Steve Clemons

At this point, we don't really know if Morsi is on a path to installing himself as a "new pharaoh" or whether he is genuinely trying to build a more inclusive Egypt.

Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters

"I am the president of the Arab Republic of Egypt, clothed in immense power!" one can imagine Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi thinking after his jaw-dropping power grab these last few days.

Of course this is parody of the words roared by President Abraham Lincoln in Spielberg's stunning film, Lincoln, as the 16th American president ground down by a four-year, bloody civil war spent the entirety of his political capital procuring Constitutionally-based freedom for millions of American slaves. 

At this point, we really don't know if President Morsi is actually planning to install himself as what Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei has called a "new pharaoh" -- or whether he has committed to an inclusive democratic vision for Egypt which he believes requires extraordinary measures, much like those Abraham Lincoln took while manipulating pols of his day, procuring votes through patronage and threat. 

The fact is that while Morsi has declared himself, at least for the moment, the maker of law, the implementer of law, and the overseer of himself who makes the law, his rhetoric is highly inclusive. He has frustrated many in the Muslim Brotherhood by not moving to establish more of a theocratic state and not moving against other of the newly established political parties and movements in the country. At a public level, Morsi says he is acting on behalf of all Egyptians -- not just those who are tied to the Brothers. 

Morsi states that he is moving to reduce the authority and influence of those loyal to former President Hosni Mubarak -- and that first the army and then the courts have been havens for protectors of the old regime's interests. 

Is Morsi the kind of leader who will aggrandize total power and then liberalize like a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln? Or is he more like a Lee Kuan Yew who can build a state and the facade of a democratic system while holding tightly to power for decades in all ways that matter? 

We don't know the answer yet. But for those surprised by Morsi's moves -- as the State Department reportedly was after having just secured his pivotal support on a Gaza-Israel truce -- only naivete would lead one to believe that a healthy, balanced, checks-and-balance democracy would immediately succeed the kind of autocracy Mubarak mastered. 

Despite the claims in the media today that Egypt's judiciary was fairly independent and respected, the fact is that the system -- all parts of it, including the judiciary -- were ruthlessly managed and sculpted by forces that stewarded Mubarak's interests and power.

There were no checks and balances in Egypt during Mubarak; nor during de facto head of state General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi's short reign; and for the time being, there will be no checks and balances during Mohammed Morsi's tenure -- at least not in this phase. 

Given the conditions of Egypt's rotten political culture that are turbulent and unstable, it seems ridiculous to think that an Egyptian leader -- whether religious or devoutly secular, whether a man or a woman -- would automatically and successfully move the Egyptian political architecture into one based on checks and balance statecraft. 

This doesn't mean that the protests against Morsi in Tahrir Square are wrong or illegitimate. They are in fact vital in the absence of other political checks on Morsi. Note this excellent survey of the scene by David Rohde.

In a political system that has not been forged over decades and centuries of constitutional battle about the rights and prerogatives of branches of government, perhaps the people must rise in such a delicate time to empower other branches of government, while communicating what they believe to be the limits of Egyptian presidential powers. In other words, this conflict was inevitable: a new President whose party had been suborned and abused by the previous political order, mistrustful of institutions derived from that preceding era, is working to sweep aside those institutions and the people in them like any powerful executive would. 

In a system of checks and balances, other parts of the political order rise to challenge the executive, vigorously defending their own turf and legitimacy. The people must allow both sides, or all three or four or five, sides in the institutional square-off to ultimately win, so that institutions are balanced each other not because they want to be but because there is no choice. 

That is the strength and delicacy of democracy -- and Egypt is not nearly there yet. 

The United States is in the proverbial glass house on this one as its own demonstration of a system of checks and balances is at a darker stage at the moment, when parties seem to relish strangling the interests of the state and the people rather than compromising across political lines. The world today sees a victorious American President stymied almost immediately by challenges to his choice (Susan Rice) for Secretary of State as well as what looks to be a high-stakes game of brinksmanship over a tax and spending deal, or alternatively framed, an ideological train wreck going over what has become called "the fiscal cliff." 

The U.S. does have an active and vigorous system of checks and balances which can paralyze and stifle progress at times -- while at others, enabling enormous leaps forward as reminded by the Spielberg film's depiction of Lincoln ruthlessly securing passage of the slavery-banning 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. 

There have been numerous other times in U.S. history when a president or other Congressional leaders spent a vast amount of capital defying what many believed to be the immutable laws of political gravity as they then saw them. Universal suffrage was achieved this way. The nation's bipartisan commitment to advanced national security science and technology spending the same. Civil rights and voting rights for African Americans achieved. Educational fairness for women. Don't ask, Don't Tell's repeal. Major health policy reform during President Obama's last term. The passage of controversial nuclear arms reduction treaties. The list is longer than many might expect -- but each of these battles was extraordinarily difficult. 

Those working hard to secure democracy by putting their jobs, reputations, and sometimes lives on the line -- particularly as we saw and continue to see in Tahrir Square -- know how hard it is to really achieve. The bottom line is that democratic practice depends on institutions evolving side by side, each challenging over and over again the rights and prerogatives, and terms of authority of each other in front of the public eye. 

Egyptian President Morsi today says that he is committed to democracy and the rights of all Egyptians. He very well could be a power-hungry liar deceiving the nation as many other heads of state have done in the past. On the other hand, he may be telling the truth. 

The public's interests are not well served by giving Morsi the benefit of the doubt. The public should protest and should remind him from whence power in the nation is really derived. People should demand their rights; should demand a non-corrupt and fair judiciary; an impartial police and security apparatus. But these things will not happen because Morsi is a benign or generous leader or has a vision of how to fairly evolve and develop the power of other branches of government not under his control. 

These judges and their institutions; and then legislators; and perhaps generals must engage and secure their place in the democratic government equation. Indeed for Morsi to become a great leader and deliver on democracy and the successful transition from a dark era to a better one for Egypt, he needs to continue to challenge other weak or rotten sectors of society and should at the same time welcome the institutional battles that will ultimately limit his power. 

This is what the people need to focus on and deliver. Revolution is always difficult. But knocking a leader from power is fundamentally a binary process -- a zero or a one. But it is the combination of impulses, competition for power in government, and a more nuanced, and complex balancing of institutionalized political equities that ultimately delivers democracy to a people. 

After President Barack Obama's 2008 election when he was propelled to massive victory in part by standing as a refreshing foil to what many perceived to be the power-usurping White House of President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney, I asked former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta what powers he thought an Obama White House would forfeit back. Podesta candidly and honestly replied, "Very few, if any." 

This is the reality of executives that run governments everywhere. Their job is not to balance the various powers of government as a goal unto itself. They tend to want to be monarchs, achieving their vision as they see it for the benefit of the nation -- or all too often for themselves personally or the clans they represent. 

Those who want to build democracy must shore up the other branches of government -- generals who will secure the interests of the military, smart policy-practitioning legislators who will protect their institutional power, judges unafraid of other branches of government. Achieving equilibrium among these conflicting corners is how democracy is ultimately forged -- and leaders like Morsi if they are true to their democratic rhetoric will both wince at the costs that come from other power centers and welcome their engagement. 

I don't have a clip of Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton, David Axelrod, or other Democratic Party heavyweights crowing that Barack Obama will "win definitively" over Mitt Romney in today's election. Perhaps they are out there -- but the Obama communications machine has not sent me such statements.

In contrast, the Romney campaign just sent me this irrationally exuberant claim from former Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie that Romney will clobber Obama decisively today.

Here is the statement and the YouTube post:

The fact is, we can't afford four more years like the last four years. And Governor Romney has been out there putting forward a positive vision and a plan to turn the economy around, to create 12 million jobs, unleash domestic energy, get us to a balanced budget. That's why he's got momentum here on election day. And I think that's why he's going to win tonight, not just win, but win decisively. I don't think there's going to be any doubt at the end of tonight who the next president is going to be.

Please. I like Gillespie and appreciate his loyalty to Romney. That said, I think that people in positions of leadership like him need to restore some honesty and occasional objectivity to political commentary.

It is most likely that neither Obama nor Romney will beat the other decisively. A close race has been brewing for a long time -- and Gillespie knows it's tight. It is wrong for either side to describe the situation in the nation as anything other than divided.

There will be a winner, but the divided aspirations and perspectives in the country deserve more respect and affirmation than Gillespie offered today.

In terms of total increase in "federal debt to GDP" under U.S. presidents in the post-World War II era, Republican presidents during their terms have contributed far more to the debt load of the nation than Democrats.

Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all added to the federal debt significantly on a percent of GDP basis. On the Democratic side, President Obama -- who inherited the worst financial crisis in this era from his predecessor -- also ranks high in terms of contributing to the federal debt as a percentage of GDP.

Who reduced debt as a percentage of GDP the most?

When comparing by presidential term as in the chart to the side (click image to make larger), the big winner is Harry Truman, followed by Bill Clinton.  Eisenhower is next, followed by Johnson and Nixon, the Kennedy, and finally Jimmy Carter. All of these presidents reduced debt as a percent of GDP.

While absolute levels of debt may have been growing through much of this period (though not all), what really matters is what percentage of GDP that debt represents. Most U.S. presidents have been able to keep the debt to GDP ratio declining -- but in the very modern era, since 1980, only Bill Clinton has succeeded in massively decreasing America's federal debt to GDP levels.

When considering it on a per annum basis, the chart of presidential debt-reducers and debt-increasers remains mostly the same, though Barack Obama wins among those adding to the debt load with a per annum increase in debt to GDP of 12 percent. Ronald Reagan is next at 7 percent. As shown in the chart to the left, Truman and Clinton still clobber other presidents in terms of a per annum decrease in federal debt to GDP. 

When looking at the charts this way, it is fascinating to see what a stand-out the Bill Clinton presidency was in balancing the budget and achieving revenue surpluses. 

These data sets were assembled by a close collaborator and credit expert Richard Vague as part of a larger history of debt project that he and I are working on.

As the debates on who is responsible for the levels of federal debt continue to play out in the next 10 days before the election and the 66 days before the US hits a fiscal cliff, remember that the worst contributors to America's debt load were mostly GOP presidents -- with the single exception of Obama, who had a global economic tsunami crashing in on the White House and nation when he took the helm.

While Martha Raddatz was masterful last night actually moderating a genuine and thoughtful debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, she failed to pose a key question to the contenders: What is your view on same-sex marriage?

Some will say, well, there are a long list of issues she had to get in the mix -- Afghanistan, the Libya debacle, abortion a few times, the economy, Medicare -- and that is true. But the issue of gay marriage is one that matters in this election, and it was not mentioned at all in either the first presidential debate or the standoff between Biden and Ryan.

Biden was the person who kicked open the door on this subject in this election by stating he was "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriages. For a couple of days at least, the public divide between Obama and Biden was wider than on any other issue since they had been in office -- a greater chasm between them than on Afghanistan policy where their differences were known but sewn together as a process leading to a conclusion everyone supported. 

Many argued at the time that Obama coming out days after Biden in support of gay marriage would cost him North Carolina. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have decidedly different views on the subject and oppose same-sex marriage, and even civil unions.

With gay marriage is being considered this season on state ballots across the United States -- and with the man who played a star role in kicking the civil-rights battle forward sitting on stage in Danville -- Raddatz should have queried them publicly on the movement broadening traditional marriage.

The final presidential debate, moderated by Bob Schieffer, will focus on foreign policy and international security, so unless he asks how gay soldiers and Marines are doing fulfilling their SEAL team duties, the question won't come up then. That leaves it to the citizens gathered on October 16 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, for a town-hall debate to do what Jim Lehrer and Raddatz did not manage to do and pose this question. (CNN's Candy Crowley will moderate.)

Many of the divisions between Romney-Ryan and Obama-Biden on national security and the economy are overstated. They are both pretending at the moment to be more hawkish on China than they really are. As Ryan said last night, core national interests and assessment of the unique circumstances of every conflict in the Middle East would guide a Romney White House's decision to deploy force -- which is exactly the position of the Obama White House.

But on gay marriage, their are substantial differences, and America should learn more about the rationale each side has for their positions.

During a major foreign policy address earlier today at the Virginia Military Institute, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid tribute to one of the school's most distinguished graduates, former Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State as well as Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall.

Romney said of Marshall that he "helped to vanquish fascism and then planned Europe's rescue from despair. His commitment to peace was born of his direct knowledge of the awful costs and consequences of war."

What he didn't share about General Marshall was that he vehemently opposed recognizing Israel and instead favored U.N. trusteeship after British withdrawal slated for midnight, the 14th of May, 1948. 

As reported in a fascinating historical snippet by the late Richard Holbrooke, who helped organize presidential adviser Clark Clifford's papers for a co-authored memoir, then-President Harry Truman overruled George Marshall, the secretary of state he "revered" along with "James V. Forrestal, George F. Kennan, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson" and did recognize Israel. 

Truman's was a brave move, and in my view, a correct one -- but did lead to the wars that Marshall feared recognition of Israel would ignite.  Today, political Islam is on the rise in the Arab region -- and the failure of Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab League, Europe, Russia, the United Nations and the United States to achieve peace and the balancing creation of a state of Palestine remains a consequential, bleeding global ulcer.

Privately, Mitt Romney offered these dismissive words about the Middle East peace process:

[S]o what you do is, you say, you move things along the best way you can. You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem...and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

Publicly today, Romney flip-flopped and committed himself to working to resolve the "unresolved problem":

Finally, I will recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel.  On this vital issue, the president has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations. In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new president will bring the chance to begin anew.

General Marshall was so disgusted with Truman's move that he stated in an ultra-secret memorandum that if Truman proceeded on Israel's recognition, he was going to vote against his boss in the next election. Nonetheless, Truman stood his ground and signed the note of recognition.

One wonders today whether Romney will ignore or listen to generals today -- like CIA Director General David Petraeus, former Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, CENTCOM commander General James Mattis, even the incumbent Joint Chiefs chairman General Martin Dempsey -- all of whom agree that establishing and recognizing a state of Palestine is vital to U.S. national security and to defending Israel's long-term security in the region. 

General Marshall had it wrong on Israel -- but today, generals are arguing that America can't afford a false choice between Israel on one hand and Arab interests on the other. 

Romney is making a false choice -- hugging tightly one part of a tough neighborhood with little interest in the rest. 

If Romney wants to get this right, he should leverage the credibility he is building with Israel's leadership and hold them tightly in place while simultaneously pulling a Truman and recognizing a state of Palestine. 

As reported by Holbrooke, Truman was irritated that the State Department had made him look like a liar in a commitment he had made to former Israeli president Chaim Weizmann.  Truman stating:

The State Dept. pulled the rug from under me today. The first I know about it is what I read in the newspapers! Isn't that hell? I'm now in the position of a liar and double-crosser. I've never felt so low in my life ....

One can only hope that Mitt Romney works as hard as Harry Truman to reconcile the private statements and commitments he makes to his public statements.

Denver is buzzing ... not. Actually there are a few students and faculty at the University of Denver who seem to be aware that the president of the United States and a former governor who really wants that title (and the headaches) are going to converge here -- with thousands and thousands of outsiders, mostly media wanting to report the first moment that one of them looks at his watch during their encounter.

Most pollsters put Obama ahead nationally -- but Rush Limbaugh says that it's a widespread pollster conspiracy and that actually Obama and Romney are in a dead heat. I'm fine to go with Limbaugh this round (!). It feels like a close race to me even if Romney has failed to leverage any of Obama's few missteps and has made so many of his own mistakes it's hard to keep count. Bottom line is that lots of Americans are unhappy -- and there are enough undecideds to flip this thing. I do think Obama will win if the race were held tomorrow -- but what if another bin Laden video turns up? (Kidding ... just nervous about other Middle East types who draw red lines with markers at UN General Assembly sessions.)

I want the debates to matter -- and thus think that all Americans who are pondering the fate of the nation should spend time watching and wrestling with the proposals they hear from our future or given-one-more-chance leader. I will be live-blogging the debates for both The Atlantic and The Washington Note -- and will be doing so along with Professor Jennifer Hopper's American Presidency class students -- some Dems, some GOPers, sitting in the same room, looking at the same screen -- at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Washington College, by the way, was launched in 1782 and actually had George Washington on its Board of Visitors when founded. Very cool place. Perhaps Washington, a Virginian, helping to establish a school in the rival state of Maryland may have been one of the first truly American acts of that time, at least in education. I wonder if Mitt Romney or Obama will reference the nation's founding fathers or Washington. What would George have done on drones? health care? corn crop subsidies? 

I do know that Hopper is going to spice up her "debate watch" much like CNN is going to do. 

First on CNN, I have learned through the grapevine that the network will have a split screen of both candidates the entire time of the debate. CNN will run a clock showing how much speaking time each candidate actually gets -- and there will be an ongoing graph at the bottom of the screen showing the 'sentiment' of a group of genuinely undecided voters who will be watching the debate in Sony PlayStation mode. 

Hopper has her own deal and sent this to a few special guests she has invited to join her debate-excited students:

We will have the opportunity to engage with the debate in an interactive way -- a group of political scientists have developed an app that will allow students to react to what's happening in real time, by indicating if they agree or disagree with what the candidates are saying, and whether they think candidates are trying to "spin" an issue or "dodge" a question.

These researchers will then make the aggregate data from campuses across the country available to us, so we can see what you and your peers find to be the most (and least) effective moments of the debate. If you are interested in using the app during the debate, all you need to do is bring your smartphone, laptop, or internet-connected tablet to our debate viewing on Wednesday. [Clemons Note:  I am bringing my smartphone -- but not upgraded to OS6]

I have attached here an email with more information for students -- note that participation is entirely voluntary and that your personal information and debate reactions will not be made public, they will merely be added to the overall summary statistics that the researchers compile.

Sounds fun.  Only bad part is that I'm in Denver the night before the debates and am planning to team up with National Journal and CNN's Ron Brownstein moderating a pre-debate event in the morning (join us if you are free -- and here).  I'll be interviewing Colorado Governor and beer and oil & gas expert John Hickenlooper at 10 a.m. central time (watch live here). And then am flying, training and driving to get to the Eastern Shore of Maryland tomorrow night to do this promised live blogging.

Some other tidbits courtesy of MSNBC's Chuck Todd (@ChuckTodd) who posted this stuff on twitter:

57 minutes ago
Chuck Todd ‏@chucktodd
As of 5pm ET, the two campaigns and the debate commission had yet to sign the memo of understanding on the rules for tmro night.

47 minutes ago
Chuck Todd ‏@chucktodd
BTW, here are the loose rules: each candidate will get 2 mins to answer the initial question at the start of each pod, then open season

46 minutes ago
Chuck Todd ‏@chucktodd
After the initial limit of 2 mins for opening answer, up to moderator to decide when a candidate's gone on too long. BTW, there are 6 pods

Well, then...he got distracted and retweeted:

45 minutes ago
Chuck Todd ‏@chucktodd
Rt "@JerrySeinfeld: Think I'll drop into Gotham and try some new stuff tonight ."

Hope someone live blogs Seinfeld. Thanks to Politico for finding a great pairing of Reuters pics of Obama and Romney. More tomorrow. 

A new poll issued by the Arab American Institute (pdf here) yesterday and conducted by JZ Analytics reports that President Obama maintains a commanding lead over Governor Mitt Romney in the election but that Obama's edge has dropped by 15 percent since the 2008 election. 

Arab-Americans are defecting from both both the GOP and the Democratic Party and are increasingly identifying as Independents (24 percent, according to James Zogby. That said Arab-American Dems stand at 46 percent of their population as compared to 22 percent who are GOPers.

In terms of what Arab-Americans thought was "very important" in guiding their presidential vote, the economy ranked far ahead of other issues. In rank order, health care came next; followed by civil liberties, taxes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and U.S. outreach to the Muslim world.

In every category, Obama beat Romney in Arab-American voter perceptions of being able to deal with key issues of the day. Obama's double digit gap was least in assessment of their respective ability to manage the economy. Surprisingly, Obama's lead on economic capability was exactly the same as the Obama-Romney gap on managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The last graph of the brief showed that 'concerns about discrimination' had grown among all Arab-Americans from 2010 to 2012, regardless of faith. Muslim Arab-Americans had very high levels of concern about discrimination; 71 percent today as compated to 64 percent in 2010. Thirty-seven percent of Protestant Arab-American worry about discrimination with 29 percent of Catholics concerned.

There are reportedly 3.9 million self-identifying Arab-Americans in the United States, and an expected 1.1 million Arab-American voters in Michigan, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The poll shows an expected advantage for Obama of 52 percent to 28 percent in these swing states.

Nonetheless, Obama's lead is less than that which he achieved in 2008, down to 52 percent from 67 percent.

It's interesting to consider whether Obama's powerful advantage with ethnic Americans has wilted 'enough' to give Romney an opportunity. 

As National Journal's Ron Brownstein has written and has explained frequently on CNN, the new mathematics of this election can be framed as "80/40". He argues that in the last election Obama won the presidency by winning 80 percent of all non-white voters in the country -- and won roughly 40 percent of white voters. 

Thus, the numbers to watch regarding Romney's challenge is whether he can take a chunk of either Obama's non-white voter base or shove Obama's white voter base to a level below 40 percent  Right now, polls show Obama roughly at the 80/40 level -- but Brownstein says it's still close.

Thus, while Obama may be clobbering Romney in absolute terms with Arab-American voters and virtually every other ethnic group, the relative gap with at least Arab-Americans has diminished.

That should worry the Obama ranks -- and represents a strange kind opportunity for Team Romney in which Obama wins with many of these groups, like Arab-Americans, but doesn't win by enough margins to win overall.

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.