The Bush administration is asking both sides in the Israel-Palestine standoff to "bend". It seems like the administration is whispering its advice rather than pushing hard, but the tone is right.

But in a comment today, Tony Snow said that he thought that the UN should not issue a resolution condemning Israel's incursion into Gaza.

Whether the UN should or should not do this is a point I don't care to debate.

However, I will recount elements of a conversation in which I recently participated. I have to protect the people involved -- but suffice it to say that there was a significant diplomatic presence at a small luncheon and most of the diplomats were involved deeply in UN affairs. The guests were from a disparate group of think tanks, as well as representatives from the Congress and the administration.

One of the U.S. government officials present advised the ranking diplomat at the lunch that if there was a strong desire to get the United States in as a member of the Human Rights Council next year, it would "help" if the Council did not disproportionately focus on Israel as compared to other nations where there are far more significant and important human rights abuses underway. In other words, the U.S. official was saying that life would be easier for America and for U.S. participation in the Human Rights Council if other allies could help take some of the heat off of Israel.

Frankly, I don't think that this was such bad advice. There are many human rights abusers in the world that deserve far more attention than Israel, but that said, Israel does deserve the scrutiny of the world for the way it has treated Palestinians during the Occupation. To be fair, I found it fascinating to learn recently -- and quite heartening in fact -- to learn that Palestinians can sue for all sorts of causes in the Israeli Supreme Court and often win their cases. That shows a positive side of Israeli justice that few see, but there is also a harsh and often radicalizing side to Israeli interaction with the Palestinians that is just as often the reality.

But what the U.S. official needs to understand is that America's zealous protection of Israeli interests in the United Nations is not being helped by Israel itself. Tony Snow stated today that the White House is "encouraged" by Israel's decision to hold back a full scale invasion of Northern Gaza. Frankly, the White House should be miffed that Israel has gone to the lengths it has to disrupt the quality of life of tens of thousands of Palestinians in their pursuit of their kidnapped soldier.

The Israeli response in attempting to secure Gilad Shalit has done several things. It has increased the fear among average, innocent Palestinians of Israel and that they will be potentially killed or have their lives disrupted because of such incidents as the kidnapping. This is probably a lesson Israel wanted to teach. But it also increases support and empathy for those fighting Israel -- and further alienates average Palestinians from Israeli communications and objectives. It seems obvious to me that such behavior from Israel is exactly what the most militant factions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad wanted to have happen. Their stock rises when Israel is provoked to fury -- and the innocent middle that Israel needs to somehow reach is crushed.

I realize that this situation is murky. So many have said that the Palestinians have brought this on themselves. There is a silent majority in Palestine that was tired of the corruption of their former government -- a corruption that included many senior members of the Israeli elite. They also yearn for self-determination and an end to Israel's occupation of their homeland.

Israel has gotten very close to working out these problems in the past -- with Rabin in particular. My hunch is that if Ariel Sharon had remained healthy, he might have eventually been pushed towards a negotiated endgame to his unilateral withdrawal plan -- but my view is only speculative and based on some background conversations that are not definitive.

But there is an opportunity to take unstable situations where there is high drama and to pull off a grand, pragmatic bargain. Olmert and Peretz need to get on more strategically adept ground and turn this mess into an opportunity.

The status quo can't stand.

-- Steve Clemons

A group of armed Palestinians, some connected to the militant wing of Hamas, did penetrate Israel's border security and did kidnap a young soldier, Gilad Shalit. Those who defend the action say that it was in response to Israel's killing 7 members of an innocent Palestinian family. It was wrong to kidnap the soldier -- absolutely wrong, and the G-8 leaders have said that; but they have also condemned Israel's perceived disregard for the safety and value of innocent Palestinian lives.

Since then, Israel has been on a rampage and has permitted emotion and knee-jerk, overzealous responses prevail over measured and sober approaches that might not have only helped get the Israeli soldier freed but made some progress in establishing a climate to talk about the bigger picture of an Israeli-Palestinian solution.

Now Israel is not only blowing up bridges and power plants but has arrested dozens of Hamas ministers and lawmakers. Israel is arresting symbols of the Palestinian government -- and edging this situation to potential full-out war. Condi Rice is urging restraint, but Israel seems out of control.

Americans have a lot to be thankful for that they didn't live under this Israeli government during the Cold War because the hot-headed, lack of restraint would have surely led to a nuclear exchange with the Soviets if Israel had been at the helm.

Israel would do well to go reacquaint itself with the USS Liberty, which Israelis fired on killing American servicemen. I have had a discussion with someone who was the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency who has no doubt at all that Israel's attack on the U.S. ship was purposeful and not an accident, as Israelis and Americans eager to cover up the incident have asserted.

America's response was measured and put in context -- whether one agrees with that or not. Israel got a huge pass.

Israel is demonstrating profound immaturity with its behavior, though I support the importance of negotiating and even pursuing its kidnapped soldier. However, despite its regional superpower status, Israel is showing that it tilts too easily towards responses far disproportionate to any sane or reasonable action. While Israel radicalizes Palestininans and many Arabs in the region with this behavior, it needs to know that it is eroding American support for its behavior and position.

Lines must be drawn -- and Israel is way over the line now.

-- Steve Clemons

A small win for the good side.

I wrote last week about Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's personal views on gay people being at odds with an outrageous practice in the Pentagon that still classified homosexuals as "mentally disordered."

A blogger buddy who has been covering this has just learned that the Department of Defense has stopped that practice. It doesn't change the ridiculous policy of "Dont Ask, Don't Tell", but it's progress.

I should be back in the U.S. on Thursday.

-- Steve Clemons

Well, if the home page is visible to you -- post away. Steps are now being taken to move my site to a new host and servers, and the problems the site has been having should be resolved shortly.

I'm still in Muscat, Oman with many thoughtful defense and national security strategists from around the Middle East -- and am watching on the BBC and Al Jazeera the Israeli incursion into Gaza.

Should be pretty lively debate tomorrow at this conference. There is an AIPAC staff member here -- as well as current and former officials and think tank types from Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Yemen, India, Europe, Japan and the U.S.

Open thread. . .

-- Steve Clemons

I have had hundreds of emails asking what was wrong with The Washington Note website. It hasn't been loading properly. Some people get blank pages, partial pages, or notes that the site has been suspended and referring to "accounts payable."

Let me assure everyone that there are no billing problems, but it does seem that my site has outgrown the resources and environment of a very generous host who has helped me build TWNthese last couple of years.

I do not know what has been wrong, and my host who manages the site has not been reachable for reasons I don't understand. We have suspicions that my site has been hitting against some kind of bandwidth limitation in addition to having been the target of a serious spam attack, and has just been growing in terms of readership. There have been spikes in TWN readership that apparently overwhelmed the host server.

In any case, the site will be moving shortly. I apologize to everyone who checks in for the inconvenience involved. I'm just as frustrated -- well more actually.

I'm writing this from Muscat, Oman now where I am speaking this morning at a conference on "The Challenges of Gulf Security" co-organized by the Stanley Foundation and the Institute for Near East & Gulf Military Analysis.

But in between sessions, I am working on getting this web hosting matter resolved.

Thanks again --

Steve Clemons

David Kaplan of US News & World Report has an insightful short piece out on the bureaucracy of U.S. public diplomacy and Karen Hughes' efforts to "win the war of ideas":

U.S. effort on war of ideas draws skepticism. Even as jihadist networks become tougher to combat, the United States still lacks a comprehensive strategy to thwart the ideological forces fueling their growth, say critics. In response, the administration recently launched its latest attempt to coordinate the "war of ideas" against radical Islam: The White House's National Security Council has convened yet another interagency committee to develop a strategy aimed at marginalizing extremists. Dubbed the Policy Coordinating Committee on Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, the group is headed by the administration's point person on the ideas war: Karen Hughes, the State Department's under secretary for public diplomacy.

Skeptics abound, as this is at least the fourth attempt at coordinating federal efforts on infowar. The NSC began two ill-fated interagency committees in 2002, one on "strategic communication" and another on "information strategy." Both generated more frustration than results, say participants. Their work was succeeded, in part, by the Muslim World Outreach Policy Coordinating Committee in 2004, which drafted a widely praised plan that was never implemented. Now that committee is being replaced by Hughes's new group. "It's the same old people with a new title," says one insider.

Hughes, the president's former counselor, has won points for crafting a Rapid Response Unit, designed to help U.S. officials abroad respond to the day's news. (For a peek at one of its daily Rapid Response sheets, see Official Use Only) But critics say the effort is typical of Hughes's quick-hit, political campaignlike approach to what is a years-long ideological struggle. Former State Department diplomat John Brown, editor of the Public Diplomacy Press Review, calls the administration's efforts "naive, provincial, and evangelical" but says the problem ultimately may lie in the very nature of U.S. government today. "It's so complex, with so many bureaucracies, that to get anybody to agree on a single message is almost impossible."

This kind of public diplomacy is extremely tough to do when few people of import are being held accountable for Abu Ghraib, when Guantanamo is still open, revelations of a mass execution at Haditha are shaking Pentagon, and when America continues to be seen as a reckless occupier that cares little for the value and quality of Muslim lives rather than liberator.

Hughes has a tough job in this environment which was mostly self-created by our President and his team -- but only serious, long-term plays are going to matter if America wants to get serious about a 'war of ideas'.

-- Steve Clemons

Every time I seem to go on a long trip -- this time to Muscat, Oman for a foreign policy conference -- I get stuck in airports and surf the net looking for front organizations that neoconservatives and their fellow-traveling Jesse Helmsian pugnacious nationalists have set up.

I've just found one that gives me over-the-top creeps.

Visit www.FamilySecurityMatters.org -- a site seemingly devoted to convincing a large cross-section of Americans that they must fear terrorism -- really fear it, now -- tomorrow -- and in the many years to come. It's high-fear exploitation of the worst kind candy-coated with slick pictures of mostly white women and their children (though I just found a graphic with an attractive Asian family on the site as well) in front of sparkly white picket fenced homes.

I understand that terrorism is serious, and I think America should deploy a multi-pronged strategy to curb terrorism, protect America and its citizens, and take serious steps to connect with the "audience" -- the global silent majority -- that terrorists are attempting to appeal to by exploiting various grievances held by people around the world. Shutting down terrorists doesn't only require a military response -- but it requires sophisticated and hard-headed diplomacy and outreach to steal from terrorists the applause they are dying for. This site, however, is designed to scare middle class, white, suburban America into accepting the high costs of a national security state.

Continue reading this article

-- Steve Clemons

Interesting commentary at Political Wire from Dick Morris on Lieberman's increasingly gloomy prospects in the Democratic Primary against rival Ned Lamont in Connecticut:

I think Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) will lose the primary and will be so crippled by the defeat and Ned Lamont (D) so empowered, that he will lose the general election as an independent. Sen. Jacob Javits (R-NY), in 1980, could have avoided defeat by not fighting the Republican Primary against Sen. Al D'Amato (R-NY) and running as an independent. But D'Amato was so empowered by the primary win and Javits so disempowered that he won the general election with Javits running a poor third.

Lieberman's correct course of action is to withdraw from the primary and run as an independent. It is the only way he can get re-elected.

-- Steve Clemons

I will be on a plane to Muscat, Oman on Monday -- for a foreign policy/national security conference on the Middle East -- but those of you who can should attend this hearing, which hopefully will air on C-Span.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee is organizing on Monday a "special oversight hearing" on pre-war intelligence on Iraq. These types of special hearings -- which are not official Congressional hearings but still potentially significant -- should have been used far more frequently by the minority party on matters related to the Iraq War.

Former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson will hit off first, but other luminaries include former National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East Paul Pillar and former State Department Intelligence & Research (INR) czar Carl Ford.

The entire lineup is impressive:

Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2001-2005

Paul Pillar, CIA official responsible for coordinating intelligence on Iraq, 2000-2005

Carl Ford, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, 2001-2003

Wayne White, State Department principal Iraq analyst, 2003-2005

Rod Barton, Senior Advisor to the Iraq Survey Group, 2003-2004

Michael Smith, reporter for the Sunday Times of London, and the first to report the existence of the so-called "Downing Street Memo"

Joseph Cirincione, co-author of WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications; Center for American Progress

I look forward to hearing the results of this mock hearing -- which all of you should tune into.

One interesting set of questions to pose to Col. Willkerson, Ford and Pillar is what they know -- in detail -- not only about pre-war intelligence lapses but about Vice President Cheney's views on genuine, hardcore torture.

On Wednesday evening, an event was hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations at the swank screening room of the Motion Picture Association of America for the DVD release of Eugene Jarecki's film, "Why We Fight." The Washington Note helped organize and sponsor the first screening of this film when it first came out which featured a discussion with film director Eugene Jarecki, Lawrence Wilkerson and others.

I was supposed to attend the CFR screening Wednesday but had a bad cold which kept me home -- but the session that followed the screening featured a discussion between Jarecki, Susan Eisenhower, Richard Perle, and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. From reports of others there back to TWN, Perle criticized the film as being slanted and as making far too much of Cheney's Haliburton linkages and Haliburton's unethical and illegal overcharging the U.S. government for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the big moment came in Perle's response to a question about Cheney and torture. Richard Perle stated that those who believed that Vice President Cheney was an advocate of torture were seriously misinformed and wrong. Lawrence Wilkerson in a pointed rebuke of Perle stated that Cheney was an advocate of torture and that Wilkerson had the documents to "prove it".

That is an important exchange -- and I am hopeful that Wilkerson will soon publish a long article and/or book informed by the very important documentation that he has in hand.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

The Pentagon apparently classifes homosexuality as a "disorder' even though the mental health profession abandoned that practice three decades ago.

It is well known that Don Rumsfeld has had numerous gay advisors -- particularly Stephen Herbits whom Rumsfeld has known since 1967 -- and today has a coterie of young men on his staff, running errands, carrying his attache case, doing advance work -- and at minimum, several of these people are gay.

I have spoken to two of them and none report that Rumsfeld is gay -- but they all say that he gives indications of being accepting and gay-friendly. One said that he gives most of the members of his team "big hugs" at his annual Christmas party at his Kalorama street home. The gay guys on his team think beneath that know-it-all, imperious demeanor is an affectionate teddy bear of a guy.

Rumsfeld has a lot on his plate. He seems to have a building number of cases of his soldiers involved in prisoner abuse, torture, and murder.

So, rectifying the "homosexuality is a disorder" problem may be low on his list -- but perhaps it's one of the easiest problems for him to fix, if he has the moral fiber to do so.

-- Steve Clemons

My new colleague at the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, has a whopper article in the New York Times today titled "The Race for Iran."

While profiling the various oil asset positions and evolving strategies of Russia, China, and Iran, Leverett finishes with a hard critique of the Bush administration's Iran gaming:

Against this backdrop, the Bush administration's approach to nuclear diplomacy with Iran is strategically shallow. The decision to encourage direct talks with Tehran generated many headlines but was really only a limited tactical adjustment to forestall an embarrassing collapse in coordination with America's key international partners.

By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran's effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond.

We need to see more Dems and moderate Republicans thinking in these terms -- beyond the binary, on-off, tit-for-tat switches that punctuate the Bush/Cheney swagger but make a mockery of serious strategy and undermine long term U.S. national interests.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a political blog, but the on-again, off-again rivalry and dance between the blogosphere and main stream media intrigues me.

The MSM took a huge dive last night.

Watch this unbelievable Connie Chung segment -- where she has clearly lost it. This was her final segment on her just cancelled MSNBC talk show with Maury Povich.

It's about the only performance I have seen that clearly rivals John Ashcroft's "Let the Eagle Soar".

I won't post crap like this much, but I couldn't help myself this time. Television journalism and punditry clearly does need to worry about quality blogging -- even though they are ridding themselves of the Chungster.

-- Steve Clemons

Hat tip to BDG for sending this really bizarre Connie Chung segment.

Probably not. . .but Jeb has been saying no to a new line of oil wells off the coast.

More like a tool of Florida's tourism industry, but that's fine with me.

-- Steve Clemons

First of all, I had to share this photo above from Vancouver. While my schedule proved to be too unpredictable to meet TWN readers in that city, I did catch up with some of Oakley the Amazing Weimaraner's cousins. These two are Jethro and Ellie May. Great dogs.

This caught my eye. Mary Cheney's book, whose most important line is that President Bush is trying to write discrimination into the Constitution, has only sold 6,000 books. Bad news, I think, for Mary Matalin who helped arrange a $1 million advance.

In other news, "War on Terror" profiteer James Woolsey chastises his church for trying to punish firms involved in the razing of Palestinian homes. Woolsey didn't stop at just saying that such principled stands against indirectly involved companies were often not successful -- he went further to paint the Palestinians as a total lost cause -- the implication being that their homes probably should be razed, or at least that's the way he sounds. The Zionist Organization of America agrees with Woolsey. TWN does not.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

Ned Lamont is kicking some serious tail in the Connecticut Senate Democratic primary process and quickly overtaking the iconic Joseph Lieberman who has spent a lot of his time cultivating credentials as a hawkish, neoconservative-leaning almost-Republican.

Some speculate that Lieberman will gather the signatures in Connecticut needed to run as an Independent if he loses his primary race to Lamont. The signatures would have to be filed the day after the primary.

I feel the same way about Lieberman running as an Independent as I did about President Bush appointing John Bolton to the UN via a recess appointment. That's ok. Lieberman has the right to do that -- just as the President has the right to end run the Senate on appointments -- though they can only last through a single Congressional term.

But what is irritating is that other Democrats like Chuck Schumer have the arrogance to act as if politics is a "top-down" arrangement and that those at the helm are really just a stacked deck of leadership annointed personalities.

Schumer hinted at the possibility that if Lamont succeeds in forcing Lieberman out as the carrier of Democratic aspirations in Connecticut, that the DSCC might support Lieberman as an independent.

This is outrageous. Schumer needs to be told in no uncertain terms that if he works to protect the inbred qualities of a Democratic leadership that has been inchoate and thus far unimpressive in its response to Bush-led Republicanism, then he has to go as well. Schumer is trying to stop change inside the Democratic Party, and that is what the party needs most.

Here is what Schumer recently said:

Pointing to the victories of Webb, a Reagan Democrat with a flair for non-traditional Democratic positions, and Jon Tester, who spent half as much as his primary challenger in Montana, Schumer said that party activists had turned to pragmatism and were less inclined to hold candidates to litmus tests.

Schumer said the Dem primary voters want winners and are focused one electability. He couldn't resist adding even "in 2008," which pricked the ears of reporters who thought he was sending a message about the relative electability of Hillary Clinton. (He wasn't, apparently.)

Schumer said that the DSCC "fully supports" Sen. Joe Lieberman in his primary bid, and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.

There were degrees of independence, Schumer said. "You can run as an independent, you can run as an independent Democrat who pledges to vote for Harry Reid as Majority Leader."

Schumer said he had neither sought nor recieved assurances from Lieberman that an independent bid would not ensue if Ned Lamont tightened the noose.

Again, Lieberman like Lamont both have chances to head the Democratic ticket in Connecticut. If Lieberman wants to leave the Democratic Party and run as an Independent, best of luck to him.

But Schumer has to abandon corrupting the ability of Democrats to refresh the cast of people they want carrying their views in Washington.

-- Steve Clemons

In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Beinart -- former editor of The New Republic, who has declared that only liberals can win the war on terror (the self-proclaimed subtitle of his new book) -- offers up a weak mea culpa for "mistakenly" backing the Iraq war but lauds President Clinton's "multilateral war to prevent the neo-fascist Slobodan Milosevic from cleansing ethnic Albanians from their homes." What he conveniently ignores is that Clinton's war in the Balkans was no different than the Bush administration's so-called unilateral invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein. Both were military actions against sovereign states conducted without the formal approval of the UN Security Council and neither represented an imminent threat to U.S. security -- and both were rationalized on humanitarian grounds. As long as liberals like Beinart cannot fathom that liberal internationalism (or what he calls anti-totalitarian liberalism) is fundamentally the same thing as neoconservatism as implemented by the Bush administration, liberals cannot hope to fashion together a policy and strategy to win the war on terror.

Like the neocons and Bushies, Beinart believes the terrorist threat confronting America is a different form of communism or fascism. And he advocates the same cure for the disease: promoting freedom and democracy in the Islamic world. Where Beinart and the Bush administration depart company is the liberals' preference for working with the United Nations and cultivating the support of the international community. But this difference is largely style over substance. It is about how to implement policy (via international institutions and multilateralism), not about policy itself -- the equivalent of John Kerry saying "it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein," but that he "would have done everything differently." The reality is that liberals like Beinart and neoconservatives both arrive at the same end point. The result is an alliance of strange bedfellows brought together by the belief that American security is best served by using military power to spread democracy throughout the world, as evidenced by a January 2005 letter from the Project for the New American Century to the leadership of the U.S. Congress calling for increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps for "promotion of freedom." The signatories included many of the "usual suspects" of neoconservative ilk -- e.g., Max Boot, Thomas Donnelly, Frank Gaffney, William Kristol, and Danielle Pletka -- as well as many left-leaning luminaries -- e.g., Ivo Daalder, Michele Flournoy, Michael O'Hanlon, and James Steinberg (not surprisingly, all except O'Hanlon served in the Clinton administration).

Continue reading this article

-- Dave Meyer

(Flynt Leverett on the "News Hour with Jim Lehrer")

In August and September, I will be helping to organize two major national policy forums -- one which will take place in Colorado and the other in the U.S. Senate -- roughly titled "Thinking the Unthinkable on Iran".

The premise is that policymakers and average Americans need to think soberly about what the costs and consequences of the two endpoints in the Iran debate are. On one end, there is the prospect of a hot, invasive attack by the U.S. (and potential allies) designed to disable and set back Iran's nuclear program. On the other is Iran with a fully developed and robust reprocessing capacity and nuclear warheads in its possession.

There are many, many possibilities between these two endpoints, but these scenarios are enough to help stir thoughtful debate about who and what will be paid if either of these outcomes come to be reality.

One of the no-nonsense, clear-headed analysts of the Middle East situation who has thought about one of the major costs of an American strike against Iran is Flynt Leverett, who has been based at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution.

Leverett previously served during the first term of the Bush administration as Senior Director for the Middle East Initiative on the National Security Council; was the Middle East and Counterterrorism Expert on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, and served for ten years as a Senior CIA analyst.

I am pleased to report that Flynt Leverett will become on July 1 my newest colleague in the foreign policy programs at the New America Foundation where he will be Senior Fellow and Director of the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Energy Security Project.

Leverett's latest article, co-written with Pierre Noel, in The National Interest, "The New Axis of Oil", is exactly the kind of forward-looking scenario development that Washington's burgeoning industry of hair-trigger "chicken hawks" need to seriously consider.

In this piece, Leverett posits that a strike against Iran will most likely produce a new axis of oil comprising Russia, China, Iran, and other irritated Middle East oil states:

But over the last three years, Russia has also come to see Iran as an important geopolitical partner in its efforts to rollback U.S. influence, not only in Central Asia but in the Caucasus as well. Moscow's recent proposal to resolve the impasse between the Islamic Republic and the West over Iran's nuclear activities by establishing Iranian-Russian joint-venture entities for uranium enrichment was calculated to serve all these interests. Such a scheme would allow Moscow to maintain and even expand an Iranian market for its nuclear technology, while also nurturing its developing strategic partnership with Tehran.

It is also increasingly evident that the current leadership in Moscow views the Iranian nuclear issue as an opportunity to frustrate the Bush Administration's unilateralist inclinations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov -- formerly Russia's permanent representative to the UN for ten years and a master of Security Council politics and procedure -- and his colleagues anticipate that, in the end, the United States may take unilateral military action against Iran, including the Russian-built reactor at Bushehr. They do not expect to be able to block such action anymore than they could block the invasion of Iraq, but the w1ng prospectively to impose serious costs on the United States for a military strike against Iran by ensuring that Washington lacks international legitimacy for its actions.

For its part, China's approach to the Iranian nuclear issue is directly linked to its assessment of its requirements for energy security. Beijing has already put down a marker, in the form of its opposition to UN sanctions against Sudan, that it will oppose the imposition of multilateral sanctions on an energy-producing state in which Chinese companies operate. In private conversations, senior Chinese diplomats and party officials describe Beijing's policy on the Iranian nuclear issue as seeking to balance a range of interests: a secure supply of oil, nonproliferation and regional stability, the defense of important international norms (including the peaceful resolution of disputes and the sovereign right of states to develop civil nuclear capabilities), securing China's northwest border (meaning Xinjiang province, where there is a significant Muslim population), the development of Chinese-Iranian relations, the development of U. S.-Chinese relations, and the positions of the European Union and Russia. It seems increasingly clear that, in their efforts to balance this set of interests, Chinese officials will remain deeply resistant to the imposition of sanctions on Iran. And as long as Russian opposition provides China with political cover, Chinese officials seem to calculate that they will not have to choose between relations with Iran and relations with the United States.

China's willingness to protect Iran from international pressure would also complicate Western efforts to impose meaningful sanctions on Iran through a "coalition of the willing." Without Chinese participation, a voluntary ban on investment in Iran's energy sector by Western powers would, at this point, be little more than a symbolic gesture, as U.S. companies are already barred from doing business in Iran by U.S. law, and most European IOCs have put potential projects on hold because of the political uncertainties. In recent years, though, Chinese NOCs have committed themselves at least in principle, to substantial investments in Iran's energy sector, thereby mitigating the impact of restrictions on Western investment.
With the Bush Administration having ruled out direct and broad-based strategic discussions with Iran aimed at a "grand bargain" that would include a resolution of the nuclear issue, the United States and its European partners are headed down an ultimately futile path in the Security Council.

The Security Council's failure to deal effectively with the Iranian nuclear issue will confront the United States, during the last two years or so of the Bush Administration's tenure, with the choice of doing nothing as Iran continues to develop its nuclear capabilities or taking unilateral military action in the hope of slowing down that development. Each of these choices is likely to damage American leadership in the world: Doing nothing will highlight U.S. fecklessness, while unilateral action without international legitimacy will further strain America's international standing (and probably not meaningfully impede Iran's nuclear development).

The points Leverett makes in this article are essential to absorb. There are few very good options on Iran -- and some are extremely dangerous. Picking the least harmful course requires thinking through all of the very worst possible outcomes.

What is at stake is not only Iranian nuclear pretensions but possibly a drastically reshuffled geopolitical order in which Americans wake up one day and realize that America is no longer the "essential nation" but has gone the way of Britain, with lofty ambitions and limited influence and means to pursue those ambitions.

-- Steve Clemons

Click here to read the "confidential messaging memo" from House Majority Leader John Boehner on all the good stuff that Republican Congressman should "tout" about America's progress in Iraq.

I guess Texas swagger is back.

Boehner's memo amplifies a "high-fear" drumbeat for the so-called war on terror and suggests that the death of Zarqawi, the completion of appointing Iraq's senior cabinet ministers, and Bush's personal meeting with Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seal the deal for America achieving victory in its efforts there.

What Boehner doesn't tell his flock is that Zarqawi's team seems dedicated to worsening the violence and that Zarqawi's activities in their entirety were a very small percentage of the overall insurgency in Iraq (some commanders in the field were even trying to get the $25 million bounty on Zarqawi reduced because he was becoming proportionally less of the exploding problems in Iraq). He didn't say that Iraq's Minister of Defense -- only just appointed -- has already threated to resign if America goes on a massive hunt and kill effort through the Al Anbar region of Western Iraq. He didn't say that security in Iraq is still so bad that the meeting between Bush and al-Maliki was put on the Iraq Prime Minister's schedule just five minutes before Bush's arrival. That's not a sign of a stable relationship.

Apparently, Boehner is going to push passage of House Resolution 861 tomorrow declaring the Iraq War as a smashing success and as synonymous with the overused and inappropriate metaphor, "war on terror".

It's a disturbing resolution that recognizes none of the setbacks that we are experiencing and again ratchets up the arrogance and hubris of America's position in Iraq.

To get a flavor, sample the opening:

H. Res. 861

RESOLUTION

Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.

Whereas the United States and its allies are engaged in a Global War on Terror, a long and demanding struggle against an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values and that is committed to imposing, by the use
of terror, its repressive ideology throughout the world;

Whereas for the past two decades, terrorists have used violence in a futile attempt to intimidate the United States;

Whereas it is essential to the security of the American people and to world security that the United States, together with its allies, take the battle to the terrorists and to those who provide them assistance;

Whereas the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other terrorists failed to stop free elections in Afghanistan and the first popularly elected President in that nation's history has taken office;

Whereas the continued determination of Afghanistan, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will be required to sustain a sovereign, free, and secure Afghanistan;

Whereas the steadfast resolve of the United States and its partners since September 11, 2001, helped persuade the government of Libya to surrender its weapons of mass destruction;

Whereas by early 2003 Saddam Hussein and his criminal, Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which had supported terrorists, constituted a threat against global peace and security and was in violation of mandatory United Nations Security Council Resolutions;

There's more. Here's the full link.

Neil Abercrombie is headlining an alternative resolution, H. Res. 543 -- but the bottom line is that many American and Iraqi men and women are dying while our House members engage in silly gestures that are not only irrelevant to America's strained military circumstances but also harmful to morale.

I will be discussing Republican and Democratic views on the Iraq War with other guests on Warren Olney's KCRW show, To The Point, which can be heard live over the web between 2 and 3 p.m. today. I think it will replay in the DC area tonight on national public radio. My hunch is that I will be on around 2:15 p.m.

-- Steve Clemons

At this point, I am not thrilled with the prospect of another Kerry run for the presidency -- but he's made progress at least in his thinking about the costs of Iraq to American prestige in the world and to global stability. The question Kerry has to answer -- and has not to my satisfaction -- is can he tell the difference between conflicts that require the application of American troops and military power and those that do not.

Iraq was the WRONG war from day one and was a fundamental distraction from the complex, transnational threat that bin Laden was brewing against the U.S. and Europe. The Iraq War that Bush contrived as a response to 9/11 -- aided and abetted by many Democrats and most Republicans in the Congress -- has punctured the mystique of American power in the world and created incentives for foes to move their agendas and allies to not count on America quite as much as before.

How will we know the next time that John Kerry might get the answer right? He needs to tell us more -- because on this one, he was dead wrong.

-- Steve Clemons

Today at 3:30 pm at the New America Foundation, I will be chairing a session with former Republican political strategist and author Kevin Phillips whose book American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century garnered enormous attention this past year.

Phillips will be giving his take on the 2006 elections.

So that those interested can watch and hear the event, I will try to get the digital copy of Phillips' comments and the Q&A on the New America Foundation website by tomorrow.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

I'm headed back to DC from a very interesting evening in New York where I got to hang out for a while in the plush and exotic "The Core Club" -- an ultra-chic watering hole for people who have seriously large monetary endowments. (The Core Club's official site is here.)
When one thinks about it for a moment, it is at such clubs that money and political ambitions often meet in states like New York, California, Florida, Boston, Massachusetts and to some degree Texas where big money places bets on some candidates and not others. The internet has undermined some of the cartelization of political fundraising, but despite Joe Trippi's great success in the Dean campaign, there is a long way to go before such power circles as I saw in operation last night are undermined fully by a diversified small money giving base.

I mention all of this not because I was there for a fundraiser but because I stumbled into Senator John McCain and his 2000 McCain for President Campaign Chairman Rick Davis there for a fundraiser just before another event I was helping to organize.

I normally prefer grungy coffee shops or Congressional meeting rooms, but the club facilitiies and food were stunningly good. The reason I was there was that The Core Club's president, Jennie Saunders, as well as Stephen Heintz, President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and I co-hosted a book reception for George Soros and his just released The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror. About 150 people attended, and the quality of conversation and debate about Soros's ideas and political views was excellent.

John McCain gave a good stump talk.

He didn't get into his work against America's de facto torture practices and only briefly echoed his lack of regard for Donald Rumsfeld's management of the nation's national security portfolio (but still slammed Rumsfeld in a momentary reference). He opened his comments by crediting Bush for the killing of Zarqawi but emphasized that there was "still a long hard slog ahead for us in Iraq."

McCain said that the war was the number one issue for most Americans and unless demonstrable progress in Iraq was tangible to Americans by the time of elections, then it was likely Republicans were going to take some serious hits.

McCain decried the partisanship that had gripped Congress and Washington and said that people would rather see Ann Coulter debate Michael Moore than McCain debate Joe Lieberman. Someone among the group of mostly Democrats and Independents in the room suggested that they'd rather see McCain debate Ann Coulter, but that dropped from discussion fast.

McCain favors increasing the size of the military in manpower terms, which will be tough, and argued that a draft would not be acceptable to the American public.

When I asked him about campaign finance and political ethics reforms, McCain harshly criticized his colleagues for their willingness to accept high-price charter flights from American corporations and rich donors while only paying first class fares rather than charter flight fares and suggested that many Senators and Congressman see themselves as a notch above America's citizens -- and thus deserving of greater perks and privileges.

On Iran, McCain said that if he was President, he would go to Putin in Russia and Hu in China and make sure that they understood in every sense that if they continued to oppose American efforts to sanction iran's nuclear weapons efforts that their respective ties with the United States would come under tangible, real stress. I personally wasn't convinced by McCain's views on Iran, but I do believe that he realizes that taking the wrong step here or there in this brewing crisis could dramatically impact the power order in the world. He seemed to imply that America could not succeed in its objectives with Iran without getting Russia and China in line with the U.S.

McCain also talked a lot about immigration and suggested that the Republican Party was in serious danger of alienating the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States because of what many perceived as a disregard for fair and balanced approaches to both securing America's borders and dealing with the eleven million illegal immigrants already here. He gave Bush a lot of credit for his position on immigration -- and emphasized the notion of "earned citizenship" over "amnesty".

McCain was compelling in the reception. He worked the room well, learned people's names, answered their questions fairly directly -- though he sidestepped parts of my question, which was what was left in his future agenda on torture, Don Rumsfeld, and political ethics reform. He answered the last part in great length but failed to get into his battles with the White House on torture and military management issues.

On a last question about stem cell research, McCain bluntly said he's all for it -- full stop. He said that whenever someone with another view challenges him on it, he says for them to "give Nancy Reagan a call. She knows what she's talking about -- and she's working the issue hard. When Nancy Reagan calls, you're going to take that call." Anyway, he's not with the Christian fundamentalists on stem cell.

I'm reporting this not to advocate on McCain's behalf but rather to give some sense of what he's talking about with groups of people like the one in this club yesterday in New York. His rhetoric is not strident -- but he doesn't shirk from his views on the war, though he is highly critical of how the Bush team prosecuted matters in Iraq.

I hung out with the host of the event for a bit and talked with many of his guests -- as the McCain event finished about fifteen minutes before George Soros walked into the very same room. Many of those assembled for the fundraiser were Democrats or independents; some were Bill Buckley/National Review style Republicans. I met no libertarians and didn't meet anyone whom I thought would reflect hard core Red State conservatism. But they liked McCain.

As an experiment, I invited a few of the McCain crowd to attend the Soros event at which Soros spoke and entertained questions about his new book which criticizes what he terms "a false metaphor of a war on terror".

Soros's book is interesting, and I may write more about it another day. Some have already criticized me by email and in public comments for admitting to hosting the Soros reception, but I was proud to have done so. I'm in the ideas business -- and Soros has been highly significant in changing the political dynamics of much of the former Soviet Union. Many people and pundits are passive, only reacting to what others do. Soros is someone who risks and does. I don't agree with some of the things he has done, but I respect and want to learn more about what strategic thinking lies behind his personal, political and philanthropic work.

Soros opened his comments by stating that he greatly appreciated and admired John McCain's steadfast commitment to the Geneva Conventions.

But then George Soros discussed a bit of his background and tutelage under the famed Karl Popper -- and his thinking about where Popper's views on "open society" were limited and no longer useful. Soros suggested that simply undermining totalitarianism did not automatically lead to open societies and that such implosion of power and control could lead to ongoing collapses within the respective country.

His biggest home run was his statement that the Bush administration, after 9/11, failed to try and restore faith and trust in the nation's abilities to manage the threat from bin Laden and had instead exploited widespread fear to trigger a war it wanted to have with Iraq. Soros, when asked what he would have done if President of the U.S. after attacks like those of 9/11, said that he would have "plagiarized Roosevelt" and told Americans that "it was still true that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself."

Soros sees American prestige in the world as badly damaged -- and somewhat restorable with a new effort at alliance restoration and a new discourse on what serious challenges nations need to collectively concern themselves with -- but he thinks it will be hard for America to get back to a position of its previous prestige and moral status in the world.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I listened to Soros carefully and have read his book. I also listened to John McCain very carefully -- and they do fundamentally, seriously disagree over the Iraq War and how America should manage its national security portfolio. Yet there is still a strikingly similar concern in both their presentations about America's standing in the world and ability to achieve its great objectives and purposes. Each holds a view about America's social contract internally and externally that seems quite similar.

When I told Soros that I thought that he and McCain probably agreed on about 80% of things when it came to national policy matters, George Soros said that it probably wasn't quite that high but that he admired McCain. I didn't ask McCain his views of Soros, but I think that McCain is probably above simplistic caricatures -- or should be.

John McCain did speak at Jerry Falwell's university, something that has vexed many McCain supporters, and George Soros did spend more than any other American, albeit unsuccessfully, to try and remove President Bush from the White House.

When the subject of John McCain comes up, many on the left go crazy and call him a Cheney-ite conservative, a "wolf in sheep's clothing," an unprincipled political huckster who blows with the political winds. John McCain, as I have known him, is a conservative, but he doesn't fit the kind of billing many on the left have been giving him.

I think McCain is making a mistake in not repudiating fundamentalist zealots in his party -- and can't support an election bid that is in part built on threatening a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, or over gay rights, or any implied promise to further mix church and state. But to say that McCain is right of the right is not accurate.

One close advisor to McCain recently told me in a reflective moment of despair about the decision to speak at Falwell's university that sometimes it is not the person Americans are electing who matters -- but rather the team of people and their views who will fill out his or her administration.

Soros too comes off to me as someone of moderate Republican sensibilities who believes that for a healthy political marketplace of personalities and ideas to be restored in America, the Democratic Party -- which he believes is in distressing disarray -- needs to be brought back to power, both in at least the House of Representatives in 2006 and the presidency in 2008.

I won't share anything that Soros or McCain said that would be considered personal or off-the-record, but I do think that the quality of their commentary and their efforts to try and direct the national debate require serious review of their thinking and ideas.

The ad hominem assaults on their character and demonization make the critics lodging them on each side look small.

McCain is running for President. Soros is not but will no doubt make a significant difference in that 2008 battle.

We should listen to and study what they are saying. Soros takes risks with his books and puts ideas on the table and seems to welcome the debate -- positive and negative -- that often ensues.

McCain too seems to welcome (most of the time) applause and criticism.

Whether one agrees with either or neither, a debate about serious ideas and proposals for the nation are what our next election should be about -- and Soros and McCain are taking this task on seriously.

-- Steve Clemons

Europe seems to have been caught giving a nod and a wink in the dark to the CIA policy referred to in media circles as 'extraordinary rendition'.

Fourteen European states colluded with the CIA in secret US flights ferrying terror suspects around the world, according a report published last week by Europe's human rights watchdog.

The Council of Europe report states that the policy practiced by the CIA, which has become known as "extraordinary rendition", could operate only with "the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners".
Extraordinary rendition involves seizing terror suspects and taking them to third countries without court approval. There have been allegations some were tortured.

At the end of last year we made a documentary on extraordinary rendition. We discovered there appeared to be evidence that the Europeans knew more than they were letting on about the seizure and transport of citizens or suspects on their soil.

Continue reading this article

-- Dave Meyer

Well, nearly.

I'm back in the country and about to talk with Brian Lehrer on New York's public radio network at 10 a.m. Eastern this morning.

Then, I'm jumping on a train to New York to host a book party this evening for George Soros whose new book, The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror is being released today.

These next few days, I will be working hard to catch up.

There may be some more guest posts that come in during the next few days -- and my thanks to all for doing such a spectacular job covering for me while away on vacation. Dave Meyer has been brilliant managing everything.

And make sure you read Katrina vanden Heuvel's piece this morning. Important.

-- Steve Clemons

As Robert Borosage, co-Director of the Campaign for America's Future, argues in The Nation's current issue, "the current rage in center-right Democratic circles is to resuscitate Harry Truman, substitute bin Laden for Stalin and jihadism for Communism, and summon America to a new global struggle."

Peter Beinart, for example, who was a supporter of the Iraq disaster (and has joined New Dems like Al From in urging Democrats to prove their resolve by purging the left from the Democratic party) is a leading proponent of the misleading and wrong analogy between Soviet totalitarianism and Islamic fundamentalism. For this stance, Beinart has been celebrated by leading members of the commentariat axis -- Tom Friedman, Joe Klein and George Will among others. More are sure to follow.

But Beinart and his inside-the-beltway crusaders are out of touch with an America that seeks a principled foreign policy that will make them secure -- not a messianic crusade that will deplete the nation's blood and treasure. His fighting faith pledge to "rally the American people" to sustain an "extended and robust" occupation in Iraq, his calls for America to intervene aggressively in the Middle East with a "sweeping program of economic, political and social reform" are more likely to create chaos and, perhaps, breed more terrorism than advance the cause of democracy. It is important to remember that this kind of "fighting faith" has more in common with the least successful periods of US foreign policy -- the crusade that led us into Vietnam, our support for the Afghan Muhajedin and Bush's disastrous war in Iraq. It would be difficult to find a security consensus that is more wrongheaded for the challenges the United States now faces, or more at odds with the best traditions of the Democratic party.

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-- Dave Meyer

"I think the jury is still out on WMD." -- Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA)

Weldon, responding to challenger Joseph Sestak, retired Navy admiral, is taking faith-based reality to new highs (lows). Check it out: Delco Times.

Peter Trubowitz is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy.

Whether you've seen Al Gore's film or not, you probably know by now that the carbon-based energy system we built last century is royally messing up our planet's built-in thermostat -- promising all kinds of nasty consequences unless we kick our response into high gear. What you may not know -- as scientists only recently broke the story -- is that carbon dioxide is doing something else pernicious to our planet apart from changing the chemistry of our atmosphere and destabilizing our climate: it is also changing the chemistry of our oceans and making them more acidic...Thirty percent more than preindustrial levels, according to an IHT op-ed this week by Thomas E. Lovejoy. If we don't kick our carbon habits, our oceans will be more acidic by century's end than they've been in millions of years.

Common sense tells us that probably not a good thing. And scientists confirm that it is bad news for marine life and for us humans who depend on it. Coral reefs, dubbed our ocean's rainforests because they support so much life, won't be able to grow when water is too acidic. Neither will countless other shell-building creatures that play crucial roles in big food chains.

In an age of staggering technological and scientific advances, many will find this news humbling: the more we learn about our planet, the more we realize how much is yet to be learned. But the ocean acid problem is also yet another major wake-up call that it's time to stop tinkering, as Time Magazine recently put it, with "the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive" on the only known habitable planet in our universe.

The good news is that the responses needed to stop the ocean acid problem are fundamentally the same as those required to stop global warming: in short, we (especially the U.S.) need to ramp up dramatically efforts to jump-start the global transition to a clean energy future. Shamefully, the U.S. federal government continues to dither despite good bipartisan proposals like the one offered by John McCain and Joe Lieberman. But fortunately, American citizens, cities, states, businesses, and farmers are busy actually doing something to help. For some encouraging examples, check out the Chicago Climate Exchange, Local Governments for Sustainability, The Climate Group, 25x25, and the Stop Global Warming Virtual March.

P.J. Simmons is Director for Strategy and Programs at the Sea Studios Foundation and co-editor of U.S. in the World: Talking Global Issues with Americans.

At the end of every spring semester, Princeton University (where I will be a senior in the fall) has a ten-day period in mid-May of no classes to give students time to write our final term papers. Three days before all my work was due, I desperately needed a study break to recharge my mental batteries. Taking a brief hiatus from the papers (on David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, and English constitutional history), I went to a free showing of Paul Greengrass' film United 93 at the local movie theater.

This film has been blogged and written about extensively; yet most commentators have missed United 93's message. The plot is well-known to everyone who lived through the events it depicts; the film faithfully follows the 9/11 Commission Report of what happened on September 11, 2001.

Partly, media discussion has focused on the question of whether it was even artistically responsible to make and release such a film five years after the horrifically tragic events portrayed. But that debate is fairly naive: capitalism's 'cultural logic' holds that every issue is a 'legitimate subject' for artistic usage (some might prefer the term 'exploitation') so long as the producer can make a buck out of it; of course tragedy can appear -- and has appeared -- on the screen if people will buy tickets to see it. It is far more interesting to consider how United 93 renders the real, lived tragedy on screen.

I have been thinking about the film for several weeks now, and I now feel that United 93 is disturbing and problematic -- and that it ultimately does a disservice to the event it portrays and to the victims it purports to honor.

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-- Dave Meyer

Although Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, has drawn renewed attention to the global warming issue, commentators on worldwide climate change have not sufficiently addressed its potential international security implications. Thus far, most of the debate has focused on whether climate change is occurring, whether human or natural causes are primarily responsible, how it will affect people's health and lifestyles, and what we should do about the problem. Whatever the ultimate magnitude and cause of global climate change, prudent contingency planning behooves us to consider how it could affect international conflict and security alignments.

Climate change could easily exacerbate existing conflicts within countries or between neighboring states. Declining agricultural yields or rising sea levels could engender major movements of people, both within and across national frontiers. Such massive population resettlement often causes friction between the existing residents and the newcomers, especially over scarce assets like land and water. Mass migrations due to depleted resources could also worsen border disputes over natural resources.

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-- Dave Meyer

I have just returned from a trip to Moscow, for speaking engagements and meetings with officials, academic and think tank experts, and energy executives about the intersection of Russian energy strategy and Russian foreign policy. Upon my return, I also had the pleasant experience of seeing the first hard copies of an article that a French colleague and I have just published in the Summer 2006 issue of The National Interest. Titled "The New Axis of Oil", the article argues that the political consequences of recent structural shifts in global energy markets are posing the most profound challenge to American hegemony since the end of the Cold War:

The increasing control that state-owned companies exercise over the world's reserves of crude oil and natural gas is, under current market conditions, enabling some energy exporters to act with escalating boldness against U.S. interests and policies. Perhaps the most immediate example is Venezuela's efforts to undermine U.S. influence in Latin America. The most strategically significant, though, is Russia's willingness to use its newfound external leverage to counteract what Moscow considers an unacceptable level of U.S. infringement on its interests. At the same time, rising Asian states, especially China, are seeking to address their perceived energy vulnerability through state-orchestrated strategies to 'secure' access to hydrocarbon resources around the world. In the Chinese case, a statist approach to managing external energy relationships is increasingly pitting China against the United States in a competition for influence in the Middle East, Central Asia, and oil-producing parts of Africa... While each of these developments is challenging to U.S. interests, the various threads of petropolitics are now coming together in an emerging "axis of oil" that is acting as a counterweight to American hegemony on a widening range of issues. At the center of this undeclared but increasingly assertive axis is a growing geopolitical partnership between Russia (a major energy producer) and China (the paradigmatic rising consumer) against what both perceive as excessive U.S. unilateralism.

I return from Moscow even more persuaded of the validity of this analytic argument -- with regard to Russia, China, and the prospects for increasing Sino-Russian strategic collaboration. Beyond the article, I'd like to offer some additional observations about Russia's rise as what some describe as an "energy superpower."

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-- Dave Meyer

The other day, Jeremy Kahn commented on the release of historic CIA documents that reveal the extent to which the CIA cooperated with former Nazis in the postwar era. The CIA even knew where the ultimate war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, was hiding, but didn't tip off the Israelis. All of this in the pursuit of Cold War interests. Kahn argues that the US should "put morality ahead of security", at least in egregious cases. The new revelations highlight "the dangers that can arise when a country chooses to subordinate all aspects of its foreign policy to a single, all-consuming goal", Kahn writes. And he quotes one of the researchers as saying: "Using bad people can have very bad consequences."

I spent all day Friday in the National Archives sifting through these papers -- and I come out with a slightly different take. Slightly, not fundamentally.

Of course, the questions of legality and morality are key if spy services are to be seen as legitimate assets of the liberal and democratic state. However, I haven't heard of a spy service that doesn't work with "bad people". Actually, "bad people" in particular can be highly motivated to provide intelligence. And regarding legality it is noteworthy that spy services are obliged to obey the law of their own country, not necessarily all the laws of all countries they work in. Given these basic principles of spy services, morality and legality become highly relative terms. That's why clear ground rules, strong leadership, oversight and democratic accountability are so important. We have seen more than once how spy services were unable to distinguish between the shades of gray. Nowhere can the slippery slope be steeper than in the world of spies. Too often, as Jeremy Kahn correctly points out, do spy services confuse ends and means.

The question is: did the CIA go too far when it had former Nazis work for the Agency?

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-- Dave Meyer

The enthusiasm of the U.S. government for pushing democratic reforms in the Middle East must be one of the shortest policy conversions on record. Remember the president's proposition? If we pry open the political systems maybe just maybe we can persuade bad guys to put down their guns and play by rules that are sort of like our rules. And maybe they'll even play by rules that Washington doesn't think it has to respect, like the Geneva Conventions and the Bill of Rights.

OK, the Palestinians had a great election, as free and fair as any small "d" democrat could wish for, but damn, the wrong guys won. When it comes to Palestinians and Israel, it seems, all bets are off, and we need to make sure this particular baby never makes it out of the crib. And too bad if we have to squeeze the entire population -- no matter whom they voted for -- to make sure.

No question, Hamas has done some terrible things that should not be swept under the rug. An organization that has killed hundreds of civilians as a matter of policy has lots to account for. But Hamas is also an important political force in the Palestinian arena, it has pretty much kept a cease-fire with Israel for the past year and a half -- at least until Friday, when Israeli artillery shells killed seven Palestinian civilians and wounded 30 more and Hamas said the truce was off. There is clearly a debate going on within this organization, and it would seem this is a moment to encourage those who want to move from the battlefield to the caucus room. If George Bush's Big Idea of giving people good reasons to put aside violence and play a different kind of politics ever had any feet, it was in just this sort of situation. Clearly what's needed is leadership here (and there) that can walk (promote democracy) and chew gum (fight terror) at the same time. Such leadership is not to be found in Washington, alas.

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-- Dave Meyer

When I was a young pup working for Senator Birch Bayh, who like Lloyd Bentsen was the kind of giant in rare supply in Washington today, on a few occasions, my bosses would take me to the old Mayflower Hotel where Kenny O'Donnell would hold court. I was barely old enough to imbibe the beverages, but I sat there quietly and awestruck, listening and learning as Kenny told "war stories" of Jack and Bobby.

Thinking about the results in the California House seat this week, if the Kennedys and O'Donnell were having breakfast the morning after, does anybody believe they would be saying anything like this: OK guys, Kerry got 44% in that District, and we got all the way up to 45%, and forced the Republicans to spend twice as much as us, to win the seat again?

In fact, if Jack, Bobby and Kenny had breakfast the day after that result, the FCC would not permit me on talk radio to use the exact words they would have used, but the word would go forth to Democrats everywhere: do not let this happen again.

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-- Dave Meyer

Many Democrats seem to think the best policy on Iraq for the November elections is to say as little as possible. They worry that Republicans will brand them "unpatriotic" if they are too critical of Bush's policies in Iraq -- if they dare, that is, to use Iraq to "nationalize" the election. However, failing to do so could be an even more costly mistake for Democrats.

James Carville and Stan Greenberg make just this point in an important strategy memo released Wednesday. Drawing on new survey data, they say "voters are prepared for an upheaval and change of party control, if the challengers define this election, run as outsiders and show voters where they would take the country." What Democrats need to do, Carville and Greenberg argue, is turn this election into a referendum on the Republican party and its overall agenda -- that is, nationalize the election around George Bush. Iraq is one of the two most powerful cards Democrats have to play (the economy is the other).

Many voters are ready for a change. If Democrats hope to capitalize on the unrest, they need to give these voters reason to vote Republicans out office. It turns out that Democrats who run hard against Bush and the Republican's national agenda do better than those who run only against the particular weaknesses and errors of the Republican incumbent. All politics may be local, as Tip O'Neill once quipped, but as the Republicans showed in 1994, sometimes you win locally by defining the election nationally.

Al-Zarqawi's death may cause some Democrats to hesitate. It shouldn't. There has been too much lying and too many broken promises. The public is now ready for some straight talk on how to get our troops out of Iraq. Indeed, as Carville and Greenberg point out, vagueness on the war will be an electoral liability. In November, clarity on Iraq is likely to be equated with leadership.

Peter Trubowitz is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy.

Reading the transcript of former House Majority leader Tom DeLay's bitter, partisan (and in these ways, quite fitting) resignation speech from Thursday, I was struck by these remarks:

We honor men with Monuments not because of their greatness, or even simply because of their service, but because of their refusal - even in the face of danger or death - to ever compromise the principles they served. Washington's obelisk still stands watch because democracy will always need a sentry! Jefferson's words still ring because liberty will always need a voice! And Lincoln's left still stays clenched because tyranny will always need an enemy!

I was somewhat sickened to learn that the perennially shameless DeLay believes his record of anti-democratic, power-grabbing, rule-breaking conduct in office merits comparison with three of our greatest statesmen. But at the same time, it's quite intriguing (and disturbing) that DeLay takes inspiration from Thomas Jefferson's defense of liberty, and somehow sees his record as following in the tradition of our Third President. As a history major, I wondered what he (or his speechwriter) was smoking, because DeLay's principles of governance (as stated in his own words) suggests that Jefferson would have been utterly disgusted by this former pest exterminator. The blogging forum does not afford me the space to develop a comprehensive comparison between these two Toms on all the important and overlapping issues of concern, so I'm going to very narrowly limit my examination to the questions of how the Constitution should be interpreted, and the role of the judiciary in the process of governance. My rationale is that legal issues such as these define the terms upon which public servants are expected to conduct themselves; therefore, a given legislator's approach to the law can help illuminate his or her broad strategy for governance and conduct in office.

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-- Dave Meyer

At a meeting of Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and American strategic analysts in Dubai last week, it quickly became clear that the common American view of the situation in the Persian Gulf region is only about 180 degrees away from that of the rest of the world.

Start with the notion of creating a democracy in Iraq as a way of catalyzing movement to democracy throughout the region. Analysts from the Middle East and elsewhere note that much of the current trouble is rooted in the American overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in the early 1950s. In his place the U.S. government installed Shah Reza Pahlevi to whom it tried to outsource hegemony over the Gulf and its vast oil wealth. When the Shah's dictatorship was overthrown by the Islamic forces of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the U.S. government responded by eventually supporting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. This war, of course, involved the now infamous gassing by Saddam of the Kurds of northern Iraq. Though strongly condemned by the present Bush administration, this action was neither condemned nor even recognized by officials of the Reagan administration at the time. Nor did the United States and United Nations forces attempt to establish a democracy in Iraq at the conclusion of the first Gulf War in 1992. In view of this history, there is great skepticism abroad about U.S. rhetoric on creating democracies.

On top of that, there is the practical question of compatible objectives. On the one hand, the United States is highly dependent on the royal family of Saudi Arabia. On the other, the U.S. government is calling for a democratic movement that would surely be a threat to the continued rule of that family. Few in the Middle East or Europe of the rest of Asia believe the United States really wants to see any quick demise of the House of Saud.

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-- Dave Meyer

My friend and colleague Charlie Kupchan and I agree on much: Europe faces policy challenges, the EU's constitution and concern with internal democracy don't help, and a united Europe is performing well on Iran, Turkey and other issues.

But we disagree on how to read crisis-ridden rhetoric by Europeans -- and I believe this issue tells us something important about the EU. Charlie says "Just about every European I talk to these days -- including die-hard federalists who have been constructing Europe for decades -- is deeply worried."

Yes, Europeans talk this way, but I draw the opposite conclusion. Why? Because, as I argue in European Voice this week, a wide gulf separates rhetoric and reality. For 50 years, the idealistic talk surrounding the EU has stressed "ever closer union" and movement toward a "United States of Europe." This is now clearly outdated, since Europe has reached a stable and very attractive "constitutional compromise", with policies divided between Brussels and the member states in a way most Europeans like.

This places politicians in a difficult bind. They know the EU can only advance incrementally, and that the constitution is dead in its current (probably any) form. Yet the small and vocal minority that feels most strongly about the European issue, especially inside the 'Brussels beltway', considers this sort of pragmatic viewpoint to be heresy -- a betrayal of the federalist dream. When Commission President José Manuel Barroso recently called for an "Elvis policy" -- "less conversation and more action" -- he was attacked viciously by European parliamentarians, who accused him of murdering the constitution.

National politicians, too savvy to get caught this way, spin rhetorical waffles about the constitution, while putting it on ice until at least 2009 and get on with implementing its content in other ways. This seems like smart policy to me, and I suspect Charlie agrees. Sure, in an ideal world, politicians might be more sincere about their pragmatism, or more creative in promoting rhetorical alternatives to 1950s-era Euro-idealism, but there is only so much one can expect of people in that line of work. Meanwhile, we agree, they are getting important things done.

Will the real president please stand up? There in our midst was the real president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, who charmed Washington Thursday as she made the rounds in this village. And the pretend president that we women all admire, actress Gina Davis, of the recently cancelled series, Commander-in-Chief! Side by side our dreams and the reality.

But the real buzz last night was the belief that the U.S. could indeed have a woman president, and that such a goal was less elusive than it sounds. The White House Project, whose mission is to encourage more women to seek elective office, took on the town when it chose to expand its mission to the international stage. I hope this is just the beginning. We need women leaders prepared to deal with the tough multilateral issues, the borderless issues of international diplomacy, and a Congress that sees beyond its own backyard to the global stage on which the U.S. holds court. The night of a thousand women was a great success, and apparently it filed a niche by bringing together so many women, Democrats and Republicans, justices and educators, business women and lobbyists, to once again make Washington come alive with hope. Women can and do rule. And Michelle Bachelet has led the way by her desire to meet the women of America as the important face of this nation.

But the spoiler in this first official visit was once again around our favorite U.S. whipping boy, the UN. Chile has noted its support for Venezuela to have a seat on the Security Council, a non-permanent seat with a two year term. Bush thinks this is a bad idea. Whatever your point of view on the merits and mine are mixed, it is the right of any sovereign state to vote in accordance with its own national interests. And with oil flowing from the northern Andes to Chile, it is clear that there is lots of hemispheric solidarity toward the wayward Venezuelan. Now the issue for the Presidenta is whether she can continue to stand up to President Bush, who is trying to bully the new leader into taking a stand against President Hugo Chavez's government at the UN. If I were a betting woman, I would say that Chile will do what it wants, given its earlier decision just before the Iraq war to oppose a Security Council Resolution that would have permitted the use of force. Keep reading this column for updates.

Johanna Mendelson Forman is a Senior Associate at CSIS and co-chair of the Real Security Program of The White House Project.

OK, I can't resist. Associated Press is reporting that Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered a daytime driving ban in Baghdad and Baquoba provice (where Abu Musab al Zarqawi was killed) to prevent car bomb attacks.

The driving ban will be from 11am to 3pm. So we should expect car bombings after 3pm and before 11am. Maybe the Iraqis should just outlaw driving and cars altogether.

Charles (Chuck) Peña is a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, MSNBC analyst, and author of "Winning the Un-War."

In an editorial about the Council of Europe's report about alleged secret detentions in Europe, the Financial Times wrote on Thursday: "Europe's foremost guardian of human rights yesterday painted a chilling picture of how more than a dozen European countries became part of a global "spider's web" spun by the US to kidnap and transport outside the reach of the law suspects in the "war on terror". Such lawless practices, including the outsourcing of torture of friendly despots, are spreading like a lethal virus."

The current US administration reacted as usual, dismissing the report out of hand. John Bellinger, the senior legal adviser to Condoleezza Rice told the BBC that the report is based on "rumor, innuendo and inaccuracy" and that "the tone of the report reads more like a supermarket journal than a serious report on human rights." (Makes you wonder where he does his shopping.)

The US administration's rhetoric reminds me of the lessons from the Turkish school I visited in the afternoons during my childhood in Germany. The teacher would tell us that we ("the Turks") are surrounded everywhere by enemies and that nobody really understands our ways. Then, our teacher would explain that we have to be prepared to defend ourselves against the enemies at our borders and that every Turk is a soldier.

The US administration needs a more realistic approach to foreign policy. The first and most important goal should not be to make enemies with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram and "black sites" run by the CIA around the world.

It is a frustrating feeling when I look around the table at the meetings of the European Parliament's temporary committee on alleged CIA activities in Europe. A high number of my colleagues, including myself, have been active participants in transatlantic dialogue for years -- and we have lived, studied and worked in the US and have worked on transatlantic issues in our political careers. It can't be said that our work is anti-American or against American interests.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote this week that the strength of the US World Cup soccer team is its "uramerikanische Siegeszuversicht" -- its primal American confidence in victory. It is refreshing to be reminded of this classic American trait in the context of soccer -- where sportsmanship and fair play are respected as much as victory.

Cem Özdemir is a Member of the European Parliament from Germany for the Greens/European Free Alliance parliamentary group and Vice President of the Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners.

Steve probably did not intend for his guest bloggers to transform TWN to a sports weblog. So, I apologize in advance for the following entry related to the Soccer World Cup which started in my home country of Germany yesterday.

Please, bear with me if I direct your attention to an important game. It's Angola v. Iran. Mark your calendars. It's on June 21st.

Actually, the game itself is not really important, at least not to me. But watch out for the events unfolding around the stadium in Leipzig. You will likely witness a meeting of minds, a lovefest of Germany's tiny, but ugly Neo-Nazi right and Iran's leading revolutionary, Mohammed Ahmadinejad. You might see extremists parading through the streets. You might see counter-demonstrations. You might see the German Government struggling with the decision to let a soccer fan by the name of Ahmadinejad into the country if he so desires. Let's at least hope it won't be a day of violence.

Germany's extreme right has been preparing for months. It all began in March when "The German Voice", the Party Newspaper of the extremist "National Democratic Party", started quoting Ahmadinejad at length. The Iranian President is a hero for the right wing fringe because he wants to wipe out Israel and denies the Holocaust ever happened. Well, in fact, Ahmadinejad is a bit more sophisticated. He just asks the question whether the Holocaust ever took place. As it happens Germany's radical right does the same thing. Under German law Holocaust denial is a crime. It is one of a few restrictions on free speech that we have on the books. Actually, the Americans urged the Germans to enact the law after World War II. Consequently, extremists just ask questions about the Holocaust. And who would blame anybody for asking questions?

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-- Dave Meyer

Interesting week so far. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, "the Sheikh of the Slaughterers," has been slain. Everybody wants a piece of this. The Jordanians are claiming a role. The Americans of course, Iraq's security forces. The US ambassador to Iraq hails it as a "good omen," which sounds rather weak, if the best the US can come up with in Iraq are omens. Perhaps they will say it's another "turning point" or a "milestone," because we haven't had enough of those since the Occupation began. Perhaps we have "turned the corner," in Iraq, which, after the thousand corners claimed turned by the Americans, makes for an interesting geometrical structure. Perhaps this will "break the back of the insurgency"? No, it is not even a good omen, it is an ominous omen.

Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. This civil war may have begun the day the Americans overthrew the old order in Iraq and established a new one, with Shias on top and Sunnis on the bottom, or it may have begun more specifically in 2005 when Iraq's police and army finally retaliated against the Sunni population for harboring the resistance, insurgency and the terrorists like Zarqawi who targeted Shia civilians. Sectarian cleansing began to increase and suddenly Sunnis felt targeted and vulnerable for the first time. Sunni militias that targeted the Americans became the Sunni militias that defended Sunni neighborhoods from the incursions of Shia militias and they began to retaliate following Shia attacks. But the Shias of Iraq have the police and army at their disposal, not to mention the American military, which has become merely one more militia among the many in Iraq, at times striking Shia targets but still mostly targeting the Sunni population, as the Haditha affair demonstrates.

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-- Dave Meyer

Dr. Mendelson Forman is speaking today at the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area meeting. Here's an advance look at her speech.

The drumbeat of reform at the UN has grown louder each day as the Bush administration continues it ongoing saga of having it both ways. On the one hand, the UN is a perfect scapegoat for an international system that has rejected U.S. adventurism in Iraq. On the other hand, the UN is the deus ex-machina for solving such intractable conflicts in the Sudan, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Haiti! But more than reform, the U.S. has now tied its allegiance to the international organization on a checklist of items that must be achieved in order to release desperately needed funding to keep the institution going.

John Bolton's continued dyspepsia around UN topics only fans the flames of conservative opponents of multilateralism who see his big stick approach to UN reform as the right touch in a time of great inefficiency, corruption and malfeasance. But indeed all through the critique of UN incapacity has been the ongoing use of the Security Council to prevent military intervention in Iran, or to rally allies together to find diplomatic solutions to global issues that the U.S. cannot handle alone. And even our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has chosen to use the UN as a forum to solve our current crisis in Iran.

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-- Dave Meyer

I first met Steve Clemons in Japan in the early 1990s when industrial policy was the subject du jour for up-and-coming policy wonks like him and sympathetic journalists like myself. How to resuscitate America's manufacturing base to compete against the Japanese threat, we wondered. Times change. These days, most Democrats wouldn't be caught dead uttering the "IP" word while yesterday morning I attended a session in Washington sponsored by the free-market Manhattan Institute that was promoting a government-led industrial policy to replenish the pharmaceutical industry's new product pipeline, which has slowed to a trickle in recent years. Robert Goldberg, the vice president of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress, referred to his proposal as a "Sematech consortium" for the drug industry.

It gets better. The confab's keynote speaker was Andrew von Eschenbach, the Texas cancer surgeon and Bush family friend who recently decamped from the National Cancer Institute to run the Food and Drug Administration. One of the panelists was Janet Woodcock, now the chief of operations at FDA after running its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which makes her the highest ranking career bureaucrat at the agency. Quite a coup for the free marketers at the Manhattan Institute: Top Bush administration officials showing up to back industrial policy.

What's up? Despite the billions poured into pharmaceutical industry and government-funded biomedical research in recent years, new product approvals at the FDA dropped to 20 new drugs last year, down from 34 the year before and about half the level of the mid-1990s. Genomics, proteomics, metaboleomics -- we know more about how the body works than ever before and we still don't know how to cure our most intractable medical problems: incurable cancers (most of them); dementia in its multiple forms; neurological disorders like Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's disease; many forms of heart disease.

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-- Dave Meyer

My essay on privacy:

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

And a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from 1968:

As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions... There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider's web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence... Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.

Bruce Schneier is a prolific writer on security issues, with eight books -- including Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World -- and dozens of articles to his name. He blogs at schneier.com.

I agree with Andy that the EU, despite the constitutional crisis, has scored several successes of late. To his list, I would add the EU's ability to hang together on Iran and take the lead in searching for a diplomatic solution. Not only are the EU 3 generally moving in lock-stop, but they have been pro-active and creative.

However, I think it is both inaccurate and dangerous to dismiss the EU's current troubles as just another passing moment of reflection. That view encourages complacency about Europe -- both in Europe and in the US -- a complacency that is not warranted. A distinct re-nationalization of political life is occurring across Europe, manifesting itself in an anti-EU, populist politics. Enlargement, economic stagnation, coping with Muslim immigrants, the passing of the World War II generation, profound political weakness across Europe's major players -- this is a perfect storm of sorts.

Just about every European I talk to these days -- including die-hard federalists who have been constructing Europe for decades -- is deeply worried. They insist that this moment of uncertainty is indeed more unsettling than any that have come before. If they are worried, then it seems those of us who observe from these shores should be worried as well.

At a moment when the United States is experiencing singular political weakness at home and abroad, it is especially disconcerting that the other main center of liberal democracy is stumbling as well.

Charles Kupchan is a professor at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The End of the American Era.

The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Air Force has increased bombings of Taliban and insurgent targets in Afghanistan, surpassing air operations in Iraq. According to Air Force officials, U.S. aircraft conducted 750 air strikes in Afghanstan during May, an average of 24 a day.

The problem with trying to kill the Taliban (which, by the way, is not necessarily the same thing as al Qaeda) from above -- even with precision weapons -- is that collateral damage is inevitable, as was the case last week when U.S. air strikes resulted in 17 civilians killed. We may be able to precisely hit physical targets, but we do not always know precisely if the people killed are the intended targets or innocents. Collateral damage creates spillover effects that result in creating more new terrorists -- much like the cycle of violence the Israelis experience in the West Bank. For example, the suicide bomber responsible for killing 19 Israelis in Haifa at the beginning of October 2003 was a 29-year-old apprentice lawyer, Hanadi Jaradat -- an educated woman with a good, well-paying job who would not ordinarily fit a terrorist profile. According to John Burns of the New York Times, Jaradat's parents "had no indication that their daughter had any contacts with Islamic militants -- no sense, they said, that she had any ambition but to establish her career as a lawyer, marry, and have children." But she had motivation: an Israeli crackdown that resulted in the shooting death of her brother, Fadi, 23, and her cousin Saleh, 31.

We need to learn from, not copy, Israeli tactics and recognize that the unintended consequences of military actions like the air strikes in Azizi can do more to create anti-American sentiment that is the first step toward becoming a terrorist. The Israelis justify their actions because they feel they must confront a direct and imminent mortal threat to the survival of their country. But U.S. actions in Afghanistan are more connected to the survival of a U.S.-created government and not the security of the United States itself. Unfortunately, if the Israeli experience is any indication, the likely result of stepped up U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan will be a cycle of violence that will play into the hands of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and create more terrorist recruits.

Charles (Chuck) Pena is a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, MSNBC analyst, and author of "Winning the Un-War."

Incoherence at the UN. Stephen Schlesinger (my brother, who has written a book on the founding of the UN) has a good take on the Mark Balloch Brown/John Bolton kafuffle over at HuffPo.

China has cracked the Da Vinci Code. Or more precisely cracked down on it. According to Reuters the Chinese government has banned the blockbuster flick, instructing theatres to pull it and instructing the state media services not to even mention the film’s name any more.

There's no official explanation. Theories on why it was pulled range from China accommodating Catholic protests (unlikely) to Chinese fears that the movie’s rampant success could make its domestic films look bad.

My theory: It's the result of a nefarious cabal that includes the NSA, Opus Dei, the Freemasons and NASA.

Mixed Messages. For an illustration of how hard it is to read the tea leaves on a special election, take a gander at the front pages of The Washington Post and NY Times today.

Washington Post: "Victory in California Calms GOP"

New York Times: "Narrow Victory by G.O.P. Signals Fall Problems"

Where does the truth lie? I think the Post's sharp political blogger (who did not write the story headlined above), Chris Cillizza, hits it pretty well:

In the end, yesterday's election results change little. If Democrats had won, it would have been interpreted (rightly, we think) as a sign of a wave building that could well wash Republicans out of the majority. But simply because Busby came up short does not mean that any hopes of Democrats winning back the House in November have vanished.

The national environment -- as determined by the deep disapproval for the job President Bush is doing and overwhelming majorities who believe the country is heading in the wrong direction -- is still very difficult for Republicans and ensures that a number of incumbents who have not faced serious elections in recent years will be forced to run real campaigns. Tuesday's result means that while these incumbents are endangered, they are not yet extinct.

And of course November remains a long, long time away. Well, a long time anyway.

Robert Schlesinger, a Washington-based author writing a book on presidential speechwriters, regularly blogs on the Huffington Post.

It's been exactly a year since cranky French and Dutch voters rejected the European Union's draft constitution, and pundits can't resist hyping an EU "crisis." A steady stream of copy is provided by die-hard federalists in Brussels, ever disappointed by slow movement toward a "United States of Europe." But Anglo-Americans seem particularly prone to mood swings from Euro-enthusiasm to Euro-skepticism. Citing the failed constitution, anti-immigrant sentiment, and economic performance, Charles Kupchan of Georgetown (who used to be bullish on Europe) claimed last week in the LA Times that Europe faces its "most serious crisis since World War II." The EU is "at risk" unless its leaders take "urgent action."

Muscular rhetoric, great story line. Yet the truth is just the opposite. And it's not just liberals like my Princeton colleague John Ikenberry who see this, but recovering Europe-bashers in the Bush Administration as well.

If you judge by concrete actions, rather than constitutional rhetoric, the EU is riding high. Over the past decade, Europe has completed its single market, eliminated border formalities, launched the Euro, and strengthened foreign policy coordination. Over the past year alone, since the constitutional "crisis" began, Euro-leaders have resolved a long-standing budget wrangle, taken a courageous decision to open membership talks with Turkey, liberalized trans-border service provision, and launched a deregulation initiative.

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-- Dave Meyer

Is what happened in Mogadishu during the past week a microcosm of how badly the Bush administration has fundamentally mishandled its "global war on terror?''

Superficially, at least, it would seem so. By all accounts, the administration's single-minded obsession with seizing suspected al Qaeda and associated Islamist terrorists without any regard for the political context not only undermined ongoing indigenous and international efforts to rebuild a shattered nation, but it also boosted popular backing for of local Islamic militias against U.S.-backed warlords who have now been expelled from the Somali capital.

Media accounts and research by the International Crisis Group (ICG) appear to have established that the Central Intelligence Agency funneled money through the Pentagon's Joint Combined Task Force (JCTF), a 1,800-man force based in neighboring Djibouti since shortly after 9/11. The warlords were originally retained by Washington to monitor and, when possible, "snatch" suspected terrorists in Mogadishu. But they started receiving more cash earlier this spring to challenge the growing power and reach of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). Baptized the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, the warlord coalition launched the worst round of violence in more than a decade only to be routed from the city by the UIC.

While the administration worries that the Islamists could turn into a new Taliban, other voices say the eviction of the U.S.-backed side could turn out pretty well, particularly if anticipated negotiations between the UIC and the two-year-old provisional national government in Baidoa can work out an agreement that would permit the latter to move its headquarters to Mogadishu and begin the long-stalled process of rebuilding a state.

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-- Dave Meyer

I woke up this morning to the breaking news that Coalition forces had killed public enemy number one in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in an airstrike. This is certainly good news. The United States has one less excuse to linger in Iraq and should re-focus its attention on the real al Qaeda threat: bin Laden and what remains of the al Qaeda leadership thought to be hiding in Pakistan -- we need to remind ourselves that it was bin Laden not al Zarqawi who attacked the United States -- and the al Qaeda terrorist network operating in 60 countries around the world.

But (there's always a but), we should not believe that killing Zarqawi means an end to the insurgency in Iraq. In all likelihood, his successor (and his successor's succuessor) has already stepped into Zarqawi's shoes. And we must remember that the insurgency is not just about Zarqawi, but is multi-faceted (comprised of at least three different elements (in varying proportions over time): Ba'athists and other Sunnis who perceive they have the most to lose as a result of regime change; other Iraqis -- including Shi'ites -- opposed to the U.S. military occupation; and foreign terrorists seeking to sow the seeds of jihad (made easy by porous borders and an inviting target in their own neighborhood). So the violence in Iraq is likely to continue.

Charles (Chuck) Pena is a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, MSNBC analyst, and author of "Winning the Un-War."

Abu Musab al Zarqawi's killing is not surprising, less significant strategically than it will inevitably be presented to be, and the man will in all likelihood be replaced sooner or later.

For the past three years, al Zarqawi had been battling the world's most powerful armies in the middle of a population whose majority (the Iraqi Shia) he had declared war on. He was on the run, and a $25 million bounty had been put on him in a place where such irresistible incentives had allowed for Saddam Hussayn to be captured and his sons killed. What is indeed surprising is that it took so long to get to a man who had alienated a number of his potential 'comrades' and had taken tactical chances by recently sending a half-hour video to the media showing him roaming around the desert with his men and discussing plans over maps. More generally, this is the gamble of frontliners (who usually embrace such fate) and, for instance, Al Qaeda in the Gulf had similarly lost two of its leaders since 2005 (Abdelaziz al Moqrin and Salah al Oofi) without much disruption to its attacks on the Saud monarchy.

Al Zarqawi was not a member of Al Qaeda until late December 2004 when his request to join the organization was accepted by Ben Laden. An acceptance that appears to have been given rather reluctantly. Zarqawi was a late-comer to Afghanistan where he had set up his own training camps, a disposition for independence that Ben Laden did not much care for. For his part, Ayman al Dhawahiri had recently disapproved of the extreme violence resorted to by al Zarqawi and invited him to put a stop to that and fold his actions into the larger umbrella of Iraqi resistance. He abided by both requests, an indication of the 'Mother Qaeda' leaders sway. Arguably, both men had only accepted him because of his early "successes" in terrorizing foreigners and Iraqis alike.

Finally, it is essentially the overstreched symbol of a key figure of Al Qaeda that has vanished. On the ground, the complex and fast-changing Iraqi insurgency will continue as it had after the May 2003 "end of hostilities, the December 2003 arrest of Saddam Hussayn, the January 2005 legislative elections and other "turning points".

Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou is Associate Director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University.

Mark Mazzetti's NY Times front-pager on the most recent U.S. failures in Somalia is worth reading on two levels.

First it's an illustrative account of where we went wrong in allying ourselves with Somali warlords. (Is it ever a good idea to line up with someone who can be straight-facedly identified as a "warlord"?)

Also worth some careful reading is the subtext of the piece. To wit

A covert effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to finance Somali warlords has drawn sharp criticism from American government officials who say the campaign has thwarted counterterrorism efforts inside Somalia and empowered the same Islamic groups it was intended to marginalize.

Seems plain enough.

The criticism was expressed privately by United States government officials with direct knowledge of the debate. And the comments flared even before the apparent victory this week by Islamist militias in the country dealt a sharp setback to American policy in the region and broke the warlords' hold on the capital, Mogadishu.

The officials said the C.I.A. effort, run from the agency's station in Nairobi, Kenya, had channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to secular warlords inside Somalia with the aim, among other things, of capturing or killing a handful of suspected members of Al Qaeda believed to be hiding there.

If one wanted to use a Washington-to-English dictionary, one might read into this: This was the CIA's fault. In Kenya. Which is thousands and thousands of miles away from the White House.

Mazzetti talked to CIA defenders as well of course.

The American activities in Somalia have been approved by top officials in Washington and were reaffirmed during a National Security Council meeting about Somalia in March, according to people familiar with the meeting. During the March meeting, at a time of fierce fighting in and around Mogadishu, a decision was made to make counterterrorism the top policy priority for Somalia.

Where does the buck stop? Oh yeah.

Robert Schlesinger, a Washington-based author writing a book on presidential speechwriters, regularly blogs on the Huffington Post.

I just got through my first read of the outstanding roster of diverse and provocative posts that TWN's guest bloggers have posted this week. Thanks to all of them who have posted and to the many others who will cover the rest of the week and weekend.

Thanks as well to Dave Meyer who has upgraded my blog software apparently and installed an anti-spam function that will frustrate the gambling and pornography hawkers. My guess is that the "extra step" involved in posting comments allows people to remain anonymous -- so look forward to reading your comments as well.

I just learned that Zarqawi was killed -- and was watching a short bit of the news coverage last night and this morning. This is important symbolically and substantively -- but one thing that Nir Rosen and Fawaz Gerges emphasized when I was with them in Florence was that Zarqawi's jihadists represented only a very small fraction of the insurgency in Iraq. Most of what is going on there is home-grown and not imported.

I went on a nice run through Juneau, Alaska this morning -- and stopped by to visit the offices of the Alaska Permanent Fund sweating and in shorts and running garb. They were very hospitable.

Have to head out -- but thanks to all for their support of The Washington Note this week I've been away and largely unconnected.

More later.

-- Steve Clemons

In case you missed it, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. air strike Wednesday.

Good. It will be interesting to see to what extent this affects the insurgency in Iraq. If we have learned anything about modern terrorism it's that these violent Islamist movements are constantly evolving and able to replace their leaders.

Robert Schlesinger, a Washington-based author writing a book on presidential speechwriters, regularly blogs on the Huffington Post.

For months, various groups, former government officials and foreign policy experts have called on the United States to engage Iran directly to find a diplomatic solution to the continuing nuclear standoff. The recent Bush administration decision to offer direct talks with Iran, with appropriate conditions to ensure that a diplomatic solution also meets US security objectives, is a positive step forward in resolving the showdown with Tehran. The incentives being offered to Iran to abandon their uranium enrichment and plutonium production and reprocessing programs include guaranteed access to modern, power producing nuclear reactors and security guarantees. Just making such an offer serves US diplomatic and security interests, and Iran's acceptance would be a security win for the United States and its allies. While some may criticize the US for waiting too long -- and many in Europe will if the deal fails -- taking the right decision gives diplomatic efforts the best chance to succeed and should be applauded from the left and the right.

But Iran is not the only nuclear crisis in the world today. North Korea's nuclear program is arguably a more dangerous and acute threat to US interests. When the Bush administration took office, North Korea might have had access to enough material to make one nuclear weapon, material acquired while President George H.W. Bush was President. North Korea may now possess enough material to produce more than 10 nuclear weapons and acquires enough to build a new weapon every year. (It should be noted that North Korea did not produce and gain access to any nuclear weapon usable material during the 8-year tenure of President Clinton). President Bush boldly stated that the United States would not tolerate a nuclear North Korea, but has not found a way to ensure US policy backs up US rhetoric. Important, but secondary US interests have been allowed to derail progress on the nuclear issue, and the six party talks insisted on by the United States are dead in the water.

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-- Dave Meyer

Here's a way to feel better about the Department of Homeland Security's evident disregard for the safety of New Yorkers, not to mention Washingtonians. Years ago, New York Knicks Basketball fans found a way to turn unfairness to their advantage. It was the early 90's, part of the Larry Bird/Robert Parish Boston Celtics era. Game after game, the Knicks, led by Patrick Ewing, would be fouled, sometimes flagrantly, by the contemptuous Who-Me? Celtics. Rather than complain, Coach Pat Riley's Knicks just kept doing their thing, playing with the knowledge that their only option was to play better basketball, to make up in talent for the calls against them. They couldn't rely upon a fair game. So they didn't. They compensated. And more often than not, they got the job done, winning 15 of 19 games against the Celtics between 1991 and 1994 and two out of four division titles.

In the current debate with Homeland Security, this should be the model for the New York City Police Department. In many ways, it already has been. The new DHS budget cuts for NYC, down 40 per cent from last year is merely an indication of a broader, remarkably consistent story. The truth is that since the establishment of DHS in 2003, New York City has essentially been on its own. Repeated conversations with New York counterterrorism officials between 2003 and 2005 convinced me that the NYPD's relationship with Homeland Security was of no practical significance. Meetings take place between lower level officials, but the head of Homeland Security is not in regular contact with the counterterrorism folks at the NYPD. This seems to be a fairly serious flaw in the system. Especially when Michael Chertoff has implicitly acknowledged what all leading experts on Al Qaeda assert, namely, that the most commonly cited U.S. target in terrorist chatter is New York City.

One could debate the rhetoric of DHS in justifying its longstanding policy of minimizing support to New York City. For example, even if New York City did not house any monuments of national significance, the City itself is a monument of national significance, where almost any target will do. One could laugh at the insistence that the City filed its papers the wrong way and at the DHS refusal to express any shame over a policy in which bureaucratic rules take precedence over the merits of national security.

But rather than resort to such all-too-easy ridicule, or to the facile explanation of pork-barrel politics, it would serve us well, as New Yorkers and as Americans, to consider the possibility that DHS has developed its tight-fisted policy towards New York City for a reason. Maybe this isn't just a mistake or an oversight. Maybe the anti-New York policy is intentional and has a basis in vastly different approaches to counterterrorism. Looking at DHS and NYPD policies, the following points of difference seem worthy of consideration.

Continue reading this article

-- Dave Meyer

Do we really know where we are in the immigration debate? We sure haven't figured out the economic dimensions yet, as John Tierney pointed out yesterday in discussing border security's relationship with opportunities for legal migration.

As it turns out, we don't know much about the cultural or ethnic facets of immigration to the United States, either. In her 2002 book World on Fire, Yale Law professor Amy Chua points out that free-market democracies often have the unintended consequence of encouraging sectarian strife when small minorities exercise economic domination over much larger majorities (i.e. the United States vis-a-vis the rest of the world). Her point exists in a larger sense: the movement of people has an under-examined cultural/ethnic component to it, too.

What Bush is doing with an insistence on a guest-worker program is implicitly relegating a very large and, as we saw during the April 10 immigration rallies, increasingly influential group of people to second-class citizenship. Germany tried it, and what that country now has is strong tensions with its Turkish immigrants, who were originally guest-workers.

Still, it's better than the House's rhetoric, whose divisive, anti-American xenophobia does no one any good.

What I'm afraid of in all of this, whether it's in the short-term from such rhetoric or the long-term when the "guest-workers" start demanding more equal rights, is that we come across as greedy and intolerant. The United States has consistently been sending the message that we are happy to have cheap labor move in with us, but we don't want anything beyond that. We can't have it both ways: if we want the economic prosperity that cheap labor brings us, we have to be able to accept the cultural implications of that as well, without telling immigrants to renounce their culture when they come to the United States.

Still, we are progressing in generally the right direction in all of this. What is left to do is hammer out the contradictions by allowing people from other countries, particularly Mexico, to come, live, and work without obstacle. We've already seen how this benefits the U.S. Anything less risks increased tensions with the rest of the Americas and cementing the inequalities that are already a problem with current "illegal" immigration.

Alexander Steffler is a student at the George Washington University. He is currently in Argentina researching Paraguayan immigration to Buenos Aires.

I wouldn't be surprised if the idea behind this American Spectator Blog post turned into a mini-meme for defenders of our own NSA's warrantless wiretap and data mining programs, so perhaps it's best to nip it in the bud if we can. AmSpec's Jed Babbin writes:

Because no one else wants to talk about this we must. The RCMP arrests of some 17 Canadian al-Q wannabes was based on the Canadian Secret Intelligence Service - their equivalent of the NSA - monitoring of e-mails between suspects and international connections, and among the suspects in Canada.

More proof that it works. Are you listening, Sen. Specter?

Now, perhaps you're among those who believe — and there seem to be not a few who at least purport to — that the sole possible basis for objections to the NSA programs, which circumvent even the most minimal sort of judicial oversight, is the conviction that we just shouldn't be trying to conduct any sort of surveillance of terrorists. If so, then this is an awesome argument. Otherwise, it looks as though it probably cuts the other way.

Here's what the Toronto Star article linked by the AmSpec folks says:

The chain of events began two years ago, sparked by local teenagers roving through Internet sites, reading and espousing anti-Western sentiments and vowing to attack at home, in the name of oppressed Muslims here and abroad.

Their words were sometimes encrypted, the Internet sites where they communicated allegedly restricted by passwords, but Canadian spies back in 2004 were reading them. And as the youths' words turned into actions, they began watching them.

And good work on their part. But was all this achieved by liberating Canada's intelligence officers from burdensome warrant requirements or oversight protocols that would have prevented them from discovering this suspected terror cell? Apparently not:

Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton University, said the surveillance of the Toronto cell shows that it is possible to detect terrorist cells using a system that requires the equivalent of a search warrant.

Canadian officials had to obtain permission from a threat-review committee before investigating Canadian citizens, he said. As a result, he said, all the information collected should be usable in court.

Now, the arrest of the Canadian cell appears to have been the outcome of a long period of surveillance involving extensive international cooperation, so it's hard to know to what extent due process was observed every step of the way. But it least looks as though the capture of these wannahadeen turned out to be compatible with reasonable checks on state eavesdropping powers.

Julian Sanchez is an assistant editor of Reason.

The revelation that the CIA did nothing to go after Adolf Eichmann after it was tipped off in 1958 by West German intelligence that he was living in Argentina under an assumed name is an example of the dangers that can arise when a country chooses to subordinate all aspects of its foreign policy to a single, all-consuming goal: such as fighting communism during the Cold War or, one might venture, winning the war on terrorism today. At some point, it becomes easy to lose perspective on what means justify what ends. During the Cold War, US government was so concerned with checking the spread of communism in Europe that it did not aggressively pursue de-Nazification after 1948 and was willing to work with a number of former Nazis, even though many were clearly implicated in the Holocaust. As it turns out, many of these Nazis made for pretty lousy intelligence assets. As The New York Times reports in its coverage today, the 27,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents, which include the revelation about Eichmann:

...reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B., according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

This led former New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a member of the panel that worked to declassify the documents, to warn that "Using bad people can have very bad consequences." And, according to The Times, "she and other group members suggested the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today."

But this seems to be the wrong lesson: In fact, if taken to an extreme, such a policy would deny the U.S. vital intelligence information that can only be gleaned from working with unsavory characters. Some say that this is exactly how the CIA's human intelligence capability was hobbled, starting with reforms introduced after the Church Committee revelations of the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s, when some CIA veterans say an overly-cautious and lawyerly Clinton administration prevented the agency from working with intelligent assets suspected of human rights violations.

Now, this isn't to say that the U.S. should embrace working with war criminals. Some crimes are on such a scale and so egregious -- say, genocide -- that the U.S. should put morality ahead of security and ban working with such individuals (actually, it should go further and work to bring those individuals to justice.) In the end, it does more damage to US credibility and interests around the world -- and therefore ultimately does more damage to our security --- to work with genocidaires than any security that is gained from whatever information they provide. But in cases of lesser abuses and crimes, it seems to me that the test should be whether one is getting valuable, actionable intelligence out of the source. The problem with so many of the former Nazis was not only were they implicated in terrible crimes, but the intelligence they provided also proved to be worthless (or worse, they were double agents working for the Soviets). If you are going to "use bad people," as Holtzman says, the key ought to be to make sure you're getting good information.

Jeremy Kahn is managing editor of The New Republic.

This weekend, my friend Harry Shearer took me and my Left, Right, and Center cohorts to the cyber woodshed for not giving the proper attention (alright, any attention) to the remarkable Army Corps of Engineers report accepting responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans. Here was the money spank: "It was astonishing to listen to these four natter on about the Treasury Secretary, while culpability for the worst man-made engineering disaster in the nation's history was ignored."

Ouch. And touché. While part of me wants to explain that I had ceded the HuffPost Katrina beat to Harry, who has done a remarkable job of keeping us informed on all the developments from New Orleans, the truth is, he's right. We cannot let Katrina and the sputtering efforts to rebuild the Gulf be shoved to the back of the priority line.

Harry's jab got me to thinking about why this has happened. Why, despite the occasional big story hitting the front page of the New York Times or leading the nightly news, the event John Zogby predicts will become more of a defining moment for America's future than 9/11, has been largely forgotten by the public -- and, even more critically, by our leaders.

Now, I understand why the GOP has been only too happy to sweep it under the rug. The last things they want voters reminded of are Bush playing that guitar while New Orleans drowned, his presidential flyover, his promise to rebuild Trent Lott's house, and the glaring chasm between his post-Katrina rhetoric -- "We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives" -- and the stark current reality. Over nine months later, 250,000 are still homeless or displaced, bodies are still being found, tens of thousands of homes still need rebuilding, disaster preparedness for New Orleans has been cut in half, and hurricane recovery funding is still slogging its way through Congress.

But why are Democrats sending mixed messages about Katrina? Yes, the Democratic National Committee held its annual spring meeting in April in New Orleans, saying the devastated city would be a symbolic image for the 2006 campaign. "The Republicans," said Howard Dean, "have cut and run when it comes to rebuilding the Gulf Coast, and we will not do that."

But yesterday, on the floor of the Senate, while denouncing the ludicrousness of the GOP's pandering gay marriage ban, Harry Reid castigated the administration for avoiding the most pressing issues facing Americans: "high gas prices, the war in Iraq, the national debt, health care, senior citizens, education, crime, trade policies, stem cell research." Notice Katrina didn't even make the list. An incontrovertible testament to the incompetence and misplaced priorities of the GOP, yet New Orleans doesn't even beat out stem cell research in Reid's Top Nine concerns?

I couldn't help but wonder if Katrina didn't make the cut because it's not polling very well these days. In a recent Fox News poll listing the 20 issues Americans are most concerned about, Katrina landed with a thud at number 18 [pdf]. In the latest CBS poll of the top 8 most important problems facing the country, it didn't even make the list.

Back in September 2005, in the wake of the disaster, Americans deemed recovery from Hurricane Katrina the highest priority facing the White House and Congress in an AP poll.

It was also front and center on Reid's agenda, as he delivered the opening remarks at a Democratic forum on "Meeting America's Economic Challenge in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina," saying: "Our first priority is making sure victims receive the assistance they need. This includes housing, health care and financial relief. We've done some work, but not nearly enough. America can do better."

I did note that Reid managed to work the Dems abysmal slogan into both speeches, ending yesterday's Senate speech with: "Together, America Can Do Better."

So can the Democrats. Eight years ago, Harry Shearer and I started the Partnership for a Poll-Free America to free our leaders from sticking their fingers in the political wind, feeling which way it's blowing, and then chasing after the fickle gusts of public sentiment. Real leadership has always been about determining the direction the country needs to go in and convincing the public that it's the right direction.

As I blogged yesterday, Democrats need to make the tragic war in Iraq and how it's made America less safe the top issue in the 2006 election. And Katrina should be the domestic companion piece. As I wrote on Sept 7, 2005: "The debacle in New Orleans contains all the elements necessary to show how Bush's misguided priorities -- especially his obsession with Iraq -- have left us far more vulnerable, unsafe, and insecure. It's the perfect opportunity to redefine national security in a way that would ironically -- by putting America first -- most appeal to the red states."

Thanks for the reminder, Harry.

When Steve Clemons first asked me to contribute to The Washington Note this week, my reaction was to decline, on the ground of fatigue following an intense few weeks -- as many of you know, the memorial service for my father was held on May 31st. However I find the temptation to say a few words irresistible.

Robert F. Kennedy jr. has created a stir with this story in Rolling Stone. Kennedy presents a useful survey of the many abusive tactics and acts of seeming incompetence that marred the administration of the 2004 election, especially in Ohio. Kennedy goes on to conclude that these abuses were numerically large enough to have thrown the election from Kerry to Bush, and for this he has been attacked quite thoroughly by Farhad Manjoo in Salon.

Without getting into back-and-forth of this argument, it seems to me that it is largely beside the point. Manjoo writes that "to prove [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell stole the state for Bush, Kennedy's got to do more than show instances of Blackwell's mischief. He's got to outline were Blackwell's actions could possibly have added up to enough votes to put the wrong man in office."

This is correct, but a red herring, induced by a strategic error on Kennedy's part. Kennedy did not need to prove that Kerry really won Ohio. And he should not have attempted to do so. It makes no difference now. George Bush is President and the outcome of the election cannot be changed.

And yet, attempted burglary is a serious crime. It does not matter whether the victim was picked clean. The systematic suppression of the votes of blacks, Hispanics and the young is a huge insult to the election process. It is by itself enough to rob an election of legitimacy. It doesn't matter whether it did actually change the outcome. The point is, it might have.

Was there such systematic suppression of (for instance) the minority vote? Manjoo agrees there was, quoting a study of Franklin County (Columbus) showing that "the allocation of voting machines was clearly biased against African-Americans." I witnessed the two-hour lines that were everywhere in the Democratic wards of Columbus that day. I spoke with voters who were deterred from voting because of the lines. And I saw numerous voters turn away from an overcrowded polling place at the end of the day.

People, this is a crime. It's not a small issue. The right to vote should not be restricted to those who have two hours to spare in order to do it! Time is money, and a wait of that order is exactly like a poll tax, against which the civil rights movement struggled for years.

Many who fret over electronic voting worry -- with good reason -- over the possibility that the machines can be hacked, though there is no firm proof they actually have been. But machines are a serious problem in a more obvious way, affecting every election. They are a bottleneck to voting.

If a precinct has less machines than it needs, the number of people who can vote in that precinct is automatically limited to the flow-capacity of the machines. When this happens, as it certainly did in Columbus, Ohio in 2004, get-out-the-vote efforts are automatically frustrated. It is easy to fix an election, in practice, by rationing the number of votes that precincts on one side or another can cast. That's what happened in Ohio. Whether it was by design or incompetence, whether it made enough difference to change the outcome -- it doesn't matter. If large numbers cannot get in to vote, the election is illegitimate on its face.

Manjoo rightly asks for solutions. The right one is to get rid of the machines. That's what Vote-By-Mail -- the Oregon system -- achieves. Vote By Mail is tested, popular, effective, efficient and safe. It is not a partisan measure. Where elections are clean there is no reason to think it will favor one party over another. But where vote suppression is a critical element of Republican electoral tactics, Vote By Mail will make a difference. And that could make all the difference in the outcome going forward.

This issue is the central civil rights question of our time, and it's time to get on it.

James K. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School at the University of Texas. He wrote an article on election reform for The Nation in November 2004.

I am glad to see that the Bush administration, having backed the losing side in fighting between Somalia's Islamic militias and secular warlords, has -- according to a story by Karen DeYoung in today's Washington Post -- chosen to offer an olive branch to the Islamic factions that seized control of Mogadishu yesterday. The U.S. is understandably concerned about an Al Qaeda cell that they believe may be operating out of Somalia. But U.S. interests in checking Al Qaeda may be better served at this point by working with the Islamic factions as they try to form a government -- perhaps in conjunction with the transitional government in the southern Somali city of Baidoa that is backed by the international community -- than in working to undermine them. I think John Pendergrast has it about right in his Washington Post op-ed today.

It is unclear that in the near term the U.S. gains much by continuing to back the secular militia. Instead, maintaining a supply of weapons to these groups would likely only prolong a civil war that has brought Somalia such terrible grief. It would be good if the Bush administration kept in mind some of the interesting academic research that has been done in recent years on the ways in which civil wars end and the kinds of endings that are likely to result in enduring peace [pdf]. Monica Toft at Havard has done research that indicates that decisive victory, particularly by rebel factions, often results in the most lasting peace settlements. And it is certainly clear that outside assistance for one faction enabling it to keep fighting when it otherwise would be forced to sue for peace is not a good way to end a civil war [pdf].

Jeremy Kahn is managing editor of The New Republic.

My thanks to Steve for the chance to guest blog. Reaching back to early March, I was struck by a NY Times piece by David Brooks entitled "It's Not Isolationism, but It's Not Attractive" on March 5, 2006. His thesis was that the US is not isolationist, but the Arab/Muslim world has set itself aside as the exception in today's world. Exceptionalism aside, Brooks used the phrase "crescent menace" (at least he didn't capitalize it) to sweep all of the Arab/Muslim world into one overarching threat. The phrase brought back memories of the "yellow peril" and the "red tide", not to mention the "evil empire". I did check as to whether this phrase has gotten traction since then, but didn't see much on the Web. My point is how easy it is to construct clever catch phrases, ones that if incorporated into the popular lexicon can become exceptionally damaging. Lets hope that this one doesn't have legs.

Brooks suggested that the US needs to wall off the crescent menace. While he didn't indicate a physical barrier, I wonder whether the current enthusiasm for a fence/wall on the US southern border is a surrogate for walling off the crescent menace. In checking with my friends and relatives in the "angry white man" community, I found a lot of confusion about terrorists crossing the border mixed in with illegal/economic immigrants. More straight talk and data about suspected terrorist transiting our borders would be helpful. It's disturbing how walls seem to be the answer to so many problems.

Ron Stoltz is a national security enthusiast working at the intersection of technology, policy and politics.

I'm a newbie to the blogosphere, but thanks to Steve for asking me to pinch hit on The Washington Note. I hope I can live up to his and his readers' expectations.

Both Washington and Tehran have used the term "positive" to describe a package of incentives -- including an offer of some U.S. nuclear technology on top of European help in building light-water nuclear reactors -- aimed at persuading the Iranians to halt their uranium enrichment program.

While this development may represent a ray of hope, in recent months President Bush has conceded that the nuclear option against Iran is still on the table but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stated that security assurances are not on the table. So we are willing to hold open the option of nuking the Iranians to prevent them from having a uranium enrichment capability (even though there is no prohibition on such a capability under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which Iran is a party) but are completely unwilling to consider the possibility of a security guarantee as an inducement to give up their nuclear program.

For diplomacy to work, however, you have to be willing to give the other party something it wants in exchange for getting something you want from them. If what the Iranians ultimately want is a security guarantee to prevent preemptive regime change, then the current overture is likely to be a go nowhere proposition and a speed bump on the road to U.S. military action.

As long as Steve is giving me a forum, let me also take this opportunity to engage in some blatant and shameless self-promotion by encouraging The Washington Note readers to buy my book "Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism."

Charles (Chuck) Pena is a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, MSNBC analyst, and author of "Winning the Un-War."

I'm grateful to Steve for inviting me back to The Note, and to repay his trust and friendship, I'm going to raise a disagreement with one of his other guests.

Arianna Huffington suggested yesterday that calling for a troop removal from Iraq would nationalize the elections this fall for the Democrats. I don't agree.

A couple of disclaimers: first, I strongly believe that bipartisan solutions are, in the long-term, the only solutions to what is now a broken foreign policy. Much as I detest the policies of this Republican President and this Republican Congress and want to see them change, the most important people in government right now are the internationalist Republicans that have quietly worked against the grain.

Second, Arianna and I share a lot of common ground. We both believe the invasion of Iraq was an awful idea, and we both question the wisdom of keeping troops there indefinitely and without a plan for victory. We both think the Democrats are rolling the dice on their future by depending on Republican incompetence and ethical lapses. And we both believe the Haditha incident and Abu Ghraib, like so many of the Bush Administration's policies, are morally abhorrent and make America less safe.

But we disagree on the potential of troop withdrawal from Iraq as a central campaign issue.

Continue reading this article

-- Dave Meyer

It's too early to know for certain how deep the Bush Administration's commitment to Iran diplomacy runs. But two ground truths have been made abundantly clear in conversations with US allies: (1) the military options are not attractive; and (2) there isn't yet the sense of urgency that characterized the run up to the war in Iraq.

What does the Iran timeline look like now? The Bush Administration has deliberately signaled a fairly relaxed expectation about how long it may take the fractious Iranian regime to formulate a response to the incentive package offered by the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. Initial Iranian reactions have been positive. Certainly, the US is prepared for at least several weeks' worth of waiting, - which costs nothing in terms of US options. Keep in mind that the UN route and "coalition of the willing" sanctions are both unpredictable and likely to fail -- possibly in a way that highlights US limitations. That helps makes the case for patience.

There are press reports that a forthcoming IAEA report on Tehran's activities will call attention to the discovery of enriched uranium on equipment at an Iranian military site. While not bomb-grade material, the fact that Iran has such equipment at a military facility increases speculation about a covert program.

What's the status of Iran's nuclear technology? Tehran started small-scale enrichment in February. It intends to build a 164-machine cascade by end of the year. IAEA officials and the foreign intelligence communities now generally agree that Iran is attempting to develop its own nuclear weapon capabilities. In addition to the possibility that Iran could break out from its disclosed activities at Natanz, it is of course also possible that Tehran could: (1) acquire highly-enriched uranium (HEU) from another country; or (2) conceal a significant centrifuge program that exceeds the small number the Iranians are thought to have assembled at Natanz thus far.

To be clear, going from a pilot program of 164 centrifuges that can produce small quantities of enriched uranium product to a cascade of 1,500 or 3,000 machines is an enormous technical challenge, and the penalty for mistakes along the way is high, e.g., in terms of damage to already assembled centrifuges. Those familiar with Tehran's capability express substantial uncertainty regarding how quickly it can achieve its objective. Absent a technological leap or the acquisition of HEU from another source, however, most agree that Iran is unlikely to obtain bomb quantities of HEU before some time in 2009 -- a point Director of National Intelligence Negroponte affirmed again last week.

Taken together, an initially positive Iranian reaction and more troubling technological discoveries leave near-term events moving in a range from vaguely positive to negative. But the technology timeline doesn't yet argue for urgency. The key will be whether a real Iranian reaction (perhaps not public) invites a dialogue or presents insurmountable obstacles to the US initiative.

Of near-term events, it's likely that the G8 Summit will be the most important. But all of these venues will be worth to watching:

• June 8 -- Meeting of NATO defense ministers (Brussels).
• June 12 -- Meeting of the Board of Governors of the IAEA (Vienna).
• June 15 -- Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; Iranian President Ahmadinejad to attend (Shanghai).
• June 15-16 -- EU Summit (Vienna).
• June 21 -- US-EU Summit; President Bush to attend (Vienna).
• June 29 -- Meeting of G8 foreign ministers (Moscow).
• July 14 -- President Bush expected to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Stralsund, Germany).
• July 15-17 -- G8 Summit (St. Petersburg).

It's interesting to ponder what impact British Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent trip may have had on US policy toward Iran. Certainly, he pressed hard for a stepped-up diplomatic outreach to Iran, likely echoing calls that Chairman Lugar and Senator Warner had made for direct talks. It's easy to imagine that he came to Washington to deliver a more pointed plea related to Iraq. Events in Basra are going very badly, and the Brits want out -- after the US midterm vote, and perhaps before end-year. To manage such an exit, Iranian forbearance would be important. Blair hasn't asked Bush for much in return for his constancy, but he now needs a story to tell about a graceful British exit from Iraq. And capping off Iran risk while reducing the worst-case outlook in Basra would make sense in protecting what's left of a Blair legacy.

Kevin Nealer is a lecturer at Georgetown University's School of Business and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Listening to the gay marriage debate on NPR amid the ongoing revelations about the mass murder at Haditha, I feel as if I'm listening to the late Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live ranting about something she misheard. When corrected, she would blithely reply, "never mind."

Since changing the subject seems to be the Republican strategy here in the nation's capital, I will give it a try myself for readers of The Washington Note (though not my own blog, www.gooznews.com, where I'll be cross-posting these comments). Let's talk about health care. Specifically, I just came back from a forum at the Center for American Progress where an all-star cast of Times columnist Paul Krugman, CAP senior fellow Gene Sperling, Times reporter Louis Uchitelle and Economic Policy Institute economist Jared Bernstein weighed in on the growing inequality in the U.S. economy. Other than Uchitelle, who didn't address the topic, all seemed to agree that health care is going to be one of the if not the major domestic issue of this election and for years to come.

Krugman and Bernstein held up the left flank admirably, calling for a single-payer system to replace our truncated insurance-based system that provides worse health outcomes at twice the price. Not a very good advertisement for free-market approaches to providing this social good. "We have a society now in which people face a lot of gratuitous risk," Krugman said. "The aggregate cost of health care is well known. Why make individuals absorb that risk?"

Sperling, who was a key figure in the President Clinton's 1993-94 health care fiasco, seems to have retained that administration's fervent embrace of small bore reforms that don't really solve really big problems. While he admitted business's growing demand to get out of its current health care obligations could well be the trigger for another massive reform effort, the best he could come up with was a program for "health care between jobs" for those who get downsized, outsourced, laid off and otherwise cast aside by our ever changing and globalizing economy.

I was disappointed by all the presentations on this vital topic. I'm a big backer of "single-payer," "Medicare for all," or whatever you want to call nationalized health care. After all, why shouldn't we join the rest of the industrialized world? But it's not the ultimate answer to our health care problems. It will deal with the uninsured. It will eliminate the 15 to 20 percent of health care costs absorbed by duplicative administrative waste. But that's a one-time saving. Then we're right back to health care spending rising at two to three times the rate of inflation.

Until we deal with why Americans are sicker than our counterparts in Europe and eliminate the waste in much of the new technology that is driving health care costs skyward, we'll never get our health care costs under control. I'll address both of those issues more in depth in the coming days.

Merrill Goozner, author of "The $800 Million Pill" and blogger at www.gooznews.com, directs the Integrity in Science project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Now that we've got the technical issues taken care of (sort of), I wanted to centraize in one place all the posts lost in the ether:

Mohammad Mohamedou: The 1970s Redux -- In Politics and at the Movies

Bruce Schneier: Data Mining and Terrorism

Arianna Huffington: What Haditha Means to Our Safety -- and the 2006 Election

Johanna Mendelson Forman: Al Gore

Adam S. Posen: Putting Money on More of the Same from Economic Policy

Robert Wright: Just Bolton Being Bolton

Jeremy Kahn: The Politics of Gesture

Scott McConnell: The Wasp Diversion

Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz: Can the Democrats Close the Security Gap?

Jeremy Kahn: Is North Korea Preparing to Test a Long-Range Missile?

Ted Widmer: A Forgotten Failure

There's some great material, and more's on the way. -- Dave

After cleaning thousands of spam comments out of the system and upgrading Steve's blogging software, things are back to near-normal here at TWN. We've made two changes to the comment system, hopefully temporary -- we'll find a more permanent solution when Steve's back in town.

First, no html in the comments. It'll just be stripped out. You can still leave a link, but it won't be clickable.

Second, we've activated a captcha/security code. Captcha's are absolutely terrible for accessibility purposes, but as a stopgap, it was the best we could come up with.

Please let me know if there are any glitches in the system.

-- Dave

(June 5) On its final descent into Istanbul yesterday, my plane swooped low over the length of the Bosphorus, that narrow sluiceway between continents, before landing at Ataturk International Airport. It was a thrilling and weirdly modern way to enter this ancient city, retracing the invasion route which the Persians used to defeat the Scythians two millennia ago, and which the Turks used to dislodge the Byzantines in 1453, and which millions of tourists follow today.

Invasion routes are not entirely the stuff of history. For it was the Bush administration's failure to persuade Turkey to let the U.S. invade Iraq from the north that may rank as the single biggest diplomatic blunder of a presidency for which that is quite a superlative.

Continue reading this article

-- Dave Meyer

While the world has been focused on negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, there is a potentially ominous development with that other member of the "axis of evil," the one that already has nukes, North Korea. Over at The New Republic's website, I report out the burgeoning debate within the administration over recent activity at North Korea's missile test site in Musudan-ri. According to sources I talked to, while the State Department's intelligence analysts think a test launch of the Hermit Kingdom's long-range taepo dong II missile is imminent, other analysts at the CIA see North Korea's test preparations as a probable bluff. To read more go here.

The situation with North Korea is a reminder that while direct engagement with Iran may be an important step toward resolving the crisis over its nuclear program, it is only that -- a step. Years of talks with the North Koreans have yielded a number of apparent breakthroughs that have quickly collapsed. Meanwhile, Pyongyang has continued to develop both its nuclear capability and its ability to deliver those weapons through long-range missiles. The U.S. needs to try to avoid the same thing happening with Iran.

Jeremy Kahn is managing editor of The New Republic.

Whether justified or not, most voters consider Republicans better custodians of the nation's security than Democrats. This bias began after the Democrats drove the country into the Vietnam quagmire, thereafter making many in the party uncomfortable with the use of American power. Only three year ago, the Democrat's own polls gave Republicans a whopping 35-point advantage on the proverbial "who's better at handling national security?" However, polls are now showing the Republican edge is vanishing. The Democrats have an opportunity to close the "security gap." Perhaps, they may even wrest control of the issue from the Republicans.

Iraq of course is the immediate cause of declining public confidence in Republicans' handling of matters of war and peace. The war has dealt a serious blow to their credibility as the purveyors of security. The problem is not just that the weapons of mass destruction never materialized, that Bush isolated America internationally, or that prospects for a democratic Iraq now look very remote. The deeper, more vexing issue for the Republicans is the war on terrorism itself. Indeed, for all its missteps in the run-up to the war, the White House did manage to convince the public that Iraq and terrorism were synonymous. Even today many Americans equate the war in Iraq with the war they really care about: the war on terrorism. That is why Bush's poll numbers on the war on terrorism are falling too.

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-- Dave Meyer

You may have noticed that we're having a problem with comments: clicking on "comment" doesn't do anything. I'm not sure what the cause is, but I'm rebuilding the site, which will hopefully fix the problem. In the meantime, you can still read and post comments by clicking on "permalink" and viewing the individual post page.

Sorry for the complication. -- Dave Meyer

Update: The problem is evidently comment spam. Apparently someone is under the misimpression that I'm a big poker player. The spam has overwhelmed the comment module, so that you can't event post through the permalink. I'm in touch with Steve's tech guy, trying to resolve the problem.

This is really a shame, as we've gotten some great posts in today.

In the meantime, you can email me comments at DaveMeyer [at] gmail, and I'll try to compile a digest to send to the individual posters this evening.

Again, apologies.

-- Dave

We will get, in due time, to Steve Walt's noteworthy appearance at the "Committee for the Republic" -- a Washington club comprised largely of dissenters from Bush's foreign policy. Walt would be the most popular speaker the club has had since its formation some three years ago -- and as result there would be no dinner so more chairs could be packed in. The unspoken subtext of the controversial Walt-Mearsheimer "Israel lobby" paper is that the "realist" Wasp establishment no longer runs American foreign policy, and if it did, America would have a more rational and even-handed attitude toward matters Mideast.

I pretty much agree with this view, but the interesting question is how and why it happened. My theory, which I hope to write about at length someday, is that it is linked to a decline of Wasp public spiritedness and a concomitant withdrawal to the pleasures of money and private life, epitomized most especially by the golf club.

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-- Dave Meyer

Granted, more than 90% of communication is supposed to be non-verbal. And images and atmospherics certainly are as important to diplomacy as the spoken and written word. But if Sunday's much-discussed New York Times tick-tock on how the Bush administration came to its turnabout on engagement with Iran is true, the Bush administration seems to have raised non-verbal politics to a new and disturbing level, both inside the White House and abroad. For starters, here is how The Times describes the luncheon between Rice and Bush that set the administration on the path toward offering to talk to Iran:

A meeting [Rice] had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?'"

That body language touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated two weeks later in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memorandum.

This is somewhat bizarre. You would think that on a topic of such importance, Bush might express an opinion rather than forcing his advisers to guess at the meaning of his facial expressions. Maybe attending meetings with the president is a bit like going to a farm auction, in which guests are cautioned against making any extraneous gestures lest they be inadvertently end up buying a cow. ("Condi, did you just suggest we bomb Tehran or were you just scratching your nose?")

Further evidence of Bush's apparent fascination with non-verbal communication is offered later in the Times story, this time in an international context:

The idea intrigued Mr. Bush, White House officials say, and on May 8, Ms. Rice met with him just hours before flying to New York for a meeting with her European counterparts.

She asked him what kind of body language to display at the United Nations meeting. Should she signal that the United States was considering negotiations with Iran? "Be careful," he said, according to officials familiar with the conversation. "I haven't made up my mind."

Jeremy Kahn is managing editor at The New Republic.

For those of you who feared that Steve's absence would mean a whole week without any references to John Bolton, I bring good news. I have a conjecture about Bolton's role in recent events that, if correct, makes me slightly - if only slightly - more optimistic about the prospects that last week's Condi Rice initiative on Iran will bear fruit.

According to the Washington Post's reconstruction of events leading up to that initiative, Bolton was kept in the dark about it until last Tuesday, shortly before its unveiling, when he "was asked to call conservative commentators the next day to explain the decision." The "next day" was the day that David Brooks would have been writing his column for Thursday's New York Times. The column he wrote is clearly informed by at least one source inside the administration, and I sure hope it was Bolton.

Why? Brooks basically presents the initiative as one that was designed to be rejected by Iran, after which multilateral sanctions could be imposed. ("There are no optimists in this administration about the prospects for diplomacy.") If that's just John Bolton talking, then maybe it's wishful thinking on his part; maybe Rice and even Bush are in fact earnestly trying to draw Iran into fruitful dialogue.

Admittedly, there's evidence that this wasn't just Bolton talking. Brooks's flattery of ("gutsy") Rice sounds like payback for her spending some phone time with him. But we can always hope...

More on Iran later today. Meanwhile, if you prefer video to print, you can watch me do this Brooks-Bolton exegesis on my web site bloggingheads.tv in a diavlog with Mickey Kaus that was posted a few hours ago.

--Robert Wright