I am aware that this is sort of old news.However, since I have been busy lately and this is still an important on-going problem, I will write my blog post about it anyway.This began as a reaction to an op-ed in the New York Times, by Princeton doctoral candidate Elliot Hen-Tov and Princeton professor of Near Eastern Studies, Bernard Haykel.With the recent tightening of the newest sanctions on Iran this past Thursday, July 1, 2010, it is important to revisit this issue.
First, back to the op-ed from last month.In order to make any real headway on US-Iran relations, it is absolutely essential that each side really understand the other.For prominent scholars of prestigious universities, this also holds true.Which is why this article must be revisited – the Princeton people have it wrong.Their main assertion is that “Iran… stands to lose much influence as Turkey assumes a surprising new role as the modern, democratic and internationally respected nation willing to take on Israel and oppose America.”While parts of this statement are correct, the article represents a flawed understanding of Iranian politics and its relationship to the United States.Principally, it does not really matter for the United States (or Israel for that matter) what type of fiery rhetoric Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad uses – it is generally not directed at American or Israeli audiences anyway.The poll quoted by the authors, although irrelevant to their article, proves this point.The two major regional powers in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia, whose regime is a strong US ally, and Iran, whose regime clearly is not.When Ahmadinejad makes his statements in “support” of the Palestinian cause, he also does so bearing in mind that this can also play on Saudi Arabia’s weaknesses.Iran can claim to be the true supporter of Muslims in peril (despite a substantial number of Palestinians being of Christian or other backgrounds) while simultaneously making the Saudi regime appear weak to its people by alluding to its close relationship to the USA.In this manner, the Iranian regime hopes to remain dominant in the region over Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states.
Ahmadi-casual-Friday-nejad is not some “irrational, rouge leader” as realist IR theory would have us believe.The Iranian government’s support of Israel is mostly a domestic campaign to give the regime the appearance of standing up to the hegemonic rule of the United States and then Israel.Given the vastly superior military forces of both the USA and Israel, Iran would not risk attacking Israel.So, while these authors note that Turkey is seen by Palestinians as a much closer ally than Iran, it is crucial to understand that Iran’s political exploitation of this crisis is mostly for the purpose of bolstering domestic support for the regime and is targeted to domestic and Saudi, not international, audiences.
Secondly, I take issue with the Islam in Turkey being called “more liberal and enlightened.”Again, this is a fundamental mis-characterization of reality.While Saudi Arabia and Iran might be self-proclaimed Islamic states and Turkey a self-proclaimed secular state, the notion that any one regime is any more or less liberal/enlightened than the other is absurd when further examining their actual policies.In Iran, women are obligated to wear hijab at all times; in Turkey, there are laws making it illegal to wear the veil in some public places.Forcing people to appear secular is no better than forcing people to appear pious – these are merely two extreme ends of the spectrum.In a liberal Islam, it would seem that one would have the ability to choose without being compelled towards either end of such a spectrum.Furthermore, the fiercely secular and authoritarian policies enacted by the Turkish government can be just as bad as the authoritarian policies of Iran.
Returning to the sanctions and Turkey’s vote (along with Brasil), it is not really that much “against the United States” for Turkey to vote against the sanctions.The United States, while allies with Turkey, is far stronger allies with Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.Saudi Arabia, with the United States’ help, has stronger military and economic ties to the USA, and it is closer to the other Arab states in the Middle East than Turkey is.With Turkey looking to gain membership to the European Union, it is smart to keep its options open for markets in the Middle East for the EU, but if push came to shove for the United States, I would bet that it would retain Saudi Arabia as its ally over Turkey.Anyway, Iran and Saudi Arabia are focused on each other and Turkey is focused on the EU, so it really does not matter for Iran what Turkey says – although its vote was nice anyway.
As stated in the BBC article, the sanctions imposed in June were not very substantial.This would suggest that the Obama administration is just reacting initially to [uneducated] domestic pressures in Congress to appear to be doing something about the Iranian nuclear program.While it is good that these sanctions were not substantial, it is also extremely damaging to any potential for improving diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran, only serving to prove Ahmadinejad correct when he claims that the United States is really not interested in changing the status quo.Bolstering domestic support for the current Iranian regime is the last thing that the United States should be doing.
In a more recent development, Nom Chomsky acknowledges that Iran poses a serious threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, despite citing sources earlier on in the article that discuss Iran’s relatively weak military capabilities; he just proposes different solutions instead of the United States “reinforcing [its] control of the vital Middle East oil-producing regions.”However, with Iran, this is not a valid argument either.Georgetown scholar Mehran Kamrava and University of Colorado professor Nader Hashemi are both of the opinion that Iran does not want to actually acquire a nuclear weapon.If Iran were to obtain the technology and actually produce a nuclear weapon, this would push Iran into a whole new realm of military prowess in which it would find itself on the bottom, easily bested several times over by the United States, Israel, etc.In other words, Iran can be a relatively strong conventional military power in the region, especially when compared to Saudi Arabia’s military on its own (aka minus USA support), but it would lose this advantage if it entered the nuclear arena and would find itself in a situation it cannot win.Thus, even the idea that Iran’s nuclear program to gain such knowledge is the most serious threat is absurd.The best solution would be to focus on finding common ground and interests within the Middle East between Iran and the United States (two really good examples here are Afghanistan and Iraq… hint, hint State Department) and go from here to rebuild diplomatic ties.
Speaking of best solutions, July 1st was not one of these.The New York Times reports that President Obama signed a law in one of the few moments of consensus in Congress during his administration that “imposes penalties on foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran or assist Iran with its domestic refining capacity. It also requires that American and foreign businesses that seek contracts with the United States government certify that they do not engage in prohibited business with Iran.”As stated several times before, the solution is to OPEN not close relations with Iran.This means diplomatically and economically. As Ahmadi-I-say-crazy-things-that-people-should-not-listen-to-nejad stated on June 28 that he would like to resume nuclear negotiations with the United States in August, giving the United States yet another opportunity to resume meaningful dialogue, the Obama administration missed it again and chose to respond to domestic pressures.This is where the State Department people need to step in and fix it.
Caving into absurd, ill-informed domestic pressures from a Congress that cannot even agree if sick people should get help to be less sick is certain to make the problem worse, not better.The Obama administration needs to focus on its priorities, improve its image in the Muslim world and the Middle East by closing Guantanamo and playing a meaningful role in improving the situation between Israel and Palestinian territories, and respecting the sovereignty of Iran and its government despite the outcome of the 2009 presidential elections.It is certainly not an easy task and will take time to produce the change promised by the Obama campaign, but it will be easier to accomplish with greater understanding of the nuances of regional politics in the Middle East and when the United States takes an active stance by following through on some good faith measures and working with Iran as a regional power in Iraq and Afghanistan.Both the United States and Iran have a lot to gain from improving relations with one another and since the United States remains the global hegemonic power in this system of uni-multipolarity, it must responsiblytake the first steps to initiate this process.
While there are a lot of important things happening, these are some recent developments that are pretty important to be aware of and a few interesting things.
First of all, the current Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stated that Iran is ready for dialogue with the USA as long as it is based on mutual respect. Here are some excerpts of the speech:
"If you really want to fight terrorism, come and cooperate with the Iranian nation, which is the biggest victim of terrorism so that terrorism is eliminated. ... If you want to confront nuclear weapons ... you need to stand beside Iran so it can introduce a correct path to you," he said.
Ahmadinejad said the world was at a "crossroads" because it had been proven that military power has not been successful — a reference to the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But now, he said, "the world is entering an era of dialogue and intellect."
"The new U.S. government has announced that it wants to bring changes and follow the path of dialogue. It is very clear that changes have to be fundamental and not tactical. It is clear that the Iranian nation welcomes true changes," Ahmadinejad told the crowds at the rally in Freedom Square.
This is crucial as Iran could support the United States in being a stabilizing factor for the crises in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the USA is very determined to pursue a dialogue with Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is up for election this year and former President Khatamiis one of the challengers. For more information, please click here.
A second extremely important development is in the area of health care, specifically in regard to the prevention of HIV being transmitted. Some preliminary trials have found that a microbicide produced by a Massachusetts pharmaceutical company Indevus Pharmaceuticals Inc. slightly reduced HIV infection rates among its trial subjects, where approximately 3,100 women from four different countries participated. Scientists discovered a 30% lower rate of infection among women who used the Indevus-produced gel, however it is important to note that this difference is not statistically significant and that the results could have occurred by change or been the result of other contributing factors. The study has been expanded to include more women from more countries. For more information on this key development in combating HIV/AIDS, please click here.
In important domestic news, a panel of federal judges found that the overcrowding of state prisons violates the inmates' right to adequate health care. State prisons are currently operating at twice their intended capacity and measures to reduce the amount of new prisoners being compelled are being explored so that state prisons would not have to release large numbers of prisoners at once. This decision by the judges is significant as the United States currently imprisons the largest percent of its population than any other country in the world (click here). Land of the free, right? For more information about the judges' decision, please click here.
And yet another instance after the BART subway shooting where California police have shot an innocent person. Daniel Balandran was shot and killed by police gunfire in a shootout at a Papa John's Pizza in Chino, California. Police say Balandran was caught in the crossfire; his lawyer states that he was targeted. For more information, please click here.
Finally, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates annouced a review of the ban on photographing fallen soldiers' coffins, a ban that he himself asked for a few years ago. For more information, please click here.
Here are some recent headlines worth checking out, compiled here for your convenience.
When Muntadhar al-Zeidi hurled his shoes narrowly missing George W. Bush at a press conference last December in Baghdad, he gained instant notoriety. Although he was arrested by the Iraqi officials, a sculpter has erected a statue commemorating his action. The statue of a shoe on a stand carved to look like a white sheet is located in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown approximately 80 miles north of Baghdad. For more information, please click here.
In other Iraq news, US Army officials announced that the suidice rate among soldiers has reached an all-time high. "Officials calculate the deaths at a rate of roughly 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials told a Pentagon news conference," reports Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press. For the rest of the article, please click here.
Blackwater Worldwide, a private security company, was officially booted out of Iraq today at the demand of the Iraqi government. Blackwater has been under harsh scrutiny for their lack of oversight and regulation, especially since September of 2007 when Blackwater employees allegedly killed 17 Iraqi civilians. For more, please click here. Additionally, Reza Aslan, a renowned scholar on Islam and columnist recently published an article for The Daily Beast entitled "Obama's Nuclear Problem." In the column, Aslan stated that Barack Obama must clearly and publicly declare that a policy of regime change is no longer on the table. Aslan also writes that I.R. Iran may not actually want nuclear weapons for several reasons, but "only by convincing Iran that it has nothing to fear, either from Israel or from the US, or from the growing chorus of Arab states lined up against it, can we convince it to reign in its nuclear ambitions." For the full article, please click here.
In important domestic news, President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law today. The act effectively nullifys a 2007 Supreme Court decision on Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. that stated that an individual has a period of six months after the first instance of discrimination to file a pay-inequality lawsuit. Lily Ledbetter was employed by Goodyear Tires for 19 years and did not learn of the pay discrimination against her until the end of her career. About the signing, President Obama stated that "Equal pay is by no means just a women's issue, it's a family issue. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month's paycheck to simple and plain discrimination." For the full article, please click here.
I couldn't help but snicker reading this editorial in the Michigan Daily. In it, Alex Prasad laments the opportunities Palin missed at the vice-presidential debate:
For example, Biden, speaking of Vice President Dick Cheney, said, “The idea (Cheney) doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the executive branch.”
Palin easily could have retorted, “Actually Joe, Article I of the Constitution discussed legislative power. Ya know, it’s disappointing that a sitting senator doesn’t even know the Constitution he’s sworn to protect. The American people need somebody who is intimately familiar with the Constitution.”
Seriously? Do you really think Sarah Palin is "intimately familiar with the Constitution"? Do you think someone who can't even remember what publications she reads knows which article of the constitution refers to what? Does it seem like Palin would say anything in that above statement besides "Actually Joe" and "Ya know"? Prasad continues:
The moderator, Gwen Ifill, asked Biden if Americans have the stomach for all the intervention he has proposed over the years, citing his calls for intervention in Bosnia, Iraq, Pakistan and Sudan. Biden responded, “I think the American public has the stomach for success. My recommendations on Bosnia … saved tens of thousands of lives … (and) the end result was it worked.”
[....Palin] should have answered as follows: “Ya know, let’s talk about success senator. Certainly, I can’t match your long record in the realm of foreign policy. But, I don’t think the American people — those Main Streeters — just want experience. They want good Main Street judgment. You cite Bosnia as a success, yet 13 years after the initial conflict, we still have 10,000 troops there. You were one of the few opposed the first Gulf War, saying thousands of U.S. soldiers would die. In fact, only 293 did in an overwhelming victory. Your maverick opposition was irresponsible.
In addition to the fact that Palin again probably does not know these things, I fail to see how these points will help her win the debate. How can you criticize Biden for supporting something that resulted in 10,000 troops staying in Bosnia for 13 years when McCain wants troops to stay in Iraq for 100 years?* If our victory in the first Gulf War was so overwhelming, why was it necessary to go to war with Iraq again just 12 years later? And you're really going to criticize someone who is not John McCain for being an irresponsible maverick? Yeah, that's a good idea.
Despite the hopes of the Obama campaign and many liberals, electoral defeat may just be the thing that reignites the conservative base. Democrats better hope that Republicans don’t find the second coming of Ronald Reagan by 2012, or conservatives will again unite behind a presidential candidate.
Wow. Are conservatives really that relentlessly optimistic/out of touch with reality? Maybe I'm wrong here, maybe I'm the one being overly optimistic, but it seems to me that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift. The pendulum is swinging leftward. Americans are tired of the excesses of conservatism and the Bush administration: deregulation, wars without provocation, living without a safety net, ignoring our civil liberties, corruption, etc. This is not to say that liberals cannot be guilty of their own excesses; indeed, Americans upset with Great Society, Vietnam, the Chicago protests, race riots, and the Iranian hostage crisis deserted Johnson, Humphrey, and Carter and turned to Nixon and then Reagan. We've been living in a conservative age ever since. Until now.
*NOTE: McCain does not want to see American troops fighting in Iraq for a century like the Obama campaign might want you to think. McCain wants the U.S. to establish a peacetime presence there as in Germany or South Korea or Bosnia. Permanent bases in Iraq are still a bad idea, though.
"This is the narcissism of partisan. You get furiously outraged at the other campaign's lies, and you love your own. Nonetheless, I do think it is fair to say that the McCain campaign has been more egregious than the Obama campaign." --David Brooks
John McCain is drawingcriticism for claims he's making about Barack Obama, even from the normally welcoming ladies on The View:
In one of the two ads to which Joy Behar is referring, McCain accuses Obama of sexism for saying, "You can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig." But Obama wasn't insulting Sarah Palin; he was referring to the McCain-Palin ticket's attempt to portray themselves as agents of change. And compare Obama's comment to Palin's "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick," and McCain's saying the same thing about Hillary Clinton's health care plan during the primaries.
The other ad accuses Obama of perversely wanting to teach comprehensive sex ed to kindergartners, when he really supports teaching what constitutes inappropriate behavior from adults.
And while speaking in Missouri last week, McCain said that Obama's health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs and reduce wages and force families into a government-run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor." Even though Obama's plan drew criticisms in the Democratic primaries for not forcing all Americans into a government-run system. Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, "I would say this is an inaccurate and false characterization of the Obama plan. I don’t use those words lightly.”
"We must do whatever it takes, and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target." --Sarah Palin
On the New York Times' most-emailed list lie at least three editorials criticizing Sarah Palin's naïveté. And why not? Her ignorance is shocking even if you're not an Eastern media elite. (Side note:
Perhaps Mitt Romney thinks he's a reporter for the Daily Show?)
Palin argued that Alaska's proximity to Russia gives her better insight into Russian affairs. Can you "[i]magine the derisive laughter in conservative circles if the Democrats had tried such nonsense"?
She was completely ignorant of the Bush Doctrine. Talking heads later argued that most Americans couldn't explain the Bush Doctrine, but how many of them are running for vice president? Others have argued that several policies could be labeled that way, but Palin seems completely unaware that the label exists at all.
Detroit mayor charged with two felony assault counts: Michigan AG Mike Cox filed those two charges stemming from an incident involving Kilpatrick and an officer trying to deliver a subpoena on a Kilpatrick ally.
China Angered by Lobbying on Rights*: China doesn't like the U.S. House of Representatives passing a resolution urging them to uphold their pledge to improve human rights before the Olympics. Maybe they should have thought about that before they broke it.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
~James Madison
A lot of people lately have been arguing that the United States is not (and should not be) engaged in a 'war on terror' and that the phrase itself is counterproductive. Three arguments for ditching the 'war on terror' mindset:
The Semantic Argument: Clinton sent troops to the Balkans, H.W. Bush to Panama, Reagan to Grenada, yet these engagements were never really considered to be wars by the public. Why? Because unlike World War II, the general public wasn't asked to make sacrifices, there was no draft, and the casus belli was not a grave, existential threat. (The threats of communism and terrorism have largely been overblown. Al-Qaeda and other likeminded terrorists "are fighting modernity itself." They will continue to be a small group, and they will never attain their goal of a re-established caliphate.)
The Constitutional Argument: Everything changes in a period of active war. Murder becomes legal. The executive is allowed to assume expansive powers. But because the threat of terrorism can never be completely eliminated, a war on terror would never end, and the powers the president assumes would be permanent.
The Pragmatic Argument: Restraint is a valuable asset in counterterrorism. Overreaction has largely fueled terrorist movements. Terrorism has been reduced almost everywhere, but two noticeable exceptions are Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, we should fight terrorists. But it is just that, a fight, not a war. The 'war on terror' is counterproductive.
Guns ruling spawns legal challenges by felons: What? You don't like that you lost your right to bear arms after being convicted of a felony? What about losing your right to vote? You don't care? Hmm, lemme think...NO.
Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?: POPPIES! The Taliban has been using the opium/heroin trade to finance their insurgency, but President Hamid Karzai has avoided eradicating poppies in the south for his own short-term political gains.
You must be at least 54" tall to ride the Straight Talk Express.
The McCain campaign has been going through some ups and downs lately, while Barack Obama is flying high on his world trip.
Last Friday, McCain submitted an op-ed about Iraq to the New York Times after Obama's was published four days before. On Monday, the Drudge Report, erm, reported that the Times asked McCain to rewrite it, as it largely criticized Obama's plan and presented no strategic vision of his own. Once this story broke, conservatives were immediately up in arms about media bias.
Two things: (1) There isn't really any bias here: The Times will gladly publish what McCain has to say, as soon as he has something substantive to say. True, Obama's op-ed criticized Bush and McCain, but it largely laid out (and made the case for) his own plan. McCain's simply tore Obama down. (2) Why didn't the Times simply avoid conservatives' grumbling about media bias, publish the editorial in the first place, and watch as others criticized McCain's criticism and lack of a coherent strategy?
But McCain's foreign policy ideas have largely been ridiculous from the start: Permanent bases in Iraq? Militancy with Iran? Removing Russia from the G-8 (which is impossible, considering that the other member nations would have to agree) and establishing a "League of Democracies" that would only ostracize the Russians and freeze Russo-American relations to nearly Cold War levels?
In short: "He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan."
And that's why for all of his experience, John McCain's foreign-policy views are worse than Barack Obama's.
Der Spiegel, Der Spiegel, auf der Wand, wer ist von ihnen alle das angemessenste?
In a Saturday interview with the German news outlet Der Spiegel, Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki said that "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." And although "this is by no means an election endorsement," "[t]hose who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems."
How does the Bush administration respond? The day before Maliki's comments, Bush had spoken for the first time of a "general time horizon" for withdrawal. The day of Maliki's comments, someone within the White House accidentally emails the Spiegel article to the press corps mailing list. The day after Maliki's comments, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq contacts Maliki's office and Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh comes out and says that someone had mistranslated Maliki's remarks. Even though the translator worked for Maliki, not Der Spiegel. And even though that's what Maliki said.
In an op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, Obama lays out his opinions on and his plans for Iraq, and he gets it exactly right. Some excerpts:
Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.
But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States....
We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months...After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal....
As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
He also credits the surge with reducing violence; conservatives have been attacking him for not doing so.
Joe Klein, of Time magazine, has one complaint: "[Obama is] clinging to his 16 month [sic] timetable." I don't interpret it that way. In the editorial, Obama writes that "[i]n carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected." To me, that sounds like he hopes he can withdraw the troops in 16 months, but that could change as events unfold.
Personally, I continue to be amazed that for all of McCain's foreign policy experience, Obama seems to understand the outside world much better.
He is a hollow shell with no substance. Yet the media are largely behind him. Why? Do the media, too, find nothing to be proud of in the United States? [I am nothing but a patriot. I always wear a flag pin, even when I'm not wearing a lapel.] Do they want to ruin "the rich" so government can be the chief if not the only employer?
Do they want to stop an unfavorable war only to let the fundamentalist Islamic cults rule the Middle East? It would seem that a man with the given name of Barack Hussein Obama would have to be scrutinized a bit before we would want him to be a senator, let alone a president! [You can tell a lot about people by their middle name. For instance, my middle name is Hitler, and I'm a secret Nazi. That's why I didn't include my name because I'm hiding something.] Never forget that it was capitalism that won World Wars I and II, not socialism. [But do forget that capitalism also lost World Wars I and II and that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was on the winning side of WWII. And don't consider Marx's complaint that capitalism leads to the objectification of the working class because that will only lead you to conclude that Hitler's Germany was the apotheosis of capitalism.] The opportunity for profit is what drives men to succeed, not the opportunity to be given someone's else's hard-earned dollars.
If the Democrats win the Congress and the presidency, increase taxes as they have promised, institute national insurance as they plan to do, and increase government size and influence, then we can forget freedom as we know it. [I'm talking real freedom here, not the due process and the Geneva Conventions that only the socialist Democrats care about.] Thinking citizens must keep these socialists out of office. Let's find out a lot more about Obama before we even consider him as fit to rule this country[, but not before we write a letter to the editor filled with no new information and conclusions that aren't supported by non-trivial facts].
This post was written in Sarcastic Trebuchet font. This post was intended to mock Chester Bartels' letter to the editor and to expose certain beliefs/conclusions as baseless or illogical. Any feelings of pique caused by this post are purely coincidental.
Look what arrived in my inbox this morning: an email forwarded by my Italian grandfather, Nonno to us grandkids, mostly containing this article by Ken Blackwell. I love Nonno dearly, but the email angered me so much that I had to respond to it. What follows is excerpts of Blackwell's article (in italics for clarity) and a slightly edited and reformatted version of my reply.
Because the truth is that Mr. Obama is the single most liberal senator in the entire U.S. Senate. He is more liberal than Ted Kennedy, Bernie Sanders, or Mrs. Clinton.
It's true that the National Journal ranked Obama as the most liberal senator in 2007, but I challenge this on two counts: (1) Liberalism is not a bad thing, in my opinion. I understand if somebody disagrees with that, which brings me to my second point: (2) The ranking is nonsense. Two votes that the National Journal considered "liberal," he voted against Sen. Clinton and with such conservatives as Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel.
Start with national security, since the president's most important duties are as commander-in-chief. Over the summer, Mr. Obama talked about invading Pakistan, a nation armed with nuclear weapons; meeting without preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who vows to destroy Israel and create another Holocaust; and Kim Jong Il, who is murdering and starving his people, but emphasized that the nuclear option was off the table against terrorists — something no president has ever taken off the table since we created nuclear weapons in the 1940s. Even Democrats who have worked in national security condemned all of those remarks. Mr. Obama is a foreign-policy novice who would put our national security at risk.
I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will.
I fail to understand the neoconservatives: We shouldn't go into Pakistan (where al-Qaeda is), but we should go into Iraq (where al-Qaeda isn't).
As for diplomacy without preconditions, when the Bush Administration refuses to talk with people with whom they have disagreements, nothing constructive is accomplished. In fact, refusing to talk with people in Iran or in Palestine bolsters the hardliners in those areas. They can take our actions and say that we're out to get them, that we're on a crusade against Islam, etc. In fact, the major success of the Iraq War--getting al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) out of al-Anbar province--was achieved by working with former Sunni insurgents. And even the Bush administration has met with Kim Jong Il.
And I don't understand how you could use a nuclear missile against an organization. I can understand how it can be used to annihilate a city, to end a conventional war against a state, but how can it be used against a group of individuals?
Finally, look at the social issues. Mr. Obama had the audacity to open a stadium rally by saying, "All praise and glory to God!" but says that Christian leaders speaking for life and marriage have "hijacked" — hijacked — Christianity. He is pro-partial birth abortion, and promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who will rule any restriction on it unconstitutional. He espouses the abortion views of Margaret Sanger, one of the early advocates of racial cleansing. His spiritual leaders endorse homosexual marriage, and he is moving in that direction.
To some extent, haven't Christian leaders hijacked Christianity? Haven't some far-right Christian leaders made outrageous statements in the name of Christianity? I don't think most Christians would identify with these statements:
Pat Robertson: "I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war, and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."
"[John] Hagee has argued that Hurricane Katrina 'was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans' for hosting a gay-pride parade."
I could go on, I'm sure.
Just because Obama agrees with Margaret Sanger on one issue doesn't mean that he agrees with that person on all issues. This is another scurrilous attack that has defined the Republican/conservative machine since at least 2000, when the Bush campaign implied that the girl John McCain adopted from Bangladesh was his illegitimate, black daughter.
And why shouldn't gay people receive equal treatment with straight people? Surely, allowing gay people to marry would be less of a threat to the sanctity of marriage than two-day, celebrity marriages.
Ken Blackwell's moral outrage is particularly hypocritical, considering that during the Ohio gubernatorial race, he implied that his opponent was having a homosexual affair with a man convicted of public exposure. The Courier, an Ohio newspaper, thought his actions so egregious that they took the unusual step of un-endorsing him.
What's worse than Blackwell's actual editorial is the statements that succeed it, statements so vile that I think even Blackwell would be appalled by it:
According to The Book of Revelation the anti-christ...will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal....the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything. Is it OBAMA??
First, the Book of Revelation does not say this, nor could it have, because Islam wasn't even founded until centuries after Revelations was written. Second, Obama is not a Muslim. Finally, just as Blackwell rightly says that eloquence and race should not be criteria by which we elect a president, neither should his religion. Even if he were a Muslim, why should that matter?
Because "staying [the] course is not a bad idea." Funny quote:
Though the Central Command was created in 1983 to cover the "central" part of the globe between the European and Pacific Commands, according its Web site, its main headquarters is located not in its theater of operations, but rather in Tampa, Fla., at least in part because of the political sensitivity of basing it in the Mideast.
Robert Mugabe intimidates his political rivals as a recount determines which party controls Parliament. Zimbabwe, by the way, has the world's highest inflation rate, at an astounding 100,000%. And that's according to officials. The real rate might be higher.
Hidden behind [the] appearance of [the] objectivity [of retired generals-cum-network analysts], though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.
But would retired generals really put a positive spin on the situation in Iraq just to maintain favor with the Pentagon?
“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General [Paul E.] Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.
The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.
“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.
National Islam Awareness Week is a way to educate students about the genocidal agendas of the global jihadists and the fact that these radical ideas are far more mainstream in the Muslim world today than most Americans are willing to believe. It is also to remind students not to forget about Sept. 11, to remember what our troops are fighting for: Our freedom, the same freedom that allows you to learn at this university without the fear of attack because of who you are.
Our group, the Young Americans for Freedom, is expecting and has had protests against our views. However, we are familiar with the way the Left wages its political wars on conservative students. If someone happens to disagree with its position on racial issues - if one believes, for example, that government-enforced racial preferences are misguided or immoral - the Left will denounce that person as a "racist." The Left's only logic is emotional, and the character of that emotion is hatred - hatred for those who want to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam. This hatred has only one purpose: to silence those who oppose the jihad.
We see members of our generation ready to put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms. We know that this war is being waged at home as well, and we will not let our brothers and sisters in uniform shoulder the burden alone.
First of all, nobody has forgotten September 11 and nobody ever will. People will remember where they were when they first found out about the attacks, much like the MLK or JFK assassinations or Pearl Harbor. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: What people did forget was the shock and the fear that was so easily taken advantage of in order to begin an unnecessary war and expand the reach of the Executive Branch. But apparently trying to ignore any feelings of terror to ponder reasonable solutions to the problem is "emotional logic," and opposing Bush's decisions to invade Iraq and to erode our civil liberties is supporting jihad.
And I'm sorry if the remarks David Horowitz made while visiting Michigan struck me as racist. His insistence that "the Muslim Students' Association is not an ethnic group. It is not a religious group. It is not a cultural group. It is a political organization created by the Muslim brotherhood," and use of the word 'Islamofascism' paints all Muslims as, if not bona fide terrorists, part of a community that unanimously and passionately hates the United States and all things Western. Don't believe that 'Islamofascism' is offensive to Muslims? What if I call Hitler, Mussolini and Franco 'Christo-fascists'? "But they weren't real Christians," you might say. The same argument can be made for Muslims, who, despite what Horowitz thinks, do not universally hate the U.S. This line of thought is particularly damning because victory over the terrorists ultimately depends on supporting moderate Muslims, to which the Sunni Awakening Councils' practical removal of al-Qaeda in Iraq can attest.
The letter to the editor from Aaron Bailey, an Afghanistan veteran and B-school student, which appeared in Monday's Daily, is so good that I have to share it with you in its entirety:
I read Wednesday's viewpoint by the University's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom with both surprise and disgust (The war at home, 04/09/2008). The one clear idea that resonated throughout the viewpoint was YAF's gung-ho, pro-war, chicken-hawk agenda and its contempt for the soldiers who are actually fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While YAF used the typical neo-conservative tactics of mentioning the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (which our own government has determined had no links to Iraq), discussing the suppression of minority rights (although the Bush administration continues to support the Saudi Royal Family's despotic regime) and continually using words like "freedom" to describe its agenda, this group did not speak for me as a veteran.
War, unfortunately, is a complex and occasionally necessary way to confront the greed, corruption and evil in our world. But chastising an entire region by calling mainstream Middle Easterners "jihadists," many of whom I served with, only serves to unnecessarily enflame the disaffected population I worked to assist. If YAF really wants to help our country, I encourage its members to visit www.goarmy.com and join the "brothers and sisters" the group claims to support. In lieu of that, perhaps YAF will advocate deploying troops with proper equipment, a clear mission and veteran's benefits when they return from war, something the group's fellow neo-cons forgot.
Make no mistake, the people who attacked us were, and still are, in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But for reasons unclear to me, my commander-in-chief has decided to ignore these threats. YAF's members continue to cover for our incompetent leaders, who place America's military at risk to further their own self-interests, all the while advocating others to fight and die in their places.
Also: Were you aware that "[i]f the President were the longest recorded flight by chicken, he would be thirteen seconds?" (Stewart 36)
Wolverine received his B.S.E. in civil engineering from the University of Michigan in 1950 and was one of the engineers who worked on the Mackinac Bridge. Following its completion in 1957, he immigrated to France and became friends with Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Ten years later, he formed the psychedelic rock band Camille Sans Saints, which had a major hit with “Le homard veux me manger.” For more...
J-Mad is the leader of The Federalists. In addition to being the most fly correspondent for WP, J-Mad is co-owner of CSAir, Inc., and senior partner in the infamous Robbem & Runn law firm. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and J-Mad are BFFs and were in each other's Five, despite neither one having T-Mobile service. J-Mad will be president someday so watch for the announcement to be made on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Also, FREE TIBET
Clarence Garside is a simple man of simple raising and simple pleasures and...oh heck...he enjoys being part of the mile high club that you only wish you could attend. He is the founder of CSAir and along with J-Mad, they'll rule the airline industry. Eventually, he will get that plane he's always wanted, but for now he must enjoy being a Golden Eagle. By the way...in case of a water landing your Wolverine may be used as a flotation device.
