WTF: Obama Wins The Nobel Peace Prize?

I thought it was an article from the Onion at first. And then... "What?!"

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it gave the prize to Obama for his "efforts to strengthen international diplomacy," his "vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons" and for inspiring hope and creating "a new climate in international politics."

Emphasizing diplomacy ahead of force is a big improvement, but at this point it's mostly just rhetoric. He's only just started to accomplish something in Iran with diplomacy. Elsewhere, we're still fighting TWO wars and he's considering escalating one of them. He's effectively covered up and excused much of the previous administrations' torture and gross human rights violations and Guantanamo Bay remains open and running. He increased the size of the "defense" budget. He has spoken about ridding the world of nuclear weapons but not indicated how that could happen nor done anything about it. He has made no appreciable progress in Israel and Palestine.

Obama does not deserve this award. I hope that knowing he doesn't deserve it makes him feel obligated to earn it retroactively.

War in Afghanistan Getting Bigger; Still Pointless

Walter Pincus reports in the Washington Post:

As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.

Mark Lynch wonders why:

I find the strategic rationale for escalating the war in Afghanistan extremely thin, and the mismatch between avowed aims and available resources frighteningly wide. What are the strategic reasons for expanding the commitment in Afghanistan? Why should the US be committing to a project of armed state building now, in 2009?

I hope that the argument isn't that it's to prevent al-Qaeda from reconstituting itself in the Afghan safe havens. That's a fool's game. It makes sense to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda, but does that require "armed state building"?

Suppose the U.S. succeeded beyond all its wildest expectations, and turned Afghanistan into Nirvana on Earth... So what? Al-Qaeda (or what we call al-Qaeda) could easily migrate to Somalia, to Yemen, deeper into Pakistan, into the Caucasas, into Africa --- into a near infinite potential pool of ungoverned or semi-governed spaces with potentially supportive environments. Are we to commit the United States to bringing effective governance and free wireless to the entire world? On whose budget?

...

I fear that the escalation of the war in Afghanistan is following a dangerous path of least resistance. Given the assignment to win the war in Afghanistan, of course a military which has been reshaped by its experience in Iraq will turn to COIN doctrine. Once the decision is made to apply a COIN approach, of course the military is going to ask for more troops there, and a long commitment, since it's always been obvious that really doing COIN in Afghanistan would require vastly more troops than are currently deployed. And then, at each step of the way, there will be a strong tactical argument for expansion and a very difficult sell for any attempt to argue for restraint. Once that iron logic has been accepted, all else follows -- and it becomes extremely difficult to reverse course.

Links via Ezra Klein.

(Previously: Obama Is Wrong On Afghanistan)

Obama, Bush, Pakistan, and Partisanship

Last year, Obama said that if he had actionable intelligence on high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan, he would take them out, without Musharraf's permission if necessary. At the time, I thought that was just common sense, although I also thought it might piss off some on the left. What I didn't expect was for the right to jump on that statement as a "gaffe" and as "evidence" of Obama's "lack of experience."

Today, as Oliver Willis points out, George Bush admitted to embracing that position:

President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

Will the same people on the right criticize Bush for this as they did Obama? Or will they admit Obama was right? Most likely, they'll try to ignore the whole thing, or else try to find a detail -- any detail -- that separates the two men's statements and seize on that to explain why they are completely different.

As it happens, I was able to track down specifically what my conservative blog-friend Ezzie wrote about Obama's statement:

Barack Obama suggested (from what I understand) nuking Pakistan [followed by suggesting nuking just terrorists in Pakistan, followed by suggesting contemplating attacking Pakistan on our own, all within a minute or so].

Obviously, Obama never said anything about nuking anybody, and I challenged Ezzie on this in a comment (I wrote, "Source?") Ezzie appeared to admit he didn't have a good one ("a friend on Shabbos said...") but then went on to say, "Regardless, even the last statement is completely idiotic."

So I'm calling you out, Ezzie. :-) Are Bush and Obama right or are they "idiotic?"

Colin Powell: Iran is Far From a Nuke

Good news all around:

KUWAIT CITY (AP) — Iran is far from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and despite U.S. fears about its atomic intentions, an American military strike against the Islamic Republic is unlikely, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

Let's hope he's right, on both counts.

Hillary a Neocon?

Libertarian Radley Balko makes the case that Hillary Clinton is "essentially a neocon who digs abortion:"

For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections.
...
Cato Institute President Ed Crane recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times pointing out that when you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton's grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn't conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
...
Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government's ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing "decency" standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.

Leftists concerned about the entertainment industry's increasingly imperial stand on copyright might take a cue from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, who wrote on his blog for Wired magazine: "Of all the Dems, I would have bet she was closest to the copyright extremists. So far, she's done nothing to suggest to the contrary."

What about secrecy and executive power? It's difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband's administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests — claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney's similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.

"I'm a strong believer in executive authority," Clinton said in a 2003 speech, recently quoted in The New Republic. "I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority."
...
Activists on the left need to recognize that Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic primary is the GOP's last best hope to elect a Republican to continue pursuing President Bush's pursuit of these unfortunate policies. And judging by her political career and recent voting record, they should also realize that even if they succeed in electing Hillary Clinton to the White House, it's likely that the only real resulting change in Washington will be that come 2009, we'll merely have a Democrat pursuing the same misguided policies.

Balko's claim that Senator Clinton is a neocon is certainly closer to the truth than the hysterical right's belief that she's a liberal commie. Everybody on the left seems to recognize that she's the right-most candidate running on the Democratic ticket, but exactly how far to the right is she? Is Balko right that she would simply continue Bush's policies? It's a scary thought.

I don't put too much stock in that much-ballyhooed moment when the top three Dems said they couldn't guarantee that no American troops would remain in Iraq by the end of their first term. It was a bad question, making no distinction between maintaining a few thousand troops in advisory roles and continuing a full-scale occupation. Nobody can predict the future and asking candidates to make those sorts of pledges is asinine*.

There continues to be no doubt in my mind that any of the first-tier Democrats would be better than any of the Republicans. Hillary might be a neocon in spirit, but I believe that she would follow her husband's model of "triangulation" and not support those policies that a majority of Americans disapprove of. That would mean that she doesn't accomplish any of the left's unpopular objectives like gay marriage or scaling back the war on drugs, but it would also mean that she doesn't accomplish any of the neocons' unpopular objectives like invading Iran or, as Mitt Romney idiotically proposed, "doubling Guantanamo." And on the plus side, she probably would improve the United States's image abroad, get universal (not single-payer!) health care through, and have fiscally AND socially responsible economic policies similar to her husband's. She would also install left-leaning Supreme Court justices, which is as important as ever, considering the "conservative" (i.e. authoritarian) direction the Court has taken lately.

I continue to support Obama and the clean break with the neocons that he (or Edwards) would represent, but I wouldn't see a Hillary presidency as a tragedy and I would certainly vote for her over any Republican now running. My biggest fear about her remains the effect the right's irrational hatred for her would have on the country. Wouldn't it be ironic if the Hillary haters got Obama or Edwards elected instead and ended up with a "real" Democratic president? One can only hope.



* Incidentally, Giuliani had the best answer I've ever heard to that kind of request at the GOP debate in New Hampshire when asked to make the same mistake George H.W. Bush made when he pledged "no new taxes" -- "I only think a man or woman running for president ought to take one pledge and that is a pledge to uphold the United States Constitution." Ironic, coming from Giuliani, who I suspect would revoke the entire Bill of Rights if he could, but a great response.

On the Consequences of Withdrawing from Iraq

It's become a popular argument among those who are against withdrawal that pulling our troops out of Iraq would lead to a bloodbath. It's a good argument in that it appeals to the compassion of those who are advocating withdrawal for mostly compassionate reasons, but it's a bad argument because it misses the point.

Mark Kleiman sums it up well:

More Iraqis will probably die of violence just after a U.S. withdrawal than are dying violently now. That will hand the pro-war forces a rhetorical "I told you so." Anyone who can blame what happened in Cambodia on U.S. doves is clearly shameless enough to blame the civil war in Iraq on the people who opposed the invasion rather than those who carried it out and then bungled the occupation.

But that's not a good enough reason to hang around, unless at some point it stops being true: that six months, or a year, or two years, or five years from now we would be able to withdraw and not have civil war and massacre follow. If we're spending blood and treasure only to postpone a catastrophe we can't prevent, the "humanitarian" argument against a fairly rapid withdrawal collapses.

Unless we are making progress towards an Iraqi government capable of preventing a civil war -- and it appears that we are not -- then there will be a civil war and probably ethnic cleansing whenever we leave. The question then is not whether leaving will lead to a bloodbath, but whether staying is simply putting off the inevitable -- but at immense cost to us, militarily, politically, and fiscally.

That a bloodbath would eventually follow the removal of Saddam Hussein has always been obvious. Dick Cheney himself said so in the 1990s and those who opposed this war from the beginning said it in 2002. To blame the inevitable on the people who have been right all along is disgraceful.

Unfortunately, this looks like it's playing out exactly as I predicted at the end of last year:

The administration will smear anyone who suggests we might have to cut our losses and leave. (The dreaded "cut and run.") They'll do so right until there is absolutely no other option. Then it will be an unplanned, "chaotic bugout with huge, avoidable losses of men and materiel." Then they'll blame the Democrats.

If they're responsible, we can minimize the damage we do by leaving. We can set a timetable and do our best to prepare the Iraqi army. We can take other diplomatic and military options to make our inevitable withdrawal less harmful. But they're not responsible. They're going to wait and wait and soldiers are going to keep dying until finally the truth is absolutely undeniable, and then they'll bug out in an awful mess and blame the Democrats.

If the right is so concerned about the results of our withdrawal, the time to start planning for it is right freaking now. We should be talking about the way to withdraw with the least possible damage to Iraq, but instead the Bush administration is forcing us to continue arguing about whether the damn surge is working.

Before the invasion, the administration failed to plan adequately for the occupation and reconstruction. Now they are failing to plan for the inevitable withdrawal. And you just know they're going to blame the results on the Democrats.

What chutzpah.

Zakaria on our State of Fear

NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria has a must-read piece on what a cowardly nation we have become. (My words, not his.)

An excerpt:

We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed.

...

Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

In a global survey released last week, most countries polled believed that China would act more responsibly in the world than the United States. How does a Leninist dictatorship come across more sympathetically than the oldest constitutional democracy in the world? Some of this is, of course, the burden of being the biggest. But the United States has been the richest and most powerful nation in the world for almost a century, and for much of this period it was respected, admired and occasionally even loved. The problem today is not that America is too strong but that it is seen as too arrogant, uncaring and insensitive. Countries around the world believe that the United States, obsessed with its own notions of terrorism, has stopped listening to the rest of the world.

More troubling than any of Bush's rhetoric is that of the Republicans who wish to succeed him. "They hate you!" says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. "They don't want you to be in this college!" he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. "Or you, or you, or you," he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, "We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us." On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. "This is reality, ma'am," he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. "You've got to clear your head."

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. In the last five and a half years, with bipartisan support, Washington has invaded two countries and sent troops around the world from Somalia to the Philippines to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. It has set up secret prisons in Europe and a legal black hole in Guantánamo, to hold, interrogate and—by some definitions—torture prisoners. How would Giuliani really go on the offensive? Invade a couple of more countries?

I agree. The United States lived for decades with the possibility that the human race could be almost completely obliterated at any moment if the Soviet leader got an itchy button finger. Today, we've let our media and politicians terrify us into overreaction at some two-bit terrorists who managed one spectacular attack that killed fewer Americans than have died in Iraq.

Somebody has got to stop the madness, but the Republicans are outdoing each other in their hawkishness ("We ought to double Guantanamo!") and the Democrats are stumbling over each other to prove that they can be as crazy as the Republicans.

One of the main reasons I hold such hopes for Obama is that I think he might be able to straddle that line of assuaging peoples' fears while not engaging in a counterproductive foreign policy to achieve it. George W. Bush has played directly into bin Laden's hands and, I'm sorry, has done more harm to America than those 19 terrorists did on 9-11.

I'll leave you with one last quote from Zakaria's article:

Such overreactions are precisely what Osama bin Laden has been hoping for. In a videotaped message in 2004, bin Laden explained his strategy with astonishing frankness. He termed it "provoke and bait": "All we have to do is send two mujahedin ... [and] raise a piece of cloth on which is written 'Al Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." His point has been well understood by ragtag terror groups across the world. With no apparent communication, collaboration or further guidance from bin Laden, small outfits from Southeast Asia to North Africa to Europe now announce that they are part of Al Qaeda, and so inflate their own importance, bring global attention to their cause and—of course—get America to come racing out to fight them.