Egypt on 1/28/11

I don't know what to think, haven't a deep enough understanding of Egypt to know what to think. I'm rather blown away by all of it.
 All of it.

How do you turn off the Internet?

Al Jazeera's coverage is vital. Biased, too? Sure, almost certainly. But then, who are we Americans to judge someone else's biased media, really? Al Jazeera's livestream is here.

And (paging Mr. Peretz) it turns out that Arabs value each other and community and all of the things we value. This item brought a tear to my eye. Also this one.

Mubarek's been our ally, but we've also pumped millions into pro-democracy groups over there; so while the situation is fraught, it seems to be what we asked for, ultimately. And no, I'm not worried about the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarek and John Bolton are worried about the Muslim Brotherhood, which tells me there are more important things happening.

Yemen, now Yemen is scary. Egypt? I don't know what to think.

Hope everyone is ok, and that the outcome doesn't hurt more than the status quo.

Experience, judgement

Salon has a new blog, Open Salon, and I'm becoming enamored of a poster named Leigh, who writes as a deep insider in the DC game. I want to draw attention to his post today.

In about fifteen years I was a skilled and experienced international lawyer for the US government. And even though it is illegal I learned the lobbying trade at the same time because the Executive Branch lobbies Congress every day. (It's called giving technical advice so as not offend the law.) (Despite eight years as President I'm sure "W" doesn't know that arm-twisting on Capitol Hill is a criminal offense for a government employee. But he lacks lots of experience.)
To the best of my knowledge no American President has interpreted treaties, negotiated in 80 countries, worked the delegates at the UN, seen Robert McNamara nude in the Pentagon swimming pool when he had to be briefed in a big hurry and manipulated Congress at the same time. Short of doing that no President has ever had serious experience in international affairs or national security affairs. People will tell you that Roosevelt was an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. By the time an issue got that high in the Navy Department it was already decided. FDR was not an expert in international affairs and national security until he was close to dying. One of our best Presidents succeeded him with no warning, Harry Truman. HST was a haberdasher in Missouri. When he became Vice President under Roosevelt he was given nothing to do and had no briefings of importance. But he had what Obama has, brains, judgement and personality.
[snip]
I want to mention one other thing. "Traveling Senators". They are set up by the State Department. Their appointments are arranged. The people they meet are pre-selected, they are made to feel important and given leather bound briefing books with all the "right" answers and they are taken shopping. Cocktail parties a plenty. They are duped. Except for a spontaneous greeting like the one Obama got in Berlin. Don't imagine the Bush State department helped set that one up for a Democrat.
[snip]
So where did McCain get his foreign affairs and national security experience? He didn't. He went to the movies. Thousands of witnesses paraded before the dais of his committee and carefully guarded the truth to ensure that McCain didn't know it. Sometimes he was given classified briefing books market Top Secret with a cover sheet bordered in red. But the contents of the briefing book only included information the executive branch wanted him to have. He was duped.
I could go on all day but you get the point. Washington is run, arranged and manipulated by the executive branch to dupe the dupeables. McCain was one of those. That's why he doesn't know the difference between Sunni and Shiite. Its hard to remember all those words when you only read five minutes a day. If he read much more he would have graduated higher than the bottom of his Annapolis Naval Academy class.
Obama has no more (or less experience) than McCain. But there is one big difference. He's smart as a whip (and being President of the Harvard Law Review attests to that. If you have that title in your resume today you can work anywhere in the country you want and fresh out of law school you'll be earning $165,000) and he isn't one of the dupeables. He is a quick learner. McCain thought he'd royally screw up his foreign trip and say the wrong word at the wrong time so he goaded him. Then he had to do everything possible to destroy a man who obviously slid right into the role of a wizened chief of state. When the Russians invaded Georgia McCain attacked viciously and immediately. Obama attacked mildly and cautiously. The experienced foreign policy expert would have done what Obama did. The temperamental foolish dupe would do what McCain did. He didn't even have time for his staff to brief him on the importance of Russia's help in settling that minor atomic bomb crisis in Iran before shooting off his mouth. But Obama was thinking. Always thinking. And Obama is a nice man or he knows how to present himself as a nice man. Either one is better than McCain who acts like a son of a bitch. And the media kisses his ass because he's a maverick.
[snip]
No matter what you hear, Presidents do occasionally get that 3:00 AM phone call. I can just hear Obama saying "Tell me more". I hear McCain saying, "Let's go get those fuckers".
Most of you are too young to have lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis with a President Kennedy and his brother Robert both of whom lacked McCain's so called experience. I am quite confident that if McCain had been President during the Cuban Missile Crisis I would be dead now, along with my wife and children and I can't imagine what the rest of the country would have been like. I am certain that Obama could be trusted to guide us through that nightmare. We really did believe we would all die the next day in a nuclear holocaust. Go back and read if you didn't live through it. But we slept better with a smart, personable man of good judgment than we would be entitled to sleep if John McCain were President.

Which goes back to my earlier (outsider) post on Wisdom. A president must listen, and then exercise sound judgement. According to contemporary accounts, the current president refuses new or more complex information than he has already based his decisions on, and either allows the information received through a very filtered single source (the VP's office) or directs the information be changed or created out of whole cloth to support his ideas (Suskind).

And then there comes the question of exercising judgment. Even in cases where he might have had the best information available, I think we can all agree that his judgments tended to result in either total failure (Katrina), opposite outcomes (democratically elected Hamas officoals in Palestine), or a prolonged mess of one step forward, two steps back (the rebuilding of civil society in Iraq and Afghanistan).

John McCain, despite his "maverick" reputation, has voted with Bush administration goals and proposals 95% of Bush's term. And this week, his response to the situation between Russia and Georgia has sounded painfully like our current president, if even more hawkish. Despite the fact that our recent diplomatic efforts in the region have really painted us into a corner and tied our hands in this conflict.

Should the cold war be heating up again, should we face a power over the next 8 years who's actually armed enough to cause us great harm, I want a JFK on that phone. A deep thinker as well as a pragmatist, who projected good will to the harshest of America's critic, who had some diplomatic credibility as well as the brain power to keep that button from being pushed, in the USSR or here in the states.

We don't truly know how either candidate would lead until the office tests them. But we can look at their tendancies in the time we've known them and make the best decision.

I'm voting for the guy who has demonstrated the ability to listen, to respond, to allow his plans to evolve and change as new information is made available.

Wow. I mean, just... wow.

President Bush,today:

No regime should ignore the will of its own people and calls from the international community without consequences.

I just don't even know how to respond to that.

Probably better that I don't, not until I'm at a table with some friends and a lot of beer

Iran

One would hope that a country such as ours would be disillusioned enough with the administration's lust for war in middle east. One would hope, but this remains to be seen.

Over the past few months, the saber rattling has gotten steadily louder, more intense. A letter writer to the Star asked earlier this week:

With the outrageous actions by Iran, such as launching missiles and its president announcing Iran will annihilate the U.S. soon, does it not seem it's trying to provoke an attack from us?

What other reason could it possibly have for encouraging superior forces to attack unless it wants to use a nuclear weapon it has developed in secret or purchased from North Korea against our troops? Or perhaps use new silent submarines to sink our aircraft carriers and kill several thousand of our servicemen?

Why would Iran test missiles right now? Hmm. I dunno. Maybe because our president and his surrogates and one presidential candidate keep insisting that bombing Iran would be a really great idea?
Condi:

WASHINGTON— Condoleezza Rice flexed America's muscles in the Middle East on Thursday, forcefully warning Iran the U.S. won't ignore threats and will take any action necessary to defend friends and interests in the Persian Gulf.

Bolton
Kristol
Lieberman

And that's just a lazy one-site one-minute search.

And McCain is a harbinger, as should be clear to anyone with ears. Conason writes:

Obviously the war lobby within the Republican Party and the Bush White House has lost neither influence nor determination, no matter how wrong its predictions nor how disastrous its policies have proved to be. When John McCain jokes that exporting cigarettes to Iran might be a "way of killing them," he isn't really kidding. Like his warbling of "Bomb bomb Iran" last year, that moronic remark represented a profound judgment that war is the only way to achieve American objectives in the Gulf region.

None of this is about security, none of this is about "our FREEDOMS". It is all about control. It is all about playground bullies who want to own the swing set, and lack the imagination (or humanity) to figure out a way to talk their way in.

Anyway. Can't hurt to get organized right now. Armchair activists can go to The Friends Committee on National Legislation and start sending letters, getting connected.

More on happy, happy Pakistan

NY Times:

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

But The Surge rocks!

And everyone will greet us as liberators...

John "the meanest mustache in the world" Bolton, this morning:

I don’t think you’d hear the Arab states say this publicly, but they would be delighted if the United States or Israel destroyed the Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

What a fucking asshole.

Fraud

Although phase 2 of the Senate Intel committee's report on the handling of pre-war intel is 5 years late, it is finally done. TPM provides links to download the entire report here.

A quick and not at all thorough glance tells me that (like Scott McMoonface's confession) there isn't much new stuff there. The fact that the Bush administration committed fraud on this country is easily documented by available public record statements and documents, and has been for years.

What is significant is that it came out of the senate, and that Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel approved it. Just as Scottie's book is significant because he's the first of the Texas loyalists to confirm pretty much everything every former administration member has said over the last 7 years.

I really think the only way to drive home the point that fucking Bush and Rummy and Cheney and Wolfie have killed tens of thousands of people because they WANTED TO, and not due to any actual threat against this country, would be full-on impeachment hearings for Bush and Cheney, and fraud prosecutions for the others.

Not going to happen though.

From around the intertubes:

Balloon Juice:

“Shorter Phase II Intelligence Report- the dirty fucking hippies were right about everything.”

Think Progress notes that Bush's claim of credibility on this issue is somewhat undermined by the report:

Q: Can you explain why you believe you’re still a credible messenger on the war?

BUSH: I’m credible because I read the intelligence, David.

To which Atrios responds:

Also undermines claim that he's not a sociopath who lied to bring the country into a war which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Just sayin'.

Sunday schadenfreude- of the primary sort

Part II

To appease, or not to appease? As has been pointed out by plenty of people with brains, memory, and a
basic knowledge of 20th century history, appeasement and dialogue are not synonomous. Not even a little tiny bit.
So it should go without saying, but just in case my republican friends are still unclear on the concept:

All of which begs the question: in regards to the current Middle East and Iranian crises, what would Reagan do (WWRD)?

Aides to and biographers of the nation's 40th president universally note that he had a preference for one-on-one engagement. And in describing the foreign policy of their former boss (or subject) they employ language that reflects, almost point by point, much of the rhetoric coming from the Obama campaign.

In fact, I'll go even further: the next line of the article:

But when asked if he would, if he were alive and in the Oval Office today, meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the bag is mixed.

"I think the same strategy would apply to Iran as currently applies to say North Korea. Reagan would always indicate a willingness to talk but you'd have to have an indication of sincerity on the other party," said Richard V. Allen, Reagan's National Security Adviser. "Reagan would not negotiate with an Iran that had been implicated in the killing of servicemen in Iraq. He would want that stopped and he would use it as a means of getting a negotiation."

Which sounds good until you remember that Reagan's administration secretly sold weapons to Iran after the hostage crisis and while Iran was at war with our then ally, Saddam Hussein.

So, yes, I think Reagan would have talked with Iran. Like Kennedy talked with Kruschev, like Isreal's talking to Syria. He might have even talked to the head of the government, Supreme Leader Ali Hoseini-KHAMENEI, instead of endlessly fretting over the rhetoric of Ahmadinejad.