Middle East Policy

"Reputation is what men and women think of us. Character is what God and angels know of us. "

- Thomas Paine

So, instant poll. Which is funnier:

1. That Fox News has demanded that McCain pull an ad using the voice of Major Garrett, one of their correspondents...
2. Or that their reason is that "As Mr. Garrett is a non-partisan news correspondent covering the Obama campaign for Fox News, it is highly inappropriate, among other things, of your campaign to use him in your ad"?
   
3. Or that, in another "Yes, I'm TRYING to lose this election!" move, McCain's campaign refuses to take Garrett's voice out.
4. NONE of this is funny--"hah-hah," funny. This whole election is turning into a circus of amateur clowns, but if I weren't laughing, I'd be crying.
   

Poor Johnny Mac-- just can't seem to catch a break today. His VP pick is rapidly losing political support in her homestate of Alaska. Over at Newsweek, (thanks, Milena!) Jonathan Alterman tries to hang on as the Straight-Talk Expres veers all over the road. "With McCain, the United States would get the one thing investors most loath: uncertainty. On Tuesday, President McCain would say one thing, on Wednesday another and on Thursday and Friday he'd be back to what he said on Monday. At best, Uncle Ziggy would drive us all over the road; at worst, we'd be back in the ditch."

He also jumped on a story from the NY Post (Really? You're taking the NEW YORK Post seriously?): "The charge -- that Obama asked the Iraqis to delay signing off on a "Status of Forces Agreement," thus delaying U.S. troop withdrawal and interfering in U.S. foreign policy -- has been picked up on the Internet, talk radio and by Republicans, including the McCain campaign, which seized on the story as possible evidence of duplicity." BUT, "Attendees of the meeting back Obama's account, including not just Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., but Hagel, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffers from both parties. Officials of the Bush administration who were briefed on the meeting by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad also support Obama's account and dispute the Post story and McCain attack."

Obama seems more bemused by McCain' attacks than anything else.

On the trail in Florida, Obama also quoted McCain's comment in Contingencies magazine last year: "Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." Wow, what a great idea--innovative products in insurance, just like the credit default swap...hey-y-y-y-y-y, wait a minute...I know what YOU'RE trying to do...Fool me once, shame on...you-- fool...uh... you can't get fooled again...

Obama's comment: "So let me get this straight – he wants to run health care like they've been running Wall Street. Well, Senator, I know some folks on Main Street who aren't going to think that's such a good idea."

Eric Schmeltzer at HuffPo oberves that how the candidates have reponded to the financial turmoil could be used as a barometer for how they'd handle a crisis as President: "Barack Obama has displayed a pretty cool, calm, and consistent response to it all - focusing first and foremost on the need to do everything to settle and stabilize Wall Street ASAP...A President John McCain would become easily frustrated from criticism during an economic collapse, and react with the "shoot first, ask questions later" temperament that we've all become accustomed to. Oh yeah, and he might cause a depression." Short-Fused McCain. Oh yeah, him. The guy who shoots his own mouth off. And apparently owns 13 cars (but don't ask him about that or he'll get pissy.)

And George Will (GEORGE WILL? George "Conservative's Conservative" Will? The guy in the bow-tie? I'm still playing "who's the conservative here??") delivered another "Ow-ee" to Johnny Mac on This Week with George Stephanopoulos: "I suppose the McCain campaign's hope is that when there's a big crisis, people will go for age and experience," said Will. "The question is, who in this crisis looked more presidential, calm and un-flustered? It wasn't John McCain who, as usual, substituting vehemence for coherence, said 'let's fire somebody.' And picked one of the most experienced and conservative people in the administration, Chris Cox, and for no apparent reason... It was un-presidential behavior by a presidential candidate...John McCain showed his personality this week," said the writer and pundit, "and made some of us fearful."

By contrast, today's NY Times Magazine has a really interesting article that examines how Obama's teaching style reflects his approach to the political process in general. "Escuder saw his professor as 'a street smart academic' 'He wanted his students to consider the impact laws and judicial opinions had on real people.'" "Hess, who worked in Democratic politics before attending law school, told me he was impressed by his professor's ability to coolly analyze such an unpleasant confrontation. 'I thought it displayed a thoughtfulness,' he said. 'He would talk about race in a way that I doubt anyone had heard from their professor before, or I had heard from a politician before.' " Fascinating reading.

What if Obama consulted another past President of a professorial bent: Jed Bartlett? I guess I wasn't the only one weeping my way through West Wing reruns. Maureen Dowd consults with the show's writer Aaron Sorkin for details on a mythical Bartlett-Obama meeting.

By the way, Obama is spending a good bit of time in Florida this week as the St. Petersburg Times reports that the Palin nomination is actually helping turn swing voters in Florida towards Obama. Here's Obama at the Women for Change event on Friday. You might have heard soundbytes from this speech: "This morning Senator McCain gave a speech in which his big solution to this worldwide economic crisis was to blame me for it.This is a guy who's spent nearly three decades in Washington, and after spending the entire campaign saying I haven't been in Washington long enough, he apparently now is willing to assign me responsibility for all of Washington's failures." The whole thing is worth a listen though.

As the polls show Obama on the rise again, another alert observer has also wondered about pollsters and cellphones. I discovered to my great surprise, that apparently some pollsters DO call cellphones, though not all of them do. FiveThirtyEight.com--whose fine array of graphs and simulations have me mesmerized every time I visit their site--has a check of those pollsters who call cellphones. Averaging over the 36 pollsters who do though, 538 detects a statistically significant +2 point advantage for Obama.

Also I still find it interesting that no one is making more of the notion that sheer voter turnout this year was much higher for the Democratic primaries than Republicans. I know we're concentrating on swings and the supposed Hillary factor and the Palin bump (!) and all that, but doesn't the fact that 36.9 million people turned out for the Democratic primary/caucus--versus 20.8 million for Republicans-- mean something? Take Colorado, which went Bush in 2004, and which held its primary back in February even before Romney and Huckabee dropped out (and before Rush Limbaugh launched his "Operation Chaos" nonsense) The Democrats still drew out 120,000 people, versus 65,000 Republicans.

Ayn Rand "The Sound You Are Hearing is the Free-Market Squelch" Alert:

Here we come, walkin' down the street.
We get the funniest looks from
Ev'ry one we meet.
Hey, hey, we're the Monkees
And people say we monkey around.

Picking up after the financial mess (I'm still exhausted from last week's insanity. Could we not have any major failures this weekend?), In case you missed it in the hubbub, the new Bush Administration plan seems to propose, in three short pages, the process by which the Federal Government will nationalize--that is, seize-- any failing financial institutions, for the low, low price of $700 billion. Your dollars. Congress is whippin' approval for this thing through so fast that Rep. Barney Frank thought they could have this little $700 BILLION baby assembled baked and cooling by oh, say the end of next week. Next week? This is Congress, where Obama's resolution that a commemorative Rosa Parks stamp be issued took a month just to get referred to a Senate subcommittee last year.

Now, once again, it's not that I'm some big "free and untethered market" kinda gal, but isn't anyone else here disturbed by, oh, the unseemly haste with which we're going to allow the government to intervene in what are ostensibly private, unregulated markets? Wait, let me check-- we still have a Republican president, don't we?

ANYway, starting tomorrow, AIG is officially out of the Dow Jone Industrial Club. Given its...um..."situation" the powers-that-Be have taken AIG out of the list of 30 companies considered to be bellwethers for the market and are replacing it with Kraft Foods. Hope they're not making any Kraft products in China.

I'd like to believe that if any of us had actually understood what the heck was going on in (or even heard of) the derivative markets, we would have spotted the fly in the ointment early. Still, some people noticed, like Edward Chancellor, who--sort of eerily--describes the situation and the outcome we see today admirably in his 2007 article "Ponzi Nation." "The key feature of a Ponzi scheme is its need to attract ever greater sums of money. Ponzi finance, in Minsky's terminology, describes the condition of those who can neither repay the principal on their liabilities nor meet their interest payments from current cash flows. To survive they must refinance, either by selling assets or by raising more debt. For this to happen asset prices must continue to rise. Ponzi finance typically emerges during a speculative bubble, when the margin of safety has been extinguished." As a bonus, think about this little tidbit when you think about the "bailout" system shooting through Congress right now. "People balance risk with reward. Incremental improvements in safety are likely to be accompanied by more risk-taking activity." (Thanks, Daniel for the article!)

In case you follow him, the NY Times' resident economist Paul Krugman is also wary of the bailout procedure. "This could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market."

And if you appreciate the depressing way that NYT columnist Frank Rich always put thing into perspective, check out his column today which note that Mccain's is "not the résumé that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That's why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice."

In the Multimedia Corner:

• In surfing wildly around, I've also uncovered this YouTube mashup, "Baracky II" that's great for those moments when you're desperate for some silly fun.
• More silly fun: Even Alaskan Malamutes think Sarah Palin is insane. (I'd be careful Baron-- you look a bit like a wolf...keep your eyes on the sky for aerial hunters... After she gets crazy African healer Pastor Muthee to dispell your doggy demonic spells of course.)
  

• 

  In case you missed last night's Saturday Night Live sketch--written in part by Minnesota Senate candidate Al Franken-- it was hilarious. John McCain approving all kinds of outrageous attack ads.
• The English-language tape of that interview for a Miami radio station, the one in which McCain seemed to diss Spain's Prime Minister Zapatero, is now available online.
• In a recent trail-stop in Michigan, Would-be Fearless Leader McCain mixed up the National Guard and the Army: (quote starts 5:00 into the clip, in case you can't stand the sound of Sarah Palin' voice) "I also know, if I might remind you, that she is commander of the Alaska National Guard. In fact, you may know that on Sept. 11 a large contingent of the Alaska Guard deployed to Iraq and her son happened to be one of them. So I think she understands our national security challenges..." The ceremony Palin attended at Fort Wainwright last week didn't involve the Alaska National Guard. Palin's son is in the Army, and his unit - 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division - deployed to Iraq.
• Bill Clinton is scheduled to appear on The Daily Show this Tuesday, September 23.
• Also, Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising, will be available to download for free on September 23.
  
• Coming up this Friday, Sept 26, is our first Presidential Debate. It comes exactly one year to the day since the Democratic candidates held their own debate at Dartmouth, with Tim Russert moderating. God, I miss Tim. If there's one thing we need now, it's his no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase attitude.

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For this weekend, I'd like to look at Middle East Policy positions:

For a different sort of perspective, About.com has engaged Pierre Tristram--an Arab-American liberal columnist for the Daytona-Beach News- Journal-- to look at candidate positions on the Middle East.(Obama -- McCain) As always, you can also check the On the Issues site as well as candidate websites for more detailed info too.

Tristram's comments on Obama: "Barack Obama tries to have it both ways on many issues—withdrawing from Iraq but not entirely, negotiating with Iran but with bombing Iran always in mind, pledging to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but firmly maintaining an Israel-first approach. Obama regards American foreign policy damaged by decreasing moral authority and leadership. Obama blames the Bush Administration's unilateralism and belligerence at the expense of the more traditional approaches to foreign policy that served the country since World War II: cooperation with other nations, diplomacy through international institutions, including the United Nations, and the use of foreign aid, especially humanitarian assistance, as a tool of diplomacy."

• On Iraq: did not support Congress' 2002 authorization for war on Iraq.
  
• taken a decidedly and consistently anti-war stance based on the assumption that Iraq's Shiites and Sunnis are more likely to settle their differences without an American presence than under American occupation—especially if they are pressured into doing so by the threat of an imminent American withdrawal. "And the only effective way to apply this pressure," Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs, "is to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008—a date consistent with the goal set by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group."
  
• is opposed to a complete withdrawal: "We should leave behind only a minimal over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American personnel and facilities, continue training Iraqi security forces, and root out al Qaeda." Yet Obama wants to "make clear that we seek no permanent bases in Iraq."
• On Iran: has said the nuclear option against Iran should not be on the table even as the conventional-attack option does remain there. And he maintains that negotiating directly with Iran is a must: "Although we must not rule out using military force," Obama wrote, "we should not hesitate to talk directly to Iran. Our diplomacy should aim to raise the cost for Iran of continuing its nuclear program by applying tougher sanctions and increasing pressure from its key trading partners."
• On Terrorism: is an unabashed hawk on the war on terror, as well as on further building up the U.S. military (he wants to add 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines). "To defeat al Qaeda," he says, "I will build a twenty-first-century military and twenty-first-century partnerships as strong as the anticommunist alliance that won the Cold War to stay on the offense everywhere from Djibouti to Kandahar." Unlike his willingness to negotiate with Iran, Obama does not say that he would negotiate with al-Qaeda's leadership. Nor does he say whether he would use pre-emptive force, following the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive attack.
• On Pakistan-Afghanistan: Rather than a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, Obama sees a needed build-up of troops there, as well as the removal of restrictions on combat duties placed on some of the NATO forces. While running for the U.S. Senate in September 2004, he said missile strikes against Iran and Pakistan might be necessary to prevent extremists from acquiring nuclear weapons. In 2007, he said reducing aid to Pakistan, and attacking Pakistan proper, would be appropriate in the fight against al-Qaeda. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act," Obama said, "we will."
• On the Israel Palestine issue: Clearly more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight than most candidates. "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," he told Iowa voters in March. He blames Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, for stalling peace talks, as well as the Bush Administration, which, Obama says, has "neglected for years" the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
• Also aligns himself on Israel's side first: Our starting point must always be a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy." Obama is also non-committal on an actual peace plan.
  

Tristram's comments on McCain: "McCain's perspective is heavily influenced by dualist Cold War thinking: The United States must remain on the offensive against a pre-eminent enemy (currently, "Islamist extremists," who McCain does not define, and "al Qaeda's leadership"). It must do so unilaterally if necessary while mistrusting Russia and looking out for the possible emergence of China as a potential enemy and rival. While McCain recognizes the need for America's top military and foreign service experts to develop much greater understanding of Arab, Persian and Asian cultures and languages, his policies toward the Middle East appear indistinct from those of George W. Bush. A military presence in Iraq, under a McCain presidency, would likely be longer and more built-up. Military intervention against Iran would be likely, should Iran continue on its present course of acquiring nuclear technology—even if that technology were not yielding nuclear weapons. McCain would likely increase military aid to Pakistan (itself an Islamic nuclear power). He would also create, he says, a "League of Democracies" that would join democratic nations into an alternative to the United Nations: Where the U.N. doesn't or cannot act, McCain's "League of Democracy" would, whether to intervene militarily or to address humanitarian crises. The one word that sums up McCain's Middle East and foreign policy is this: interventionism."

• On Iraq: McCain disagreed with President Bush's execution of the war in Iraq only to the extent that it was not militarily overwhelming enough.
  
• McCain, along with 76 other senators, voted in 2002 to approve invading Iraq.
  
• never advocated withdrawal. but has advocated building up military forces in Iraq, and fully supported Bush's spring 2007 "surge".
  
• opposes "a withdrawal strategy that has no Plan B for the aftermath of this inevitable failure and the greater problems that would ensue."
  
• does not propose an exit strategy on his own terms, either. His plan is Bush's current plan: stay, fight, and see what happens.
• On Afghanistan: McCain considers the United States' and NATO's campaign in Afghanistan successful, based on the return of 2 million refugees, even though, as he wrote in Foreign Affairs, the Taliban's recent resurgence "threatens to lead Afghanistan to revert to its pre-9/11 role as a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach."
  
• On Iran: According to McCain, Iran is "the world's chief state sponsor of terrorism."
  
• Asked in a forum when the United States should send "an air mail message" to Iran in the form of bombs, McCain replied by singing the Beach Boys song, "Bomb Iran."
  
• advocates levying severe sanctions on Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons technology, then stepping up to military intervention if Iran doesn't comply.
  
• would work against other nations acquiring any kind of nuclear technology, even if it's for peaceful purposes: "The notion that non-nuclear-weapons states have a right to nuclear technology must be revisited," he says.
• On Israel and Palestine: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a priority for McCain.
  
• supported President Bush's "Road Map for Peace", but McCain has no peace plan for the region, other than to advocate further talks.
  
• The priority is continued support for Israel: "The next U.S. president must continue America's long-standing support for Israel," he writes, "including by providing needed military equipment and technology and ensuring that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge."
  
• supports Israel's separation wall with Palestinians.
• On terrorism: McCain has always been an enthusiastic supporter of the "war on terror" since its inception. "Only the most deluded of us," he said in his 2004 Republican National Convention speech, "could doubt the necessity of this war. Like all wars, this one will have its ups and downs. But we must fight. We must."
  
• would continue supporting Pakistan's military dictator, Pervez Musharraf (the United States has contributed $10 billion in aid, most of it military, to Pakistan since 2001) and "dismantle the cells and camps that the Taliban and al Qaeda maintain in his country." Since Musharraf has stepped down it's unclear what his new stance is.
  
• A Permanent Corps of American Para-Military Forces?:
  
• strongly supports fighting the "war on terror" through various means, including military intervention and covert special operations.
  
• supports a strategy of pre-emptive strikes where necessary.
  
• "We also need a nonmilitary deployable police force to train foreign forces and help maintain law and order in places threatened by state collapse." Should such a force materialize, the United States would, in effect, have a paramilitary force ready for deployment at a president's notice.

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44 days to the election. This is a reminder that, for many states, would-be voters must register well in advance of the elections. RockTheVote provides a convenient list of voter registration deadlines. As always, people in the swing states, get out there and REGISTER TO VOTE NOW! And if you're voting absentee, Declare Yourself has links to each state' voter information page where you can find out how to get your absentee ballot.

Playing with the NY Times' Make Your Own Electoral Map. This is all I ask: