.

But I do feel that Feldman gets the stakes right -- and it will be incumbent on Europeans to think more entrepreneurially about the role that they might play to prevent Feldman's worst concerns from becoming reality.

That would further American and European interests -- and will ultimately be good for Iraq.

-- Steve Clemons

As regular readers of The Washington Note know, I have been fairly stunned by the growth in readership of this blog, and I work hard to interact with those who comment -- both in private emails and in the public comments sections.

I am also launching a suite of foreign policy and international economic policy projects at the New America Foundation in collaboration with some other organizations.

And I have had some writing commitments to manage -- some of which have gone well and the others on the edge of being wrapped up (or were).

All of this was manageable until my hard disk crashed the other day forcing me to spend several days at computer firms trying to extract items trapped in my machine. Unfortunately, "everything" seems to be irretrievable.

When my computer began making "whirrrrring" noises as I was pounding out the final words about 'pugnacious nationalism' and the religiously inspired President we have (reviewing Anatol Lieven's book), a blue screen appeared stating "PHYSICAL MEMORY DUMP IN PROCESS." Nothing on it worked after that. I had been unplugged, and I chuckled to myself that George Bush's God might be better than my own -- since I had just been screwed by fate.

Can you say back-up? Well, I can say it now -- but never did before.

So, I have lost email addresses, schedules, email, draft articles, speech drafts and notes, photos, everything one would save on a laptop that held 'it all.'

This has slowed me down -- and I am rebuilding lists, etc. One of the things on which I have been slow is sending out receipts for those who sent in donations to the Walter Reed Society. I am getting them done -- but have had to do some retrieval of lists on this that were a bit more time consuming than expected.

I also lost two articles that were finished and just being edited in final form -- and I had decided not to send them until done. Now, I need to rewrite at least one of them as the deadline has passed on the other.

So, these are my problems -- but for those of you who wonder why I might not have been as responsive as usual to emails sent, now you know the rest of the story.

My issues are minor compared to real world tragedies that some in this world are dealing with -- so I am still smiling about all of this. But to others expecting a note back, hang in there while I reorder and reorganize my digital life.

And yes, I will back-up everything from now on. More later.

-- Steve Clemons