HRC is Better for Israel than Gen. Jim Jones

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Israel and Palestinians, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

The New Republic’s Eli Lake compares Gen. Jim Jones and Sen. Hillary Clinton on Mid-East policy. He first assesses expected National Security Adviser Jim Jones:

In August, Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported that the draft report challenged Israel’s conception of its security interests in the West Bank as being overly broad, and that the IDF in particular was too dismissive of the Palestinian security services. The newspaper quoted one IDF officer as saying he expected the report would be “very harsh, and make Israel look very bad.” Steve Rosen, the former director of foreign policy for AIPAC who was dismissed from his post after the federal government charged him and a colleague with leaking classified information to the press and a foreign official, told me, “In my experience, when you take a ‘deep dive’ into security issues in the territories, you very quickly come to tradeoffs between Israeli security and Palestinian rights. Successful counter-terror preventive and pre-emptive measures require highly intrusive intelligence collection that is onerous for the population of the area under surveillance. … A third party tries to balance Israeli security and Palestinian rights with a different valence than an Israeli security agency.”

In his interview with Inside the Pentagon, Jones said that the Palestinians should be granted increasing degrees of local sovereignty over the West Bank until an independent state is born–with an emphasis on giving the Palestinians experience with governance. On Sunday, Ha’aretz reported that Jones favors dispatching a NATO force to keep the peace in the interim. That’s a plan that the Israeli government would likely fiercely resist on the grounds that the Jewish state’s defense doctrine has always spurned the presence of foreign troops on its territory and that it could be a reprise of the disasters of the U.N. mission to Lebanon.

Hillary Clinton sees it differently:

Now, consider his potential nemesis, Hillary Clinton. It is true that there is some doubt about where she ultimately lands on the Israel-Palestine question–confusion that followed her famous hug with Suha Arafat. But since becoming senator, she’s been a persistent critic of Palestinian media and schooling, an issue that has traditionally been swept under the rug by the State Department and a central argument the Israeli right has used to warn against the delusions of the Oslo process. Clinton has described the teaching of anti-Israel views in Palestinian textbooks as “child abuse,” and held hearings on the topic in an effort to get the Bush administration to do more on the issue.

By focusing on the underlying tenets of Palestinian culture, Senator Clinton has in a way made common cause with the Bush administration hawks. While General Jones wants to take steps now to empower Abbas and his Fatah party to take over a Palestinian state, Clinton is asking if even the Palestinian moderates are ready to govern. At AIPAC’s annual policy conference in 2005, she said: “How do we expect to have a democratically elected Palestinian government if their textbooks are still preaching such hatred, and this if we allow this dehumanizing rhetoric to go unchallenged? Because what is happening is young minds are being infected with this anti-Semitism, and that is going to run counter to what we hope can happen over the next years as we do work for peace and stability.”

It’s Hard To Place Sanctions On Iran When…

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iran | Leave a Comment 

Allies like Germany do business with the Islamic Republic:

As Europe’s largest exporter to Iran, Germany has unique leverage over the regime. But Berlin refuses to use it. German exports to Iran are up 14.1% in the first seven months of this year. The Islamic Republic is so popular in Germany that another group, Management Circle, is planning a two-day crash course next month in Frankfurt. The program lists seven reasons for doing business with Iran, including “traditional good economic and political relations with Germany.”

Readers may recall that Barack Obama assailed President Bush for not doing more diplomatically to contain Iran, including more vigorous sanctions. Job one on that score for Mr. Obama would seem to be persuading his many admirers in Germany. Good luck.

And Who Could Forget Bush’s Africa and Security Policies?

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Bush Administration | Leave a Comment 

Ron Radosh covers what I neglected to mention in my previous post:

Bush and his defenders have good reason to be angry at Wilentz’s premature verdict. As Fulford points out, the President created the $30 billion Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, and extended it this year with a $48 billion to end the number of people being treated in Africa to three million and to train 140,000 health care workers who specialize in HIV prevention and treatment. Thus Bush changed our nation’s involvement in Africa in a positive fashion. The rock star and activist Bob Geldorf openly acknowledged this, pointing out that Bush “has done more than any other president” for Africa. But yet, as Fulford writes, “it’s unlikely that one in a 100 of [Bush's] fellow Americans know about it.”

Most important of all will be acknowledging Bush’s role in keeping America free of terrorist attacks since 9/11. If we look at what has taken place in Britain, Spain and now India, we must realize that the various terrorist networks have certainly been trying, and had their efforts not been stopped, might have been successful.

Obama Entering Bush’s World

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Bush Administration | 2 Comments 

In an ironic set of circumstances, Victor Davis Hanson explains how Pres-elect Obama won by capitalizing on Bush’s rhetorical and his administration’s communicative misfortune, but the conventional wisdom still proves on central issues that 43 was right all along:

we will come, through the Obama prism, to see that Bush’s sins were largely the absence of rhetorical skills, unfortunate shoot ‘em braggadocio in 2003-4, the federal response to Katrina, and a certain administration haughtiness about the problems in Iraq between 2002-6, but not most of his policies that included prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, AIDs relief in Africa, the removal of two odious regimes, and consensual governments in their places, a framework at home to stop 9/11-type terrorism, and good working partnerships with key allies abroad such as Britain, Germany, France, Italy, India, et al, and a pragmatism in handling rivals like Russia and China.

In short, given all that, Obama’s victory (predicated on painting Bush as a Hoover/Nixon redux), more so even than perhaps a John McCain’s, may do more for Bush’s reputation that anyone ever imagined. And the Mumbai mess (over there, not here) will only empasize all this, as an array of old 9/11-era experts who used to warn us about radical Islam, then, in the subsequent respite at home, screamed that Bush fabricated a war against terror against bogeymen, and now in their third manifestation are paraded once more out to warn us about?—why, yes, radical Islam!

During the campaign, Pres-elect Obama said that he would work to rebuild America’s reputation in the world. Would that course of change differ from Bush’s ability to attain allies in Italy’s Berlusconi, France’s Sarkozy, the U.K.’s Gordon Brown, or Germany’s Angela Merkel? What about Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe or Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai?

What about Pres. Bush’s ability to outplay Russia’s one-two punch with pro-Western democracies in Kosovo, Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia, and anti-ballistic missile treaties in Poland and the Czech Republic? Can Pres. Obama manage to make similar progress while Russia receives world-wide condemnation when they make their own political and military overtures?

What will Pres.-elect  Obama make of the Wars Afghanistan and Iraq? He appears to be keeping the status-quo policy by retaining Robert Gates at Defense, with General David Petraeus at CENTCOM and General Ray Odierno as Iraq Multinational Forces Commander.

And as I echoed Gregory Mankiw in his response to Paul Krugman yesterday, can Pres-elect Obama really appoint anyone better than the economic minds that made Bush administration policy?

On the heels of the terror attacks in Mumbai I can’t help but think that a Pres. Obama – faced with the same set of circumstances-will be equal or less of a President than George W. Bush.

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

November 30, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | Leave a Comment 

Every Sunday The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular and the performers who were influential forty years ago, around the time Richard Nixon was elected President.

Seventy-two hours later, your Soundtracker is sitting here, intrepid but essentially immobilized, still in an L-tryptophan-induced stupor, still with the remote clutched in his hand, still trying to convince himself that there is, in fact, room for one more piece of pie.

The outcome of that internal debate is uncertain.  What is certain, however, is that The Soundtrack Of Our Lives will be back in this space next Sunday.

In the meantime, as a place holder, here’s a video for Otis Redding’s classic composition “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”  The song was Number One for a month —16 March-6 April— early in 1968.

The record was issued posthumously: The track had been recorded at the beginning of December 1967, three days before the phenomenally talented twenty-six year old composer-performer, along with his back-up band, died in a plane crash.  

Featured Articles — November 30, 2008

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes from Home and Abroad:

No go for Hugo By Dale McFeatters
Against the odds, the Venezuelan opposition delivered a stiff rebuff in Sunday’s election to hemispheric nuisance Hugo Chavez, whose brand of socialism is as grandiose as it is incompetent.

In Powell and Rice, Bush broke important ground By Cynthia Tucker
Even though Barack Obama received less than 53 percent of the popular vote, his favorable rating stands at 67 percent. It appears that many conservatives who didn’t support him are nevertheless enthusiastic about his presidency and optimistic about his tenure.

This Fire Needs to Be Put Out By Fareed Zakaria
The horrific attacks in Mumbai should be a call to arms for the region.

New New Deal Won’t Help the Economy By George Will
Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.

Obama’s Iraq Inheritance By Thomas L. Friedman
Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

India Is Pointing in the Right Direction By Claus Christian Malzahn
Mumbai a terror zone, and India bitterly points its finger at Pakistan. The unloved neighbor needs all the help the West can offer. Pakistan is nearly a failed state — and a US invasion under President Obama can’t be ruled out.

China: Don’t Isolate, Integrate By Richard N. Haass
The single most important challenge for the new administration—one with the potential to shape the 21st century—is China. As goes China, so go 1.3 billion men, women and children—one out of every five people on the planet.

Turn Up The Forbidden Music And Dance

November 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Terrorism | Leave a Comment 

Suketu Mehta weeps for his beloved Mumbai and then tells how to defeat the terrorists:

The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. Dream of making a good home for all Mumbaikars, not just the denizens of $500-a-night hotel rooms. Dream not just of Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai or Shah Rukh Khan, but of clean running water, humane mass transit, better toilets, a responsive government. Make a killing not in God’s name but in the stock market, and then turn up the forbidden music and dance; work hard and party harder.

From Henry XIII To Henry K

November 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

In a profile, the Newark Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty gets Frank Langella to compare playing RN in “Frost/Nixon” to playing Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons:

“Thomas More was a man fighting for his life,” the actor says, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room just a few hours before curtain time. “And, to a certain degree, Richard Nixon was a man fighting for his life, for respect. What’s important in each case is to bring across a sense of what motivated them to persevere.”

Peter Morgan in Creative Screenwriting Magazine

November 29, 2008 by David Emig | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Movies | Leave a Comment 

The screenwriter discusses writing the screenplay , that was taken from his play in the latest edition of the magazine.

Latest Major Economic Crisis

November 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, economy | Leave a Comment 

Consumers are more optimistic than the media.

Taking Mom And Dad Out Of Christmas — Impossible

November 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Movies, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

“Four Christmases” is great. And there’s a Nixon (or, at least, a Vietnam) angle.

Mankiw Feels Slighted by Krugman

November 29, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Economic issues | 2 Comments 

A respected Harvard Economist himself, N. Gregory Mankiw wants a little respect from the NY Times‘ Paul Krugman who feels the need to delineate between “hacks” and “grownups” when comparing Bushies and Obamans. Mankiw, who was head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers between 2003 and 2005, cites the standard ranking of more than 18,000 economists. With the exception of Larry Summers, all of Pres. Bush’s appointments (including Mankiw) ranked higher than Pres-elect Obama’s:

11. Larry Summers (Obama)
21. Greg Mankiw (Bush)
35. Ben Bernanke (Bush)
99. Eddie Lazear (Bush)
132. Glenn Hubbard (Bush)
249. Harvey Rosen (Bush)
391. Christy Romer (Obama)
653. Austan Goolsbee (Obama)

Peter Morgan’s Not-So-Youthful Perspective

November 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Movies, Vietnam, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

In a “Newsweek” column, “Frost/Nixon” playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who won an Oscar for “The Queen,” imagines being at next week’s Washington premiere of Ron Howard’s movie and being asked by the city’s older denizens what business a whippersnapper such as he had writing about Richard Nixon, whose peccadilloes they know far better.

Dramatists love straw characters. Obviously, Washington’s media and political elites won’t act like that. Would anyone with a brain tell an historian, “You weren’t at the Battle of the Wilderness, so keep your opinions to yourself”? They’ll probably jostle one another for photos with Morgan and autographs for their “Queen” DVDs.

Morgan uses the device to explain the advantages for the moviegoer of his gift of a more objective, less emotionally involved perspective:

As a European from a different, younger generation, I wasn’t really gripped by the trauma that was Nixon’s presidency…. The horrors and betrayals that Nixon visited upon his electorate left me comparatively unscathed, though I have clear memories of my late father’s anger and sense of disappointment as the Watergate scandal began to unfold. (He died in December 1972, close to two years before Nixon resigned from office.)

Nor did I set out to write “Frost/Nixon” as a metaphor for the failed imperial presidency and abuses of power of George W. Bush…

Not to minimize the traumas, horrors, and betrayals, but Watergate was a political scandal, not the Siege of Leningrad. I still meet people who loved every minute of it, never missing the Senate hearings and even throwing Watergate parties. So it’s not as though if Morgan were 20 years older and had actually experienced the Ordeal, it would be completely beyond his considerable powers to imagine a Nixon character who was halfway human.

Though not gripped by trauma, Morgan is obviously gripped by a fashionably left-wing perspective on U.S. and British politics. Nothing wrong with that, but since it’s the same perspective most of RN’s critics had during Vietnam and Watergate, his youth doesn’t seem to add much value, notwithstanding his play’s merits. As for an accurate rendition of the era’s real trauma, the war President Nixon inherited and ended, that’s yet to come.

Featured Articles — November 29, 2008

November 29, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes from Home and Abroad:

The Krugman Recipe for Depression By Amity Shlaes
Massive government spending is no solution to unemployment.

Thanksgiving Cheer From Obama By Karl Rove
He’s assembled a first-rate economic team.

Irrational Obama Exuberance by John Avlon
For the first time in a long time, Americans are happy about their political leaders. Three reasons why Obamania isn’t just completely ridiculous.

Managing Risk in an Unstable World By Michael Barone
How can we reduce risk for individuals? That’s a natural question when a financial crisis has vaporized trillions of dollars of personal wealth in residential real estate and financial instruments. The problem is, when you try to reduce risk for individuals too much, you end up making things much more risky.

An idea lost on fanatics By Tim Rutten
Those behind the Mumbai attacks will never fathom religious liberty.

Mumbai could happen just about anywhere By Mark Steyn
When terrorists attack, media analysts go into Sherlock Holmes mode, metaphorically prowling the crime scene for footprints, as if the way to solve the mystery is to add up all the clues. The Mumbai gunmen seized British and American tourists. Therefore, it must be an attack on Westerners!

Forgotten Lessons From 9/11 By Anne Applebaum
As I write, the world’s security experts still have no idea which organization carried out this week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and I have no idea myself. The Indian government suspects Pakistani groups, but some eyewitnesses have said the gunmen spoke Hindi, which could mean that they were of Indian origin.

India’s Terrorism Dilemma By Hasnain Kazim
India has been rocked by a number of terror attacks in recent years. Still, the country has no over-arching strategy to confront the problem. The reasons are myriad.

Revising jihad By Nathan Field
When the former jihadist Sayyid Imam published his attack on al Qa’eda in 2007, many saw it as a pivotal document. But Imam’s sequel, published in Egypt this week, is just sound and fury, writes Nathan Field.

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

November 28, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

Jackson Browne singing his 1982 hit “Somebody’s Baby.”  The song appeared on the soundtrack of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

The Jubilee Train Was A Little Late

November 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Economic issues, History, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

Reviewing some recent scholarship about the New Deal, Mona Charen argues that massive federal spending didn’t reduce unemployment. She offers this May 1939 quotation from congressional testimony by FDR’s own Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau:

We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started and an enormous debt to boot.

So Much Blogging, Same Amount Of Time

November 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Episconixonian, Technology | Leave a Comment 

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan. Technology becoming a burden? Think of it as walking with hand weights.

Being Puritanical About Palin

November 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Sarah Palin | 6 Comments 

Promoting the insights of Garry Trudeau, Andrew Sullivan continues to encourage the idea that Gov. Palin can’t learn and grow as a national political figure in order to make the most of her substantial political capital. How unfortunate when a world view excludes the possibility of redemption!

Besides, the title of Sullivan’s post, “Why Palin Failed,” begs the question: How? She didn’t cost the Republicans the election; the economy did. She had about the same negligible effect as most VP candidates. She certainly failed to be the person Sullivan and others might have wanted her to be. But she’s still going to be a factor in ‘12 and probably ‘16. I’m content to watch and see what she does, to see whether she takes the Reagan or the Nixon way. Whatever happens, it won’t be dull.

The Perils Of The Middle Way

November 28, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under International Affairs, Israel and Palestinians, Terrorism | 1 Comment 

It’s a classic dynamic: Rivals inch toward understanding, if not yet friendship. Bitter anger gives way first, perhaps, to exhaustion and then the glimmer of a possibility of the hope of peace. Always good news — except for extremists who for whatever reason find the idea of accommodation or compromise intolerable.

In March, teenage seminarians in Jerusalem were the victims of an attack that seemed calculated to destroy any progress being made by Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.

Similarly, the week’s attacks in Mumbai (in which innocent Jews also died) seemed calculated to drive a new wedge between India and Pakistan, who had come to the brink of nuclear war after terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in December 2001. India had blamed elements of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. Both sides finally backed down. Now prodded by the U.S., which wants him to worry about al-Qaeda instead of India, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has been making determined overtures, mindful of his country’s desperate economic straits as well. Reports the New York Times:

A businessman at heart, Mr. Zardari understands the benefit of strong trade between India and Pakistan. Now on life support from the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan would profit immensely from the normalization of relations.

But some people don’t want normalization. They want their enemies humiliated and killed and their every ambition for revenge and power realized. When India quickly implicated Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks, the cycle seemed bound to recommence.

The on-line Times (its site is mucked up, so I can’t link) now reports that Pakistan’s ISS chief is heading to India to assist in the investigation, an extraordinary, encouraging move. Sometimes extremists make the middle way impossible. But sometimes they fail, and the world gets a little better.

Hillary At State: The Continuing Conundrum

November 28, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Economic issues, International Affairs, National Security, News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Terrorism, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

In today’s Wall Street Journal the paper’s Washington correspondent Kimberley Strassel devotes her “Potomac Watch” column to the consequences inherent in President-elect Obama’s reported offer of the office of Secretary of State to Sen. Hillary Clinton. 

The column maintains that the main advantage of handing this position to the junior Senator from New York, where Obama is concerned, is that it would oblige her “to dismantle her extensive political operation and end the patronage that has earned her continued loyalty.”

Really?  As I wrote earlier in TNN, a couple of days ago the Washington Post ran an op-ed which raised the prospect of New York Gov. David Paterson appointing ex-President Bill Clinton to the seat if Hillary vacates it, which, of course, would keep her organization more or less entirely intact, and enable the couple to wield almost unimaginable influence in two of the three branches of federal government.

And even if such a scenario didn’t happen, as Strassel points out, a Secretary Clinton would

have plenty of leeway to go rogue. The State Department is traditionally hard to rein in, and Mrs. Clinton has insisted she also be free of traditional constraints. She’s demanded the right to staff her department with her own people. And while national security advisors are often more powerful than secretaries of state, she wants the ability to circumvent that position and go directly to Mr. Obama. This is the stuff ugly internal disputes are made of.

The tragic events of the past 48 hours go a considerable way toward showing how especially undesirable it is, at this time, that Foggy Bottom not be the scene of the kind of infighting and semi-Machiavellian maneuvering that always has accompanied both Clintons wherever they’ve gone, and that the authority of the National Security Council not be vitiated by whatever notions Sen. Clinton might bring to State.  Whoever was behind the thugs that have brought death, injury, arson, and destruction to Mumbai had American casualties planned from the start.  The city was chosen because India’s antiterrorism structure has been weak compared to other nations.  For the safety of its citizens abroad – and those at home, as well – America can’t take the chance of having a State Department that’s dominated by dissension, no matter how expertly and efficiently the Department of Homeland Security and other defense and national-security organizations perform in the next four years.

Strassel also points out that a lot is still unknown about the identity and past of innumerable donors to Bill Clinton’s post-presidential projects, and that the records pertaining to such need to be thoroughly evaluated by Obama’s transition team before the President-elect can be sure that the appointment of Sen. Clinton wouldn’t raise conflict-of-interest issues. 

Elsewhere in today’s WSJ is a somewhat surprising column from the man often regarded as the Richelieu of the Bush White House, Karl Rove.  The veteran policy mastermind discusses Obama’s economic and domestic Cabinet and staff choices, and, for the most part, has high praise for such choices as Timothy Geithnet as Treasury Secretary, Christina Romer as Council of Economic Advisors head, and Peter Orszag as OMB chief. 

Rove states that the “only troubling personnel note” so far has been the selection of Melody Barnes to be Domestic Policy Council director; he points out that putting Ted Kennedy’s onetime staffer in charge of universal-health-care initiatives in that position, on top of former Sen. Tom Daschle’s appointment as Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, “sends a clear signal” that the President-elect is thoroughly committed toward the most expansive (and, for the taxpayers, expensive) health-care initiatives in American history.  He also notes that Obama’s recent statements regarding stimulus packages to lift the nation from recession have been confusing and sometimes contradictory.  But Rove makes it clear that he feels reassured when he looks at the economic brain trust being assembled for the coming administration.

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