"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." - John Kenneth Galbraith.
According to Charles Krauthammer, it is Obama's fault that the Iranian protest over last summer did not result in the collapse of the Iranian regime.
Obama responded by distancing himself from this new birth of freedom. First, scandalous silence. Then, a few grudging words. Then relentless engagement with the murderous regime. With offer after offer, gesture after gesture — to not Iran, but the “Islamic Republic of Iran,” as Obama ever so respectfully called these clerical fascists — the U.S. conferred legitimacy on a regime desperate to regain it.
Why is this so important? Because revolutions succeed at that singular moment, that imperceptible historical inflection, when the people, and particularly those in power, realize that the regime has lost the mandate of heaven. With this weakening dictatorship desperate for affirmation, why is the U.S. repeatedly offering just such affirmation?
Yeah, and how did eight years of Bush's constant bullying work out then? But Krauthammer is displaying a well known neo-con trait; insist that your tactics are the only ones which will work even when they have been shown to have repeatedly failed.
I find their insistence that everything is Obama's fault - from the economic collapse which occurred under the Bush regime, to the fact that Ahmadinejad hasn't gotten down on his knees and offered to disarm - simply tiresome.
And, of course, behind this insistence that Obama alone could bring about the collapse of the Iranian regime is the belief in the falsehood that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union single handedly.
This is why it is so hard to engage in any meaningful dialogue with neo-cons, they simply supply their own set of facts, which bear little relation to how anyone else sees the world.
When Jon Bolton and Glenn Beck get together you know that lunacy lies ahead, as each seems to outdo the other in terms of the madness they exhibit.
Beck begins by pretending to throw a frog into boiling water. I presume he thinks he's making some cryptic point, but in the end, like much of what Beck does, one is struck simply by the oddness of it all.
I would honestly have thought that things couldn't get any odder from that point onwards, but they both managed to easily outdo the frog business by showing their utter lack of understanding of international law.
Beck, for instance, objected to Obama referring to Israel's occupation of the Palestinians as an "occupation".
Beck: "Occupation that began in 1967." That's weird. There was a war. They won.
Beck is either the dumbest ass ever to address this issue or he's simply being disingenuous. I suspect the former.
The fact that one can't keep land acquired by war is clearly stated in UN Resolution 242 (PDF):
"Emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war."
But Bolton's astonishment at what Obama has just said, in what he describes as "the most radical, anti-Israeli speech I can recall any president making", comes down to this:
Bolton: Two phrases in what you just heard. The president says America does not accept - and I am quoting now - "the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements". Not new Israeli settlements, continued Israeli settlements. Which... this is Mr Wordsmith here... that calls into question, in my mind, all Israeli settlements.
The very fact that they are both sitting there pretending that all Israeli settlements are not illegal means that they haven't the faintest clue as to what international law says in this regard.
The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
Although, I suspect Bolton knows fine well what international law says, he simply doesn't feel that international law should apply to Israel. Beck is simply a moron on this subject, as he is on so many others.
Bolton: Then he says, that we want "a Palestinian state that is contiguous". By the way, Gaza and the West Bank were never contiguous Palestinian areas before. And "that ends the occupation that began in 1967." That means, I think, a return to the 1967 borders.
Again, a return to the 1967 borders is only controversial if one thinks that international law should not apply to Israel, as that is the entire point of UN Resolution 242: That Israel "withdraws from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
They then pretend that a "contiguous" Palestinian state would mean that there couldn't be a contiguous state of Israel.
All that is needed to make the West Bank and Gaza "contiguous" is a road or a railway link between the two. That road or railway could be elevated so that both Israel and Palestine have contiguous states, but this concept is obviously too complex for these two bozos to comprehend.
But Beck's ignorance is especially a thing to behold. He actually asks Bolton where the 1967 border would be, proving that he knows almost nothing about this issue.
Bolton insists that this is the most anti-Israeli speech ever. But, in reality, what got Obama these rounds of applause at the United Nations was the fact that he made it clear that he was going to make sure that international law was applied in this dispute. Bolton thinks that this amounts to Obama being a lawyer for the Palestinians, and he actually laments that this should be happening when the Palestinians find themselves in such a weak position. I suppose Bolton feels that, at such a time, the Israelis should be allowed to press home their advantage.
Of course, what Bolton misses is that allowing Israel to do this would not result in peace, even if it resulted in a victory of sorts for the Likud movement, and lasting peace is what we are supposed to be seeking here. But Bolton has been fighting for Israel's corner for so long that this concept is literally lost on him.
Bolton notes the warm reception which Obama received at the UN, the place that Bolton has famously said that he does not believe in, and one can't help thinking that the warm applause Obama received merely emphasises just how out of touch with world opinion Bolton and Beck actually are; and just how in touch with it President Obama has shown himself to be.
Both Beck and Bolton come across as dinosaurs, yearning for the day when the US told the world that they could all bugger off; and that Israel, backed by the US, would do whatever it bloody wanted when it came to it's dispute with Palestine. They fail to comprehend that the attitude which they yearn for was the very thing which made the US hated around the globe and that it is Obama's specific rebuttal of their core beliefs which have earned him the world's respect.
To counter the fact that they are both so out of touch with the world's view on this matter Beck comes up with the oh-so-expected false charge of anti-Semitism:
Beck: Do you think it's possible to sit in a church with somebody who is as anti-Semitic as Jeremiah Wright is and not come away with an anti-Semitic view?
We could have seen that coming a mile off. They simply find it impossible to believe that anyone could be asking that international law be obeyed. Indeed, Bolton has spent most of his adult life arguing against the very concept of international law which Obama has stood up for.
As I say, Bolton and Beck come across as dinosaurs. Perhaps their world view should have gone into the boiling water instead of the frog.
They display the mindset of the Bush years and they can't understand why no-one else misses it in the way they do.
Maddow does wonderful job of taking apart Tom Ridge's message that the Intel got it wrong before the war in Iraq.
He thinks, despite the fact that the neo-cons dreamt of deposing Saddam long before 9-11, that the regime only acted with the very best interests of the country at heart.
And, when he makes an argument which basically amounts to "we'd do it again", she skewers him:
Maddow: I think that is an eloquent argument and I have to tell you….I think you making, I think you making that argument right now is why Republicans after the Bush and Cheney administration are not going to get back the country’s trust on national security. To look back at that decision and say we got it wrong but it was in good faith and not acknowledge the foregone conclusion that we were going to invade Iraq that pervaded every decision that was made about intelligence, looking back at that decision making process, it sounds like you’re making the argument you would have made the same decision again.
Americans need to believe that our government would not make that wrong a decision, would not make such a foregone, take such a foregone conclusion to such an important issue that the counter, the intelligence that proved the opposite point was all discounted, that the intelligence was combed through for any bit that would support the foregone conclusion of the policy makers. The system was broken and if you don’t see that the system was broken and you think that it was just that the Intel was wrong, I think that you’re one of the most trusted voices on national security for the Republican Party, and I think that’s the elephant in the room.
I don’t think you guys get back your credibility on national security until you realize, that was a wrong decision made by policy makers, it wasn’t the spies fault.
The Republicans simply can't stop thinking that they have to look tough all the time when it comes to foreign policy, which is why McCain behaved like such an arse regarding Russia and Georgia during the election.
They still can't admit that they were wrong when it came to the Iraq war. If I think back to friends and family members who I argued with prior to the Iraq invasion, there isn't a single one of them who is still making the arguments which they made at that period in time.
It's almost universally understood, certainly here in Britain, that the Iraq war was a hugely counter-productive blunder.
And yet even Tom Ridge - and he was one of sensible Republicans - can't bring himself to admit that this was an error brought about by the Bush regime seeing what they wanted to see in the intelligence and discounting anything which did not support an ideological determination which they had always held to depose Saddam Hussein.
As Rachel says, though I'm not sure how right this will prove to be in actuality, they certainly don't deserve to be taken seriously on the subject of national security until they admit that Iraq was a terrible blunder.
I suppose, once Bush left office it was bound to happen. Former foreign leaders feel free to talk far more candidly than they ever could whilst Bush was still in office. But, even so, this is jaw dropping:
President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”
And I swear I am not making any of this up.
What kind of mindset would one need to have to be able to ever seriously say that to another world leader? How deluded must he actually have been?
Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”
This insane person was in charge of the free world. And this is how he chose to speak to other world leaders. He wasn't even embarrassed by this crap, he actually bloody meant it.
After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”
In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.
They missed it my ass. Around about the time of the Iraq war the press in the US were terrified of being called unpatriotic by the loons of the right and the last thing they would have reported on was the fact that the man in the Oval Office was a religious zealot who believed that God was, literally, sending him on a mission to defeat Gog and Magog.
Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.
Oddly, mainstream media are ignoring this alarming revelation that Bush may have been half-cracked when he started his Iraq war.
There's nothing odd about it. That's what the MSM do. That's why The New York Times can still only use the word torture when talking about other countries and speaks of "enhanced interrogation techniques which some allege amounts to torture" when talking of the actions which Bush gave permission for.
It’s awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who “got saved.” He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.
He never should have been president in the first place. Exactly as we saw with Sarah Palin; the lessons to be learned here are that the Republicans will name any nutcase as their leader if they think they can fool enough people into voting for them.
He had the name Bush and she was nutty enough to please the Christian Fundamentalists that the Republicans have come to increasingly rely upon to get power. And they hoped that, once they got elected, that they would be malleable enough to be persuaded to follow the neo-con agenda.
"The first time I met Bush 43 … two things became clear. One, he didn't know very much. The other was that he had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much."
In other words, he was an empty vessel; a blank canvass on which the neo-cons could paint. Exactly as they attempted to do with Sarah Palin as Bush was leaving office.
Which suddenly explains this creepiness:
Recently, GQ magazine revealed that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attached warlike Bible verses and Iraq battle photos to war reports he hand-delivered to Bush. One declared: “Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”
He was probably too dumb to even realise that he was being shamelessly manipulated. And, anyway, he had unfinished business with Gog and Magog to think about.
It really is terrifying to think that such a "superficial and fanatical" zealot ever had his hand on the nuclear button.
It's well known that the neo-cons hoped that Ahmadinejad would remain in power, as the last thing which they have ever wanted the US to have with Iran was meaningful discourse.
So now we have Kristol stating that Obama cannot possibly negotiate with Iran, or "mindlessly go on this path [...] and force Israel to take action if she has to." Obama is now, according to Kristol, "pathetically hoping that he can engage with this regime".
The only"serious realistic policy on Iran is now to help accelerate regime change".
So, the lunatics who brought us the Iraq war, are now desperate for "regime change" in Iran. And their justification is that Ahmadinejad, the man they wanted to win, has been declared the winner.
Why does anyone listen to these people? We are still up to our necks in their last "regime change" and they are already calling for the next one. No matter what the situation, war is always the answer for these buggers.
It really wouldn't matter to John Bolton if Iran elected Mahatma Gandhi. Iran is a regional rival to Israel and, as far as the neo-cons are concerned, that is all that is necessary to deem them "evil" and to demand the overthrow of whatever regime happens to be in power here.
It's simply hysterical to watch Bolton tell us that Ahmadinejad is not actually the Supreme Leader of Iran. The rest of us have been pointing that fact out for years as the neo-cons sought to use his every utterance as an argument for why Iran must be attacked. However, as long as there is a chance that Ahmadinejad might not be re-elected, Bolton is quick to remind us that it doesn't matter who the Iranians elect, they will always be evil.
Notice how he tells us that there is no such thing as a moderate Iranian. The neo-con agenda remains unchanged, no matter who wins the Iranian election.
UPDATE:
Here Daniel Pipes actually admits that he'd prefer it if Ahmadinejad was elected.
I find right wingers anger at Obama's comments regarding America's failure to appreciate Europe simply hysterical.
Krauthammer finds it "disgraceful", but Krauthammer fails to realise that he is the perfect example of the arrogance of which Obama spoke.
He decries Europe as "sucking on our tit for sixty years" (is there a better example of American arrogance than that remark?) implying that Europe spends pennies on defence whilst the US spends billions, whilst ignoring the fact that this situation exists at America's insistence.
This was Rumsfeld's reaction to the news that Europe might develop a European army:
Donald Rumsfeld: 'I personally will be watching carefully to see how things evolve.'
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Rumsfeld warns that the plans could "inject instability" into the Nato alliance and "put at risk something that is very special". It is the first detailed public statement on the subject by a senior American politician since Mr Blair returned from Camp David last month claiming that President Bush had agreed to support the European "army".
Mr Rumsfeld makes clear that the new Republican administration remains deeply concerned about the project. Invited to confirm that he is "relaxed" about the European Union's proposals, Mr Rumsfeld conspicuously declines to do so.
Mr Rumsfeld says: "I personally will be watching carefully to see how things evolve, because we have so much at stake with that [Nato] alliance. We need to be vigilant to see that we don't do anything that could inject an instability into the alliance."
The US have always insisted that their military superiority cannot be challenged by Europe which is why Krauthammer's outrage is such a piece of hypocritical bullshit.
You cannot demand that Nato is sufficient for Europe's defence and then attack Europe when they accept you at your word.
But what is really outraging Krauthammer is that Obama is criticising the attitude of the Bush administration and that he is doing so on foreign soil. Perhaps he is forgetting that criticising an American political figure on foreign soil is not without precedent.
In a speech to Israel's Knesset, Bush said: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.
"We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."
Krauthammer is feeling outraged because Obama has called him and Bush out as the arrogant arseholes that they are. And he's right in saying that Europe loves Obama for it.
Like many Americans we, in Europe, are suckers for the truth. And, as I made clear at the time, we loved the fact that he called us out as well.
Europe has waited for the past eight years to hear an American president chide us and yet tell us that he values our opinion.
Obama wasn't scoring cheap points. Quite the opposite. He was demanding that the rest of us stop scoring them. And we appreciated that.
Frank Schaeffer really is letting the cat out of the bag regarding how extreme the republican party have become:
"The republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of colour or two up front on TV to obscure the all white, all reactionary, all backward -- there-is-no-global-warming -- rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled."
As he, rightly, states; these are the two groups to whom the republican leadership are now pandering to. They are either pandering to the religious right or to the neoconservatives, the people to whom every war is a good war.
This was most obvious during the recent election by simply observing the kind of people attending Sarah Palin rallies; we were left looking at the dead enders of republicanism, the nutcases. The Colin Powell's and others had all jumped ship.
Here, Schaeffer argues that Rush Limbaugh really has become the Republicans perfect representative for where they now stand. Limbaugh shows, "the raw naked true face of where republicanism is."
And he has written an open letter to Obama warning him not to rely on republican support as "they hate him, they do hate him".
"Rush Limbaugh is telling the truth when he says he wants him to fail. And these people are ideological enough that they'd rather take our whole country down and be proved right than be patriotic Americans and stand up and do the thing that every American who loves this country would do right now, which is to support the president whether you voted for him or not."
And of the 20 million of the Christian right, as opposed to the 300 million American population, he states:
"It's not a big percentage, it's just a loud percentage. This is the drunk on the subway making all the trouble at the end of the car for all the people on the subway. There's a hundred decent citizens in there and there's one ass at the front end who is molesting women. That's the Republican party now in terms of the loud part."
Rush is the perfect representative of where the republicans now find themselves. Indeed, Rush, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck now represent the intellectual Illuminati for the rump litter left supporting this failed movement.
Today the Republican Party is rooting for doom. And since the Republicans are now anti-American members of an Obama-must-fail insurgency, lies become a self-fulfilling prophecy: talk doom, and keep the economy in a panic and we may get what we wish for.
Don't conservative Republicans object to the lies? No, because the Republicans don't have any actual and traditional conservative followers left.
The Republican religious nuts are rooting for Jesus to "rapture" them, not for America, and the neoconservatives are rooting for war and the Israeli hard liners, not for America. Truth (and sanity) are out the window.
Good on Schaeffer for saying it so clearly. The party of Limbaugh are not joking when they state that they want Obama to fail, they are actually insane enough to really mean that.
He was, rightly, known as one of the greatest playwrights of his generation and, on Xmas Eve, he finally exited the stage after a long battle with cancer.
Pinter had a number of awards bestowed on him during a long and distinguished career, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. In its citation, the Nobel academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century" and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".
Pinter was best know for his plays, including his 1960 breakthrough production The Caretaker, The Dumb Waiter and The Birthday Party. But he was also a screenwriter, actor and director and in recent years a vociferous campaigner against human rights abuses, including the occupation of Iraq by western armed forces. He joined other artists such as Blur and Ken Loach in sending a letter to Downing Street opposing the 2003 invasion.
In 2004 he received the Wilfred Owen award for poetry for a collection of work criticising the war in Iraq.
I well remember his comments on the day 2 million people marched through London protesting against the Iraq war, when he referred to the neo-cons as "thugs". There was something beautifully apt about this master of language choosing this particular word to describe so bluntly a group of people that political commentators were bending over backwards to understand. Pinter simply called them as he saw them and it was a description which never left me.
The Independent refer to him this morning as the "most anti-Establishment member of the Establishment" and there is great truth in that. He has for many years been in a class of his own, indeed the term "Pinteresque" had long ago entered the lexicon, and yet he never lost his anger at that same establishment and the mindless wars that they engaged in, the most recent being the Iraqi misadventure.
It was typical that he should take a swipe at the Iraq war whilst collecting his Nobel Prize in 2005, but he widened his criticism to American foreign policy in general:
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.
But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed.
He gave examples, including what took place in Nicaragua, E Salvador and Guatemala of how this promotion of "democracy" works and how it impacts on the world's poorest citizens:
The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.
And, of course, he saw this same pattern being repeated in Iraq, where American corporations were moving in on Iraqi oil whilst their government spouted platitudes about democracy.
And Pinter, a master of language, understood perfectly well how American presidents have managed to sell what they are doing to the American people:
Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable.
He referred to the Iraqi invasion as "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law" and asked the question, "How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"
Only on Fox News would a lunatic like John Bolton still be listened to. Here he is on his usual high horse regarding Iran, even going as far as pushing the line that the Israelis might act unilaterally should Obama hesitate to take action shortly after he takes office.
He [Olmert] also dismissed as “megalomania” any thought that Israel would or should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.
We may have a new President-elect, but the right wing loons aren't going to be changing their tune any time soon, even if an outgoing Israeli Prime Minister is on the record saying the very opposite of what they are claiming.
The latest global trends review, produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) every four years, is predicting that US power will wane by 2025 and that the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured with countries like India and China challenging US dominance.
It's a further indication that the country which Barack Obama inherits will no longer "call the shots" and makes him a perfect choice as the kind of person both the world and the US needs to see the US through this dangerous transition period. The era of George Bush and the neo-cons, the era of "we do what we want and there's nothing anyone can do to stop us" is looking as if it is very much nearing it's end.
Looking ahead to 2025, the NIC (which coordinates analysis from all the US intelligence agencies), foresees a fragmented world, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, particularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict grow more likely.
"Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed" warns that the spread of western democratic capitalism cannot be taken for granted, as it was by George Bush and America's neoconservatives.
"No single outcome seems preordained: the Western model of economic liberalism, democracy and secularism, for example, which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its lustre – at least in the medium term," the report warns.
It adds: "Today wealth is moving not just from West to East but is concentrating more under state control," giving the examples of China and Russia.
"In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the state's role in the economy may be gaining more appeal throughout the world."
At the same time, the US will become "less dominant" in the world – no longer the unrivalled superpower it has been since the end of the Cold War, but a "first among equals" in a more fluid and evenly balanced world, making the unilateralism of the Bush era no longer tenable.
The vanity of the neo-cons and the American right wing in particular was best summed up after the cold war by the title of Francis Fukuyama's book, "The End of History". They really did believe that the they had won the battle for world domination and that they would forge ahead and create A New American Century and that there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.
It was this vanity which led Bush to rip up international law with his invasion of Iraq, as he and other right wing loons believed that the law would be what they stated it to be and that the rest of us would simply have to swallow hard and accept this new reality.
Those of us who had read Emmanuel Todd's "After the Empire" suspected that American power was actually on the wane and the fact that Bush not only failed to win in Iraq, but that he was unable to punish countries which opposed the invasion - France, Germany etc., - only reinforced that impression.
People like Bill Clinton have always argued that international law mattered because the US was in a position to model the world into how it would like it to look for the day when it was no longer on the top of the pile. Bush and the neo-cons, consumed by vanity, argued that international law didn't really exist and that they observed it merely as a courtesy and reserved the right to ignore it as it suited them.
As we move into this difficult transition period, we can be grateful that a steady hand like that of Barack Obama is on the US wheel. Were Bush and Cheney in charge at such a time we could very well sit on the edge of the nuclear abyss.
The time is approaching when the US can no longer tell the rest of the world to fuck off and international law is about to matter more than it ever has before.
The example set by the Obama presidency will matter greatly as America approaches the time when it finally becomes a first amongst equals.
The biggest winner in the coming multipolar age will be China, according to the NIC report.
"China is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country," it predicts. On present trends China will have the world's second largest economy by 2025, and could well be the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter. It will be a leading military power, with a considerable navy to protect the sea lanes that deliver its raw materials, and at the same time wield hi-tech asymmetric tools.
A US congressional panel claimed on Wednesday night that China was already practising its cyber warfare skills.
Glenn Greenwald has done a post today about the group of foreign policy advisers who are advising McCain and it really does makefor some scary reading. These guys are nutcases.
As Greenwald states:
The foreign policy team exerting chief influence over John McCain is truly more extremist -- in a purer and more deranged form -- than the foreign policy team of the Bush administration. They're not only the most extremist faction in American political life, but also the most delusional. These aren't just the people who led the U.S. to war in Iraq -- though they are that -- but they're also the ones who actually believe that the Bush administration has been far too meek in its assertion of U.S. military force and too passive in its interference in the affairs of other countries. They want to accelerate -- massively intensify -- virtually every one of the polices that has brought the U.S. to such disgrace and near ruination over the past eight years. There is nothing "moderate" or "centrist" about any of them. John McCain is the Candidate of Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman and John Bolton for good and clear reasons (including in Georgia): he's the best and most devoted instrument to advance their militaristic agenda.
Is there any real discussion of any of that? Hardly.
I am always extremely puzzled as to why, after eight disastrous years of Bush, that the US press don't make more of these guys and what their beliefs actually are. I mean we have James Woolsey, a guy who believes in the WWIV theory and who believes that the US has been at war with Islamists since 1979, when “they [Iranian revolutionaries] seized our hostages in 1979 in Tehran.”
Then there's Bill Kristol, a man who deserves to be laughed at every time he appears anywhere as the buffoon that he is, constantly making wrong predictions like these corkers:
The [Iraq] war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. […] History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.” [The Weekly Standard 3/17/03]
“There’s been a certain amount of pop sociology in America … that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.” [NPR, 4/1/03]
“We’re not in a civil war [in Iraq]. This is just not true….” [Fox News, 7/15/07]
So McCain is going to be advised by a man who has been wrong in almost everything he has said about the Iraq war and the American press have no interest in that?
Why is it in the United States that the most extremist right wing views are never called out as such? Why do we only ever hear of extreme left wingers and yet pretend that the group who came up with PNAC are somehow centrist?
I suspect it's because the extreme right have now taken control of the Republican party and that extremism is now what Republicanism actually stands for.
I mean imagine any other western nation, with the possible exception of Israel, where someone who came out with the following sentence would be an advisor to that country's elected leaders?
“If we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies. The holier-than-thou response to this proposal is predictable: ‘We can’t kill our way out of this situation!’ Well, boo-hoo. Friendly persuasion and billions of dollars haven’t done the job. Give therapeutic violence a chance.” [New York Post, 10/26/06]
And yet Ralph Peters is one of McCain's foreign policy advisers, despite calling for "therapeutic violence" as a serious policy.
And we have John Bolton, who I consider the greatest nutcase currently not residing in an asylum, coming out with this:
“While treaties may well be politically or even morally binding, they are not legally obligatory.” [Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 1999]
He's advising McCain on foreign policy and he doesn't even regard treaties as "legally obligatory"?
It is worth clicking here to read the long list of, basically, unhinged right wing wackos who McCain has assembled to advise him to get a small taste of the kind of presidency McCain is actually offering.
It's further to the right than even the Bush administration and it's scandalous that the American press are allowing this man to be presented as a "maverick" rather than as the dangerous threat to world peace that his presidency would represent.
Bush has shown that he has scarce understanding of how the neo-cons have conducted themselves over the past eight years when he comes out with a statement like this:
“Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”
The US, under Bush, have done nothing but bully and intimidate. That has been their entire foreign policy. They have dismissed international law and the United Nations as an outrage which is nothing short of demanding that they seek a permission slip to defend themselves.
The very mantra which he used to define his administration is the mantra of the bully: "You are either with us or against us."
Indeed, there is even the Ledeen Doctrine which many right wingers have been quoting as a sensible way for the US to conduct it's foreign policy. The doctrine states:
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
It's simply ridiculous for Bush to state that he's against "bullying and intimidation" when aides from his own administration are on record as stating nonsense like this:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
I suppose the most arrogant administration in memory must mean that it's not fair for others to use "bullying and intimidation" to get what they want, as the Bush administration have some kind of copyright on such practices.
Here we see Thomas Friedman outline what he regards as the real reason for the Iraq war. The US needed to tell Arabs to "Suck on this":
This is how Bush's defenders see his actions. And the US is against "bullying and intimidation"?
Robert Kagan suspects that Putin might be feigning sympathy for the Ossetians:
Putin cares no more about a few thousand South Ossetians than he does about Kosovo's Serbs. Claims of pan-Slavic sympathy are pretexts designed to fan Russian great-power nationalism at home and to expand Russia's power abroad.
Who could believe such a thing? Next Kagan will be telling us that the US really don't give a shit about Iraqi freedoms and merely wanted "to expand the US's power abroad".
The notion that the US, like Russia, might have larger geopolitical considerations doesn't fit in with the Kagan farce that every US action is always guided by beneficence.
I said yesterday that I thought the decision for the US to open diplomatic negotiations with Iran, including stationing diplomats there for the first time since the seventies, represented a stunning victory for Condaleezza Rice over Dick Cheney and the neo-con nutbags.
Well, the nutbags are making their displeasure known.
"This is a complete capitulation on the whole idea of suspending enrichment," said Mr Bush's former UN envoy, John Bolton. "Just when the administration has no more U-turns to pull, it does another."
It always brings me deep pleasure to know that John Bolton is displeased, as it's usually an indication that someone somewhere is doing something sensible.
Now Rice has been as guilty as any other member of this administration in pushing a policy of preventive wars and has been every bit as bellicose as the others in her public condemnations of Iran. And she doesn't have the power to reverse more than thirty years of US policy on her own, so how did she do it?
Well, apparently the first thing she did, was use her own signature on the offer to the Iranians.
The breakthrough, if that is what it turns out to be, that persuaded Mr Bush that it was time to end the 30-year boycott of high-level diplomatic contacts with Iran, came from the simple act of Ms Rice signing her name to a joint letter offering sweeter terms to Tehran than it had seen before.
The very act of putting her name to a package of incentives presented in Tehran last month persuaded the Iranian authorities that there was movement that would allow them to proclaim victory over the US, while ending their nuclear programme.
When he saw Ms Rice's signature on the document, Iran's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, was visibly stunned, according to those present at the meeting. He formally responded to the offer with a letter addressed to Ms Rice and the EU's foreign policy envoy, Javier Solana, as well as foreign ministers of the five other countries at the talks.
His letter skirted around the hot-button issue of Iran's uranium enrichment programme, but it contained an olive branch of an offer to "find common ground through logical and constructive actions", according to reports.
Hearing of Mr Mottaki's reaction and then receiving a formal response persuaded Ms Rice that Iran was finally willing to have meaningful talks with the US that could avoid a war.
Rice had to first persuade Cheney to agree to this, which is why so much is being made about this being a "one time only" offer.
But the Iranians appear to have taken the offer seriously and it is causing much relief throughout Europe where the fear of another steep rise in oil prices caused by an attack on Iran was a source of worry for the markets.
Iran welcomed the American change of attitude yesterday, but with governments from France to China also welcoming the shift, Tehran also signalled that there was a long way to go before the diplomats break out the champagne. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that there are still "clearly defined red lines", meaning that Iran is insisting that it has the right to peaceful nuclear energy. This is a position that Israel and the American conservatives still find unacceptable.
There's still time for it all to go pear shaped as the Americans and the Israelis are still insisting that it is unacceptable for Iran to follow the rules of the NNPT. They are demanding that Iran give up it's right under the NNPT to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, which is a bit rich coming from a nuclear power like Israel who has never even bothered to sign up to the NNPT.
But, for the moment, Teflon Condi continues to prove that no matter how many times she fucks things up, she still manages to come out smelling of roses.
The truth was that this war was sold, not on Iraq's liberation, but on the lie that Saddam had WMD which he might pass on to al Qaeda.
But Condi wants us all to know that she's "proud" of that intervention, an intervention which has turned out out to be one of the the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of her country.
And she remains "proud" even as she openly admits that the sanctions, which killed half a million Iraqi babies, had little effect at all on the regime. There were many of us arguing that at the time, but people like Condi simply were not listening. I find it slightly shameful that she can now so glibly admit what was so vociferously denied at the time.
McCain goes to great lengths to say that he is not running for Bush's third term, but the facts tell a very different story. Last year McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time. That is simply a fact. Maverick, he is not.
However, the truth is not so much that McCain represents a continuation of Bush, but that - much more damagingly - he represents a continuation of the neo-con policies which have proven so catastrophic over the last seven and a half years.
Carpenter believes that the more realist advisers such as Henry Kissinger on the McCain campaign are largely window-dressing to protect him from Democratic charges that he is really a neoconservative.
"John McCain is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the neoconservative movement when it comes to foreign policy," Carpenter said.
"The Democrats have to go on the offensive and stay on the offensive. The message has to be: John McCain and his foreign policy team are very, very dangerous for America," he added. "A worried American electorate on that score might very well shy away from McCain."
Few of McCain's top advisors are well known to the general public, and even fewer are directly linked to the highly unpopular Bush administration.
However neoconservatives, whose thinking has directed Bush's foreign policy following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, are ever-present and powerful in McCain's inner circle.
But John McCain is a not-so-modern type. One might call him a neo-Victorian — rigid, self-righteous and moralizing, but (or rather and) manly, courageous and principled. Maybe a dose of this type of neo-Victorianism is what the 21st century needs.
The best that Kristol can come up with is that he is "rigid, self-righteous and moralizing." And, of course, Kristol comes up with that other Republican obsession that McCain is "manly". For a party of homophobes, they really do some serious man-loving in order to sell their candidates "qualities" as a way of avoiding being confronted on their appalling policies.
And, in McCain's case, those are the policies of the neo-cons.
For the first time in four decades Iraq is preparing to allow four of the west's biggest oil companies to renew exploitation of the country's vast reserves .
Iraq's oil ministry stepped up talks with BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Total after the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, visited Iraq in March, where he also pressed the government to revive efforts to pass the hydrocarbon law that nationalist MPs were blocking. The first contracts are expected to be signed this month. Some 90% of Iraq's budget comes from oil revenues.
Iraq's oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, told the Guardian this week that the deals did not amount to the privatisation of the country's oil. But the four companies are heirs to the consortium given the concession to control Iraq's oil by King Faisal, the foreign Sunni Arab whom the British imposed on Iraq's majority Shia population after occupying the country during the first world war. They lost their right to explore new fields in 1961 after the monarchy was overthrown, and nationalisation followed under the Ba'ath party.
So, not since the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, not since the British told the Iraqis who their leader should be, have these four companies been allowed access to Iraq's oil.
And yet, here they are again, fitting symbols of the "liberation" that Bush has brought to this country.
There was no competitive bidding for the concessions, which are to be awarded to the four giants plus Chevron and some smaller companies.
But the deals, known as service contracts, are unusual, said Greg Mutitt, co-director of Platform, an oil industry research group. "Normally such service contracts are carried out by specialist companies ... The majors are not normally interested in such deals, preferring to invest in projects that give them a stake in ownership of extracted oil and the potential for large profits. The explanation is that they see them as a stepping stone..."
So, the "liberation" has taken Iraq backwards to the heady days when western oil companies were involved Iraq's oil industry, but it would be a cynic who claimed that this was the plan all along.
After all, who could deny that the Iraqi people have been "liberated"? Who, other than the worst anti-American cynic, could deny that the people of this battered war torn country are better off than they were under Saddam?
Under Saddam they at least had order, however brutal. Now they live in anarchy, their country ethnically cleansed, with Sunni and Shia populations segregated and separated by concrete walls.
But now, finally, we get to see a reward for all the suffering we have inflicted upon this battered nation. Now, finally, four western oil companies have managed to get their toes in the door and their fingertips on Iraq's oil production.
I would honestly send the people who have done this to jail.
The reaction from some on the right to the Supreme Court decision that Habeas Corpus applies to the men held at Guantanamo Bay has been as hysterical as expected, but Andy McCarthy has gone even further:
A Courtroom, er, Battlefield We Can Win On [Andy McCarthy]
An old government friend emails with a practical response to the Supreme Court:
Let's free all Gitmo detainees...on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start.
It says a lot about how deranged the American right have become that they now advocate killing people when they have utterly failed to find these people guilty of any crime.
They are now enraged that Bush should even be required to produce any evidence at all against men that he has held in custody for over six years.
Glenn Greenwald has a good piece up today contrasting the reaction of British conservatives like David Davis - resigning in protest over the state's encroachment of civil liberties - and the fact that the American right are on the other side of the conservative fence, demanding ever more state powers to arrest and detain and spy on the populace with utterly no oversight from the courts.
There really is no power that American conservatives would deny their government and, apparently, they want this power handed over without any oversight of any kind.
Let's remember, the Supreme Court did not demand that Bush and Co. release the prisoners on Guantanamo Bay, it merely asked that their guilt be proven before a court of law.
Why do so many conservatives on the American right find such a thing so scandalous? How far removed have they become from their own values during the Bush administration that the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" has become almost a swear word to them?
The neo-cons were always an extremist element within the Republican party and for the last seven years these extremists have come to represent the Republican mainstream. It is only when one looks at how offensive they regard what most people consider as legal norms that the scale of their utter extremism becomes so glaringly apparent.
The notion that people have the right to a trial before being detained is something that has been accepted as a norm in western society since 1215, and yet Andy McCarthy now jokes about gunning people down rather than affording them that basic right. He sees that as a "practical response" to the Supreme Courts decision.
These people are fanatical extremists, there really is no other way to describe them.
I'm with The Young Turks and McClellan on this one. This incident proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that President Bush is a liar.
He stated publicly that he would punish the leaker when he, himself, had authorised the leak. He's a liar. There's simply no other way to describe what he did.
That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.
The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.
