Sowing Seeds of Trouble in Gaza

Vanity Fair:

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever...

(H/T: Open Left)

"Do you want to end up like Bush?"

The London Times via Think Progress:

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to [Sarkozy’s chief diplomatic adviser, Jean-David] Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr. Putin declared.

Mr. Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr. Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr. Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr. Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

Obama on Missile Defense, Part II

Political Punch:

According to the Web site of Polish President Lech Kaczynski, in a conversation yesterday between him, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and President-elect Barack Obama, the newly-elected American president said "that the anti-missile shield project will be continued."

Obama disputes this characterization.

Senior foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough in a statement said, "President-elect had a good conversation with the Polish President and the Polish Prime Minister about the important U.S.-Poland alliance. President Kaczynski raised missile defense but President-elect Obama made no commitment on it. His position is as it was throughout the campaign, that he supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable."

Obama on Missile Defense

BBC:

US President-elect Barack Obama will go ahead with plans to build part of a controversial missile defence system on Polish soil, Poland has announced.

President Lech Kaczynski's office said the pledge was made during a telephone conversation between the two men.

Russia opposes the US plans, and early this week said it planned to deploy missiles on Poland's border and electronically jam the US system.

This is the first signal that Mr Obama plans to continue George Bush's policy.

During the US election campaign, Mr Obama said he wanted to review the system to build a missile defence system in central Europe to ensure it would be effective and would not target Russia.

...This is also the first signal from the US president-elect that he has no intention of backing down in the face of the Russian threats.

Foreign Affairs

Image Source: NYT

NYT reports that Obama's election is already making a difference in Iraq.

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month. “Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

Reports indicate that Russia did not start the war in Georgia.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia’s inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.The accounts are neither fully conclusive nor broad enough to settle the many lingering disputes over blame in a war that hardened relations between the Kremlin and the West. But they raise questions about the accuracy and honesty of Georgia’s insistence that its shelling of Tskhinvali, the capital of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, was a precise operation. Georgia has variously defended the shelling as necessary to stop heavy Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages, bring order to the region or counter a Russian invasion.

Obama calls world leaders to thank them for their calls congratulating him on his victory.

A Bellicose Russia Greets Obama

NYT:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia greeted his future American counterpart, Senator Barack Obama, with bristling language on Wednesday, promising to place short-range missiles on Russia’s western border if Washington proceeded with its planned missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

In a speech to the Federal Assembly, Mr. Medvedev said Russia had “no inherent conflict with America” and invited the new administration to start afresh with Moscow. However, he did not congratulate Mr. Obama on the election he had won only hours before, or even mention him by name.

Later in the day, the Kremlin announced that Mr. Medvedev had sent Mr. Obama a congratulatory telegram.

Image Source: New York Times

McCain's Open to Dialog with Syria

The Syrian ambassador claims Lieberman assured him that McCain would be open to dialog with Syria.

This is a startling revelation, considering McCain and Lieberman have attacked politicians who have sought to engage Syria diplomatically:

– McCain adviser Max Boot slammed the Israeli government for engaging Syria, casting it as a betrayal of Lebanon. “John McCain is not going to betray the lawfully elected government of Lebanon,” Boot said.

– The McCain campaign slammed David Kutzner, an Obama adviser, for attending a legal summit in Damascus. McCain aide Randy Scheunemann accused Obama of favoring “unconditional summit meetings with state sponsors of terrorism.”

– Lieberman joined the conservative attack machine in slamming Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria in 2007. “I believe her visit to Syria was a mistake, that it was bad for the United States of America,” Lieberman said. “And I say this because we’re in a war. We’re in a war against the Islamic terrorists who attacked us on 9-11-01. Syria is a state sponsor of terrorism.”

Spreading Lies

When even Fox News thinks it's too much... Watch this clip.

Misguided

CQ Politics: Covert U.S. action to topple Iran’s government through operations inside the country’s borders has become a major hindrance in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner asserts in a new study.

...Support for a handful of proxy groups began in mid-2005, including the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which the State Department lists as a terrorist organization. But clandestine operations escalated only within the last year or two, and a new presidential finding was signed and partially briefed to appropriate members of Congress, which expanded funding for a wider scope of operations within Iran, according to Gardiner.

“Whether explicitly approved in this latest presidential finding or not, it is now fairly clear that assassinations are being carried out,” Gardiner writes, citing the work of Andrew Cockburn in Counterpunch in May as well as the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, ABC News and numerous other U.S. and Iranian news agencies in support of his claims. “Terms like ‘targeted officials’ and ‘high-value targets’ have clear meaning in the sterile language of covert operations,” but the national security community is uneasy about whether the terms reflect government complicity in the proxy groups’ killing of Iranian leaders in government, the military or the nuclear program.

There are four main groups, which are managed by the CIA and U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, Gardiner writes. They include the MEK, which has been performing intelligence work for the United States for at least a few years; the Free Life Party of Kurdistan, or PJAK, which performs combat operations in Iran and is supplied with Russian weapons; the Jundallah, which operates out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and conducts killings, leaving behind videotapes in some cases; and a new group, the Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran.

Pakistan First, Syria Next

US helicopter-borne troops have attacked an area on the Syrian border with Iraq, killing eight people, Syrian authorities say.

Russia First

Moscow's mayor uses city funds to advance the cause of ethnic Russians in neighboring countries.

Over the past decade, Mr. Luzhkov, 72, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars from Moscow’s well-padded city budget in Russia’s “near abroad,” several city officials said. He has supported pro-Russian separatists in Moldova, built highways in rebellious Georgian enclaves and constructed housing for the Russian military on the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine.

Sahil says: The resurgent nationalism is fueled in part by the massive oil revenues and Putin. How will Russia adjust to falling revenues and a slowing economy?

Double Standards

Huffington Post:

John McCain, who has harshly criticized the idea of sitting down with dictators without pre-conditions, appears to have done just that. In 1985, McCain traveled to Chile for a friendly meeting with Chile's military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, one of the world's most notorious violators of human rights credited with killing more than 3,000 civilians and jailing tens of thousands of others.

The private meeting between McCain and dictator Pinochet has gone previously un-reported anywhere.

A Fine Balance

The NYT reports on the fine balance that Azerbaijan tries to maintain in order to survive in a tough neighborhood.

Azerbaijan, a small, oil-rich country on the Caspian Sea, has balanced the interests of Russia and the United States since it won its independence from the Soviet Union. It accepts NATO training but does not openly state an intention to join. American planes can refuel on its territory, but American soldiers cannot be based here.

And The Economist on why Azerbaijan matters to the America and the Europeans:

Europe’s energy hopes lie in a much discussed but so far unrealised independent pipeline. Nabucco, as it is optimistically titled (as in Verdi, and freeing the slaves) would take gas from Central Asia and the Caspian region via Turkey to the Balkans and Central Europe. That would replicate the success of two existing oil pipelines across Georgia, which have helped dent Russia’s grip on east-west export routes.

McCain-Palin Interview with Brian Williams

Palin and McCain have been hammering Obama for months now on wanting to meet with "dictators without preconditions." When asked what she meant by preconditions, Palin can't answer the question. Watch the clip.


(H/T: Think Progress)

Seriously? I can answer the freaking question! An example of a precondition would be for Iran to publicly disavow Hamas, or to stop work on nuclear enrichment, or to allow UN inspectors greater access to Iranian nuclear facilities!

Here's a second video clip. This one features NBC's Chuck Todd discussing how he thought McCain and Palin did in the interview.

Biden's Foreign Policy

Another great article from the McClatchy newspapers, this one looks Biden's foreign policy views.

...Biden, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 1975, has often seemed to be ahead of the curve on issues from aid to former Soviet states in the early 1990s to U.S. involvement in the Balkans.

Ideas from his seemingly endless cache haven't always looked good in retrospect, however. As Iraq descended into chaos in mid-2006, he co-authored a plan to divide the country into three semi-autonomous regions with a limited central government. Leading Iraqi politicians condemned the plan, and it generated little enthusiasm among his fellow Democrats...

See also, the article on McCain's foreign policy.

McCain's Foreign Policy

A must read -- this article traces the evolution of John McCain's foreign policy.

...Yet when it came to Iraq, a far more formidable challenge than Somalia or Haiti, McCain embraced the neoconservative belief that a U.S. occupation would foster peace and democracy throughout the Middle East. He also backed the U.S. military's lead role in Iraqi reconstruction, argued that a withdrawal would weaken U.S. stature and, contradicting his statement on Somalia, asserted that only Bush — not Congress — had the authority to order a pullout. (More here and here.)

McCain's apparently ideological shift began after Haiti. His conversion coincided with his becoming president of the New Citizenship Project, a neoconservative advocacy group that was founded in 1994 by columnist Bill Kristol.

McCain on Osama bin Laden

An interview that John McCain did in 1998 has the potential to cause some embarrassment for his campaign. Or given the right treatment, this could be devastating.

You not only have had combat experience in Vietnam, but you were also a prisoner of war. When you look at terrorism right now, with people like Osama bin Laden, do you have any reservations about watching strikes like that?

You could say, Look, is this guy, Laden, really the bad guy that's depicted? Most of us have never heard of him before. And where there is a parallel with Vietnam is: What's plan B? What do we do next? We sent our troops into Vietnam to protect the bases. Lyndon Johnson said, Only to protect the bases. Next thing you know.... Well, we've declared to the terrorists that we're going to strike them wherever they live. That's fine. But what's next? That's where there might be some comparison. (emphasis added)

(H/T: David at BMG)

Bomb, Bomb, Bomb

McCain's last meeting with an editorial board didn't go so well. Now Think Progress reports on an audio clip of McCain's interview with The Denver Post editorial board, where McCain recommends a hard-line approach to Iran. Read the entire story here.

Here's an extract featuring multiple administration officials and others disagreeing with McCain's recommendations.

Only after years of failure — and a strengthened and emboldened Iran — have members of Bush’s team finally recognized the need to engage Iran. In other words, McCain is now more extreme on Iran than the Bush administration:

ADM. MIKE MULLEN, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair: I would like to have a healthy dialogue with Iran…I do think engagement would offer an opportunity, certainly, to understand each other better. [6/21/08]

ROBERT GATES, Defense Secretary: We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage…and then sit down and talk with them…If there is going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the demander, with them not feeling that they need anything from us. [5/14/08]

NICOLAS BURNS, Undersecretary of State for political affairs: There is a choice: confrontation or diplomacy. We prefer diplomacy and we are trying to open two diplomatic channels — on the nuclear issue and on Iraq. [5/2/07]

The call to move away from the isolationist policy McCain hopes to revive has been endorsed by five secretaries of state, including McCain adviser Henry Kissinger, as well as McCain’s own neocon foreign policy adviser Robert Kagan. McCain’s “let’s completely isolate Iran” approach makes him even more radical than President Bush, who last year said, “We can have meetings. Talking is not the problem. We can talk to Iran.”

The Obama-Palin Doctrine

McCain has criticized Obama repeatedly for saying that the US should go into Pakistan to pursue terrorists. In a recent interview, George Stephanopoulos shows McCain a video of Palin suggesting the same course of action. When confronted with the video, McCain blames people for recording conversations and the media for assuming that anything that Palin says during a conversation is official policy.



(H/T: Open Left)

Leaving aside the ridiculousness of McCain's arguments, I actually agree with McCain on the policy being discussed. There isn't much good that can come out of publicly stating that the US would compromise the territorial integrity of a sovereign nation, especially when we are talking about a hypothetical situation. Obama's statements, I believe, are at least in part designed to make him appear strong on national defense. That may work for the campaign and for the purposes of winning an election, but the bluster is hardly conducive to diplomatic efforts.

Does that get McCain off the hook? Not so much. McCain makes a big deal about using reserve and restraint while talking about the possibility of going into Pakistan, but it seems that this talk of reserve is, well, reserved exclusively for Pakistan. He has no problems ratcheting up the rhetoric when it comes to Iran or Cuba, or Chavez, or when it comes to snubbing allies like Spain.

Given his generally hawkish stance of foreign policy, McCain’s posturing on Pakistan seems mostly designed to draw contrasts with Obama and make him look naïve. Either that or it is a continuation George Bush’s schizophrenic policy on Pakistan, which would have far worse implications than political posturing implied in previous sentence.

Beyond Naive

Sarah Palin talks about foreign policy with Katie Couric.



First of all, the idea of questioning someone's judgment on foreign policy, when you have no experience in the area, reeks of self-delusion. If you keep telling yourself that you have foreign policy experience and you keep hearing that assertion repeated in the echo chamber that surrounds you, do you really start believing it?

Second point -- Palin talks about knowing how to tell the good guys apart from the bad guys. Is it just me or does she sound like someone who is talking about whether she'll share her snack with some kids but not others during the kindergarten recess?

Even if you are more forgiving of tone and nuance, or of her lack of foreign policy experience, the "with us or against us" philosophy is the continuation of the same hardline and petulant Bush foreign policy that has left our relations with allies and foes in tatters.