Snippets – May 23rd 2008

Bob McCarty writes about his guest appearance on BBC’s World Have Your Say program (visit the podcast link).

Barack Obama’s form of diplomacy:

Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. Now is the time to pressure Iran directly to change their troubling behavior. Obama would offer the Iranian regime a choice. If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization, economic investments, and a move toward normal diplomatic relations. If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation. Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress.

• In a related article by Jed Babbin, The New Appeasers as well as Victor Davis Hanson’s article Appeasement and Its Discontents …

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
So spoke President Bush to the Israeli Knesset on the 60^th anniversary of the birth of the Jewish state last week. … First, the state of Israel is inextricably a result of the Holocaust – a genocide that was in itself the logical consequence of an ascendant Nazi state, whose industry of death might could been circumvented by concerted action earlier in the late 1930s by the then stronger liberal democracies. Bush was assuring the Israelis that the United States would not, in contrast to liberal democracies of the past, appease states and organizations intent on killing Jews by the millions.
Second, Bush’s warning came in a climate of fear and weariness in the West, in which calls to meet without preconditions with both Iran and Hamas – the former state whose president has forecast the impending destruction of Israel, the latter terrorist organization whose charter hinges on the end of the Jewish state – have been voiced by several public figures, most prominently in recent days by former President Carter.
Third, the warning about appeasement comes not just after, and in implied defense, of military action in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the case of the United States, also after the September 11 catastrophe, which itself followed a decade of bipartisan inability to confront and respond to a number of al-Qaeda serial provocations.
The speech caused outrage among Democrats who insisted that it was “appalling” and a “smear” on Barack Obama, who has advocated talks, without preconditions, with Iran, and who had been informally endorsed by a Hamas official, and who had recently fired a Middle Eastern adviser, Robert Malley, for meeting with Hamas leaders. Obama fired off the following reply:
“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60^th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel … George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”
Three questions are raised by this controversy. First: What constitutes appeasement in the 21st-century age of globalization? Second: If President Bush had wished to imply a connection with the unnamed Barack Obama, how fair would such a charge have been? Third: Has President Bush himself followed his own advice and shunned the appeasement of “with terrorists and radicals”?
Most define appeasement not by the mere willingness on occasion to negotiate with enemies (i.e., the heads of nation states rather than criminal terrorist cliques). Rather, appeasement is an overriding desire to avoid war or confrontation to such a degree so as to engage in a serial pattern of behavior that results in an accommodation of an enemy’s demands — and ultimately the inadvertent enhancement of its agendas. Key here is the caveat that there must muscular alternatives to appeasement, as was true with a rather weak 1936 Nazi Germany or a non-nuclear theocratic Iran.
Talking with an Iranian theocrat like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad per se might not necessarily constitute appeasement. But continuing such talks without preconditions that made no progress in curbing Iranian nuclear agendas, or support for Hezbollah terrorists and Shiite militias in Iraq would not only be futile, but encourage further Iranian adventurism — by the assurance that negotiations were infinite and there would be few lines in the sand and little chance of military opposition to follow. In our era, the locus classicus of appeasement is the near decade of negotiations, empty threats, and drawn out diplomacy with Slobodan Milosevic, in which with virtual impunity he butchered thousands of Croats, Kosovars, and Bosnians — until a belated bombing war forced him to capitulate.
Bush in his Knesset address may have acknowledged that expansive notion of appeasement when he elaborated on his “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” line, with the proviso of futility — namely that such talking assumed an “ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” In addition, Bush’s example — that when “Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided” — suggests that his reference to appeasement meant not just one-time talking, but delusional and persistent engagement that is oblivious to facts on the ground.
If the president also meant to include Obama among those who would engage in such appeasement, would there be any evidence for such a view? Obama himself has never been in a position of exercising executive judgments, so we have only his campaign statements from which to surmise. In this regard, we certainly know that Obama is willing to meet any and all our enemies without preconditions. During a televised debate he was asked directly whether he would agree “to meet separately, without precondition . . . with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea,” Obama replied: “I would.” …
If a President Obama were to enter into multiple negotiations with Iran, and if Iran were to continue to subvert the Lebanese government and threaten Israel through its surrogate Hezbollah, and continue to develop a nuclear arsenal while promising the destruction of Israel, at what point would he be willing not merely to cease talking, but to accept that his negotiations had done more harm than good and thus required a radical change of course — and would it be in time? …
Both the president and Obama, in arguing abstractly over appeasement, do not factor in such realist concerns of leverage that govern decisions to negotiate, such as exporting ten million barrels a day of scarce oil (Saudi Arabia), the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of an unstable government (Pakistan and North Korea), or the unwillingness of American public opinion to support an armed intervention (Darfur).
In that regard, Barack Obama shows his own inexperience when he evokes past summits that a John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan conducted with the nuclear Soviets — contemporary rivalries in which escalation to nuclear annihilation was a real worry, and at the time Soviet combatants (as is true in Iraq) were not killing our own soldiers.
In short, nothing in the president’s speech was inaccurate, inflammatory, or hypocritical. Whether Barack Obama believes he was a target of the president’s rhetoric, or whether he would engage in appeasement, hinges on whether his overeagerness to talk without preconditions to the world’s thugs and rogues would persist in the face of unpleasant facts — and so make the likelihood of eventual military action more, rather than less, likely.

• Barack Obama writes at his website on issues – foreign policy …

“When I am this party’s nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq; or that I gave George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran; or that I supported Bush-Cheney policies of not talking to leaders that we don’t like. And he will not be able to say that I wavered on something as fundamental as whether or not it is ok for America to torture — because it is never ok… I will end the war in Iraq… I will close Guantanamo. I will restore habeas corpus. I will finish the fight against Al Qaeda. And I will lead the world to combat the common threats of the 21st century: nuclear weapons and terrorism; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. And I will send once more a message to those yearning faces beyond our shores that says, “You matter to us. Your future is our future. And our moment is now.” [Barack Obama, Des Moines, Iowa, November 10, 2007]

• In another article concerning President Bush and one of his family’s old friends and business partner, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, where during a visit the President of the United States asked that the Saudi open up the crude oil faucet and bring the price down on oil by meeting the present demand. The Saudi Arabian ruler declined, as he did previously. The Saudi are not about to turn on the faucets that is presently making them a lot of money. As the Newsvine article, Red Dawn reported …
• The rest of the president’s five-day trip to the middle east was a similar bust everywhere he turned. He tried to get our “allies” in the region to step up pressure on Iran to abandon its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons — no go. He failed to get anyone to help us discourage Tehran from arming and training forces to defend Gaza and Lebanon against Israel’s endless aggression there. In fact, instead of the backing down a less clumsy leader could have expected, those groups stepped up attacks on America’s allies before, and during, his trip. And if that’s not enough, he also used the international spotlight he was in to snipe at one of his countrymen who is running for president — a truly unprecedented piece of unpatriotic behavior. Politics used to end at the water’s edge. It doesn’t now — yet another of George Bush’s bequests to the country he’s been running into the ground for going on 8 years.
  Even if his especially slimy attempt to jettison Barack Obama’s run at the White House fails, the new president will inherit an America that the George Bush presidency has horribly weakened. The article I linked says that “Bush ['s] … his successor, Republican or Democrat, will find that America’s influence in the world is at its lowest point since the end of the Cold War. …
• Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi …

Will chair the Democratic National Convention in August said she thinks the party should slash the number of so-called superdelegates for the 2012 presidential race. Although Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois currently leads Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, neither candidate appears to likely amass enough pledged delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses to secure the nomination. The choice will fall to the unpledged superdelegates. They are the 796 ex officio delegates chosen from select ranks – members of Congress, governors and other elected officials and state party leaders. They include Pelosi’s daughter Christine, who is a superdelegate from California, and Pelosi herself.
The unprecedented prominent role of superdelegates in this year’s election has led to charges that their very existence is undemocratic, taking the presidential choice out of the hands of voters. …
Pelosi said she opposed the idea of superdelegates when they were created, some three decades ago. She also ran a losing campaign for the Democratic National Committee chairmanship two decades ago, in which abolishing superdelegates was part of her platform.
As Pelosi spoke, the latest Associated Press count showed Obama needs just 61 delegates, super or otherwise, to clinch the nomination. Including committed superdelegates, he has 1,965 delegates to Clinton’s 1,780, with 2,026 required to win.

• At the United Nations [San Francisco Chronicle] …

The top American envoy at the U.N. slammed terrorists and insurgents for using children to carry out violence, but said Tuesday that the U.S. tries to provide special treatment when it detains those young people. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s comments followed the release of a U.S. report that 2,500 people under age 18 have been detained, almost all in Iraq, since 2002 during the war on terror. Some had been held for periods up to a year or more.
“We are heartbroken that terrorists and extremists use kids for their campaign of violence,” said Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to both Iraq and Afghanistan who has been close to the scenes of the detentions.
The report said the exact age of the juveniles is not known. The majority are believed to be 16 or 17 years old. In the United States a 17-year-old can enlist in the U.S. army, with parental consent. …
The envoy said the American government understands the needs of children. “We do our best to have special treatment of them in terms of their psychological need, their educational needs, and keep them apart form adults, and work with their communities and their families.” …
The report said that of the total detained, all but 100 had been picked up in Iraq. Of the remainder, most were swept up in Afghanistan. The U.S. military says it has held eight juveniles, ages 13-17, at Guantanamo since the detention center opened in 2002. Six were released and two are now adults facing war crimes charges.

• Political activists have been a part of political conventions for about as long as conventions have been around – but this convention will be as different as the present political process of Election 2008 – there will be a Ron Paul revolt. …

A significant amount of attention has been paid to the anti-war protesters and liberal demonstrators headed for the Republican National Convention, but a potentially more disruptive group of political activists threatens to descend on St. Paul this September in what has already been dubbed “Ron Paul’s Revolt.”
“I have a busload of Ron Paul supporters on the way to Minneapolis-Saint Paul for the National Convention, along with an expanding army of volunteers from more than 1,500 locations coast to coast. We are resolved to make these next few months count. We look forward to the list of speakers. We will converge on Minnesota regardless of whether you invite Dr. Paul, but we would prefer to stay in hotels and attend the convention as members of the Republican Party rather than stay at the YMCA and protest outside as disaffected ex-Republicans. The choice is yours.”
That is the message Ron Paul supporters are sending to Maria Cino, chief executive officer of the Committee of Arrangements which is organizing the 2008 Republican National Convention. Paul’s fervent followers have been frustrated by the Republican Party establishment as they continue to push their candidate’s libertarian ideals. Many in the party view Paul as a nuisance for not ending his campaign and not endorsing Republican nominee John McCain.
The Paul campaign has been organizing for state and county conventions nationwide in an attempt to wrest delegates away from McCain. This has led to disruptions of state GOP conventions in Nevada, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, and Georgia as well as district conventions in Minnesota. Now, word of an unconfirmed “Freedom Rally” to be held in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention is spreading through message boards, blogs and MeetUp groups. Such a demonstration could steal the spotlight from McCain and give the Republican Party a major headache going into the general election.
Paul spoke with radio station KTRH in Houston this past week and discussed the role of his supporters at the convention. When asked about a “revolt” at the convention, Paul said he wasn’t sure that’s the appropriate word, but “there certainly will be some challenges because the supporters I have, have been very energized.” Asked what those challenges from his supporters in St. Paul may be, Paul said, “There is no specific plan.”
While Paul’s lawyers have apparently advised the candidate to avoid such a rally, the prospect of unrest is being used as leverage for a prime speaking slot at the convention. Furthermore, Paul himself may be helpless to stop his enthusiastic supporters from crashing the party if their dissatisfaction persists.