Brad Warthen's Blog

une aide de 900 millions de dollars

One of the many, many groups that send me releases via e-mail every day -- which I generally delete immediately, not because I'm not interested or the subject is unimportant, but because there's only so much time in the day -- is one called The Israel Project.

Today's release from that group grabbed my attention, though, because -- inexplicably -- it was in French. Here's the headline and subhead:

Les États-Unis annoncent une aide de 900 millions de dollars pour la reconstruction de Gaza
L'argent aidera Gaza pour consolider l'Autorité palestinienne

... which reminds me: Night before last, I was downstairs working out for the first time this year (more about that later), when a report came on CNN about Hillary Clinton promising this aid to Gaza, with the stipulation that it had to be channeled through the Palestinian Authority.

Which of course raises the question, How on Earth do you get aid to Gaza through the Palestinian Authority when the Palestinian Authority doesn't control Gaza -- where, in fact, being associated with the Palestinian Authority can get you shot by Hamas, the real power?

Wolf Blitzer didn't say, and I didn't think about it until I saw this headline. So merci for that.

And now a follow-up question occurs to me: What IS going to happen to this money, in reality?

And here's a follow-up to the follow-up: If this money isn't effectively going to go to relieve actual human suffering, or to further our interests in the region, either, aren't there a whole lot of better ways to spend this money in the world? I ask that because we have notoriously underfunded our diplomatic efforts around the world for years and years. What might this money -- mere chump change by stimulus standards, but a respectable amount (I would think) if added on to the State Department budget -- accomplish if we actually drew up a list of our international priorities, and funded them?

WashPost: CIA helps Pakistan, India work together on Mumbai case

Today I got a release from The Washington Post touting a good-news story that for me explained a lot:

The Washington Post today reports that in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters.
 
The exchanges, which began days after the deadly assault in late November, gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way for Islamabad's announcement last week acknowledging that some of the planning for the attack had occurred on Pakistani soil, report Joby Warrick and Karen DeYoung.
 
The intelligence went well beyond the public revelations about the 10 Mumbai terrorists, and included sophisticated communications intercepts and an array of physical evidence detailing how the gunmen and their supporters planned and executed their three-day killing spree in the Indian port city.
 
Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks with gleanings from its networks, the sources said. The U.S. role was described in interviews with Pakistani officials and confirmed by U.S. sources with detailed knowledge of the arrangement. The arrangement is ongoing, and it is unknown whether it will continue after the Mumbai case is settled.

As I've read reports in recent weeks about Pakistan making arrests and acknowledging the involvement of its nationals, I've sort of wondered at the back of my mind why this case has proceeded without a lot more tension -- and maybe actions that went beyond tension -- between these too long-time adversaries. Think about it -- we could have had a nuclear war in the region by now. Then I read this.

This is just the kind of thing you HOPE your government is secretly doing, but you fear that too often it is not...

Rendition we can believe in

Earlier this week I noticed yet another promising sign of continuity we can believe in in the War on Terror. The Obama administration has backed Bush policy in a key court case testing the policy of extraordinary rendition -- sending detainees to countries that have, shall we say, a more relaxed attitude toward certain methods of interrogation.

Here's a NYT story on the subject. And here's the AP version:

By PAUL ELIAS
Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A government lawyer urged an appeals court Monday to toss a lawsuit accusing a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA fly suspected terrorists overseas to be tortured, maintaining a Bush administration position that the case would jeopardize national security.
    The American Civil Liberties Union and others had called on the White House to change direction and drop its move to dismiss the suit. The organization filed the lawsuit on behalf of five men swept up in the "extraordinary rendition" program and who are still being held in various prisons around the world.
    The lawsuit claims that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should be punished for allegedly providing the CIA airplanes and crew to carry out the program that included torture.
    The U.S. government intervened in the case and a trial court judge last year tossed it out after CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden invoked the government's so-called "state secrets privilege," which lets intelligence agencies bar the use of evidence in court cases that threaten national security.
    U.S. Department of Justice lawyer Douglas Letter on Monday urged a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to uphold the lower court decision. Letter said his position was "thoroughly vetted with the appropriate" administration officials.
    "These are the authorized positions of the administration," Letter said in a response to a question from Judge Mary Schroeder.
    Letter said that he was confident that Schroeder and her two colleagues on the appeals court would toss the suit after they read top secret legal documents the government filed with the court under seal.
    The case presented Obama's Justice Department with one of the first of many policy and legal decisions it faces in countless actions across the country left over from the Bush administration. Legal scholars contend that the prior administration stopped litigation involving the government by invoking state secret claims a record number of times, including in more than 40 legal challenges to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretap program.
    A Department of Justice spokesman in Washington, D.C., said government lawyers were reviewing all such state secret assertions in lawsuits across the country.
    "It's vital that we protect information that if released could jeopardize national security," said Justice spokesman Matt Miller. "But the Justice Department will ensure the privilege is not invoked to hide from the American people information about their government's actions that they have a right to know."
    Outside of court, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero criticized the new president.
    "This is not change," Romero said in a prepared statement. "Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue."

I had meant to post something earlier in the week on this and another example of pragmatism-over-rhetoric on the part of the Obama administration. Right now I'm forgetting what the other example was -- I'll let you know if I remember.

But I was reminded of this one by an editorial in the WSJ today, which said in part:

    President Obama has done a masterful job disguising his Administration's growing antiterror maturity, but this week produced further evidence that he is erring on the side of keeping the country safe rather than appeasing the political left. The Justice Department filed to dismiss a federal appeals case involving rendition, embracing an argument developed by . . . the Bush Administration.
    In other words, the anti-antiterror lobby is being exposed as more radical than its putative banner carrier. As Mr. Obama is learning, the left's exertions to disarm the country's counterterrorism arsenal are as dangerous now as they were prior to his election.

Blinded by ideology

Just to show you the difference from an UnParty approach and an ideological one, take a look at The Wall Street Journal's editorial on the Detroit bailout, and compare it to ours.

Both of us are against the bailout. So we agree, right? Not quite. It seems that the one thing that bugs the WSJ the most about the deal is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it might force Detroit to make sensible cars for a change. And that, to the libertarian extremists at the Journal, would be like taking the country to Room 101 -- in other words, it would be the worst thing in the world:

It's also becoming increasingly clear that the real goal of Democrats isn't to save jobs per se, but to tell Detroit what cars to make and how to make them. The goal is to turn GM and the rest into Big Green Machines that will stop making SUVs and trucks and start making small cars that run on something other than carbon fuel. If consumers don't want to drive them, well, the next step will be to impose subsidies or penalties and taxes to coerce them to do so. Giving the federal government an equity stake could also lead to protectionism, as the politicians attempt to shield Detroit's mismanaged assets from competition by citing the interests of the UAW, the environment, or some other "social" good that has nothing to do with making cars Americans will want to drive.

Here's what's wrong with that -- or one of the things wrong with it: As I've made clear, I'm against the bailout. But if there IS a bailout, provisions requiring Detroit to build cars that move us toward energy independence and maybe, just maybe, reduce greenhouse gases would be a GOOD thing about deal, not a bad one.

Moreover, if we the taxpayers are putting up the money -- which, we shouldn't, but if we are -- we have EVERY RIGHT in the universe to demand that Detroit make whatever kinds cars we demand. If we want them all to be purple and green two-tone three-wheelers that run on moonbeams, that by God is the kind of cars the recipients of OUR money ought to get. If the market demands some other kind of car, then the car companies that aren't taking our frickin' money can make them.

Of course, I also believe -- as the founder of the Energy Party -- that there would be absolutely nothing wrong with making it illegal to sell those idiotic land yachts that Americans have been driving for the past decade or so. SUVs are contrary to the national interest -- strategically and environmentally -- and I am utterly unmoved by anyone's argument that they should be allowed to help fund the next bin Laden to come out of Saudi Arabia's madrassas just because -- and this infantile "reason" is offensive to me in the extreme -- they WANT to.

Of course, the God-given right to fund petrodictators -- helping Mahmoud buy the Bomb, for instance -- while at the same time destroying the planet, for no better reason than some moronic desire to loom over the rest of traffic in a vehicle that can carry 8 times as many people as it ever actually carries, is of SUPREME IMPORTANCE to the editors of the WSJ. Nothing is more sacred. One gets the impression that if someone came up with a foolproof plan to capture bin Laden, neutralize the Taliban, stabilize Pakistan, turn our economy around 180 degrees, end man-made global climate change and make everyone in America a millionaire (without the currency losing value, mind you), the WSJ would be against it if it also included a requirement that CAFE standards rise.

Obama and national security: Pragmatism, continuity

Sorry I haven't posted today -- actually, I DID post something, but it blew up when I hit SAVE, and I'm not about to type it again, so there.

Anyway, I thought I'd put up something that would provide a chance for y'all to discuss Obama's National Security team. I've already expressed my concern about Hillary Clinton, and I don't have a lot to say about the rest. I like that Robert Gates is staying. I've always liked Gates. (See my Nov. 10, 2006, column, "The return of the professional")I thought he was a great pick to rescue our military from the screw-ups of Rumsfeld, and he's generally lived up to that.

But the Gates choice speaks to a larger issue, which is continuity of policy. Obama spoke of his "pragmatism about the use of power and my sense of purpose about America's role as a leader in the world." Which speaks to something I like about him, and appreciate. I hoped it would have been like this, and he's not disappointing me.

Some of y'all who know about my support for our national endeavor in Iraq may have wondered how I could have been so wholehearted about endorsing Obama in the primary last year, given that he stressed so much how he was the one guy who would NOT have gone in there. Well, there's the issue of whether we should have gone in, and the issue of what to do next. And the next president is about what to do next. And I believe Obama will be sensible and pragmatic about what to do next.

Some of his most ardent supporters are likely to be disappointed by the very things that reassure me about Obama and foreign policy. But personally, I don't think Obama's going to blow Iraq just to please them. He's fortunate that the Surge (which he was wrong to oppose) has produced a situation in which an ordered withdrawal of American troops is actually advisable, and no longer reckless. I think he'll be careful to do it in a rational manner, according to conditions on the ground. I think he'll see the things that Tom Friedman sees, and wrote about in his Sunday column:

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against al-Qaida and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

The really miraculous thing that Friedman notes is a sign that an independent judiciary is emerging in Iraq: The high court came down on a member of parliament for trying to persecute a government official for visiting Israel. This is a startling development, almost miraculous, really. I remember several years back listening to Lindsey Graham talk about how very far Iraq was from developing the institutions that support the rule of law. Graham believed we needed to stay there; I believed we needed to stay there, but contemplating how long it would take for such institutional changes to take hold was extremely discouraging.

Now we're seeing such encouraging signs as this, which is actually as important as the reduction of violence. As Friedman says, "It’s a reminder of the most important reason for the Iraq war: to try to collaborate with Iraqis to build progressive politics and rule of law in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, a region that stands out for its lack of consensual politics and independent judiciaries." That's why Friedman was for the Iraq War, and it's why I was, too. But I didn't think something like this would happen so fast. As you'll recall from what I wrote the week we invaded, I really didn't expect us to be talking realistically about withdrawal this early in the process. But now we can -- as long as we don't screw it up. And keeping Gates at Defense is an important way of maintaining the continuity needed to avoid screwing it up.

I realize that doesn't fit the hopes of those who thought an Obama administration's policies would be as different from the Bush administration's as night and day, and Obama's going to have to do and say some things to keep those people happy, but I suspect he can do that and still chart a wise course. To them, "continuity" is probably a cuss word. But it's the wise course, and it will be respected abroad. More than that, it's what will work.

As David Brooks wrote today, in a column headlined "Continuity We Can Believe In:"

Over the past year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has delivered a series of remarkable speeches echoing and advancing Rice’s themes. “In recent years, the lines separating war, peace, diplomacy and development have become more blurred and no longer fit the neat organizational charts of the 20th century,” he said in Washington in July.

Gates does not talk about spreading democracy, at least in the short run. He talks about using integrated federal agencies to help locals improve the quality and responsiveness of governments in trouble spots around the world.

He has developed a way of talking about security and foreign policy that is now the lingua franca in government and think-tank circles. It owes a lot to the lessons of counterinsurgency and uses phrases like “full spectrum operations” to describe multidisciplinary security and development campaigns....

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Some of you might not be seeing the change you believe in. But I'm already seeing continuity I can believe in.

And here's the change that we WILL see, and that will matter: I think Obama can sell this policies, and make them work, better than Bush did. He was a lousy salesman. As I wrote about the Surge when I first heard about it, it was the right strategy, but Bush was the wrong guy to have selling it.

Obama's the right guy. This is going to be interesting, and I hope gratifying, to watch.

So when do we invade Pakistan?

OK, so now Iraq was a bad idea, because Obama was against our going into Iraq, and the people (except for 46 percent of them) voted for Obama, so that's the new truth. Right?

And we've always been at war with Eastasia.

See? I've always said I love Big Brother.

But here's my question: When do we invade Pakistan? You know, that's where al Qaida is and all, as certain people keep telling us. As one of my interlocutors said back here, "Al-Qaida was not in Iraq until we got there." Which prompted me to say:

If al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, and we can't get AT them in Pakistan, on account of the fact that Pakistan gets really, REALLY upset when we go in there after them, and they're a sovereign country and all (which doesn't bother ME; I still think it was a good idea to follow the enemy into Cambodia in 1970, but presumably a lot of folks who voted for Obama Tuesday disagree, although not necessarily Obama himself, which is another topic), then isn't it kind of a good thing to draw them into Iraq, where we happen to have troops to fight them?

Sorry about the long sentence, there.

Re-education is never an easy process, and as you see, I'm a particularly hard case.

You see, I forgot for a moment that Obama is all for doing a Cambodia and chasing al Qaeda into Pakistan, so in that sense we really didn't need to go into Iraq (I still think we should have, for other reasons, but let's stick with this point for now).

At least, I think Obama's OK with that. That was the impression I had back in August 2007, when I wrote:

BARACK OBAMA was right to threaten to invade Pakistan in order to hit al-Qaida, quite literally, where it lives. And as long as we’re on this tack, remind me again why it is that we’re not at war with Iran.
    OK, OK, I know the reasons: Our military is overextended; the American people lack the appetite; the nutball factor is only an inch deep in Iran, and once you get past Ahmadinejad and the more radical mullahs the Iranian people aren’t so bad, but they’d get crazy quick if we attacked, and so forth.
    I can also come up with reasons not to invade Pakistan, or even to talk about invading Pakistan. We’ve heard them often enough. Pakistan is (and say this in reverent tones) a sovereign country; Pervez Musharraf is our “friend”; we need him helping us in the War on Terror; he is already politically weak and this could do him in; he could be replaced by Islamists sufficiently radical that they would actively support Osama bin Laden and friends, rather than merely fail to look aggressively enough to find them; fighting our way into, and seeking a needle in, the towering, rocky haystacks of that region is easier said than done, and on and on.
    But when you get down to it, it all boils down to the reason I mentioned in passing in the first instance — Americans lack the appetite. So with a long line of people vying to be our new commander in chief, it’s helpful when one of them breaks out of the mold of what we might want to hear, and spells out a real challenge before us...

Anyway, this seems particularly relevant at the moment, because Obama just won the election -- perhaps you heard about that -- and on Election Day itself, I read this in the WSJ:

ISLAMABAD -- Pakistani officials warned U.S. Gen. David Petraeus that frequent missile strikes on militant targets in Pakistan fan anti-American sentiment in the country, an ally in the fight against terrorism.

The new U.S. commander of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq met Pakistani officials, including Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, as part of his first international trip since taking over U.S. Central Command three days earlier....

So what's the new Commander in Chief going to tell Petraeus to do about all that? Keep up the pressure on al Qaida and the Taliban in their Tribal Area hidey-holes? Or back off in deference to our ally?

I'm sorry to interrupt everybody's warm and fuzzy feelings about how we'll be at peace with all the world now that Obama is going to be our president, but I'm ornery that way. I've got this habit of noticing that the real world has this way of intruding upon us...

Kagan's right: Security trumps all

Frederick Kagan has it exactly right in today's Wall Street Journal: "Security Should Be the Deciding Issue." An excerpt:

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a "real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression -- the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

A couple of things to note: Mr. Kagan doesn't express a preference for either Obama or McCain. Of course, folks likely to vote for McCain are more likely to agree with him that security overrides such considerations as the economy. Democrats love it when the economy is the one thing on the table; just ask James Carville. And of course, I've had arguments with bud here about the relative importance of foreign affairs vs. the domestic economy. He thinks the economy is everything, and to me it's less important (not to mention simply being something I hate to spend time talking or thinking about, because it has to do with money).

And, yeah -- I trust McCain more on national security. At the same time, I don't think Obama would be all that bad. Yes, he continues to insist upon being wrong about Iraq. But I think he has calculated that he has to be consistent there; his views on the rest of the world aren't nearly as MoveOn.orgish.

But set all that aside, and the main thing I'm saying here is that I agree with Mr. Kagan: For us we turn inward fretting over our pocketbooks at the expense of ignoring our proper role in the world would be extraordinarily dangerous. Yeah, we can do both. But not the economy at the expense of international security.

South of the Border

Some of y'all really hated it that I mentioned the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in the McCain endorsement -- which to me illustrates the no-win situation I saw myself in with all those loyal and devoted Obamaphiles out there. Nice people, many of them, but hard to please if you don't agree with them.

If I had just cited the usual reasons -- being right on Iraq, taking a stand on doing the right thing on immigration, being a war hero, etc. -- I would have been castigated for lack of original thought. So I decided to include something you might not have thought of -- and something that actually helped confirm my preference for McCain -- as a way of broadening the discussion. Perhaps predictably, I got the obvious response from those determined to find fault: Obviously you don't have any good reasons, since you drag this out of left field.

No win situation.

Doug mentions back on this post that The Economist has endorsed Obama. Well, a couple of days ago I was reading something in The Economist that reminded me of why the Colombian FTA is important to me, but also why y'all might have trouble understanding that.

Blame it on my upbringing -- or part of it, anyway. I spent two years, four-and-a-half months -- easily the longest I lived in one place growing up -- living in Guayaquil, Ecuador. From late 1962 through spring 1965. Like Obama in Indonesia, I saw a lot during that time that most nine-to-11 year olds growing up in the States don't see. For instance, I was not only there during a military coup, but I was in the house at the time during when the plot was being hatched, at least in part. Our landlord was a captain in the Ecuadorean Navy, and my parents had left me at the landlord's house while they went out one day. While I was there, a man came to visit the captain; they went into a room and closed the door. The next day, the president had been put on a plane to Panama, the man who had come to visit was a member of the new military junta, and our landlord had a big post in the new government. Minister of Agriculture, I think.

My guitar teacher, who had a little shop down by the waterfront where he made his own guitars by hand, was an agent for U.S. Naval Intelligence, I would later learn. And the missionary who preached at the nondenominational English-language services we attended on Sunday was working for the CIA. But not everyone was running things or plotting to run things. I remember the men who squatted in a circle in the dust of the vacant lot near our duplex as they bet on the cockfight in the center of their circle. I remember the smell of REAL poverty, the Third World kind, that arose from the poorest barrios of the city. It was different, very different, from living in this country.

I also remember people who were there working for JFK's Alliance for Progress program. And ever since I came back in 1965, I've been acutely conscious of the fact that most of my fellow Americans just don't give a damn one way or the other about these countries in their own backyards. JFK was the last.

This cultural indifference is definitely reflected in the mass media. So it is that I have to turn to such publications as The Economist to find out what's going on in the realm of the Monroe Doctrine. It's weird. Anyway, I got to thinking about that when I read this piece in The Economist the other day. It was about the irony that folks in Latin America seem to prefer Obama, even though it's McCain who cares about the region enough to learn about it:

OF THE two candidates in the American presidential election, it is John McCain who knows something about Latin America. Not only was he born in Panama, he also visited Colombia and Mexico in July. He thinks the United States should ratify a free-trade agreement with Colombia and, at least until it became politically toxic, wanted to reform immigration policy. Ask him who the United States’ most important friends around the word are and he pretty quickly mentions Brazil.

And yet if they had a vote, Latin Americans, like Europeans, would cast it for Barack Obama—though without much enthusiasm. Preliminary data from the latest Latinobarómetro poll, taken in 18 countries over the past month and published exclusively by The Economist, show that 29% of respondents think an Obama victory would be better for their country, against only 8% favouring Mr McCain. Perhaps surprisingly, 30% say that it makes no difference who wins, while 31% claim ignorance. Enthusiasm for Mr Obama is particularly high in the Dominican Republic (52%), Costa Rica, Uruguay and Brazil (41%). In Brazil, six candidates in this month’s municipal elections changed their names to include “Barack Obama” in them.

In the third presidential debate, I noticed two things (well, I noticed a lot of things, but two things related to this post): That McCain had cared enough to understand what it meant to support a trade agreement with a key ally in the region -- an agreement that could only be good for this country in terms of trade and jobs, and which affirmed a country that had undertaken huge sacrifices to ally itself with U.S. interests. That was the first thing. The second was that Obama seemed not even to have scratched the surface of the issue. His answer was such Big Labor boilerplate, it seemed plain that he had not looked into the issue or thought about it beyond his party's talking points.

To me, that spoke to things that were true about the two candidates in a broader sense -- experience, and the ability to differentiate between our friends in the world and those who wish us, and their own people, ill. I had been deeply impressed by the recent piece Nicholas Kristof -- a guy who almost certainly will vote for Obama -- had done on this issue, and the degree that Obama's answer utterly failed to look at the issue as knowledgeably and thoughtfully as Kristof had. And as McCain had.

I sat and talked to Ted Sorensen about Obama as the heir to Camelot, and was deeply impressed. But I've gathered since then that aura aside, Obama seems actually less likely to take the kind of interest in Latin America that Kennedy did. McCain is more likely to do so. Ironic, huh?

So to me it was more than, here's a little esoteric fact I know and you don't. To me, it mattered. But to me, South America has always mattered.

Scattered thoughts on the debate

First, I'll refer you to video from the panel discussion last night, where you will find Joshua Gross and others offering their thoughts.

I was wiped out last night, and didn't stick around to talk to folks after the discussion ended a little before midnight. Long day. I hope folks didn't think I was rude, but I'd been fighting a cold and had no resources left. I'd told everyone at the start that I was just there to observe; it was the newsroom's show.

On my way out I did run into our own Norm Ivey, who was there sporting an Obama '08 T-shirt. You can see some of Norm's recent comments on this post, and this one, and this one.

As I said last night from my Treo, I don't think this was a debate that changed any minds -- although Norm raised the interesting point that the candidates were speaking to voters who hadn't paid attention until now, and that on that score he thought McCain did better. I can't say, because I wasn't looking for that while I watched.

Nor do I have an overall observation or theme. I thought each candidate exhibited some strengths and weaknesses, as follows:

McCain strengths:

• Having been right about the Surge. There's so much more to that than the fact that by sending those extra troops, and using them properly, we created a stituation in which we can start talking about drawing down and leaving behind a stable Iraq. It goes to the core fact that McCain was right, and Bush was wrong, for four years before the president finally got rid of Rumsfeld and switched to a strategy that would work. This narrative (and so many other things) gives the lie to the Democrats' "McCain equals Bush" nonsense. It communicates that he won't give up on our nation's commitments, or let American blood be spent for nought. And it shows he knows the differences between approaches likely to work, and those not to.
• The constant reminders of his long experience with these issues. The answer he gave to the "bomb, bomb Iran" remark was his best moment. He gave the history of his judgments of major decisions involving the deployment of our military, from being against sending the Marines to Lebanon in 83 to backing Clinton on Bosnia in defiance of many in his party. It strongly suggested the thought, "Oh, yeah -- and Obama just got to the Senate..."
• His long-held opposition to earmarks and wasteful spending, and clear willingness to use his veto and the bully pulpit to fight it. Lehrer was irritating with his constant hammering on "if the bailout passes, what will you give up," but McCain gave the best answer.
• The reminder that he and Biden pushed through the 9/11 commission, again in spite of the Bush administration.
• His answer on the initial economic question, emphasizing how encourage he was that Democrats and Republicans were working together finally, made Obama's answer about "failed policies" of Republicans look petty.

McCain weaknesses

• One overrides all others, and he did it repeatedly and intentionally -- his condescending references to Obama "not understanding" issues. Obama is a smart man, but even if he weren't, McCain's constant attempts to put him down would have been unseemly, and beneath him. Yes, I believe there are some things Obama "doesn't get," but that's not a gentlemanly way of putting it, and I'm betting it created a lot of sympathy for Obama. Most of all, it was inconsistent with the sort of man McCain is -- he is usually deeply humble and gracious to those who disagree with him (something that I think is all the more admirable because of his natural temper; he has chosen to be mild in disagreement, and it speaks well of him). This was artificial and offensive, and whoever talked him into taking this approach should not be listened to again.
• As we knew already, he is not as smoothly articulate as his opponent. He lost himself in his sentences a number of times, particularly toward the end, and that did him no good.

Obama strengths

• His argument that Iraq has sapped our resources to the point that we can't "project force" where we need to elsewhere in the world. Yes, Democrats have long said this in regard to Afghanistan, but he took it beyond that. This remains the strongest argument that critics of our involvement in Iraq have, and he used it well, doing an excellent job of distancing himself from those in his party who are reflexively against ANY military action, and that's something he has to do to be credible as a candidate for commander in chief.
• Beyond exhausting the military, he also made a good argument that Iraq has enabled and strengthened Iran -- a familiar argument, but he presented it well.
• His gracious acknowledgment of the courageous leadership McCain showed in standing up to the administration on torture. The normal Democratic position is that McCain "caved" on the issue, and is no better than Bush. That's a deeply unfair characterization, and Obama showed himself to be above that.
• More articulate, as always (see "McCain weaknesses").

Obama weaknesses

• Continuing to be wrong on the Surge, and not acknowledging it, hurts him with everyone else except his base. Trouble is, that base will go nuclear if he acknowledges it. (The thing is that logically, he could still assert it was wrong to go INTO Iraq, but that the Surge was the thing to do.) The "worked beyond wildest expectations" earlier helped, but McCain turned that against him well, noting that it was no surprise to HIM.
• Probably no one else noticed this, but when he tried to excuse his failure to hold hearings on Afghanistan (a weakness in itself), he said that's not the practice on the committee chaired by his veep candidate. That made me fully realize, in a way I hadn't before, just how upside-down the ticket is in terms of qualifications -- the number two guy on the ticket is the number one guy's CHAIRMAN. If I had been McCain, I might have succumbed to the temptation to point out the irony.
• This is a silly one, but the "professor" was much in evidence in his pedantic insistence on trying to pronounce foreign names and terms the way natives of those countries might, but doing it with such an obvious American accent (the bad guys in Afghanistan were the "Tollybon," said as only an English-shaped tongue could say it). Maybe you couldn't hear it; it's something from my childhood when I lived in South America and was bilingual -- even though I can hardly speak it now, hearing other gringos try to be SO proper in their pronunciation and fail still grates on my ear.

Yeah, I know -- I gave McCain more strengths, and Obama more weaknesses. But each item does not have equal value, and overall, I think they came out even. That's bad news for McCain, because the subject of most of the debate was his personal area of strength, and he needed to clearly win this one.

I don't think he did that, but then I can't speak for all independent voters.

Seven years on

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
Seven years ago this week, I was filled with optimism. Not everyone responded to the events of 9/11/01 that way, but I did.
    Yes, I was mindful of the horrific loss of human life. But nothing could change that; my optimism rose from what I believed would come next.
    Surely, I thought, we could set aside foolishness and use the unprecedented resources our nation possessed — military power, certainly, but also our economic dominance and perhaps most of all the strength of the ideas upon which our nation is built — to make future 9/11s less likely.
    By “foolishness” I mean a number of things. Take, for instance, our insatiable appetite for oil produced by nations that consider fostering al-Qaidas as being consistent with their interests. (Joe Biden has a great speech he’s given around South Carolina for years about the incalculable opportunity wasted by George W. Bush on Sept. 12, when, instead of urging us to every sacrifice and every effort toward transforming the energy underpinnings of our economy, he told us to go shopping and delegate the war fighting to the professionals.)
    But the greatest foolishness was the pointless, poisonous partisanship that militated against focusing the nation’s resources toward solving any problem. It should have been the easiest to set aside. It’s not that I read too much into those Democrats and Republicans singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps; it’s that partisanship is based on considerations that are so much less substantial than the realities of 9/11. Those attacks should have melted away party differences like the noonday tropical sun burning away a morning mist.
    But partisanship is an industry that employs thousands of Americans — in the offices of Beltway advocacy groups, in the studios of 24/7 cable TV “news” channels, in party headquarters, on congressional staffs and in the White House. And they are much better focused on that which sustains them — polarization for its own sake — than the rest of us are on the interests we hold in common.
    They lay low for awhile, but as most of us went back to shopping while our all-volunteer military went to war, the polarization industry went back to work dividing us, hammer and tongs. They tapped the powerful emotions of 9/11 to their purposes, and led us to levels of bitterness that none of us had seen in our lifetimes.
    But what did I expect to happen, seven years ago? Nothing less than using our considerable influence to build a better world. Go ahead, laugh. All done now?
    In an editorial the Sunday after the attacks, I wrote that “We are going to have to drop our recent tendencies toward isolationism and fully engage the rest of the world on every possible term — military, diplomatic, economic and humanitarian.” That meant abandoning a lot of foolishness.
    Take, for instance, our policy toward the Mideast. Our goal had been stability above all. Prop up some oppressive regimes and come to terms with others; just don’t let anything interfere with the smooth flow of petroleum. Saddam upsets the equilibrium by invading Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia? Send half a million troops to restore the status quo ante, but don’t topple his regime, because that would upset the balance.
    But 9/11 showed us that the status quo was extraordinarily dangerous. It produced millions of disaffected young men, frustrated and humiliated by the oppression that we propped up. Things needed to change.
    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed part of the equation well in Cairo in 2005: “For 60 years the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.” The New York Times’ Tom Friedman took it further, speaking of the need to “drain swamps,” the figurative kind that bred terrorists the way literal bogs breed malaria.
    But instead of leading a national effort on every possible front — the military speaks of our national power as being based in the acronym DIME, for “Diplomatic,” “Information,” “Military” and “Economic” resources (those who put their lives on the line are wise about these things) — we’ve spent most of the past seven years bickering over the military aspect alone. This argument between the antiwar left and the hawkish right has so weakened the national will to do anything that we came close to failure in Iraq, could still fail in Afghanistan and are helpless in the face of Russian aggression in the Caucasus and Iranian nuclear ambition.
    So how do I feel about our national prospects today, given all that has happened? Forgive me, but I am once again (cautiously) optimistic, based on a number of signs, from small to momentous:

• Dramatic improvement in Iraq — thanks largely to the “surge” that he belatedly embraced after four years of floundering — has changed the national conversation, and led President Bush to speak of starting the process of moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the battleground even the partisans can agree upon.
• Last week Secretary Rice sat down to solidify a new understanding with Moammar Quaddafi of Libya, the once-intractable sponsor of terror whose mind was changed by the Iraq invasion.
• The choice for president is between two men who gained their respective parties’ nominations by speaking to the deep national desire to move beyond partisan paralysis. (I realize they would lead in different directions. But if either can lead a national consensus toward implementing his best ideas, we will be better off — if only for having had the experience of agreeing with each other for once.)

Yes, the threads of hope to which I cling are delicate, and cynics will regard me as laughably foolish. But the alternative is not to hope. And that, given the potential of this nation, would be the ultimate foolishness.

Go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.