Steve Clemons

After President Obama's moving UN General Assembly speech that started with a story of who US Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been in terms of his life's passion for the Middle East and North Africa, the Romney camp issued a statement from former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky:

In his speech, President Obama listed the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, Syria, and Iran as major challenges facing the international community.  But those are three vital issues on which President Obama has unfortunately made no progress. The Peace Process is at a standstill, tens of thousands have been killed in Syria with Assad still in power, and Iran is hurtling toward nuclear weapons capability.

In his 2009 speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama called for progress on the Peace Process and for an end to Iran's nuclear weapons program. Three years later, he's failed to deliver.  As has too often been the case with President Obama, the rhetoric doesn't match the policy.

The President and his national security team do deserve criticism for how some of these portfolios have been managed.  After all, Israel/Palestine had been the first major national security agenda item the President put his power and credibility behind, appointing former Senator George Mitchell to be his Envoy in seeking to secure real Middle East peace.

In a compelling but bleak New York Times assessment titled "Seven Lean Years of Peacemaking" by my New America Foundation colleague Daniel Levy, the negative results scream out.  Levy writes:

One thing is clear: The years from 2005 to 2012 have been seven decidedly lean ones for peacemaking and withdrawal and seven gluttonously fat ones for entrenching Israel's occupation and settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In these areas, almost 94,000 new settlers have been added since 2005, some settler outposts have been legalized and thousands of Palestinians have been displaced.

Obama should only get the blame for the 2009-2012 part of this portfolio -- but the failure to get Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on to a credible peace track with Palestinians has enormous strategic consequences for the country.

Dobriansky tells only part of the story as it was in both 2009 and 2010 that President Obama committed substantial portions of his UN General Assembly addresses to the problems of Palestine and Israel.  In 2010, he pointedly criticized the unwillingness of the parties to come together and pushed George Mitchell and others on his team to double down and get a deal done.  Obviously, with the resignations of both Senator Mitchell and Dennis Ross who had been Obama's Middle East wrangler on his National Security Team (both of whom had often worked at cross-purposes), ended Obama's efforts thus far on securing Middle East peace.

These results deserve both to be highlighted and criticized -- so thanks to Ambassador Dobriansky.

That said, would her candidate Mitt Romney do any better?

Yesterday we were given what were perhaps some of the most thoughtful comments yet expressed by Governor Romney on the turmoil in the Middle East and what can be done in response.  While his comments were not Palestine-specific and this may be the first time I have heard Romney address foreign policy and not make a single mention of Israel, his broad survey of the Middle East region and his assessment of the youth cover Palestine. 

Romney makes the sensible point that jobs matter, that economics is a major driver of both hope and desperation.    

Work has to be at the heart of our efforts to help people build economies that can create jobs, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem. It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work does not long tolerate corruption nor will it quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hard-working men and women. To foster work and enterprise in the Middle East and other developing countries I will initiate something I will call Prosperity Pacts, working with the private sector the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. And, in exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to U.S. investment and trade, developing nations will receive U.S. assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law, and property rights ....

The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work, and the fostering of free enterprise. Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives and nations more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America's own economy, and that is that free people pursuing happiness in their own ways, build a strong and prosperous nation.

Whether Romney is right or not, his jobs talk and the notion of "Prosperity Pacts" are a step ahead of the rhetoric that typecasts instability in the Middle East as a function of Islamic culture and fanaticism.  And the fact is that the Obama administration's policy towards places like Egypt and Palestine, Tunisia, and Libya is to try to lay groundwork for investment, aid, and jobs. 

So, Romney and the Obama administration actually are on similar tracks.  But the scale of what is needed in the region is staggering -- and small US programs or bland talk about job creation by the GOP presidential challenger doesn't come near to the level of economic course correction the region needs.

The more disconcerting gap between rhetoric and action is not on Obama's docket, however, but on Romney's.

What it not Mitt Romney who said at a fundraiser regarding Israel-Palestine peace, "this is going to remain an unresolved problem."

As Bill Clinton said during his Democratic National Convention speech, "it takes some brass to criticize the President for something you have done yourself."  In this case, it's out of place to take Obama down a notch on Israel-Palestine when your own candidate has no intention of trying to resolve the geostrategically significant ulcer.

And even more disconcerting were Romney's comments in Jerusalem about "culture" being the dividing line between the economic performance of Israel vs. Palestine.  As reported by Ashley Parker and Richard A. Oppel Jr., Romney said:

"Culture makes all the difference," Mr. Romney said. "And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things."

He added, "As you come here and you see the G.D.P. per capita, for instance, in Israel, which is about $21,000, and compare that with the G.D.P. per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality. And that is also between other countries that are near or next to each other. Chile and Ecuador, Mexico and the United States."

Notwithstanding Romney's significant errors on the GDP gap between Israel and Palestine, it's outrageous to assess Palestine's economic potential without considering that all they have done has been done under Occupation, with barriers to travel and commerce embedded throughout their territory which Israel occupies and dominates, often brutally.

It's easy to talk about jobs and "Prosperity Pacts", but tougher to put them into motion in addressing the economic needs of a growing MENA youth bulge that needed a massive number of jobs yesterday.

To make this interesting, I dare Mitt Romney to test his thesis personally in the way that former World Bank President James Wolfensohn did.  Wolfensohn invested his own money in an effort to get Palestinian-grown strawberries to markets in Europe and worked out deals with the Israelis and established a greenhouse project and processing infrastructure at Israel's Karni Crossing.  To make a long and sad story short, even the great James Wolfensohn failed to overcome Israeli arbitrariness in what it allowed and didn't in terms of earnest Palestine commerce with the rest of the world.

Let's see if Mitt Romney can devote a small bit of his fortune to getting a business up and running in Palestine.  Perhaps he could meet with his new employees and hear what they have to do to connect with their families and what humiliations they go through trying to get their kids to school or trying to take products to market.

Perhaps Romney would succeed in ways others in Palestine have not, but until then, it seems that, as Dobriansky framed it, the gap between rhetoric and results on the Romney vision for the region seems insurmountable.

Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, previously a GOP presidential and vice-presidential hopeful, has jumped ship and resigned as co-chairman of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. 

Romney's team issued a statement incorrectly stating that Pawlenty would take over as chairman and CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable. 

Pawlenty will actually become president and CEO of the organization, succeeding former Dallas Mayor and Member of Congress Steve Bartlett, who has been serving as president of the Financial Services Roundtable since 1999.  Allstate CEO Thomas Wilson is the chairman of the Roundtable.

But one wonders whether Pawlenty, who has been on everyone's very short list for a likely high level cabinet post in a Romney White House, has just given up on Romney. Clearly a lot of other Republicans are on edge.  Rich Lowry's surprising blast at the GOP candidate is a case in point.

I asked a seasoned insider closely following the day to day operations of Team Romney:

Are people surprised by Pawlenty's move 48 days before the election?

Answer:

Well, let me put it this way - it's a great job for T-Paw, but not a better job than a cabinet secretary. If Romney were running five points ahead in the polls I doubt Pawlenty would've jumped ship.

There it is. Congratulations to Tim Pawlenty on FSR. Probably a smart move, and as good a political indicator as any of Obama/Romney trends.

Joe Cirincione, one of the nation's sharpest minds on nuclear weapons policy, just highlighted in Foreign Policy yet another big gulp moment in the viral video of Mitt Romney triggering shock and awe (wrong kind of awe though) across the political world.  Cirincione speculates, based on the recording, that Mitt knows little of nukes and even less of dirty bombs.  And the difference matters, big time.

Cirincione picks up something few others did in this clip from the Romney fundraiser:

If I were Iran, if I were Iran -- a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, "Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb." I mean this is where we have -- where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don't have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

--Mitt Romney, May 17, 2012

The Ploughshares Fund President and former Carnegie Endowment and Center for American Progress nuclear wunderkind (approaching wunderelder) then implies that Romney isn't up to the job he is seeking and doesn't understand what may be the premier responsibility of the American president in a still-nuclear world.  Cirincione writes:

Governor Mitt Romney's description, caught on video, of what he considered the real nuclear threat from Iran has further undermined his national security credentials, showing a fundamental misunderstanding of nuclear threats. Iran's nuclear program has nothing to do with dirty bombs. Terrorists would not use uranium -- from Iran or anywhere else -- in a dirty bomb. It is unclear if Gov. Romney was just riffing, or if his advisors had fed him this line of attack. But it is dead wrong.

Nuclear bombs are serious business, and preventing their spread and their use against the United States is perhaps the paramount duty of the president, who, of course, is also responsible for any decision to use America's own arsenal.

Does Romney really not know the difference between a dirty bomb, which as Cirincione points out has never been used, and a nuclear warhead?  Does Romney know that no matter what bomb Iran manages to put together, if it assembles one, that it will be primitive, and not have anywhere near the magnitude, destructive ability and lethality of any of the single thermonuclear warheads in Israel's sizable arsenal?  Nuclear weapons are a dangerous business -- so too the materials that could contribute to a dirty bomb; but how one deals with each of these types of threats is radically different. 

President Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, has done a commendable job restoring global concern about nuclear materials management.  Obama hosted a major global summit in Washington focused on nuclear materials controls; got a revised START arms control treaty back in place with the Russians; used the US presidency of the UN Security Council three years ago to focus on nuclear and WMD proliferation.  Obama and Biden know the entire nuclear terrain well.

Let's think the unthinkable for a moment.  If Governor Romney got that 3 am call and learned that a dirty bomb had been successfully deployed in a US city, or perhaps in Israel or another ally, would he launch a nuclear weapon in retaliation?  These questions matter -- and it's not clear that Romney has the wherewithal at the moment to understand the responsibilities the US President carries for globlal nuclear stewardship.

In the mid-1980s, I had the privilege of working with RAND nuclear strategist and former USAF General Glenn Kent, who recently passed in April of this year, on an arms control related 'currency system' called "Standard Weapon Stations."  In its obituary, RAND recognized Kent for "devising the framework that would serve as the U.S. government's general plan for nuclear war from 1961 to 2003."

Without going into too much detail, one of the technical problems in US-Soviet arms control at the time was trying to find a way to ease the comparison and trade-offs between a widening variety of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.  There were the slow-moving but powerful B-52 nuclear warhead-laden fleet, MIRVed and non-MIRVed warheads on a variety of nuclear missiles, some of which were launched from fixed but hardened sites, some on tracks, some on subs, some miniaturized and highly mobile on cruise missiles. Miles Pomper, Jeffrey Lewis (aka Arms Control Wonk), or William Potter could issue dozens of other innovative ways that the US President or Soviet Premier could blow up a large chunk of the world.  The differentiation in missile warhead throw-weight and accuracy made negotiating across this complex portfolio more than just a political problem -- but also a genuinely technical one.

When trading apples and oranges, or trading GLCMs for SLCMs or more, Glenn Kent smartly thought one needed a currency, or metric, that allowed easy trading of dissimilar nuclear weapons commodities.  Kent wasn't popular for this, nor I for me enthusiasm for his idea, because most thought that we were distracted by a gimmick and not understanding that politics more than anything else drove the deal-making.

What was fascinating at the time is that no matter who was President of the United States -- Ronald Reagan then and Jimmy Carter just before, or the people who wanted to rise up and challenge them like Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, eventually Bob Dole, Bill Bradley, Richard Lugar, John Anderson and more -- everyone had a basic, grounded understanding of nuclear weapons, their dangers, and an approximate understanding of America's arsenal as compared to the Soviets.  Folks at the time would joke about whether Ronald Reagan really had a grasp of the nuclear dangers and systems he was frequently speaking about. 

There was a rumor that possibly was urban legend (never have been able to find the quote) that Reagan thought a submarine-launched ballistic missile could be called back after launch.  I doubt Reagan said this -- but even if he had, Reagan knew enough about nukes after many tutorials and discussions with hydrogen bomb father and nuclear hawk Edward Teller that Reagan respected the devastation that a nuclear conflagration could generate.

I happened to be with Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter at West Point one day in the 1980s on the morning that the Los Angeles Times' Robert Scheer wrote about a leaked private letter from then President Ronald Reagan to Albert Wohlstetter, a direct and personal one, asking the famed conservative nuclear strategist to outline for Reagan's second term the key strategic opportunities and pitfalls facing the United States.  Wohlstetter was furious about Scheer's article and refused to discuss publicly what he might share with Ronald Reagan. 

But what one could surmise from both Reagan's letter and Wohlstetter's response is that the actor-turned-Governor-turned-President knew a lot about nukes.

It's not clear that Mitt Romney meets the Ronald Reagan bar -- or the bar set by any other US President in his fundamental appreciation for the nuclear weapons realities the White House must manage. 

One hopes that one of the anchors in the upcoming Presidential debates will pose a nuclear weapons related question to Governor Romney and President Obama. 

Note to the Governor:  a good place to start his tutorial on Iran would be a chat with CSIS' Anthony Cordesman who can give him a candid, Herman Kahn-style rundown on who will be the victor and vanquished in an Israel-Iran nuclear tiff (hint: not Tehran). 

Next, Dana Priest's well-researched and compelling profile of America's deteriorating nuclear weapons stockpile is another fantastic resource.  I'd probably count on Joe Biden and Barack Obama each being totally up to speed on all of this.

Good luck to the Governor in those debates should this topic come up.

Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan has accomplished something quite important. At both conventions, in the corner rooms of Charlotte and Tampa organized by media groups and political activist outfits, serious discussions unfolded about the real state of the economy and the different policy approaches Americans needed to consider.

Paul Ryan is the most ideologically severe vice-presidential candidate in a century, a commentator said at a National Journal/Atlantic economic-policy dinner done on a not-for-attribution basis. But nearly everyone credits his selection with igniting a debate about tough choices on the economy that politicians and presidents have been ducking for decades. The clear consensus emerging out of Tampa's GOP convention and the DNC's in Charlotte is that there is a real choice being offered to Americans. The first option is "rigorous austerity" that could even further gut America's middle class and take the fallen standard of living to new lows. The second is a limited Keynesian approach that tries to reform while slashing spending.

There are also a couple of themes that aren't getting much air time but which deserve to be kicked around.

One of these, a charge leveled by Democrats about themselves, is that the Democrats have really screwed up -- twice. The argument goes like this: Back in the '90s, while the economy was expanding, the IT bubble was bubbling, and capital gains churning was filling federal and state coffers, Clinton -- guided primarily by his economic mentor and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- helped ignite a financial-sector privileged wealth production machine that didn't take into account the long-term consequences of American manufacturing decamping to foreign shores.

In other words, Clinton pushed the Uruguay Round of GATT, set up China's membership in the WTO, and removed the important barriers that divided retail banking from securities trading. Clinton was highly influenced by the economic-policy practitioners on his team who carried with them all of the biases of neoliberal economics. Those who focused on the importance of manufacturing, of the role of government in seeing to the parts of the economic environment markets would not sustain, the importance of high-wage job creation, were pushed aside.

This is also exactly what happened during the first two years of the Obama administration, where those of a neoliberal persuasion prevailed over those who wanted to concentrate first on a serious jobs and infrastructure program.

That discussion came up frequently in the meetings in Charlotte. Arianna Huffington even held a "shadow convention" (as she also did in Tampa) on the subject of what is really working and what not in job creation in the United States. She believes that the Democrats on the whole are not having a serious debate about the jobs crisis today and have not taken responsibility for their own mistakes in favoring banks' survival over that of families losing their homes and jobs on a massive scale. 

To be fair to President Obama, he inherited skyrocketing unemployment, collapsing global economy when he moved into the White House, and did take steps that stopped further, probably catastrophic implosion. He called on people like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner in part because the world respected them and Obama needed to stop a global confidence crisis that was aggravating underlying economic instability. 

But Obama allowed voices like Austan Goolsbee, Jared Bernstein, and Paul Volcker to be sidelined, while really technical financial and economic geniuses like George Soros never got in the door. Obama allowed the neoliberal, macroeconomic financial-sector-über-alles types to prevail over the micro-economic jobs, housing, and manufacturing voices. 

Obama has shifted now and is pushing a jobs and infrastructure program that many Dems I spoke to in Charlotte say he should have led with in his administration. Ironically, the financial sector crowd that Obama bailed out are giving donations in droves to Mitt Romney, while many in the small donor base that previously supported Obama have lost their jobs and their homes and their willingness to send in $3.00 for a chance to play basketball or have dinner with the president.

Another of the issues being kicked around is whether Americans are indeed worse off or are better off than they were four years ago.

At the National Journal/Atlantic dinner mentioned above, a prominent pollster said that there is no doubt Americans are better off. In his view, the global economy was going over a cliff, the mounting job losses were staggering, and America was facing a genuine potential depression. He said that most today, however dissatisfied with the status quo, know that jobs are being slowly created, that the recovery is really happening albeit slowly, and that the economy is heading generally in the right direction.

National Journal's Jim Tankersley, however, disputes that assessment in a powerful piece that should be read in full. In the opening clip, he writes:

The middle class in America today is not better off than it was four years ago, not better off than it was at the end of the Great Recession in 2009, not even better off than when President Clinton left office in 2001.

This is the truth that Democrats must confront as they anchor their national convention theme in Charlotte on vows of support for American workers: The middle class has been declining for more than a decade, including through the Obama recovery.

Inflation-adjusted median income fell by 2.3 percent in 2010 (the last year for which official statistics are available) and dipped below $50,000 per year for the first time since 1996, the Census Bureau reports. Real median weekly wages last quarter were lower than at the same time in 2002 -- and down 1.5 percent from the second quarter of 2010.

Ouch. Tanerksley is right. Americans are down and out, and on whole more down and out than when Obama came in, even if the original downward momentum wasn't the president's fault.

Reuters

I thought President Obama's decision to surge troop levels in Afghanistan was a strategic mistake and only deepened the black hole of costs in blood and treasure that the US had already invested and raised expectations in Afghanistan of an equilibrium in their lives that that would tilt more toward jobs and hope than toward despair and political disappointment.

That said, I think that the other tools of statecraft -- ranging from development aid to people-to-people exchanges, digital diplomacy to media focused on human rights, all of this -- is appropriate and important, even if the results seem less dependable than what some (misguidedly) think can be achieved by sending in troops and tanks. 

Part of me thinks that America now owes the best and brightest in Afghanistan, promising youth who believe in education and modernity, an opportunity to get out of the country. 

As America pulls out of Afghanistan, power throughout much of the country will become more fluid, aggrandized and fought over by resurgent warlords, Taliban networks, and some loyal to the government in Kabul. Many Afghans I speak to and hear from believe that a new, bloody civil war will come -- and that those who worked in Kabul, who worked professionally in government, and had interaction with the West will be major targets for Taliban vengeance squads.

Dark days are probably coming for the Afghan people -- at least some of them; darker than the bleak situation now.

I maintain correspondence with quite a number of people inside the country -- some journalists, some who work in ministries, some students.  I received a letter from a friend whose identity I must protect. 

I am going to post his letter here with permission.  I am not going to edit his letter, though I realize that his English is challenging.  He nonetheless manages to convey very well the tension of what he calls the "real scene" in Afghanistan -- and thus will leave the words and grammar as they are.

This guy is brave -- and has been very helpful to numerous associates of mine.  He is completely trapped in a situation that he feels could result in his being killed, and in my view he is the kind of person that the United States and Europe need to know and deal with in future years in Afghanistan.. 

From an Anonymous Reader of this blog:

The Real Scene: My Nightmare in Afghanistan

Mr. Kabir is a 28 year old young man, whose father was originally from Gaghato district of Ghazni province. But his poor luck is that he has a mother of totally different background as she is originally belonging to Pashtun ethnicity of Laghman province.

Mr. Kabir is government employee and has been working as a translator/interpreter in one of government offices in Kabul. With diverse parental background, he has experienced tough conditions and now culturally sensitized to the sore impact of his parents verbal fighting throughout their life since the time he know the bad and good things in life.

Mr. Kabir is a young, educated, open-minded, less religious oriented person who chose to study, work and live in his country together with his parents and still has been living with his mother as he recently lost his father who was suffering from cancer. This young man is
apparently very shy, family oriented, conservative and less developed minded person who is very discreet and has always lived with so much respect and trust to his mother and all people elder than him. So much respect, less motivation and other fear factors which are normal stuff with everyone in their culture have been the main reasons for causing him not to grow faster, not to take advantage of the opportunities came on his way since the fall of the Taliban in last 10 years.

Since he graduated from the university in 2007, he has been working with different NGOs and government offices in Kabul. Five years of working experience have given him nothing yet and he still struggles and couldn't manage to build a reliable foundation for his future life. In addition, as mentioned before his native province from Mother Side is Laghman and his mother and his mother's relative are Pashtun.

When he worked for almost two years his mother started to think about his marriage so she forced her son to marry her niece who is totally an uneducated girl, never lived in the city and has been far away grown up in a poor rural village of Laghaman and despite all in an extremist Islamist family in northern district of Laghman province.

After his marriage, Kabir's in-laws are all now know that Kabir is an interpreter and working with infidels (according to most of Pashtun people living in Afghan villages, they call infidel to anyone who is working and is colleague with Afghan government and foreigners). So they have recently started threatening him to stop working and leave the country unless he faces the music as other interpreters and colleagues of infidels have faced.

They told him to send back their daughter and the baby son who was born only two months ago in Kabul. Now, Kabir is finding himself in a totally disastrous stage of his life.  Shall he leave the country with his family or has to send his wife and 2 month old son back to his in-laws family and also accept beheading by his very close relatives???

The scenario is totally complicated, there are more reasons that why he accepted to marry a rural girl and why still haven't done anything despite all these threats.

In Kabir's opinion, less than 10 million Afghan will remain alive in their country until 2020. According to the knowledge he has from the situation in his country and real stories from local people of his Mother province, Taliban will take the control over most parts of Afghanistan and will start killing people, especially those who have worked foreigners and government during past decade.

Some estimations which ISI of Pakistan predicts are as five million Afghans who have worked or had link with the Afghan government shall be killed or imprisoned. More than Five million Afghan will flee their country to the countries other than their neighbors and the remaining number will either chose to stay under Taliban regime or will flee to neighboring countries. Most number of people who are now either working or have link with the current government will lose their lives.

Kabir is one of thousands of those people who is extremely vulnerable and now recent threats have compelled him to think of finding a way out of his native country. On daily basis, Taliban is killing more than fifty Afghans including Afghan security forces and civilians and at least more than five to ten foreigners and anyone who have link or work with the government (visit Pajhwak Afghan News). Death and mortality rate is far higher than the figures which are being reflected by local and international media.

Laghaman province, for example, has recently turned to one of bloodiest area than it never been before. One of Kabir's relatives who visited him in Kabul told him about the story of their young fellow relative execution scenario that happened in mid-August 2012 in this province.

Faiz Mohammad who has worked for more than five years in Iran has returned forcedly by IRAN security forces, has joined his family six months ago. In recent months he was working for one of concrete brick factory when he met Janan who had been operating for Taliban in Maidani area, around 200-300 meter north of Mehterlam capital of Laghman province.

By taking benefit of his friendship with Faiz Mohammad, Janan was always making his friend to help him with shopping groceries from Mehtarlam for all the group members of Janan who have been engaged in militant activities in the area. Once, Afghan security forces received the report about Janan and the security forces were almost about to capture Janan.

But Faiz Mohammad helped him and covered him with women clothes in a wedding party in their villager's house. Police searched the house but couldn't manage to find Janan who had worn women clothes and they remained unsatisfied with the search operation so they called their woman police colleague to search the women's rooms inside the wedding party.  In this interval, Janan managed to call his Talib colleagues and told them that most likely Faiz Mohammad, his friend has reported about his whereabouts to the Police.

After the call ended, Janan came out from women's room and opened fire with his gun on police men who were waiting for their women colleague, in retaliation, Janan and three police men are killed. When it was the burial gathering of Janan, Faiz Mohammad, his close friend also took part in the burial gathering. After the burial, Janaan's friends and Talib colleagues has arrested Faiz Mohammad and blamed him for reporting about Janaan to the police, however, Faiz Mohammad was totally innocent and has just helped him during last months.

Taliban a little far from the cemetery told Faiz Mohammad to call his brothers about to carry his death body from the Besram area where the cemetery was located, later Taliban shot dead Faiz Mohammad and then his brothers carried his dead body. It is one of the examples of how more than fifty people are being killed in Afghanistan on daily basis.

Kabir now has to find way to live and escape the death threat which has been posed on him by his very close relatives - his in-laws. Serial killing of innocent people by Taliban is continuing with the killing of two to ten people every night only in Laghman province as an example of a relatively peaceful province in the country.

This is the kind of guy the West should be helping to escape Afghanistan.  He is clearly intelligent, modern, and has placed his bet on a better, modern future for his country -- in part because of expectations raised by nations who invaded.

More »

The New Yorker has just published a gripping, must read piece for those following the horrible convulsions inside Syria titled "The War Within" by Jon Lee Anderson on the diverse array of bosses, ideologues, thugs and strategists animating the Syrian opposition today.

I highly recommend it -- and think that his characterization of the conflict as now indisputably a civil war is sobering, particularly for those advocating deep intervention by the US and Europe:

For months, policymakers and pundits have debated whether Syria was in a state of civil war. Today, it undeniably is, but not in the schoolbook sense of the phrase, with its connotation of two tidily opposed sides--Yanks and Rebs squaring off at Antietam. Instead, the war comprises a bewildering assortment of factions. Most of the rebels, like seventy-five per cent of Syria's citizens, are Sunni Arabs, while the Assad regime is dominated by Alawites, members of a Shiite offshoot that makes up about eleven per cent of the population. But the country also has Christians of several sects, Kurds, non-Alawite Shiites, and Turkomans, along with Palestinians, Armenians, Druze, Bedouin nomads, and even some Gypsies. Each group has its own political and economic interests and traditional alliances, some of which overlap and some of which conflict. There are Kurds who are close to the regime and others who are opposed. Around the cities of Hama and Homs, the regime's paramilitary thugs are Alawite; in Aleppo, hired Sunnis often do the dirty work.

Another clip that I wanted to share mentions a Syrian opposition chief, an Islamist "who calls himself Abu Anas", relying on Google Earth and lap top video clips of his fighters. Anderson profiles a number of key opposition personalities, all driven by radically different impulses but for now united in opposing Bashar al-Assad. Abu Anas heads the Islamist group that bombed the inner sanctum of Syrian military intelligence killing al-Assad's closest military chiefs and brother-in-law and resulting in al-Assad's brother losing his leg:

A young aide brought some photo-copied Google Earth maps of Azaz, and Abu Anas, pointing out what had been the enemy's key positions, explained how the rebels had taken the town. "First, we cut off their water and electricity," he said. "Then we gradually surrounded them and shot at them and tried to get them to fire back at us until they ran out of ammunition." The final battle had stretched for twenty-four hours, he said, and ended only when some of Assad's soldiers began defecting. On a laptop, he showed a film clip, in which his men fired furiously at regime soldiers inside the mosque and then surged inside themselves. "We killed and captured some and some escaped," he said. "They tried to get out of town, but we ambushed and killed most of them." Abu Anas had taken some wounded men prisoners, but found that he didn't have enough medicine even for his own fighters. "We couldn't look after them, so we let them die," he said.

The stories emerging of house to house killings by Syrian regime-supporting thugs as well as the summary executions of Syrian soldiers and captured officials by Syrian opposition forces while horrible don't quite convey the degree to which the internal tensions are not only a zero sum game between opposition and regime. Jon Lee Anderson conveys this well in his essay.

The internal complexity of a future Syria -- made worse by meddling neighbors and superpowers -- will most likely make this an ongoing horror story with few answers, and a platform of convenience for proxy fights between interests tied to Russia, Iran and China and those supported by the US, Europe, Turkey and Sunni-led governments in the region.

Harvard scholar Stephen Walt argues in his Foreign Policy piece, "Why Isn't Anyone Talking about Afghanistan?" that hawkishness is rewarded by the national security establishment and that those agitating for prudence or moderation are shunned or called "weak-willed idealists."

The Obama campaign four years ago called Afghanistan the 'right war' and Iraq the 'wrong war.' Those who sat on top of the foreign policy/national security food chain in Washington were those who drew their power from the Afghanistan conflict.  Former National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, General David Petraeus, then US Ambassador to Afghanistant General Karl Eikenberry, General Stanley McChrystal, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and others leaned in to the Afghanistan terrain in part because it was a national priority but also because that was where status could be claimed.

But as Walt describes, few are talking about Afghanistan today even though Obama administration supporters of the war incessantly justified it with rationalizations about preventing a state-sized terrorist safe haven, supporting Afghan women's rights, spreading democracy, or shoring up US credibility.

When Obama was considering 'surging' US troop levels in Afghanistan up by 30,000 more military personnel, there were many who counseled against it -- inside the administration like Vice President Joe Biden and many others outside.  They counseled against the deeper investment of US lives and resources not on pacifist grounds but through realistic calculations of costs and benefits.

The strategic class in Washington had decided to make Afghanistan the war it wanted -- and upped the annual cost of the conflict to more than $120 billion a year i a country with a $14 billion GDP.  Nations like Iran, China, Pakistan, and others watched America draw itself more deeply into a conflict that was telegraphing military overstretch to allies and foes alike.

I once asked a senior policy planner from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs what China's grand strategy was -- and he half-joked that China simply counted on the US to remain distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.

Editorials ranging from the very liberal The Nation to the much more conservative, Nixonian-realist-right The National Interest suggested that Afghanistan could break the back of the Obama administration and sacrifice American internationalism while energizing a resurgent isolationism. 

Some like me argued that it was impossible to prevail in Afghanistan when America was at war with Pakistan's allies and proxies -- and when the solution required as my colleague Steve Coll has often written, a real rapprochement between India and Pakistan, which I didn't believe would be possible within a period of budget-patience by frustrated and increasingly job-stressed American tax-payers.

Now the strategic class is running for cover.  There are no well-known names who have staked their credibility on achieving success in Afghanistan.  On Obama's national security team, General Doug Lute stands out as one who has remained in the mix, but he's not a well-known policy star outside of the Afghanistan policy ghetto.  Marc Grossman, who succeeded Richard Holbrooke, is another at the State Department.  One other is Petraeus and McChrystal successor ISAF Commander General John Allen who is rarely in the media other than apologizing for wayward drone strikes or military missions that went awry.  But no others posture themselves as Afghanistan policy czars today because they know it's a sinking ship and disaster.

If there was justice in foreign policy, people like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Thomas Pickering, Stephen Walt, Paul Pillar, former Senator Chuck Hagel, Vice President Joe Biden, Anatol Lieven, Flynt Leverett, Juan Cole, Sherle Schwenninger, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Michael Lind, Lawrence Wilkerson and others would be given salutes for having offered important but neglected counsel when the US ramped up a war that would never be worth more than its staggering costs -- higher even today with this news of seven more US soldiers dead.

I don't speak Arabic -- though I recently ordered the beginner module from Rosetta Stone which still sits in its wrapper on my desk shelf.  (I am in the Arab world a lot however and learning more each trip) Perhaps after the conventions.

But a friend, Foued Mokrani, speaks Arabic just fine -- and reported on his Facebook page the following after watching a film during a flight to Paris:

I watched the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and noticed they translate the word ''gay" to ''pervert" in the Arabic subtitles!!  Very dumb.

He continued, responding to a person who really loved the film:

Nice movie.  They should sue the translator.

The exchange intrigued me -- and obviously raised the question of what the right word in Arabic might be for "gay" and in my own inexperience with the language whether there was such a word at all.

Another commenter on Mokrani's page wrote:

Maybe "homosexual" in Arabic takes too many letters.  They had to choose something shorter for the subtitles.

Mokrani responded:

Somehow there is no decent word to say homosexual in Arabic. . .They started recently using a word
for it but still very unfamiliar one.

When I wrote to Mokrani about this, intrigued that a language as distinguished, beautiful and storied as Arabic would not have been modernized to include "homosexual" in its basic vocabulary, he wrote this to me:

In Arabic, there is no exact word to say "homosexual."  People use bad words like faggot, pervert, or just use the sentence "liking people from same sex."  Recently, a few people started using the word "mithli" modifying the word for "sex" -- meaning "same as me".

What they used in the movie is "pervert" to translate the word gay -- or "cheth" in Arabic.

The same word was used by my Imam when I met him as a young guy and told him I like men.

Still intrigued, I called Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, to see whether what I was hearing was right or not -- and ask how he would say the word "gay."  Al-Omari just happened to be walking into a lecture he was giving to a bunch of foreign service students on the topic of Arabic language, so the timing was perfect.

Al-Omari texted me after his lecture:

I have it on good authority that the word is "mithli al-jins" (which is a literal translation of "homosexual"), sometime shortened to "mithli" which is the literal translation of "homo."

Other commenters on the Mokrani thread wrote that Arabic also tends to describe gays as deviants -- using words like "munharif" and "shadh."

There are lots of struggles inside Arab terrain today -- about human rights, about the role of women, about gays, religion, education, about modernity in general -- but inclusive language that buttresses society's evolution and advancement seems important.
 
To that end, translators of American movies -- like the terrific and heartwarming The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel -- really ought to preference words like "homosexual" or even "homo" in their Arabic form over "pervert" or "deviant."  That might help move hearts and minds in the right direction.

Paul Ryan's budget plan will define Mitt Romney, and Joe Biden's early focus on jobs and infrastructure is what President Obama finally embraced.

Mitt Romney has just made the same mistake John McCain made in picking a vice presidential candidate that folks will talk more about than they will talk about the top of the ticket. Romney has flip-flopped on so many issues, and seems so inchoate in his core views, that the clarity of running mate Paul Ryan will now define him.

Conversely, what has always been clear about the Obama-Biden ticket is that Obama defines in people's minds what the ticket stands for. What is less recognized but important is that Vice President Joe Biden is the one who has built out the policy parameters of the president's jobs and infrastructure bill, which will be the key weapon that Obama uses against the Romney-Ryan team.

The vice-presidential debate on October 11 at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, will likely be the most important of the ticket-vs.-ticket debates. This is because the divide between Paul Ryan's political agenda, as defined by his budget, and the smart investment strategy that Joe Biden and his former economic adviser Jared Bernstein have been pushing, will be starker than any of the issues that Obama and Romney will debate.

The media are now saturated with good analyses of how Ryan's budget would sculpt America's budgetary future. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer has a particularly nice rundown showing what the consequences of the Ryan budget would be: raising $2.2 trillion less in taxes, and spending $5.3 trillion less, over 10 years than the Obama budget. To be brief, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid would be slashed -- but as Plumer points out, Ryan would cut income-security programs for the poor by 16 percent, transportation expenses and investment by 25 percent, spending on science and technology by 6 percent, and investment in education, training, and other social services by 33 percent.

At the same time, Ryan wants to reduce the Obama Administration's cuts to defense spending growth and, along with Romney, wants to boost defense spending, perhaps pegging defense spending to a specific percentage of GDP regardless of rising or falling threats. Romney has suggested a peg of 4 percent of GDP, which would boost defense spending above current levels by another $100 billion, according to Time's Mark Thompson.

Back to the incumbents in the White House. One of the tensions around the president as economic policy proposals were being discussed in 2009 was a macro-economic, financial-sector revitalization track, which economic adviser Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner advocated, and a package of combined initiatives including new regulations and micro-economic smart investments in key infrastructure projects advocated by Joe Biden's team, particularly Jared Bernstein as well as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Obama campaign economic policy adviser Austan Goolsbee.

A State Department official has been on a publicity tour paying tribute to the great working relationship between the Pentagon and State Department -- when it's really the DoD that should be saluting Hillary Clinton and State for their important work.


AP

On Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs and long-time Hillary Clinton foreign policy advisor Andrew Shapiro will give a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled:  "Ushering in a New Era in State-Defense Cooperation."  The meeting will stream live here, and CSIS President and former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre will preside.

On one level, an official of one national security bureaucracy publicly hugging another national security bureaucracy, particularly when it has a much larger budget, may not be all that surprising.  But it is disappointing.

Part of Hillary Clinton's legacy has been to try to reassert the role of the State Department as the statutory lead in conflict areas around the world. 

She and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates tag-teamed on the need to significantly expand State Department resources given that nearly all of the major conflicts the US was engaged with involved failing states and major development challenges.  Gates often beat the drum for the State Department arguing that Iraq, Afghanistan, and simmering dilemmas elsewhere in the world required political and diplomatic solutions that could not be solved militarily.

In December of 2010, I asked Secretary of State Clinton at the roll-out event of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) how her reorganization of the State Department's efforts in global diplomacy and development would interact with Pentagon -- and bring the Department of Defense around as a better partner.

Here's an excerpt of her response that can be read in full here:

We're trying to, frankly, get back a lot of the appropriation authority that was lost during the 2000s - I guess that's a word - and that because of the military emphasis in Afghanistan and in Iraq, it just was easier, quicker for the military to do a lot of things. And so you found the military doing development. You had young captains and colonels with discretionary funds, the so-called Commander Emergency Response Funds, the CERF funds, that they were literally able to call on $50- or $100,000 to repair a school outside of Mosul or help build a road in Afghanistan without any of the bureaucratic checks and balances that we go through at AID and State.

So we are well aware that first we have to be a better partner. Secondly, we have to be more operational and expeditionary. And thirdly, we have to win back from the Congress the authority we should have as the coordinators and lead on civilian power in the United States.

You cannot work with the Pentagon as multitudes of agencies. That does not work. And one of the key messages in the QDDR is that the State Department has the statutory authority to lead. That doesn't mean that we're not in partnership with Justice and Treasury and Ex-Im and everybody else who has a role to play, but you've got to have someone accept the responsibility. And that's what we are offering and, frankly, demanding that we be given in order to make this civilian-military partnership something more than just a phrase.

Hillary Clinton's phrasing in this response is important.  She essentially acknowledges that war-time efficacy resulted in the Department of Defense aggrandizing budgets to do development in crisis areas.  She implies that this was a mistake that needed correction.  Clinton also said that the State Department needed to become much more "operational and expeditionary" in the field.  And lastly and most importantly, Clinton reminds that the State Department, not the Pentagon, holds the statutory lead in crises -- and is "demanding" respect of that role in order to make "this civilian-military partnership something more than a phrase."

The roll out of the QDDR came just four days after Richard Holbrooke's death -- and I thought to myself at the time that another of the many reasons the Democratic foreign policy establishment would miss the tenacious diplomat is that he was one of the very few in the ranks that could intimidate and wrestle down the Pentagon. 

Hillary Clinton has been a constructive partner with the Department of Defense and worked out a good relationship with the Pentagon under Gates -- but from both an authorization and appropriations perspective, the Pentagon has continued to clobber the State Department, not necessarily of its own volition but in part because a Republican-dominated House prefers to under resource diplomacy and development and over resource military action. 

Only a few months after the QDDR release and after then State Department Policy Planning Director and QDDR czar Anne-Marie Slaughter's departure from government service and return to Princeton (read about that her in her provocative Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All"), several senior State Department officials told me that the battle was already lost with the Pentagon when it came to securing funding from Congress for the State Department's growing role in field-based conflict stabilization and reconstruction.  They said that there was no way to secure funding directly but that State had to continue to piggy-back on Department of Defense budgetary authority and appropriations.

In July of this year, Assistant Secretary Shapiro reported that it just didn't make any sense to fight the Pentagon over budgets.  He commented at the time at at meeting with the Defense Writers Group that "given that DOD has more money and has a lot of planning capability, [this process] ensures these efforts are not stovepiped, but working together."  In other words, Shapiro is stating that feeding at the trough provided by the Pentagon is as good as it will get for State.   

There may be few options for the State Department in rejiggering budgets and control over them given the political climate today and the deference that so many pols give the Pentagon. 

But Hillary Clinton through her tenure as Obama's foreign policy chief has been making important points of principle about statecraft and civilian leadership in military matters and global crises that deserve their own salute from the defense side of the equation. 

In July, the Pentagon posted on its website reference to Andrew Shapiro's celebration of civilian-military cooperation titled "State Official Praises Cooperation with Defense Department."

I have looked as thoroughly as I can (and could be wrong), but I see no similar article since the resignation of Robert Gates titled with the alternative, "Defense Official Praises Cooperation with State Department."

In fact, while I have been able to easily find a mountain of material about Robert Gates' frequent references to the State Department needing more resources and authority to fulfill its mission, I don't see such references at all from the Pentagon under Leon Panetta.

In a somewhat ominous reference, Shapiro praised that agreements had been signed with the Pentagon that increased the presence of each other's personnel in their respective ranks.  From the Armed Forces Press Service report:

State and DOD recently signed a memorandum that increases the number of DOD personnel serving at the State Department, Shapiro noted. There are also more State Department political affairs specialists at the combatant commands than at any time in history.

The Pentagon, with a budget more than 14 times greater than State, can easily colonize other institutions with its massive resources and staff.  As former Center for a New American Security President and close aide to General David Petraeus John Nagl was fond of saying:  "There are more musicians in the Department of Defense than there are diplomats in the State Department."

My note intends no disrespect towards Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro -- but as a believer in the vital role of the State Department and its work in global affairs today -- the trend towards Pentagon-hugging both outside and within the government does not bode well for balanced and long-term diplomatic and development practices.

At the session on Wednesday, it would be interesting to hear a rundown of policy statements by Pentagon officials that offer even half of the praise of Clinton's diplomatic shop that Shapiro is offering to the military. 

What has the Pentagon really done to deserve the salute? And what has happened to Hillary Clinton's campaign to reassert the Department's role as 'statutory lead' in conflicts? 

Clinton said that clear actions would be needed, even demanded, "to make this civilian-military partnership something more than a phrase." 

I hope that Shapiro's commentary will offer a real perspective, something more than soporific tributes, on what has evolved so well in civilian-military cooperation other than just really acquiescing to the Pentagon's considerable political power.

Margaret Carlson gets the quote of the week for her Bloomberg commentary on Mitt Romney's wealth blind spots and not getting that dressage may not be the kind of business tax deduction he wants a lot of economically strapped political independents to read about. 

Hmm ... I do get why he is holding back on those other tax forms now.

As Bloomberg Businessweek reported, Mitt Romney declared in his 2010 taxes a $77,000 business loss (of which only $50 thus far was deducted from his taxes but which protects him on upside gains in the future) costs related to his Olympics-competing horse, Rafalca.

Dressage, or 'horse ballet', are not part of my normal lexicon -- so wanted to share the nice write-up Wikipedia provides for those, who like me, may not be wired in to the sport:

Dressage -- a French term, most commonly translated to mean "training") is a competitive equestrian sport, defined by the International Equestrian Federation as "the highest expression of horse training", where "horse and rider are expected to perform from memory a series of predetermined movements." Competitions are held at all levels from amateur to the World Equestrian Games. Its fundamental purpose is to develop, through standardized progressive training methods, a horse's natural athletic ability and willingness to perform, thereby maximizing its potential as a riding horse. At the peak of a dressage horse's gymnastic development, the horse will respond smoothly to a skilled rider's minimal aids. The rider will be relaxed and appear effort-free while the horse willingly performs the requested movement. Dressage is occasionally referred to as "Horse Ballet".

Now for the zinger quote from Margaret Carlson, whose full article you should read:

A presidential candidate who takes a huge tax deduction for such an elitist sport exhibits a cluelessness bordering on contempt. Romney has argued that dressage helps his wife's multiple sclerosis. That's all to the good, but dressage is to therapeutic horseback riding as caviar is to Spam.

Emphasis added. 

Gore Vidal has departed the stage given news today that he has died of complications from pneumonia at age 86.

I shook Vidal's hand once -- and when he took mine, his smirk pretty much sheared off several layers of identity protection I had cloaked around myself.

I imagined him instantly reading all of the things about me that I didn't want to share at the time. He seemed to convey in that look that he knew I was gay. I was just a college student then, about twenty years old, not out, and scared of the whole gay thing. But I had read The City and the Pillar, one of the first American mainstream novels with a gay theme, and just knowing who Vidal was -- a great writer who befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, read books to his blind uncle US Senator from Oklahoma TP Gore, and ran around with the Kennedy-Bouvier clan -- changed what I thought was possible in my own life.

I was interning at both RAND Corporation and a place then called the Center for International and Strategic Affairs -- and without conveying any of this to Vidal, I sensed that he perceived in my self-serious coat and tie and briefcase that I was well on my way to becoming a tool of the American empire.

He talked that way in general about everyone, not specifically about me, but then I knew my too stiff demeanor planted the idea. He said from the stage, "Stand against empire.  Don't be deceived."  And then he looked right at me from the podium, or I thought he did.  I felt his interest and his nudge to make better choices than I was making.   

Vidal's characterization of the United States as a turbo-charged version of ancient Rome and his dismissal of those in think tanks and academia tied to the state as 'spear-carriers for empire' prepared me well for my later, quite close relationship to Chalmers Johnson who succeeded Vidal and Chomsky as an equally effective, often acerbic, staunch 'chronicler of empire' during America's post-9/11 convulsions.

Vidal's revealing and psycho-politically gripping memoir, Palimpsest, helped me understand the power of networks, of cocktail parties, of social scenes and what could be created or destroyed through them. They didn't all have to be about being a geisha to the powerful, but one could orchestrate political and policy drama from inside the network. He also laid bare the flaws of many iconic political powerhouses from the 1950s through the 1990s.

I loved Vidal's expose-it-all battle with Charlton Heston over the gay sub-themes Vidal said he wrote into early script versions of Ben Hur -- a culture war duel that then Los Angeles Times Managing Editor Shelby Coffey had stirred up between a self-righteously indignant Heston and the gleefully provocative Vidal.

Anyone who knew Gore Vidal -- and some friends like Michael Lind who corresponded with him -- knew that he was self-absorbed, a constant name-dropper and flamboyant about it (at a New America Foundation board retreat a couple of years ago, I took a page from the Vidal playbook and dropped a few names, saying "Name-dropping: I embrace it." Brought the house down. Thanks Mr. Vidal).

But Vidal was also committed to something quite selfless -- and that was turning a mirror such that Americans could see themselves and reflect on what they were doing to the world; that empire was not democracy and that the US was building a national security state that didn't see a threat it couldn't hyperventilate about and overreact towards.

He was active in big causes, not all of them with which I agreed, but he put his credibility and his brilliant capacity as a literary and political thinker, as well as his considerable pedigree as an uber-connected socialite on the line for meta-causes.

Vidal's brand of self-absorbed selflessness had limits but was something I wish there was more of in America and around the world.

Vidal was the epitome of flamboyant, unforgiving boldness, and he made a difference.  Whether in the broad game of American politics, the sizzle of the film industry, or in the arena of letters and literature, Vidal dramatically broadened the world -- and my world -- by upending the conventional. 

His handshake and grin helped me realize much and gave me an opportunity to pivot in new directions, at least in my own mind, and for that I am deeply grateful to Gore Vidal.

Wall Street Journal economics correspondent David Wessel published a roster of what he calls "digestible morsels" to help Americans better understand what is at play in the federal budget.

Among the realities he notes are that "two-thirds of annual federal spending goes out the door without any vote by Congress" and that "the U.S. defense budget is greater than the combined defense budgets of the next 17 largest spenders."

I'm glad Wessel touched the stratospheric defense budget, and I'm looking forward to reading his forthcoming book, Red Ink: Inside the High-Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget, but there are dimensions to this national spending account that are often overlooked.

First of all, the costs of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been offset by either raising taxes or from financial contributions from other affected countries. It's important to remember that in the first Gulf War, Japan wrote the United States a check for $13 billion to pay the costs of that conflict.

Secondly, if one takes the approximate amount the United States was paying to "feel safe" on September 10, 2001 and account for inflationary growth since, the cumulative amount in just defense spending since is roughly $2.7 trillion. That doesn't include other domestic expenditures for Homeland Security which would make the collective bill even higher.

One could call this $2.7 trillion the "Bin Laden effect," and while it is appropriate for the U.S. to modify its defense and security infrastructure to deal with threats that are emerging rather than clinging to dissipated threats from the past, this level of spending not supported by tax dollars is staggeringly consequential.

While there are apples and oranges problems in comparing defense spending and the number of soldiers, private contractors, technologists, uniform manufacturers in Tianjin, corrupt foreign government officials, and others employed by that spending -- it is indisputable that the same amount of economic spending and activity in the private sector would be managed more efficiently and contribute more significantly to America's job base and GDP growth.

To put the comparison in context, $2.7 trillion in economic activity in the private sector equates to approximately 6 million jobs sustained over the period between the 9/11 terror attacks and today.

Big, costly, unpaid-for wars are undermining the economic health of the country -- and are robbing growth and opportunity from the future to pay for these military objectives today. 

It is a good debate to have whether the invasions of Iraq and the ongoing 'ownership' of the Afghanistan conflict have been worth the investment or not -- but not tending the economic health of America's core has been a strategic failure of enormous magnitude.

The highly tempestuous debates between Keynesians and deficit-hawks distract from the real cause of America's Great Recession and from the solution.  Former banker and credit expert Richard Vague and The Atlantic's Steve Clemons argue in a new report (pdf) that to stimulate jobs and economic growth, financial houses should take phased write downs of assets and give loan holders relief and debt forgiveness.



Restructuring Private Debt May Be Better Option than Austerity or More Stimulus
by Steve Clemons and Richard Vague

In the Spring of 2011, the Obama administration started to rev up a campaign called "The Summer of Recovery" and planned to deploy the President, VP Joe Biden, and the economically connected Cabinet members and advisers to go to all parts of the country, particularly battleground states, and convince Americans that things were getting better, that jobs were being created, and that the vector of the nation was pointing in a great direction.

The Summer of Recovery became a Summer of Anxiety as the jobs machine sputtered and as other parts of the global economy slowed reducing demand for American exports. Voices like Paul Krugman and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich lambasted the White House for not having been Keynesian enough and not opening the government spending spigots to more deeply invest in US infrastructure, shore up deteriorating state balance sheets, and keep more Americans employed and in their homes that were still being foreclosed at record rates.

But Republicans, who under George W. Bush's leadership hatched the conditions of inattentive and lax regulatory attention that contributed significantly to the Great Recession of 2008-2009, decided to convince Americans that the nation's economic malaise was a product of Obama's massive government post-crisis spending.  In a dangerous game of government debt limit brinksmanship, House Speaker John Boehner and his Tea Party-fearing Republican caucus took the nation to the brink of default. 

Even though the crisis that had unfolded had been a function of behavior in private debt markets, the debate about what to do next has focused entirely on what level of debt the government should deploy or cut back. 

The debt-hawks and uber-Keynesians may both be well meaning in their desire to steady the US economic ship and relaunch it towards growth -- but they are distracted by ideology and conventional economic thinking from looking at more compelling causes of major economic crises and more efficacious policy responses. 

It's private debt that matters most.

There is about $24 trillion in consumer and business debt held in the United States today and this dwarfs the federal debt, money supply, and the nation's GDP.  

In a short report (pdf) we are releasing today that explores the behavior of private debt before and after economic crises -- not only in the US, but in Japan as well as a number of European nations -- we have noted that (1) a fast run-up of private debt combined with (2) a level of private debt more than 150% of GDP were evident in both the Great Recession of 2008-2009 as well as in America's Great Depression.

Federal debt was inconsequential to these crises.  Charts in the report (pdf) we are posting today make clear that Spain, economically beleaguered today, was in excellent federal balance sheet health before the recent Eurozone financial quakes started.

So as a predictor of future crises, we suggest that private debt growth rates combined with the absolute level of non-government, private debt are the two most important factors to flag.

Once a private debt-triggered crisis starts, attention turns typically to the government and whether it will reform through austerity programs and conditioned loans or whether the government will inject capital resources of its own to keep the economy primed and liquid.

What is interesting about the recent Great Recession and the American case is that while many economic pundits speak about post-crisis deleveraging, the private debt total only declined by 3% in the US and is now increasing again, essentially reaching today the pre-crisis level of private debt. 

That's right.  The private debt load in the US today is roughly the same as the private debt load held in early 2008.  This is of enormous consequence as consumers and businesses that are overburdened with debt cannot lead an economy to higher growth.  Government spending can provide some stimulus, but our analysis shows that this stimulus is significantly less efficient in stimulating GDP growth than re-jiggering and triggering private spending.  And while private debt typically matters more than government debt, a total debt load for an economy does matter.  Ask Japan.

Federal austerity may be necessary at some point, but austerity in government accounts does not give the private sector any relief from these record high burdens of private debt.

The Great Recession of 2008-2009, from which there are still repercussions in the US and global economies, resulted from a massive surge in consumer loans -- 98% in just five years -- and as just stated but to remind for emphasis, the combined total of US business and consumer loans is basically at the same level as at the moment this crisis hit. 

The Great Depression was also caused by a massive private debt buildup.  The ensuing implosion of a 36% contraction in the economy tracked an almost-as-massive 25% paydown in debt, since paying down debt uses money that would otherwise have been used for spending or investment.

Clearly, what policymakers wanted and achieved in the contemporary crisis was avoiding a massive private debt paydown and subsequent contraction.  Thus, the Great Recession did not become the Great Depression II.  But the debt overhang that was retained is also of great cost, stifling growth well into the future.

The Great Depression and the Great Recession were the only two periods in the past century that were preceded by a 40+% decade of growth in private debt-to-GDP while the US had a ratio of overall private debt-to-GDP greater than 150%, territory where the US economy remains floundering in today.  The private sector cannot lead the economy to strong growth until it has lower leverage, but it has not de-levered.  Some economists invoke inflation or alternatively, "strong growth" as the solution to high debt -- but even with the most optimistic expectations, a private debt correction will require the clock to tick for a generation or more.

The best alternative for reducing debt levels without the economic contraction caused by paydown (as during the Great Depression) is restructuring loans.

Dollar for dollar, a restructuring of problem loans -- with appropriate moral hazard consequences intact -- would provide as much or more stimulus than government spending, without the GDP-suppressing effect of additional government debt.  A trillion dollars of private debt restructuring of loans could provide as much stimulus as a trillion dollars of government spending.

Some argue that the political moment for restructuring America's debt load may have passed, and the complexity of large-scale restructuring may be too daunting, but the fact remains that America's high levels of private sector debt will inhibit the private sector from leading the economy out of its malaise.

Commentators like Paul Krugman and others have argued that the US would benefit from more government spending and that higher federal debt levels would be relatively inconsequential.  They give two reasons.  First, they argue that the US had higher debt levels in 1945 and overcame them.  Second, the US government debt level is less than a number of other countries.

However, even though Krugman is right that US federal debt is below 1945 levels, America's total debt level -- government plus private sector debt -- is 65% higher and at an all-time high.

Secondly, even though US federal debt is lower than some other countries, those nations have lower GDP growth than the US while key countries with lower debt loads than the United States have higher GDP growth rates.  It strikes us that a lower 'total' debt ratio constitutes a competitive economic advantage globally and that all other things being held equal, high debt levels suppress GDP growth.

Restructuring debt, and writing down assets over ten-year terms could have an enormous impact on economic activity in the United States.  More working Americans could remain in their mortgage-stressed homes after those mortgages were written down and banks compelled to take the write-offs over time. 

The US government could encourage its mortgage lending operations to essentially write off debt for Americans and allow them to relaunch their financial activity.  Such a strategy could replicate the go-go growth in the US in the 1950s after significant deleveraging that occurred in the era previously -- but rather than contracting the economy, these restructured loans could actually immediately kick start growth.

In ancient times and as recorded in the old Testament of the Bible, the Land of Israel forgave all debts periodically, and the economic basis point for lands and slaves was reset in what was called "Jubilee."

Perhaps the economic system we have built today that seems addicted to ever higher levels of private sector debt, not to mention public debt, needs a modern Jubilee as well -- and whether they are working Americans facing impossible economic hurdles or Greek citizens facing a future as permanent serfs in a Germany-dominated Europe, finding a way to restructure and write down debt held by financiers and banks is the fastest and most effective way to bolster healthy economic growth.

Officially, the vice president was sorry for forcing his boss's hand -- but that "apology" never occurred and should never have been fabricated by White House staff.



Vice President Joe Biden never apologized to President Obama for getting a "bit over his skis" in endorsing gay marriage before the president did -- and according to very senior White House sources, Obama didn't ask for or want an apology from Biden.

But google "Joe Biden", "apology", and "gay". On May 10, 2012 the official White House position -- as fed to the media -- was that Joe Biden apologized to the president.

What did happen is that Obama White House staff and campaign advisers went nuts and angrily denounced Biden for triggering what they thought would be a gay marriage political nightmare after comments on a Sunday morning talk show. Jay Carney, spokesman for the president and former spokesman for Biden, was widely acknowledged to be an exception to the tension and was working hard to bridge the mutually angry camps.

The heat was so strong that Biden staff scrambled to construct a gesture, which was a falsehood, that Biden apologized to the president for getting ahead of him on gay stuff. Biden staff put out word that Biden apologized -- but the truth of this matter is that never happened.

Or did it? Biden himself never said "sorry" to the president for his principled stand on the leading civil rights issue of the time. That would be a bit like Lyndon Johnson tucking it in and apologizing to JFK for being about nine steps ahead of the Kennedy clan on black civil rights in the country (which LBJ was).

However, when staff do something in the name of the principal for whom they work -- the question is whether that constitutes truth or not. In political or financial scandals, one of the techniques that politicians frequently use is to blame the transgression on an aide working for the pol, arguing that the principal had no knowledge of the illegal act. However, when things are going smoothly and well, Senators and Congressmen count on their aides to generate legislative and political successes for which they can take credit in their own name.

Very little in the Congressional Record for that matter, that is the digest of all that officially transpires on the floor of the House of Representatives and Senate, actually happens. There are tributes, commendations, long speeches that read as if they were given and which appear in the record -- but even a bleary-eyed replay of C-Span video will never yield the commentary being given. 

Typically, a legislative assistant will write a speech on some topic for his boss, a senator or representative, let's say on the subject of stopping Iran's nuclear program. Then the legislative director will approve the speech, and it will be transmitted by the staff member down to the floor clerk for inclusion in the Congressional Record. The senator or House member, on most occasions, never sees the commentary that will appear under his or her name. The system works on trust and the subordinated credentialing of staff who are given the authority to speak, think, and write in the name of their employer.

But when it comes to communications between the president of the United States and the vice president -- two people who meet regularly and privately and who have a 'deal' that Biden will be the last person in the room with Obama when major controversial issues, particularly of war and peace are discussed -- the rules should be different, particularly when it comes to personal beefs or grievances between them.

After Biden made his comments saying that he was "absolutely comfortable" with gay marriage on NBC's Meet the Press and a firestorm erupted over the gap between Biden's gay-hugging humanity and Obama's 'evolving' views on the matter, a senior White House official confided that Biden was one of the few people aware of the president's thinking on the matter -- and that what was at issue was not that Biden was out of sync with the president substantively but rather the political timing of the president's announcement.

In my view, Biden said nothing to change or disrupt Obama's position, which was then official White House policy -- but anyone who knows Joe Biden and his complete, authentic affection for both straight and gay couples, married or not, knows that he held the views which he articulated. Similarly, Vice President Cheney was ahead of George W. Bush on gay marriage -- arguing in contrast to Bush that states should govern the issue, not the federal government. 

The good thing is that no matter how they got there, both Joe Biden and Barack Obama now publicly endorse gay marriage. This was not true -- and was painfully apparent when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, introduced to standing ovation craziness by Sarah Jessica Parker at last year's Human Rights Campaign Dinner, blasted by implication President Obama's stance supporting civil unions over 'marriage.'

But at another level, when the history of gay rights and the Obama administration is written and the president's pivotal leadership on Don't Ask Don't Tell is explored, along with the Obama team's decision to abandon legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and the president's important endorsement of gay marriage, it will be contestable (and wrong) to include the vignette that Biden apologized to Obama for a principled and important civil rights view that Biden personally held.

What happened and can be written is that Biden's staff apologized to Obama's staff -- and whether such fabricated truth is really truth is worthy of debate.

If he reads this or is pushed by the media or public on it again (think presidential debates) Obama should give a full-throated embrace of his vice president and his leadership on gay issues and should apologize for these staff theatrics that sullied Obama's step forward. 

Frankly, I applaud Obama's gay marriage evolution, but when he should have looked BIG for the move -- this apology kabuki backfired and made the president look smaller and more petty than he should have appeared at such a historic moment for his presidency and the nation.

The USAF is reportedly targeting and trailing civilian auto traffic on New Mexico's highways.  Harmless or just another example of the blurred lines between the international and domestic application of U.S. military technology?


They are most likely not "armed drones," but news has surfaced that the US Air Force is training drone pilots to trail civilian auto traffic on New Mexico's highways.

In a 'lifestyles-of-video-game-war' piece by Mark Mazzetti that appears in The New York Times Magazine this Sunday, Mazzetti writes:

When I visited the base [Holloman Air Force Base, N.M.] earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

"Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?" a reporter asked. One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room.

Some may shrug and say that the undisclosed high-altitude tracking of US vehicles for training purposes is harmless, but the line between civilian privacy and an increasingly Orwellian capacity of the U.S. federal government to track its own citizens is blurred just a bit more by this practice.

There are already serious concerns about U.S. military drones -- designed for warfare abroad -- being re-purposed for civilian purposes. 

The blog Loss of Privacy reports that unarmed drones at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D. are being used for civilian surveillance.  And according to the same report former California Congresswoman and now Wilson Center for International Scholars President Jane Harman helped lead efforts to block expansion of drone hardware and related intelligence to the US domestic theater:

In 2008 and 2010, Harman helped beat back efforts by Homeland Security officials to use imagery from military satellites to help domestic terrorism investigations. Congress blocked the proposal on grounds it would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from taking a police role on U.S. soil.

The problem with an ever powerful national government with more and more tools to control and track its citizenry is that these powers, legal and technical, are often abused and used in ways not originally intended.

Tools developed for the so-called war on terror are now used to spy on Americans -- and not enough, Dana Priest and Shane Harris excepted, are blowing the whistle on this creeping intelligence capacity that is now using Americans as unwitting guinea pigs before the video-trained pilots go track and destroy similar SUVs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This should not be happening. There should be controls on what the U.S. Air Force can target. The Department of Defense has no shortage of vehicles, enormous swaths of federal land for their own staff to traverse. 

If Air Force video pilots need to train by tracking something from the air, they should target soldiers in their ranks.

The argument for celebrating "July 4th" on July 2nd



A few months ago, I was a guest (a plus one of someone invited) at an impressive evening thrown by the Washington National Opera to thank key board members, volunteers and significant donors.  The dinner was held in the room pf the National Archives that holds original copies of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.  As I sipped my red wine, the guards in front of the nation's founding documents glared a bit. 

This is sort of like eating foie gras in the same room with the Mona Lisa.  Not many people can arrange a dinner in a room holding priceless documents of such national and global consequence. 

Then it all became clear.  Our two hosts for the evening were chocolate empire heiress Jackie Mars and Carlyle Group co-founder and the Indiana Jones of rare document collecting David Rubenstein.

Rubenstein wasn't at our dinner he had arranged next to "When in the course of human events..." and all that.  Ironically, he chimed in to welcome all of us via video from London (capital of the folks from whom we were declaring ourselves independent) where he was on global roadshow for the Carlyle Group's recent IPO.  But Rubenstein, a billionaire many times over, has made it a mission to pursue and purchase on the private market some of the nation's most important documents and then make them available to the public.

Recently, Rubenstein bought an original copy of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States which formally abolished slavery -- and put them on display at the New-York Historical Society.  He also owns a copy of the Magna Carta, from the year 1297 and carrying the Seal of King Edward I, which he has loaned the National Archives.  And on a long list of other patriotic philanthropy, Rubenstein is donating millions to repair the Washington Monument after the damage done from last year's earthquake.    

Of course, David Rubenstein could easily get the National Archives space for the Washington Opera.  Easy only for him -- not for anyone else.

At this year's Aspen Ideas Festival, organized by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, Rubenstein gave a talk on why America's Independence Day really should be July 2nd and not July 4th.  I had a conflict and could not attend -- but as he raced off to his private plane yesterday, I asked him to give me the really short version (fuller take here in this well-done piece by Aspen Times writer Janet Urquart).

Basically, the vote of independence by the Continental Congress was on July 2nd -- recorded on July 4th and actually signed on August 2nd, 1776.  The real act happened this past Monday 236 years ago. 

John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by
succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.

Only problem, according to Rubenstein, is that when they began to celebrate the date the following year -- they forgot to do so on July 2nd and hurried the celebration to occur on July 4th.   That then became the fixed date.

So to all, happy Independence Day -- and a salute to the day it happened and when we finally got around to the party!

The president of the American Federation of Teachers suggests such a test will ease doubts about  instruction quality.

Steve Clemons

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten in an interview with Walter Isaacson, President of the Institute, just launched an interesting, "big idea."  She said that we should establish a "bar exam for teachers."

Part of the challenge that the AFT, the mother ship for about 3400 teacher labor unions, is that it is perceived by many to be concerned primarily with protecting the jobs of teachers, some of whom are poor performers, rather than with promoting higher quality outcomes for students.

AFT's Weingarten has been trying to turn that impression around, just recently announcing the launching of a free, new, digitally-based resource platform for teachers called "Share My Lesson."

But the bar exam idea shoots at the doubt many have about the quality of teachers in the American educational system.  Isaacson started the discussion this morning at the Aspen Ideas Festival, presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, by asking about what more could be done in "training and gating teachers."

Weingarten said that it took her longer to get her certification as New York City school teacher than preparing for the bar and taking the exam to become a lawyer in the State of New York.  She said that the bar exam is made for the times -- and that ten years from now the bar exam would be different.

She said a bar exam for teachers today should emphasize the instruction of critical thinking.  That could change in the future as needs and expectations change.

Weingarten said that we could do with teacher screening and training what we are doing today with the "common core" -- establish a national board that sets a 'national standard' and then strongly encourage, nudge, and seduce states to adopt the standard.

I look forward to hearing the views of others in the education reform debate about whether this bar exam idea has merit. 

My sense is that such a bar exam could be promising, but all depends on how high that bar is set.  If low tier graduates from our universities continue to turn to teaching as their default profession and get an easy hop over the bar -- then this bar exam big idea will flop.

Weingarten may be on to something that helps change the impression that many have of the quality of today's teachers and teacher unions, but hopefully she will not only suggest the "bar exam" but rather a "bar exam with high standards".

Chrystia Freeland, the sassy smart, globe-trotting provocateur and editor of ThomsonReuters Digital, helped open the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival yesterday evening by pushing back against Walter Isaacson's characterization of the American idea. 

Isaacson spoke of America being a hotbed of ideas and values that rub and push against each other, ultimately producing a balance and harmony among divergent interests.  Freeland pushed back, saying "that's Canada -- not America."

"America," Freeland argued, "is the place of revolutions."  

Freeland expanded on this theme in the two minutes that she was allowed to speak at the Aspen Ideas opener to offer her "big idea" that we are now in the era of "leaderless revolutions." 

She said that in the past, those who rose up against tyranny had to place bets on who and how many might protest and go to the streets.  She said, "if a hundred people went out, they ended up in prison.  If a million show up, the leader goes to jail."  Today, she said, technology allows protestors and organizers of revolutions to scale up and communicate across networks of networks. Leaders per se aren't needed in this densely communications enmeshed world, but there will be many revolutions as individuals garner power from those who have tried to corner and monopolize power.

Freeland and fourteen others offered two minute snippets of ideas, provocations, and just simple assertions before two thousand festival goers who will spend the next week at an annual cornucopia of seminars co-organized by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. 

Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg, who often writes about dark stuff like the ticking clock of an Israeli strike against Iran, said that there is too much self-seriousness in our policy discussions and proceeded to bust the room into laughter with a stream of hilarious vignettes and commentary.  Because of the buzz everywhere about The Atlantic's cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All," Goldberg introduced himself as Anne-Marie Slaughter.  He then introduced himself as the Festival's director Kitty Boone, and then seemed apologetic for revealing that he was only Jeffrey Goldberg.  He said "the joke" is under appreciated and needs revival.  Those who know him should ask about the "CIA-trained speaking beagle".

Back to the serious side, Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal argued that America had forgotten that it was a place forged by risk-taking and change and that it needed to rediscover and deploy that heritage of growth through instability.  Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows argued that if US Senators wanted to continue undermining progress and legislative activity through the filibuster, then there should be 41 bodies on the floor of the Senate the entire time of the filibuster.  In other words, if Senators felt strongly about stopping legislative machinery, then they needed to put their back and time into it.  Fallows calls it the "41 Body Rule".

Atlantic tech guru Alexis Madrigal offered the provocative view that humans would soon be able to program themselves -- their choices about diet, fun, information, tasks -- with technologies and sensors embedded in everything they do.  Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos said that the world is approaching a massive ecological tipping point disaster, stating that plankton are disappearing at a rate of 1% a year -- and when the plankton are gone, we are dead, along with a lot of other life on the planet.  Nigerian Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dele Olojede decided to challenge political correctness about universal suffrage in developing countries -- arguing along Hamiltonian lines that uninformed political decisions and votes are dangerous and a threat to genuine democracy.  He fears mob rule in Africa that is held in place by voters who know nothing and whose stakes in healthy civil society are weak.

The Festival, which I'll be covering along with a team of other Atlantic writers this week, offers a rich array of programming along big concept 'tracks'.  Those offered include:

WORLD AFFAIRS:  Democracy on Trial
THE ECONOMY:  Is the Crisis Permanent?
OUR PLANET:  Seven Billion and Counting
ARTS AND CULTURE:  Art Matters
AMERICA 2012
WHAT WE BELIEVE AND WHY: An Exploration of Values
SPORTS:  Taken Seriously
RADICAL DISRUPTION:  The Transformative Power of Technology
WAR AND PEACE IN THE MODERN WORLD
THE CHILD:  Raising the 21st Century Child
FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE

There are a lot of wealthy folks here -- with time on their hands that they admirably want to deploy towards learning about major challenges in the world -- but there is considerable diversity here as well -- including high school students from challenging environments supported by the Bezos Scholars Program -- and numerous speakers, Aspen Ideas Fellows, and journalists who ethnically and economically broaden those in the halls further than America's 1%.

Yesterday, 9/11 and BP Oil Spill compensation czar Ken Feinberg talked about 'pricing life'.  This morning, I saw former ISAF Commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal jogging in the early hours.  (I gave him the runner's 'hey' but didn't get a nod back and wondered if he somehow knew i was pals with Michael Hastings.)  Last night, actress and culture activist Anna Deavere Smith chatted with me about the need to diversify the culture here -- surfers, maybe some thugs, and definitely more religiously animated folks who represent key corners of the American ecosystem.  As I write this, I am listening to American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks loudly speak (in a public area) about his plans to "take back America" by hiring "young killers" from America's top universities to re-energize and essentially re-animate America's conservative movement.

There is all sorts of stuff going on here.  Brooks is on fire.  Wish Jane Hamsher or Ezra Klein were in the room to mix it up a bit. Brooks did acknowledge that Harvard, Yale, Princeton are still producing some "lefties" but he's hiring a bunch of "young killers" who can help change the political equation in the country.  Fascinating.

If the Festival succeeds, people will get out of their comfort zones and spend time learning about ideas and issues they know little about. 

There will be Goldberg-style levity, self-serious discussions, a lot of introspection about our society and world, and as I'm hearing from Arthur Brooks, one of the leading conservative public intellectuals in the country now, there will be attempts at revolution as well.

Reuters

David Ignatius reveals this morning that US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter has fought hard and ultimately failed to maintain ultimate 'country authority' over the CIA's drone attacks inside Pakistan.

Ignatius writes:

As America's relationship with Pakistan has unraveled over the past 18 months, an important debate has been going on within the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad over the proper scope of CIA covert actions and their effect on diplomatic interests.

The principals in this policy debate have been Cameron Munter, the U.S. ambassador since October 2010, and several CIA station chiefs who served with him.  The technical issue was whether the ambassador, as chief of mission, had the authority to veto CIA operations he thought would harm long-term relations.  Munter appears to have lost this fight.

Munter is no ordinary campaign-contributing pal of Barack Obama and didn't buy his perch in Islamabad like so many other US Ambassadors. 

Munter is one of the few career foreign service officers who has stacked up respect not only from his State Department colleagues -- but across other agencies and departments, particularly the Department of Defense for his pivotal work in securing Congressional approval of NATO expansion during the Clinton administration, and from the various intelligence agencies for his 'smart power approach' to trying to simultaneously win the hearts and minds of citizens in Pakistan while also understanding that some targets require deployed hard power.

According to Ignatius' interesting report, Munter has fought the significant expansion of drone attacks, particularly when US-Pakistan relations are on the verge of catastrophic rupture.

Ignatius also reveals that CIA Director David Petraeus has often sided with Munter and his concern about an increasingly zealous drone targeting program -- and that Petraeus and the chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, whose name is classified and is referred to as "Roger", have had substantial disputes with each other over drone targeting and attacks.

The possible implications of this report on Munter's frustration and political loss is that this punctuates a larger set of failures.

First, Hillary Clinton, in her launch of the QDDR (Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review), made a statement at the time that the Department of State was re-asserting itself as the "statutory lead" in America's conflict situations abroad.  This statement that she made at the launch of the QDDR was seen as part of a strategy to rebalance the powers between the military/intel part of America's power equation with the diplomatic/economic elements of statecraft.

It seems that by allowing the drone-deployers to prevail over the diplomats, the Obama White House is pushing tactics over strategy.  Some may debate this -- and I welcome that debate -- but a drone triumphalism seems to be dominating over other key strategic equities that the U.S. should be concerned about.

Secondly, the Petraeus revelations remind one a bit of the privileged, off the grid activities organized by David Addington in the Bush/Cheney White House.  It is one thing to see that the Department of State is predictably losing another national security power struggle in the White House; it is an entirely different thing to see that an operation inside the CIA is resisting and bucking the authority of that agency's director, perhaps because the Counterterrorism Center sees its reporting line directly to the White House and President. 

David Addington always felt that his off-grid work in creating a Kafka-esque system of secret prisons and policies surrounding combat detainees was done with the direct authority of the President (and Vice President).

David Ignatius' article is titled "Drones vs. Diplomacy".  The consequences for the nation, during the presidency of a Democrat who once opposed many of the Bush administration's anti-terror methodologies, of letting 'drones' win could be enormous.