If true, this is the best news to come out of Washington in a long, long time. Turns out the Iranians may not be nuts after all. Who knew? The NYTreports:
A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran
halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains
on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was
working inexorably toward building a bomb.
The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to be a major
factor in the tense international negotiations aimed at getting Iran to
halt its nuclear energy program. Concerns about Iran were raised
sharply after President Bush had suggested in October that a
nuclear-armed Iran could lead to “World War III,” and Vice President Dick Cheney promised “serious consequences” if the government in Tehran did not abandon its nuclear program.
The finding also come in the middle of a presidential campaign
during which a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear program
has been discussed. The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate
that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies,
states that Tehran’s ultimate intentions about gaining a nuclear weapon
remain unclear, but that Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit
approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political,
economic and military costs.”
“Some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny
and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its
security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways
might — if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible — prompt Tehran to
extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program,” the estimate
states.
National Review Online's Andy McCarthy believes that the premise that:
"we are all quite aware that the Muslims we take seriously are the formers and reformers'" — is mistaken. We,
as in you and I and many of us Corner types, may be aware of that. But
the American people generally are not. They have been told,
repeatedly, by high public officials (and those who would be high
public officials) that there is one Islam, that it is a religion of
peace (the religion of love and peace, sayeth our Secretary
of State), and that the people we need to be concerned about constitute
a tiny fringe who have distorted the "true Islam." That is a very
unrealistic way of looking at the problem, which makes it a disastrous
foundation for policies on foreign relations, democracy promotion,
immigration, etc.
Well, given that there are, what, more than a billion Muslims in the world it does seem reasonable to suppose that most of them, perhaps even the overwhelming majority of them, do not pose a significant threat to the United States of America.
More to the point however, if you wanted to radicalise Muslim opinion around the world and foment anti-Americanism it seems that one good way of doing so would be to employ rhetoric that lumped all Muslims together in the same Jihadist basket. Why bother wasting time on these people and their petty concerns or pride when it is simpler just to insult them all?
Oddly enough, I think it's quite well-established that when you start treating everyone as your enemy you ought not to be surprised when otherwise peaceful or well-intentioned folk decide to sympathise or support or throw in their lot with people who really are your enemies.
But no, far better to declare war on a sizeable proportion of the planet's population. That's the tough, manly way to think.
People often
note that there appears to be a more vigorous debate over Israel's
approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict in the mainstream Israeli press
than there is in the mainstream American press. This is, however, the
kind of judgment that it's hard for a casual American observer to make
with much confidence. Writing in International Security, however, Jerome Slater takes a more systematic comparison of coverage of the conflict in The New York Times and in Haaretz and concludes that, indeed, Israelis debate this matter more freely.
1) No one in Israel is worried about being called anti-semitic.
2) Ethnic groups in safe exile tend to be more committed to
territorial possession than the people back home who actually have to
get shot at in order to obtain or retain the land. This is certainly
true of the Irish.
3) Being correct about Israel/Palestine matters a lot more in Israel
than it does in America. People expressing views here (or in Europe)
are more often staking out ethnic or political solidarity with a cause.
People in Israel have a certain level of solidarity assumed, and are in
a high-stakes battle for the lowest cost solution, which permits and
even demands a wider breadth of views.
4) Newspapers in Israel are just better than newspapers here.
2 and 3 seem pretty plausible to me (with a dash of 1 thrown in) but if 3 has some validity then it's likely that 4 is true too - at least as far as coverage of Israeli national interests is concerned. Which makes me wonder if Megan is joking when she says:
Obviously, four is not the correct answer. I don't know how much to weight each of the other three.
I mean, it stands to reason that Israeli newspapers are going to cover Israeli political and security issues better - and from a wider range of viewpoints - than papers anywhere else? Similarly you'd expect British newspapers to be best for British political news, Australian for Australian etc etc. These papers may not necessarily be able to compete with the big American metropolitan dailies across the board, but pound-for-pound they have their specialty niches where they can continue to provide a service that is valuable beyond their own immediate markets.
Relatedly, it's the case that, though I'm a partisan for foreign coverage and expanding it wherever possible, it makes a certain amount of sense for penny-pinching proprietors (the enemy in other words) to target foreign coverage, even if doing so dents the credibility and authority of their newspaper (foreign coverage being, alas, one of those things that flatters readers estimation of their own seriousness and inquisitiveness even if they rarely, most of them, do much more than glance at th foreign news). For those readers who are most passionate about the rest of the world, however, it's now possible to go straight to source and get the full or at least a more complete, picture of events abroad than one can get from even the New York Times which must, necessarily, simplify matters so as not to suffocate the casual reader with detail and nuance.
Still, cutting back on foreign coverage is an admission of defeat; it tells you that a paper has lost confidence in its purpose and, even more fatally, in the ability of its readership to be interested in and stimulated by events beyond the city limits. This is fatal even if many of those readers are not in fact, as I say, much interested by foreign affairs; many of them still like the idea that they might be one day or that if they suddenly develop an interest in, say, Spain or Russia, their paper will be there to provide them with copy a level or two above The Bluffers' Guide to Funny Foreign Parts. It's what one editor of mine used to call The Virtue of Un-Read Copy.
But once you start treating your readership as simpletons in one area it's often not long before you the cancer spreads to other sections. It's easy to patronise and condescend to readers - one reason the trade is struggling - it's much tougher to hold yourself to demanding standards when the marketing people and the accountants are telling you to go with the flow.
The trouble is that when you do listen to them they seem so sweetly reasonable (they have stats! And Powerpoint! And surveys!) But sooner or later the readers see through it and realise they're being treated as mere advertising fodder and then they find reasons not to buy your newspaper and you can't rake in as much advertising loot and you're on the downward spiral to ending up like the poor old Daily Express, once the envy of Fleet Street and now a sad laughing-stock...
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the latest Great Moment in Public Diplomacy:
"Sports is a universal language... Everybody knows that if you can play baseball like Cal Ripken then you're going to... have the world at your feet... So he's going to go out and I'll bet he'll find people who want to be Cal Ripken in Pakistan and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Guatemala and people who want to be Cal Ripken in Europe... That's the wonderful thing about sports: it really transcends culture and it transcends identity."
It's obvious, isn't it, that you would send a retired baseball star to cricket-playing muslim countries to preach the merits of blue collar American-ness and hard work and being an "Iron Man" and all the rest of it. The wonder is that Karen Hughes didn't dream up this masterful idea sooner.
Equally tellingly, you'll notice that Dr Rice doesn't mention the one country where Mr Ripken might conceivably (and even then it's a stretch) do some good for the Yankee image. That would, of course, be Venezuela - the one South American country that considers baseball, not soccer, its national sport. But then again, why would you want to engage with the Axis of Evil's Junior Varsity skipper?
I've defended Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal, but that's not an endorsement of his political sensitivity. From the Campbell diaries:
Thursday January 17th, 2002: Murdoch was coming in for dinner and... brought James and Lachlan [his sons]...Murdoch was at one point putting the traditional very right-wing view on Israel and the Middle East peace process and James said that he was 'talking fucking nonsense'. Murdoch said he didn't see what the Palestinians' problem was and James said it was that they were kicked out of their fucking homes and had nowhere to fucking live. Murdoch was very pro-Israel, very pro-Reagan. He finally said to James that he didn't think he should talk like that in the Prime Minister's house and James got very apologetic with TB, who said not to worry, I hear far worse all the time. Most of the discussion was a run round the main foreign policy blocks, Israel, Saudi, Iran, Indo-Pak, a little bit of why does Britain have to bother so much?...Murdoch pointed out that his were the only papers that gave us support when the going got tough. 'I've noticed,' said TB.
How's that "Freedom Agenda" going? Foreign Policy notes that according to the State Department's own website Karen Hughes, the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, has all but given up speaking to, well, the public. While she made an average of 5.5 public speaking appearances in 2005, this year she's averaging just 1.5 speeches or op-eds a month.
Still more remarkably, according to the State Department's list of what one presumes to be Ms Hughes' mot important pronouncements, 75% of her speeches and articles have been delivered or published inside the United States. Her overseas engagements have been limited to an op-ed in the Times of India and a brief speech in Bombay at a lunch hosted by the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce.
Some (eg, the redoubtable Mr Larison) will be reassured by this. Others may be reminded that a famous (and perhaps, by now, cliched?) Texas phrase might sum up his administration's approach to its stated goals in this area: All Hat and No Cattle.
PS: It is of course possible that Ms Hughes' silence does advance the President's ambitions in so much as when she does speak she routinely makes herself - and by extension her President and, I fear, her country - ridiculous. Perhaps she is merely following the old principle: First, Do No Harm. If so, it would be pleasant if that attitude were extended to other parts of the administration...
Of all the ways one might describe Boris Johnson - Tory MP for Heneley, former editor of The Spectator, bumbling national treasure and quiz show star - "usually sensible" is not the sort of thing that springs to mind immediately. Alas this category error isn't the only thing James Kirchick gets wrong when he suggests that Boris blames Tony Blair for the 7/7 tube bombings in London.
The paragraphs Mr Kirchick cites read:
And why are there so many middle-class, fish-and-chip-eating,
cricket-playing British Muslims who seem to want to murder their fellow
Britons, 10 years into the Blair premiership?
Yes, I am afraid it is his fault, and it is time we all admitted that the
latent poison of Muslim alienation and disaffection has been potentiated by
the war in Iraq.
This, apparently, is the sort of weaselly apologetic one might expect from a George Galloway or a Ken Livingstone. This might have the potential to be a devastating point but for the inconvenient fact it's just not true.
The important words here are "latent" and "potentiated": all Boris has done is make the entirely reasonable point that though the threat posed by Islamist extremism existed in Britain has been around for some time, it has been made demonstrably more serious by the way the war in Iraq has unravelled.
As someone who supported the war (with rather more enthusiasm than it's comfortable to recall) I cannot see the point of denying the obvious truth of this point. Indeed, I'd go somewhat further and suggest that it was indeed always quite clear - well at least it was to me - that invading Iraq and destabilising the Middle East might well produce an increase in risk to the United States and Great Britain in the short to medium term even as it was hoped that the long-term consequences of reform across the region might reduce the long-term nature and seriousness of the threat posed by radical islam. That bargain was always, I thought, implicit in any gaming of these things out over the next 25 years.
Now of course it hasn't worked out like that as the prospects of a reinvigorated Mesopotamia acting as a beacon of political and economic liberty (relatively speaking) to the rest of the region seem desperately slight even when one take the most generous available assessment of where Iraq might be in five to ten years time. It was, I suppose, always quite a gamble and perhaps an irresponsible one at that even if different decisions been made and some of the worst blunders avoided.
In any case it's now terrible clear that the short term consequences one feared are worse than I'd anticipated and likely to stick around for longer than one thought too while the best-case scenario long-term consequences have disappeared over the horizon.
And to say so is to a) state the obvious and b) does not mean one is a member of the George Galloway Appreciation Society (Founder, Chairman, Secretary, & Senior Patron: G Galloway Esq).
Another great moment in Congressional history. This time from a recent House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on "extraordinary rendition" that heard evidence from members of the European Parliament.
California's Dana Rohrabacher (GOP) dismisses opposition to the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" and says that if you find this policy distasteful "Well, I hope it’s your families, I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences."
There is, naturally, more:
One person — if we let, if in order to protect the rights of one or two
people, or five people or ten people, who are mistakenly abducted
because their names were the same or because they went to a mosque that
they didn’t know this thing was going on in the back room, if 10 of
those people suffer those consequences, but in order for us to take 90
other people off the street who are intent and involved in plans that
would slaughter tens of thousands of our citizens, I’m afraid that’s
the price we pay in a real world. And the United States, we’re not
ghouls. We’re not, we don’t, we’re not, we don’t want to torture
somebody because he has a bad name. We want to get information from
somebody that we think might want to kill our children and kill your
children. And if you doubt our motives, you’re welcome to, I know
there’s a lot of people who hate America, but when the pressure’s on,
quite frankly, we have known all along that at times America has to go
it alone, and people will try to find fault with us rather than trying
to at least understand our morality.
Let us leave the morality or seemliness of this argument aside, for one moment. Those who favour despatching suspects to Syrian or Egyptian torture chambers are unlikely to be swayed by protestations that this brings shame upon the United States. After all, when times are tough a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do...
But the policy isn't just wrong in principle it's wrong in practice too. Though prospects for the liberalisation of the middle east look gloomier now than they did in the heady days of Lebanon's "Cedar Spring" (days which prompted even The Independent to splash with "What if Bush Was Right?") it remains the case that the most - indeed almost the sole remaining - element of the Bush administration's rationale for toppling Saddam was the belief that the long-term causes of resentment and extremism in the middle east could only be solved, or at least tempered, by political and economic liberalisation.
In speech after speech Mr Bush and Dr Rice insisted that the old days of favouring "stability" and propping up tyrants were over. Fine words, indeed, that allowed for the risky but refreshing gamble that though elections might empower extremists in the short-term, the long-term prospects for a safer, less feverish Middle East were enhanced by this process even if, as I say, it might actually lead to an increase in risk for the United States in the short to medium term.
Alas, "extraordinary rendition" reveals that this was just rhetoric. More fool me, I suppose, for hoping it might have amounted to something more substantial. People in the Middle East aren't stupid. They can see that an administration notionally dedicated to advancing opportunity is still asking dictators to do its dirty work for them. That being so, why should they draw anything other than the darkest conclusions from anything the President or Secretary of State says?
Remarkably, then, the "extraordinary rendition" (which has not, mind you, been so very extra-ordinary at all) undermines and refutes stated US policy. Are you with us or against us? Well, in key instances we know that the US is still in bed with the very people it argues are a root cause of the problem its other policies are trying to address. Ah yes, joined-up government...
Eliminating "extraordinary rendition" would not change everything overnight, of course. But this policy has been a disaster, in theory and in practice. It has dishonoured Washington while failing to advance US strategic interests an inch; indeed, quite the contrary, it has helped set US ambitions back.
There's plenty to dislike about the attitudes towards the US one sees in many European capitals these days. But this administration has brought much of this upon itself. No wonder it's pretty lonely being an Atlanticist these days.
OK, one observation on the South Carolina debate. I know it's considered improper to mention that Israel and Israeli concerns ever play a part in American politics or policy making. But just because that's a charge made by some anti-semites does not a) make it anti-semitic to mention this or b) refute the suggestion.
Anyway, the most telling moment, in this regard, during the debate came when Barack Obama was asked "What are America's three most important allies around the world?'' and, rather startlingly failed to include Israel in the list.
Brian Williams (the moderator) drew Obama's attention to this and gave him a second shot at answering the question. I don't think Williams was trying to catch Obama out or embarrass him, rather I suspect he wanted to help him recover from an inadvertent moment of forgetfulness and spare him the vitriol that would doubtless come his way had he not avowed his support for Israel. We would, I fear, have heard more of the "Madrassa Obama" nonsense had this not happened.
But if it's inconceivable - as seems to be the case - that you could or should be able to leave Israel off a list of vital allies, then doesn't that rather make the point that Israeli interests are important to the United States? And what sort of ally would the United States be if it routinely ignored the interests and needs of its allies? (On second thoughts, British readers might want to ignore that question. Obama, of course, didn't mention Britain by name either. Scandal!) Are we seriously supposed to believe that it's illegitimate or anti-semitic to notice this? Or to believe that if Israeli interests have no impact in Washington then AIPAC is perhaps the least effective advocacy group in the city?
Apparently so. No wonder this city so often seems to have escaped from the pages of a political version of Alice in Wonderland.
Election fever sweeps Syria in run-up to "too close to call" elections. Damascus giddy with feverish political debate. Or maybe not. That said, keep an eye on turnout: the opposition is boycotting the poll, despite a concerted government effort by the Baathist regime to persuade voters to cast their ballots.
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