John and Elizabeth Edwards are more vile than you could possibly have imagined.

Ferguson on the president's "high-handed refusal to be high-handed" at the UN.

Michelle Obama says the "gloves are off" in the fight for Chicago's Olympic bid.

But even David Corn has to ask "Is President Obama serious about Afghanistan?"

General Odierno damns Ambassador Hill with faint praise.

This is what victory looks like.

Bob Kagan says forget the nukes, target the regime.

This may be the creepiest man in the Obama administration.

Another innocent, harmless former Gitmo detainee killed in shoot-out.

Tourists and city officials not so hot on the Empire State Building's celebration of the Chinese Communist Party.

And now, an important message from non-celebrities on ObamaCare:

Today, on a 13 to 10 vote, the Senate Finance Committee rejected an amendment offered by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to prohibit taxpayer money from paying for elective abortions. Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine were the only senators to cross party lines on the vote. The Hill's Jeffrey Young reports:

Hatch’s first amendment would have required women to purchase a separate, supplemental insurance plan to cover abortion services. The aim, he said, was to make existing laws against federal money being used to pay for abortions, and the language in the healthcare bill, ironclad.

“All I'm asking -- my gosh -- is for specific language in the bill that prohibits federal dollars from being used to fund abortions,” Hatch said.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) described Hatch's amendment as "insulting" to women.

Democrats on the committee, along with Snowe, rejected Hatch's argument, saying it would be unfair to require women to purchase separate insurance coverage for abortion services. "It's discriminating against women," said committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who authored the bill.

Right now, the language in the Senate Finance Committee bill and the language likely to be included in the final House Bill (the Capps amendment) would allow federally subsidized plans to provide insurance coverage for elective abortions.

"Obama has promised for months that the health care overhaul would not provide federal money to pay for elective abortions, but White House officials have declined to spell out what he means," the New York Times reported yesterday. Congressional Democrats claim that the current bill prohibits federal funding for abortions because--on paper at least--insurers would segregate an individual's premium contributions from the federal subsidies and then pay abortionists with the private money. This amounts to little more than a bookkeeping scheme, as the National Right to Life Committee's Doug Johnson has argued.

The Times also reported that "Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, a leading Democratic abortion opponent, said he had commitments from 40 Democrats to block the health care bill unless they have a chance to include the restrictions." If true, that would be enough votes to block the bill in the House.

Credit to Kurt Campbell. At today's Burma hearing he acknowledged that State has handled the Burma policy review very poorly. Last Friday, two senior state officials briefing Hill staff on the results ran into a buzz saw of complaints over the process State used in rolling out their review. The policy was disclosed to foreign governments in New York by Secretary Clinton before anyone on the Hill had a hint as to what was going on. Cambpell scored points for acknowledging the mistake and also clarifying State policy that no sanctions are being lifted until there are meaningful steps taken by Burma’s military.

On the other hand, the testimony of one of Senator Webb's witnesses, Thant Myint-U, might as well have been ghost written by Burma’s military. His testimony is worth a read if only for the regime cheerleading. If you click into the PDF, search for these words:

Number of hits
Rape (the military’s use of): 0
Refugees (from military attacks): 0
Attacks (on ethnic groups): 0
Abuses (as in human rights): 0
Suu Kyi (Burma’s democracy icon): l 1

Revealing, to say the least.

In a scolding screed Thant Myint-U blames the U.S. for Burma’s problems. He uses the Senate podium to castigate the U.S. for economic sanctions and for not pouring more assistance dollars into Burma. He complains that U.S. assistance to Burma amounts to only $4 per person -- the lowest per capita of the 55 poorest countries. He boasts about Cyclone Nargis opening the country to humanitarian assistance -- a lie. He says nothing about the tens of thousands murdered by the regime when they rejected U.S., British, and French food, water and help in the days following that catastrophe. Humanitarian assistance workers wanting to work in the delta are still denied visas to Burma and forced labor on assistance projects has been documented by no less than Johns-Hopkins University in a report that compiles charges that likely rise to crimes against humanity.

It is worth noting that Thant Myint-U refused to call for the junta to cut spending on their military (one of the largest in Southeast Asia) or halt human rights abuses. One can only assume his doing so would curtail the access and privilege he enjoys among the military on his visits back to Burma.

Burma is at a crossroads where -- to quote his testimony -- “…the demise of current leaders could lead to elite fracture and even state collapse.”

OH NO! To think we should be so fortunate.

Dr. David Steinberg, the director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University and another of Webb's witnesses, pointed out that the U.S. through its policy along with others had “created a garrison state” because of sanctions. He pressed his point on trying to reach into the military ranks to cultivate future allies.

To those who believe that Burma’s elections offer a way forward, read this from the testimony today of David Williams, a constitutional expert at Indiana University: “even if the 2010 election are free and fair -- which they won’t be -- they won’t bring about civilian rule because the constitution does not provide for it.” He goes on to point out that the constitution gives the military the power to do anything it wants, when it wants. This is what the junta calls the “Burmese way to Democracy.”

So now that Senator Webb has had his love-in. What will he do for the junta next?

How bad of a year was 2008 for the GOP? This guy narrowly defeated a four-term Republican incumbent in Orlando, Florida:

The good news: after saying on the House floor that the GOP health-care plan is for Americans to "die quickly" if they get sick--and then doubling-down today, calling the current health-care system an ongoing "Holocaust"--Rep. Alan Grayson will almost certainly be thrown out of office in 2010.

Obama's special envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, said this week that in dealing with rogue states like Sudan, "We've got to think about giving out cookies...Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement." So, in that spirit, Ben Smith reports that "The group STAND, which is campaigning against genocide in Darfur, Twitters that it's preparing gold stars for delivery to the Embassy of Sudan in Washington." The group will also deliver smiley faces if that is your preferred method of indulging and coddling the genocidal fanatics in Khartoum, though cookies seem to be off the menu.

The AP reports:

Iran's foreign minister made a rare visit to the U.S. capital Wednesday on a visa granted with unusual speed by the State Department one day before the start of nuclear talks in Geneva.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the significance of the U.S. decision to permit the visit by Manouchehr Mottaki, even though it marked the first time in years that a senior Iranian official has visited Washington.

"I wouldn't read too much into this," Crowley said.

Pletka declines Crowley's suggestions and reads into this:

State Department flack P.J. Crowley promises Manouchehr Mottaki won’t be meeting U.S. officials, but in light of recent Obama administration meetings with every international thug they can find (Cuba, Burma, Syria), one has to wonder.

Indeed, promises for tomorrow’s P5 +1 meetings in Geneva—theoretically among all the interested parties in Iran’s disarmament—have already turned into a one-on-one between the U.S. and Iran. Quick work indeed.

Let me be clear: visas for members of the Burmes junta, visas for members of A'jad's terrorist government, but no visas for members of the government in Honduras, which expelled a wanna-be Chavez-style tyrant with the consent of the country's constitutional court and its democratically elected legislature. One sharp observer suggests that the Iranian foreign minister is "perhaps looking at properties for when they reopen an embassy -- I am not joking."

Today the Supreme Court agreed to rule on one of the challenges to Chicago’s handgun ban -- an important ruling that will decide the scope and power of the Second Amendment. From SCOTUSblog, which has a detailed breakdown of all the cases the Court has chosen to hear for its coming session:

The Court had three cases from which to choose on the Second Amendment issue — two cases involving a Chicago gun ban, and one case on a New York ban on a martial-arts weapon. It chose one of the Chicago cases — McDonald v. Chicago (08-1521) — a case brought to it by Alan Gura, the Alexandria, VA. lawyer who won the 2008 decision for the first time recognizing a constitutional right to have a gun for personal use, at least in self-defense in the home (District of Columbia v. Heller). A second appeal on the Chicago dispute had been filed by the National Rifle Association (NRA v. Chicago, 08-1497). Presumably, the Court will hold onto that case until it decides McDonald; the same is likely for the New York case, Maloney v. Rice (08-1592) — a case in which Justice Sonia Sotomayor had participated when she was a judge on the Second Circuit Court.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good overview of the issue at hand. For a more in-depth analysis on why the Court should strike down the ban, check out Damon Root over at Reason.

Also, in other Second Amendment news, over at NRO, there's a great interview with Judge Laurence Silberman on whether the Second Amendment is incorporated -- that is, whether or not it applies to states. The judge's answer:

"The interesting question now that is going to go before the Supreme Court is whether the Second Amendment is incorporated. . . . It would be anomalous for the Supreme Court to conclude that the Second Amendment creates or protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, but it does not apply vis a vis the states."

Anomalous, yes. But let's not forget that the 2nd Circuit Court, on which Sonia Sotomayor sat, didn't see it that way and ruled against incorporation. Let's hope SCOTUS is as clear-headed Silberman.

The full interview with Silberman is well-worth the watch.

Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has begun his 2:30 pm hearing on Burma and a friend emails to report that the room is "packed with Burmese democracy supporters. Taking up the front row are 15 saffron robed monks who traveled from New York and are led by U Pyinya Zawta" -- one of the leaders of Burma's 2007 "Saffron Revolution" that was brutally crushed by the junta. A warrior every bit as much as Webb, U Pyinya Zawta spent more than a decade in prison undergoing torture, solitary confinement, and other brutalities because of his peaceful protests for democratic change. He has castigated Webb calling his approach "ignorant" while other senior democracy activists accuse Webb of "damaging" their movement.

Our friend reports that "more than 50 activists are crammed into the small room wearing neon green 'Burma is not Vietnam' tee shirts" -- a shot at Webb who compares the situation in Burma with that of Vietnam in a bizarre "one-size-fits-all" approach to foreign policy.

Testifying for the administration is Assistant Secreatry of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell. Webb has selected to testify two appeasers and accomodationists: Thant Myint-U who has close ties to the regime, and Dr. David Steinberg, the director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University.

Steinberg is little more than a mouthpiece for the regime and insists the junta has a softer side -- as in, if we just talked to Burma's murderers more, we would understand their feelings and concerns. In fact, Steinberg was so favorable to the regime he was actively recruited by Burma's intelligence service and the embassy here to attend briefings designed to discredit Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi and the democracy movement. This according to an article published today based on information provided by a junta defector. Thuant Myint-U, also testifying today, was targeted for special attention by the intelligence service as well. Dr. David Williams, a constitutional expert at Indiana University who has worked with Burma's ethnic groups on federalism is also testifying. He enjoys wide respect within Burma's democracy circles.

More to follow...

In Osama's latest audio recording, he says:

There is a lesson for you in the situation of your sister Georgia. Its people were bombed and humiliated, so they asked for help from America, to restore sovereignty over what had been seized from them, but the latter provided them with nothing but empty words; and after they insisted, American ships finally came, not to restore Ossetia and Abkhazia, but rather to provide what they had no need for: a few tents and a little food and laundry detergent.

So reflect on that deeply.

This is not a horribly embellished view of the Bush administration's response to the war in Georgia. Other than flying home the Georgian forces that were engaged in Iraq, the Bush administration did very little to support a a democratic ally that faced an existential threat from the Kremlin. The Obama campaign was even weaker in its response -- if that's possible. The soon-to-be president-elect called on both sides to show restraint. Obama might as well have called on the Poles to show restraint as the Nazis and Soviets carved up the country in 1939.

So it's worth keeping in mind that while Democrats were almost universally opposed to any U.S. support for Georgia during that war -- and ridiculed McCain even for declaring his solidarity with the people of Georgia -- the weakness of America's response to Russia's aggression has now become a talking point for al Qaeda. It is a rare instance in which Democratic talking points and al Qaeda talking points do not embarrassingly converge.

But the fact that al Qaeda is mocking America's shameful indifference to the invasion of Georgia should not obscure the real problem with abandoning our allies in times of crisis -- that bin Laden's interpretation of events is sure to ring true to America's allies in Eastern Europe and the rest of Russia's near abroad. When America fails to stand by her allies, it is a signal of weakness and a lack of resolve. And now that the Obama administration has rewarded Russia for its bad behavior by dropping missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, the message is clear: if Bush rolled over for Putin, Obama will find a way to be even more accommodating.

So which American ally wants to send additional forces to Afghanistan secure in the knowledge that should they face a threat to their own security, the American people will not return the favor?

JTA's Eric Fingerhut reports:

A new survey shows that a majority of American Jews would support a U.S. military strike on Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons -- a significant increase from a year ago.

Fifty-six percent of American Jews would support the “United States taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons,” according to the American Jewish Committee's 2009 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion. That's an increase of 14 percentage points from the AJC survey taken in the fall of 2008. In addition, 66 percent of those surveyed said they would back an Israeli strike on Iran.

The survey of 800 self-identifying Jewish respondents, interviewed between Aug. 30 and Sept. 17, comes as a wide swath of Jewish organizations are rallying support in the Jewish community and elsewhere for increased economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran -- in particular tough sanctions targeting Iran's importation and production of refined petroleum. With a margin of error of plus or minus three percent, the poll would appear to undercut the claims of some who charge that Jewish organizations are out of step with the Jewish public in pushing for pressure on Iran.

Geez, I wonder which organization has been claiming that Jewish organizations are out of step with the Jewish public based on polling data that said organization failed to report had been compiled by one of their own board members. It turns out that for all the screeching from Joe Klein and Stephen Walt, American Jews are not quite so deluded as they are about the threat posed by Iran. American Jews will support a U.S. military strike against Iran by a fairly significant margin, and they will support an Israeli strike by an overwhelming margin. Still, I won't be surprised if J Street comes out with a poll later this week showing strong support in the Jewish community for a "reverse Liberty" -- because really, mainstream Jewish organizations will be out of step with members of the Jewish community like Salam Al-Marayati if they don't call for U.S. aircraft to defend Iran's nuclear facilities from an Israeli strike.

Surely this is one of the more popular receptions on the Hill:

Senator Jim Webb is holding his much-anticipated hearing on the Obama administration's Burma policy today and Burma's democratic opposition is crashing the event in a likely futile attempt to shame the Virginia senator for his coddling of the junta. The press release says that "In a sign of protest against U.S. Senator Jim Webb, dozens of Buddhist monks will attend a hearing on U.S. Burma policy....Webb was recently defeated in his drive to unilaterally lift U.S. sanctions on Burma's military regime, after the State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States would maintain sanctions on Burma unless the country's military regime made concrete steps toward democracy." They go on,

Webb did not invite anyone from Burma’s democracy movement to testify at the Burma hearing -- including no Buddhist monks or members of the political party of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi. Webb exclusively invited participants who share his views on Burma, preventing a full discussion of policy options on the country. With great disappointment for the absence of monks or members of Burma’s democracy movement in the hearing, two prominent monk groups, International Burmese Monks Organization (IBMO) and All Burma Monks’ Alliance (ABMA) have submitted written testimonies to Senator Webb.

The written testimony that the monks have submitted to Webb's committee includes an op-ed by U Pyinya Zawta, who spent 10 years as a political prisoner and is executive director of the All Burma Monks' Alliance. His article was originally published in Irrawaddy and Zawta is asking that be included in the hearing record. It concludes:

Webb is now despised by the people of Burma. If he succeeds in achieving a shift in US policy to abandon sanctions, he will have secured his place in history as one of the most important supporters of Than Swe's military dictatorship.

How did Webb end up on the side of the junta and against the people of Burma? Why is Webb spending his weekends with the war criminals that control that regime while the people of Burma plead for him to stand down? On behalf of what constituency is Webb acting, or is this simply a misguided and botched attempt by Webb to leave his mark on some area of U.S. foreign policy?

We will have reports from the hearing later today...and you can read the testimony submitted by the monks here and here.

Palestinians used to be considered the best educated and most cultivated—and secular—of all the Arabs, before the gore-spattered Arafat and his bloody-handed cronies returned from Tunis in the mid-90s to murder their opposition, immiserate their brethren, and destroy the Palestinian civil-society NGOs that had flowered after 1967, and before inroads by radical Islam commenced to turn Gaza into the Wahhabi Outpost of Hamastan (about which more below). Even now, despite the depredations of Arafat and his weak and corrupt Fatah successors, and notwithstanding their ostensible victimhood, the Palestinian literacy rate, at 91 percent, is still one of the highest in the Arab world. What this tells us about the “occupation” may be argued ad infinitum by the Ahmadinejad/Walt/Klein cabal, but here is something that even our Israel-allergic president and his amen corner on the anti-Semitic left will have to contend with: According to a poll released the other day by the International Peace Institute, Obama is not beloved of Palestinians, and settlement growth matters very little to them:

The main gestures under discussion in Washington and Jerusalem – a settlement freeze and reducing checkpoints – are the least important to Palestinians of six major confidence-building measures under consideration. Palestinians are much more interested in evacuation of Israeli settlements/outposts (28%) and prisoner releases by Israel (27%). Next came further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank (13%) and easing border crossings, particularly in isolated Gaza (11%).

Only seven percent of all Palestinians polled—and a mere four percent of those living in the place where there actually are settlements, Judea and Samaria—care at all about settlement growth, one of the two great bugbears of the Middle East peace fantasy harbored by U.S. policymakers (the other being putative Israeli war crimes allegedly committed during operation Cast Lead, about which see this from Jen Rubin). Noteworthy, too, is that even with respect to the expulsion of Israelis from established settlements and the evacuation of outpost dwellers, those “much more interested” number an impressively small 28 percent.

What do Palestinians want? It appears they want to get rid of Hamas, and apparently in high numbers ("Palestinian Authority President Abbas has a 55% job approval rating, while his likely challenger, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, languishes at 32%".) With Gaza coming increasingly to resemble Saudi Arabia, as this amazing report in the Jerusalem Post details, that is no wonder. A sampling of statutes imposed upon the benighted citizens of that hell-hole by the “Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” security force:

Rules banning men from bathing topless, and women (who may still bathe separately from men and fully covered) from laughing or smiling while bathing, are also in the process of enforcement. . . . Few women may now be seen in Gaza without the hijab. More and more are now wearing the jilbab (the long, shapeless black dress associated with Islamic piety). Many secular teachers have been fired. Hamas summer camps, which provide cheap alternatives for poor families in the summer months, involve intensive Koran study and competitions. . . . The promotion of Islamic norms in Gaza extends to the widespread banning of books and restricting of access to "immoral" internet sites.

However much they've come to believe in their own self-infantilizing propaganda, Wahhabi in Hamastan, it turns out, is not how these people wish to end up living.

A reader emails: The government is playing down Iran's missile tests as scantly more than "provocative," while some political pundits are calling them gravely serious. What's the real story? Just how far along are they in [missile] development?

Short skinny: It's serious.

Iran's test provides some useful insight into where the regime sees itself in 6-8 years -- as a proven nuclear power with full deterrence capabilities. The fuel they used, for example, is in itself destabilizing. Iran has traditionally powered their rockets with volatile liquid fuel. Because liquid rocket fuel is unstable, their rockets required significant preparation immediately before the ignition sequence. That's why you see headlines screaming about a North Korean missile launches weeks before they actually happen -- intelligence services can detect activity at launch sites well ahead of scheduled tests. Liquid fuel also "sloshes" in its tank, which destabilizes trajectory. Solid fuel burns evenly and remains steady during flight, which is why Russia, China, and the United States all use it in their various ICBM booster systems.

Full deployment of solid-fuel boosters would give Iran a "launch-on-warning" capability that they've never had before, as it's stable enough to store without significant prep time. That means the old paradigm, where Middle East tensions would escalate to the point that Iran started fueling their rockets in response to a tactical or strategic threat, is gone. Now, if the United States or Israel were to hit Iran conventionally, we'd have to hit 100 percent of their rockets with an initial, coordinated surprise attack -- an unlikely scenario, even considering the unmatched abilities of our Navy and Air Force.

The second concerning aspect of the test is Iran's further use of staging technology. The Minuteman III ICBM uses three solid fuel stages to boost the missile into orbit, then a manageable amount of liquid fuel to guide the nuclear reentry system into a safe release point. The hybrid system optimizes both range and accuracy. Iran's not quite there yet, but they've got the basics down with the first and second stages.

Yesterday's test proves that Iran has figured out both staging and solid fuel technology. The next logical step is to combine the two, yielding a fully functional ICBM. Couple that with a nuclear reentry system (thankfully not an easy technology to master), and Iran will have a full nuclear deterrent similar to the United States and Russia during the Cold War.

The idea of Iran using its terrorist proxies under the aegis of nuclear ICBMs and MRMBs is chilling. And President Obama has now cut a critical component of our contingency plan against this scenario -- European missile defense.

I'm very sympathetic to the liberal, good-government argument that building big sports complexes with public money is a bad idea because it benefits owners and teams and disadvantages taxpayers. But here's liberal blogger/economist Ryan Avent discussing Chicago's Olympic bid and (a) admitting the liberal critique of publicly-financed sports venues while (b) finding a liberal silver lining:

The Olympics can help to align the interests of fractious local governments and increase public acceptance of tax increases.

The way Hollywood is closing ranks around Roman Polanski, you’d think he was Alger Hiss come back to life and sent back to prison--instead of a convicted pedophile who drugged and raped a little girl three decades ago and then fled to France to escape punishment. The list of celebrities outraged over his arrest in Switzerland (he went there to get a prize, and he got one), which has an extradition treaty with the U.S., and where he currently languishes in jail waiting to learn his fate, is long and shallow: "I know it wasn't 'rape' rape,” philosophized Whoopi Goldberg. “I think it was something else, but I don't believe it was 'rape' rape.”

"He pled guilty to having sex with a minor and he went to jail, and when they let him out (on bail, pending sentencing), he said, 'You know what, this guy's going to give me 100 years in jail. I'm not staying.' And that's why he left. . . . So that's why I wanted to be really clear, cause I want to know exactly what I'm talking about."

Uh huh. That’s really, really clear, Whoopi. You’re one of our deep thinkers. So, too is actress Debra Winger,

president of the Zurich film festival's jury, [who] blasted Switzerland for its “philistine collusion” with the U.S. in arresting Polanski, who was honored by the festival Sunday night even though he was in jail.

Another great philosopher, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, “said that he hoped authorities would respect Polanski's rights ‘and that the affair [will] come to a favorable resolution.’”

Best of all, though, is the fabulous petition signed by 138 film people decrying “The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country, where he assumed he could travel without hindrance [and which] opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.” More deep thinking! Among those demanding “the immediate release” of Mr. Polanski: one Woody Allen, noted moralist and chairman of the North American Man/Teenage Girl Love Association.

Leslie Gelb:

Are we now to understand that he made all those previous declarations and decisions without a strategy he was committed to? Prior to his recent statements, it seemed clear that the president and his advisers had adopted a strategy already—the counterinsurgency one—and that Gen. Stanley McChrystal was tapped precisely because he would implement that plan. The idea, to repeat, was to deploy forces sufficient to clear territory of Taliban threats, hold that territory, and build up the sinews of the country behind that.

Howard Fineman:

The president's problem isn't that he is too visible; it's the lack of content in what he says when he keeps showing up on the tube. Obama can seem a mite too impressed with his own aura, as if his presence on the stage is the Answer. There is, at times, a self-referential (even self-reverential) tone in his big speeches. They are heavily salted with the words "I" and "my." (He used the former 11 times in the first few paragraphs of his address to the U.N. last week.) Obama is a historic figure, but that is the beginning, not the end, of the story.

Richard Cohen:

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

Tom Ricks (kinda):

But Obama has done nothing much on Iraq except screw up a couple of appointments there and break a campaign promise to withdraw a brigade a month this year. And on Afghanistan, when told recently what it would take to implement the strategy he announced in March, he appeared to balk. So he reacted, characteristically, I think, by dithering. Some readers of this blog think this looks like leadership, but I disagree-it isn't leading of you do a multi-month review of Afghan strategy, decide what it is going to be, ask the general in charge how to implement it, and then respond by deciding to review strategy again for a few weeks. Sometimes Obama's stance manifests itself as professorial pomposity; at other times as repeated policy reviews.

Representative? Who knows. More to come? One can be hopey. And yes, there’s many a blip between “shut up” and “pink slip.” But still.

Frank Rich is an Afghan war hypocrite, cont.

Dan Rather to headline pro-abortion fundraiser.

Run, Rudy, Run! (for Senate).

Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Tim Carney: The Obama revolving door spins.

Allahpundit: Video: Even Jon Stewart laughing at western threats towards Iran.

And: Celebrities, diplomats unite behind convicted child-raping degenerate.

That's the view of a couple retired generals who've been trotted out by Human Rights First. They do not blame Greg Craig or Barack Obama for the failure to meet the January 22nd deadline to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. They also don't blame the ninety senators who voted to deny the administration funds to close the facility. And they don't blame the Bush administration's filing system and sloppy paperwork, as Greg Craig has done.

"Generals: Cheneys scaremongering."

Some of the fear issues that are being raised in this are really unfortunate. It gets people excited about things they shouldn’t be excited about and impedes doing what is critical to this country. Get that damn symbol off the table,” said retired Gen. David Maddox, a former Army commander-in-chief for Europe. “We take a setback every time somebody, whether it’s the vice president or his daughter comes out and says the things that they say….We have to get out there again and just keep pounding.”...

The former military officers, whose Washington visit was organized by Human Rights First, argued rather bitterly that the Cheneys have exaggerated the risks of bringing Guantanamo prisoners from Cuba to the United States.

“Can you imagine getting a terrorist from Guantanamo convicted and put in a federal penitentiary in your town?” Maddox asked. “Have you ever checked who the hell’s in there already? Have any of them gotten out? The person who we’re putting in is probably a heck of lot less dangerous than most of them who are already in there."

Never mind that almost 100 of the detainees held at Gitmo are Yemenis and the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, is wary of sending them back home because of the duplicitous Yemeni government -- al Qaeda terrorists have a habit of "escaping" from jail in Yemen. Never mind the lack of cooperation from our European allies. For years the Europeans complained about Gitmo, but it turns out they are actually not too keen on taking in terrorists. And never mind the fact that the American people don't want the Gitmo detainees here for obvious reasons -- despite General Maddox's great faith that they are no more dangerous than your average pick-pocket. Never mind all that because there is still the little problem that, you know, there are a lot of dangerous terrorists down at Gitmo whom even the Obama adminstration doesn't want to free or transfer or put before a court.

It would've been nice if Obama had thought this through before blindly ordering Gitmo closed at the end of his first year in office -- a move the majority of the American people did not support then and do not support now. Because Obama didn't think this through, however, his surrogates are now reduced to attacking the Cheneys.

Yesterday's Washington Post piece on Scott Gration and his milk and cookies approach to dealing with the indicted war criminals that rule Sudan and have committed genocide in Darfur has prompted push-back from the White House. "This article wildly misrepresents the policy discussions that have occurred in the White House, with quotes that have been cobbled together out of context," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor told ABC News. And then a senior administration official on background:

"The story paints the picture of a wildly irresponsible policy; I feel good that it's not our policy."

"The story seems to suggests our approach is to trust the government of Sudan at its word and provide incentives in hope that by providing incentives they will somehow change their behavior," says the official "That's wildly inaccurate. There is no talk of incentives until there is a change of conditions on the ground -- verifiable changes in conditions on the ground."

So apparently the blame for this misunderstanding rests squarely with the Washington Post, which was wildly irresponsible in quoting the administration's point man for Sudan. "We've got to think about giving out cookies," Gration said, "Kids, countries -- they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement." Yeah, the administration's policy is nothing like that and the reporters at the Washington Post should be ashamed of themselves for wildly misrepresenting those policies by removing the context from that quote. Also, this administration is not to "trust the government of Sudan," even though the Post quotes Gration as saying that the regime's "efforts" make him "willing to take a risk that I'll be betrayed...And if that trust is violated, then I believe pressure should come." No, he doesn't trust the Sudanese regime and think incentives should be offered instead of pressure. That would be a wildly off-base interpretation.

General Stanley McChrystal acknowledged during a television interview that aired Sunday that he's spoken with President Obama just once since arriving in Afghanistan more than two months ago. At today's press briefing Robert Gibbs provided "a little context," noting that the "President receives a memo every week from General McChrystal, as he does from General Odierno, on -- an update on how things are going in either Afghanistan or Iraq."

These these memos apparently amount to "tremendous input from the commanders on the ground," as Gibbs put it later. He noted that Obama speaks frequently with Secretary of Defense Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mullen, and the president also "receives input from regional commanders like General Petraeus." An email to the White House asking how many times the President has spoken with Gen. Petraeus since McChrystal arrived in Afghanistan was not immediately returned.

You can read Gibbs's full statement after the jump...

The New York Times reports:

The [Senate Finance] committee on Tuesday afternoon voted, 15 to 8, to reject an amendment proposed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, to add a public option called the Community Choice Health Plan, an outcome that underscored the lack of support for a government plan among many Democrats.

Mr. Baucus voted no, as did Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and Bill Nelson of Florida, joining all 10 Republicans in opposition.

The New York Times quotes a senior administration official on General McChrystal's troop request and how the numbers are being viewed inside the administration:

“The figure of 40,000 would be what one official described as the ‘we’re in this to win’ option, which would include ambitious goals for securing the cities, clearing out the countryside of Taliban insurgents and nation-building.”

The senior administration official went on to explain that the president is considering alternatives to the “we’re in this to win” option. Among them:

The “we’re in this to muddle through ineffectively until political support at home is exhausted and we are forced to retreat” option.

The "we’re in this to demonstrate that we learned nothing from the surge” option.

The "we’re in this to reassure Donald Rumsfeld that Democrats are equally capable of screwing up along the lines he did in Iraq” option.

The "we’re in this because we needed to look tough during last year’s presidential campaign and had no clue what we were getting ourselves into, and now are frantically trying to extricate ourselves without getting called on it” option.

A prediction: President Obama will add a “surprise” visit to Afghanistan to his Olympics-lobbying trip to Copenhagen.

The president and his advisers must realize, in Mark McKinnon’s words, that "people elected Obama to be president--not the head of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce," that a large part of being president is being commander-in-chief, and that it’s not good that Obama appears to have plenty of time for everything--David Letterman, Democratic fundraisers, Olympics-lobbying jaunts--except Afghanistan, just as he’s about to decide whether to commit tens of thousands more troops there. In addition, Obama’s never been to Afghanistan as president, and--we now know--apparently has spoken to General Stanley McChrystal only once by video-teleconference since McChrystal assumed command there.

David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel aren’t stupid: Expect to see Barack Obama get on the plane after his session with the International Olympics Committee at mid-day Friday Copenhagen time, and be in Afghanistan with our troops five hours later, in time for the evening news Friday here in the U.S.

AFP reports:

New York's iconic Empire State Building will light up red and yellow Wednesday in honor of the 60th anniversary of communist China.

The Chinese consul, Peng Keyu, and other officials will take part in the lighting ceremony which will bathe the skyscraper in the colors of the People's Republic until Thursday, Empire State Building representatives said in a statement.

Hey, the Red Chinese only killed 50 or 60 million of their own people, why not celebrate that achievement with a special lighting scheme. The only question is what colors they use for Stalin's birthday, since obviously they don't want people confused as to which genocidal regime they're paying tribute to on any particular night.

Update: A reader sends in this story from last week that has supporters of the Iranian opposition requesting that the Empire State Building lit up in the green to mark their rallies against A'jad during his speech at the UN only to have their request denied because...the Empire State Building doesn't get involved in political issues:

Iranian activists -- trying to blanket New York City with their trademark green color -- lobbied to bathe the top of the Empire State Building in green light all this week during their rallies against Iran's president, who is visiting the United Nations.

The request was rejected...

Ms. Goldwater received a reply dated Sept. 18 from the Empire State Building Co. LLC, which decides on lighting requests, refusing the application. "After careful consideration of your proposal, unfortunately, the decision was made to deny your request," wrote Nicole Grzywacz of the building's public-relations office. The office wouldn't comment on the reason, but those familiar with the building's practice said it avoids taking sides in political disputes.

As if no one would dispute the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party sixty years of rule over mainland China.

It occurred to me last year that Obama's theory of foreign policy, which ventured past soft power and into the realm of "smart power," might be more aptly described as "iPower." That's because it centered largely on the belief that -- by dint of his background, intellectual, and charismatic gifts -- Barrack Hussein Obama was uniquely positioned to influence foreign actors to take actions congenial to U.S. interests, even if those interests ran (or seemed to run) counter to the foreign actors' own interests and goals.

We've yet to get a definitive verdict on iPower, though the list of blunders committed in its name is unnerving. The closest we've seen to getting an up-or-down assessment of Obama's personal ability to convince foreign bodies to work toward American interests was Iran's blowing through the September 10 nuclear deadline. But even that isn't entirely dispositive.

However, Obama's personal intervention in Chicago's quest to host the 2016 Olympics does bring us to a clear data point. Either the IOC will give the Olympics to Chicago, as Obama will ask them to, of they will not. The question is, what happens if they don't?

If Obama's iPower isn't enough to convince the IOC to render a trivial decision that is utterly painless to them, then why should anyone believe that he can coax a hostile regime to take actions they deem contrary to their self-interest?

In the wake of the last week’s revelation that Iran has a clandestine facility designed to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs, the New York Times has an interesting look at the ongoing debate between American and her allies over Iran’s nuclear program.

Behind their show of unity about Iran’s clandestine efforts to manufacture nuclear fuel, however, is a continuing debate among American, European and Israeli spies about a separate component of Iran's nuclear program: its clandestine efforts to design a nuclear warhead.

The Israelis, who have delivered veiled threats of a military strike, say they believe that Iran has restarted these “weaponization” efforts, which would mark a final step in building a nuclear weapon. The Germans say they believe that the weapons work was never halted. The French have strongly suggested that independent international inspectors have more information about the weapons work than they have made public.

Meanwhile, in closed-door discussions, American spy agencies have stood firm in their conclusion that while Iran may ultimately want a bomb, the country halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort — a judgment first made public in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate.

There are at least a couple of problems with this.

First, as I noted last week, the 2007 NIE defined Iran’s nuclear weapons program as including both its “weaponization” efforts (i.e. designing a warhead) and its clandestine uranium enrichment efforts. (Oddly, the development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead was left out of the NIE’s definition of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.)

The American spooks who are referenced by the Times may want to pretend they limited the 2007 NIE to only Iran’s weaponization efforts, but their definition back then clearly included Iran’s “covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work.” That part of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” did not come to halt. The mullahs continued pressing forward, as the Obama administration itself now says. So, the 2007 NIE is entirely meaningless. It was always a dubious piece of analytical “tradecraft.”

That American intelligence officials are standing by the 2007 NIE – even after senior intelligence officials such as former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell walked away from it – suggests they are still infected with a particularly close-minded myopia, despite telling the Times they are “open-minded” when it comes to Iran’s burgeoning nukes.

Second, notice that America’s allies dispute what our spooks are saying about the other piece of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, as defined by the 2007 NIE: the mullahs’ weaponization efforts. The Israelis think it was restarted in 2005. The Germans don’t think this component ever really came to an end. Needless to say, this is a pretty wide variance in judgments. It does not inspire confidence that anyone knows with any great deal of precision exactly what is going on.

Indeed, we should keep in mind what the Robb-Silberman commission found in 2005: “Across the board, the [U.S.] intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors. In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or ten years ago.” This assessment undoubtedly included Iran.

Are there good reasons to think much has changed in the four years since? It is doubtful.

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking…

A little while ago I wrote about the comic-book industry's obsession with Barack Obama. Since then, the pace has only picked up. The second issue of IDW's Barack Obama biography is out now, titled The First 100 Days. The Obama's dog, Bo, has gotten his own comic book. This week brings yet another super-hero comic with Obama on the cover.

It is hard to know if Thomas L. Friedman’s love affair with China, already reaching approval of autocracy, is so intense that he is blind to reality or that he simply likes to pick and choose facts from China to buttress whatever he thinks we should do in America.

His recent column in the New York Times, "The New Sputnik," is mostly a recitation of what is widely known. China, both because it is increasingly concerned about pollution and because there may be business opportunities is looking to “go green” or, at least, more green than it has been as it has built, and continues to build, many coal fired electric generating plants, and typically without the latest anti-pollution technology.

This is not particularly surprising and has precious little to do with global warming. As populations become more affluent they tend to value less tangible goods such as cleaner air and water. Besides which coal is problematic for China, as its reserves are located distant from its population centers and its rail system is already straining with over half its total rail capacity being used to transport coal.

Friedman’s push is that China is doing more work in solar power and wind generation and this is, like Sputnik, a direct challenge to the U.S. that warrants a strategic response – by which he means a governmental response. He then blames business, in the form of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and says that the Chamber, “having sold its soul to the old coal and oil industries, uses its influence to prevent Congress from passing legislation to really spur renewables.”

One could read this column and never glean a hint that the primary way China is going green when it comes to electrical power generation is by ramping up nuclear power plant construction:

Japan Steel Works Ltd., a maker of atomic reactor parts for Areva SA and Toshiba Corp., more than doubled its forecast for China’s nuclear plant construction because of stimulus spending and environmental pressures.

The country may build about 22 reactors in the five years ending 2010 and 132 units thereafter, compared with a company estimate last year for a total 60 reactors, President Ikuo Sato said in an interview.

China’s plan calls for the percentage of China’s electric power now coming from nuclear to more than double by 2020 and increase almost seven-fold by 2030:

China is likely to make nuclear power account for five percent of its total installed power-generating capacity by 2020, Tuesday's China Securities Journal quoted Zhang Guobao, head of National Energy Administration, as saying.

The newly revised share target was one percentage point higher than the four percent goal set in the 2007 edition of the nation’s nuclear power development plan. …

China now has 11 operational nuclear generating units with a combined installed capacity of 9.08 million kw.

Nuclear plants provide 2.3 percent of China's power and the proportion is planned to rise to 16 percent by 2030.

These new reactors are typically very advanced relying on both foreign technology and a program to raise the domestic content of nuclear reactors. In addition to the benefits on pollution, nuclear reactors site easily near the densely populated coastal cities that are far from both the coal mines and the places where hydroelectric and wind power are commonly found.

Despite Friedman’s swooning, it is not actually obvious that the “one-party autocracy” of the Chinese has all the answers. The ability to “just impose” policies is just as likely, indeed believers in democracy and the republican form of government would say more likely, to lead to bad policy making than good. We did, after all, beat both the Nazis and the Communists.

In any case Friedman can’t have it both ways. Either the Chinese government is brilliant and we need to respond to its green initiatives a la Sputnik, or we don’t. If we do, the obvious implication is we ought to be ramping up our nuclear power program and Friedman’s decision to omit any mention of it from his column is simply inexplicable.

Scott Gration, Obama's gaffe-prone special envoy to Sudan, boils it down:

"We've got to think about giving out cookies," said Gration, who was appointed in March. "Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement."

This from the man who took it upon himself to declare the genocide in Darfur over -- mere "remnants of genocide" remain he told reporters in June -- at a time when even our push-over Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, was still accusing the Sudanese regime of that precise crime. (Gration would later try and make amends by telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "Susan Rice is one of my dear friends. There are few women in the world that I would say, 'I love you' to, and Susan is one of them. I love Susan Rice.") Only three months before Gration issued his summary judgment that the genocide in Darfur had come to an end, Sudanese President Omar al Bashir was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Gration is pushing the administration to normalize relations with this indicted war criminal.

A piece in the New Republic this summer slammed Gration for "fashioning his Sudan policy around an ideological attraction to carrots and an aversion to sticks--when everything we know about Sudan tells us that this is precisely the wrong tactic." Apparently Gration and Obama have moved on from carrots to cookies and gold stars. This explains perfectly the administration's approach to Burma (Clinton is talking of dropping sanctions), Russia (abandoning missile defense), Iran (submitting to talks on the ridiculous terms laid out by the Iranians), and North Korea (dumping the Six Party talks for bilateral negotiations). And if Obama pulls the plug on the war in Afghanistan, it may be cookies for the Taliban, too.

Christopher Caldwell: Obama’s age of atonement.

Ross Douthat: Obama needs to become a war president.

You Mislead!--Michael F. Cannon and Ramesh Ponnuru fact-check Obama's statements about the health-care overhaul.

Palin's memoir "Going Rogue" due to hit bookstores November 17.

Rich Lowry notes that Frank Rich is an Afghan war hypocrite.

Today, the Washington Post’s Del Quentin Wilber tells the heart-tugging story of two Uighur detainees held at Guantanamo. The two detainees, Bahtiyar Mahnut and Arkin Mahmud, are brothers who are held at Gitmo, according to the Post, for no good reason. The brothers, along with other Uighur detainees, have been cleared for release but they have not found freedom yet.

Accompanying the Post’s piece is an embedded video of Elizabeth Gilson, the brothers’ lawyer. Gilson says that Bahtiyar “left China to seek his way in the world” in 2001 and “ended up in Afghanistan” somewhat by chance. After Bahtiyar called home, his mother got worried because, you know, Afghanistan under the Taliban was not such a great place. So, she dispatched Bahtiyar’s older brother, Arkin, to retrieve him. Unfortunately, according to Gilson, the two brothers were not reunited until after they were captured and shipped off to Gitmo.

The South Pacific island nation of Palau has agreed to take Bahtiyar along with a number of Uighur detainees, but he won’t go. Palau won’t take his brother, Arkin, who apparently has some severe mental problems (which are all America’s fault, of course). Because of his brotherly devotion, Bahtiyar has decided to stay with Arkin at Gitmo.

“This story really puts a human face on the cost of the Bush detention policy and the Guantanamo prison situation,” Gilson explains to the Post’s readers in her stirring video. Gilson says it’s all Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the American military’s fault that the brothers are in this predicament.

Now, as Paul Harvey would say, for the rest of the story –- the parts that Gilson and the Post conveniently left out.

Bahtiyar Mahnut was trained by a senior al Qaeda terrorist in the Tora Bora Mountains of Afghanistan. We know this because Mahnut admitted as much, without apparently realizing it, during his combatant status review tribunal (CSRT) session at Gitmo.

After denying that he was an al Qaeda member or that he had any animus for the United States, Bahtiyar explained why he went to Afghanistan:

“To our knowledge there was no fighting with the Chinese in Afghanistan, and it was therefore a safe place to train so we could one day fight the Chinese. The person running the camp was named Abdul Haq, and he was a Uighur.”

Who is Abdul Haq? According to the Obama administration’s Treasury Department, Haq is a senior al Qaeda member who sits on al Qaeda’s elite Shura Council. Haq is also the leader of the al Qaeda-affiliated Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), aka the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which has been designated by both the U.S. and the UN as a terrorist organization. The TIP/ETIM has executed a number of attacks against civilian targets in Western China and threatened to strike the Chinese Olympic games. As Stuart Levey, the Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, explained earlier this year, “Abdul Haq commands a terror group that sought to sow violence and fracture international unity at the 2008 Olympic Games in China.” Levey added: “Today, we stand together with the world in condemning this brutal terrorist and isolating him from the international financial system.”

Abdul Haq is not bashful about his al Qaeda and Taliban ties, or his radical jihadist worldview. In a recent jihadist video, Haq talked about his time fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and how the Taliban’s martyrs inspired him. Haq also made sure to bless Osama bin Laden (“may Allah keep him safe”) when saying the terror master’s name.

But, you won’t find Abdul Haq’s name in the Post’s account. You won’t find the words “Tora Bora” or any mention of the TIP/ETIM either. Yet, Bahtiyar was clearly trained at Abdul Haq’s TIP/ETIM camp in the Tora Bora Mountains -- a pre-9/11 stronghold for al Qaeda and the Taliban. Curiously, the Post refers to the Tora Bora location of the camp as in Afghanistan’s “southern mountains,” which sounds less ominous. Bahtiyar stayed at this terrorist camp in Tora Bora for several months.

These facts are not hard to find. You can read the brother’s Gitmo documents on the New York Times's web site. (See here and here.)

Yet, the closest the Post gets to mentioning any of this can be found in these three sentences:

“In 2002, the military brought the brothers and 20 other Uighurs to Guantanamo Bay. Authorities alleged at the time that the men trained at military-style camps affiliated with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The accusations later dissolved upon close scrutiny by the courts.”

That isn’t true. There was no “close scrutiny” by the courts. The Uighur detainees’ admitted ties to Abdul Haq, one of the most wanted terrorists on the planet, are especially troubling. Incredibly, the court's rulings last year in the Uighurs’ case do not even mention Abdul Haq -- the key personality involved here.

There is at least one other noteworthy aspect of the Post’s account. Gilson says in her video that the four Uighurs who were transferred by the Obama administration to Bermuda earlier this year, “are serving as groundskeepers and going to picnics at the American embassy.”

If true, then this has got to be a first. All four of those Uighurs were trained at Abdul Haq’s Tora Bora camp as well. Who would have thought that a senior al Qaeda terrorist’s trainees would be guests of America’s diplomats?

I realize that President Obama wants to improve America’s image, especially with respect to Guantanamo. But is this the way to go about it?

Now, I don’t think anyone would accuse the Uighur brothers, or any of the other Uighur detainees, of being the “worst of the worst.” By the same token, there are some very troubling facts about their time in Afghanistan, especially Bahtiyar’s, that are worth reporting. The Post couldn’t be bothered. Instead, Elizbeth Gilson is given free rein to portray her clients as innocent victims of the Bush administration’s horrible detention policies.

In reality, this story demonstrates just how lazy the press has become in its coverage of all things related to Guantanamo.

A Republican sends over this video of the State Department press briefing today, in which Assistant Secretary P.J. Crowley calls Gitmo detainees "refugees" at about the 24-minute mark.

QUESTION: Talk to us a little bit about response and talks and any commitments that you may have gotten from our European and other friends in the international community about taking in Guantanamo detainees as the camp in Guantanamo is expected to close at some point in the near future. Have you gotten any commitments from our European friends and anybody else?

CROWLEY: Ambassador Dan Fried continues his efforts to resettle, you know, Guantanamo refugees to various places around the world.

Unbelievable.

So far unremarked upon in Obama's about face in deciding to go to Copenhagen to press for Chicago's Olympic bid is the potential fallout for U.S. relations with Brazil. Brazil is an emerging regional power (one of the BRIC countries), and critical for efforts to balance the subversive leftism of Chavez and his ilk with the electorally-based leftism of President Lula. Brazil, the most populous country in South America, is important for the U.S. over a wide range of issues--energy (nearly self-sufficient in ethanol), economics, environment, and security. By virtually all accounts, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro are the finalists for the 2016 Olympics. South America has never hosted an Olympics and there is huge national and regional pride behind Brazil's bid. President Lula himself is going to Copenhagen and has been heavily involved in making the case for 2016.

By deciding to personally intervene on behalf of the Chicago machine's Olympic bid, if successful, Obama threatens to damage a critical relationship in Latin America. I doubt if Lula and 200 million Brazilians would be too pleased if the Yankee colossus derailed their Olympic bid at the last minute. Maybe Obama thinks the fallout would be worth it to get the Games for his Windy City cronies (think of the real estate opportunities for Tony Rezko, the book sales it could generate for Bill Ayers, the proselytizing Reverend Wright could do).

As Venezuelan President-for-life Chavez strutted around Italy recently as if he were playing Benito Mussolini, his Honduran wannabe, deposed President Zelaya, continued to receive strong support and advocacy from the Obama administration. Speaking for the United States, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that we were canceling most of our financial aid to the small country, and hinted that we would not recognize their free national election scheduled at the end of November. (Yes, you heard right, the U.S. is threatening not recognize a free election in Honduras.)

Now Zelaya has managed to sneak back into Honduras, and has taken up residence at the Brazilian embassy there. From that temporary sanctuary (there is a warrant for Zelaya's arrest), he has proclaimed himself president of Honduras again, perhaps his own attempted imitation of Mussolini, who after being deposed as dictator of Italy, was reinstalled as Duce of the tiny Republic of Salo by Hitler and the Nazi army for a few months (until he was unceremoniously executed by Italian anti-Nazi partisans).

Zelaya was legally removed from office after he attempted a plebiscite coup a few month ago. The Honduran constitution explicitly forbids such a plebiscite, and states that any elected official who tries to implement such a plebiscite is automatically removed from office. The Honduran Congress and Supreme Court then replaced Zelaya with the leader of the Congress who is also a member of
Zelaya's political party, and, to avoid bloodshed, he was exiled to another country.

Zelaya's friends in the region, Chavez of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia, and of course, Castro of Cuba howled and complained at this because they had hoped that through the plebiscite Zelaya would be able to create a Marxist totalitarian regime like their own in Honduras.

The surprise came when President Obama agreed with Chavez, Castro and Morales, and other South American leftists, and joined their chorus to return Zelaya to power.

Meanwhile, the temporary Honduran government has leaned over backwards to restore constitutional and democratic government to the country, including scheduling a new election for president at the end of November.

Small countries do count. When Marxists attempted to transform little Grenada into a satellite of the Soviet Union years later, President Reagan intervened and said no. Now we have an analogous circumstance in Honduras, and the official policy of the United States is on the side of the totalitarians!

Zelaya's latest gambit--sneaking into Honduras and Holing up in the Brazilian embassy--has of course embarrassed the Obama administration which has condemned the gambit in harsh terms (while at the same time still advocating his return to office). The U.S. is backing the wrong horse in Honduras. Verbal criticism isn't enough.

Our policy in Honduras needs to be revised, and pronto.

It is not a good sign that General McChrystal has spoken only once, and by teleconference call, with President Obama during the past 70 days. This would suggest that the commanding general of allied forces in Afghanistan is at significant odds with the White House, and close to resigning his command; or it might suggest that the White House and its national security apparatus are deliberately keeping their principal military advisers at a distance as they ponder their political options.

Either possibility is unwelcome news in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is also highly unusual in the history of relations between senior commanders and their political chiefs. President Lincoln was in constant written and telegraphic communication with his successive senior generals in the Union Army; and decades before the invention of the automobile, took the trouble to consult in person with General McClellan after the Battle of Antietam, and with General Grant at Richmond. For that
matter, on the Confederate side, the regular contact between General Lee and President Davis fills a thick volume edited by historian Douglas Southall Freeman.

Move ahead a century and you will find near-daily written and personal communication President Roosevelt and his chief of staff, General Marshall, as well as his naval chief Admiral King, and a regular two-way correspondence with his chief European (General Eisenhower) and Pacific (General MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz) commanders. FDR met with Ike in North Africa--where, in 1943, he offered him command of the Normandy invasion--and with MacArthur and Nimitz in Hawaii in 1944.

President Truman famously traveled to Wake Island to meet with General MacArthur to discuss strategy in Korea, and President Johnson not only monitored events in South Vietnam on a near-constant basis, talking directly with advisers, Cabinet officials and commanders in the field, but met repeatedly with the two successive U.S. commanders (Generals Westmoreland and Abrams) in Washington and in the Pacific, as did President Nixon.

To be sure, the invention of more sophisticated communications technology, as well as advances in transport, have made contact between presidents and their military commanders considerably easier than they were in the Civil War. Which makes General McChrystal's relative isolation from his commander-in-chief all the more astonishing, and troubling.

Here's an interesting Briefing Room back-and-forth on Iran's successful Sajjil-2 missile test (emphasis mine).

Q: Robert, what's the White House's reaction to Iran's test-firing of missiles and how will that affect the atmosphere for the October 1st talks?

MR. GIBBS: Well, a couple things. I mean, obviously, these were pre-planned military exercises. I think -- I would lump any of these into the provocative nature with which Iran has acted on the world stage for a number of years. I would point out that the reason that missile defense decisions have been made in the past couple weeks to change from something that dealt virtually only with an ICBM threat and dealt more with medium- to intermediate-range missiles I think was proven out in many of the pictures that you saw over the past few hours.

The decision that Secretary Gates and General Cartwright, the Joint Chiefs approved unanimously and forwarded to the President, which the President then approved, is something that deals with the exact threat of medium- and intermediate-range missiles that you saw Iran testing just today.

This is largely political spin, damage control aimed at shifting attention from the fact that the President's decision to unilaterally cut missile defense from Europe was answered with Iran testing out their new missile staging technologies and revealing the existence of a second uranium enrichment facility. Not a good week for the Obama administration.

So we're now told that this is "smarter" missile defense, a purely military decision recommended by senior military leadership. Yet only a little over a year ago, Lt General Henry Obering --Director of the Missile Defense Agency-- said the following before the Foreign Affairs subcommittee:

Iran has the largest force of ballistic missiles in the Middle East (several hundred short- and medium-range ballistic missiles), and its highly publicized missile exercise training has enabled Iranian ballistic missile forces to hone wartime skills and tactics. In addition to its uranium enrichment activity, Iran continues to pursue newer and longer range missile systems and advanced warhead designs. Iran is developing an extended range version of the Shahab-3 that could strike our allies and friends in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe as well as our deployed forces. It is also developing a new Ashura medium-range ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel and U.S. bases in Eastern Europe. Iranian public statements also indicate that its solid-propellant technology is maturing. With its significantly faster launch sequence, a new solid propellant missile would be an improvement over the liquid-fuel Shahab-3.3.

That's not the testimony of someone who felt we needed "smarter" missile defense, but rather a military professional who had already developed a working solution to Iran's rapidly advancing ballistic missile technology. The fact of the matter is, the SECDEF and Joint Chiefs were fully on board with the practical European missile defense plan laid out by Obering until the Obama administration injected politics into their military analysis. It's likely that the plan submitted by the Chiefs last week was one compiled only after the White House told them "no" on European BMD, resulting in a less-robust stop-gap that cobbled together politically neutral missile defense technologies and was then clumsily labeled "smarter."

Today, Iran validated Obering's concerns of 2008 by demonstrating that they've mastered staging and solid-fuel rocket technology. Killing the European ground based mid-course inceptor in Europe, a technology that has already been proven against precisely the type of rocket that Iran tested today, was exactly the opposite of what military missile defense experts had been saying for years. Smarter indeed.

At the White House press briefing today, Robert Gibbs said, "I assume that any decision [on sending more troops to Afghanistan] is a number of weeks away." Later Gibbs added, "We have seen the movie before where you put a bunch of resources in a place and then you decide your strategy. I don't think the output that we've seen in those decisions has altogether been good for this country or for our military."

In his report delivered to President Obama at the end of August, General Stanley McChrystal called for the implementation of a counterinsurgency strategy, which would require more troops in Afghanistan. "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible," McChrystal wrote.

Nobody took more guff from the left for backing the surge in Iraq than Michael O'Hanlon -- though O'Hanlon, of course, turned out to be right on the money in his analysis of the war there. Today O'Hanlon co-authors an op-ed with Bruce Riedel, the man who oversaw the Obama administration's first review of Afghanistan policy, arguing in favor of a robust counterinsurgency strategy rather than the over-the-horizon counterterrorism strategy favored by some on the left. The two write:

The fundamental reason that a counterterrorism-focused strategy fails is that it cannot generate good intelligence. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban know not to use their cellphones and satellite phones today, so our spy satellites are of little use in finding extremists. We need information from unmanned low-altitude aircraft and, even more, from people on the ground who speak the language and know the comings and goings of locals. But our Afghan friends who might be inclined to help us with such information would be intimidated by insurgent and terrorist forces into silence — or killed if they cooperated — because we would lack the ability to protect them under a counterterrorism approach....

The second reason a counterterrorism-oriented strategy would fail is that, if we tried it, we would likely lose our ability to operate unmanned aircraft where the Taliban and al-Qaeda prefer to hide. Why? If we pulled out, the Afghan government would likely collapse. The secure bases near the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and thus our ability to operate aircraft from them, would be lost. Our ability to go after Afghan resistance fighters would deteriorate. And the recent momentum we have established in going after Pakistani extremists would be lost...

Third, we would likely lose our allies with this approach. A limited mission offers nothing to the Afghans, whose country is essentially abandoned to the Taliban, or to the Pakistanis, who would similarly see this as the first step toward cut and run. The NATO allies would also smell in a "reduced" mission the beginning of withdrawal; some if not most might try to beat us to the exit.

Once the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda will not be far behind.

On the one side we have the man who chaired the administration's first Afghan policy review as well as the man Obama picked to command U.S. forces there, General Stanley McChrystal. Joining them is Michael O'Hanlon, who argued for the surge in Iraq, General David Petraeus who commanded U.S. forces during the surge in Iraq, and Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. On the other side is...who? Joe Biden? If he'd had his way would have split Iraq into three countries and allowed them to play king of the mountain in blood-soaked civil war in the heart of the Middle East.

HT: Michael Crowley

The Iranian military has test fired the Shahab-3, a ballistic missile that is capable of reaching Europe and is thought to be the delivery platform for a an Iranian nuke. The test has Western governments up in arms, and comes just days after news of a secret nuclear facility in Qom put the Obama administration in an awkward position of having to explain that, contrary to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, Iran is indeed pushing forward with developing a nuclear weapon.

Iran has conducted multiple tests of the Shahab-3 missile this year. Why conduct another just days after news broke of the secret nuclear facility near Qom, and just days before bilateral talks with the U.S.?

Iran is openly flaunting its nuclear weapons program to the Western media, knowing that there is not the collective will at the United Nations Security Council to impose even moderate sanctions. The news of the Qom reactor was actually leaked by the Iranians, when they sent a letter to the IAEA to disclose the existence of the site.

But the Obama administration will regardless carry out the bilateral talks starting on October 1, hoping that Iran will change its tune, when the Islamic theocracy shows no inclination of actually doing so.

And while Iran flaunts its capabilities, the U.S. military in Iraq continues to release members of the League of the Righteous, the radical Shia terror group backed by Iran's Qods Force. More than 100 fighters have been released this year. In exchange, the Shia terrorists returned the bodies of three Brits kidnapped in early 2007. The three men were murdered by the group.

Kimberly A. Strassel’s column in the Wall Street Journal, Obama’s Swing-State Blues, focusing on the gubernatorial race in Virginia, is both thoughtful and accurate in detailing the importance and dynamics of the race between Republican Robert F. McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. A win for the Republican in this state that Obama carried would signal that swing states are swinging back to the Republicans. This would both help Republicans with recruiting and fundraising for the mid-term elections and put pressure on “blue-dog” Democrats to vote in line with their districts, not the Democratic leadership.

One point Strassel makes may not, however, be the only lesson that could be drawn from the facts she presents:

The unearthing of a thesis Mr. McDonnell wrote 20 years ago, critical of feminism and homosexuality, changed the dynamic. The Deeds campaign unleashed ads calling Mr. McDonnell "Backwards Bob" and this time the accusation gained traction. Mr. Deeds has narrowed Mr. McDonnell's lead to five points. Mr. McDonnell has insisted it was long ago and his views have changed. Yet the majority of those who switched candidates were independent women. The moral for the GOP? Cultural controversy does not sell.

Perhaps. But there are other considerations. One possibility is that what doesn’t sell is any hint of hypocrisy. And therefore it is important to be honest about the evolution of one’s views. Within the Republican Party, how many conservatives could not shake their doubts about Mitt Romney in the last election? To many it seemed obvious that he either tilted his views to win election in Massachusetts or was tilting them to cater to a more conservative base in the Republican primaries. In either case, he didn’t come across as a principled man.

It seems that if you don’t defend a position, your opponent gets to define the position. As Strassel points out, McDonnell did not attempt in any way to justify, explain or defend the arguments he made in his thesis. He just ran away from the points. With the Deeds campaign attacking the ideas in the thesis as “backwards” and the McDonnell campaign refusing to defend the thesis, the vast majority of voters, not familiar with the details of the matter, are understandably left with the take-away that years ago McDonnell wrote a paper representing some really bad, indeed indefensible, ideas.

But there are plenty of people who agree, or could be persuaded to agree, with many of McDonnell’s earlier ideas. In fact, there is a great deal of respectable legal opinion agreeing with McDonnell’s critique of the Supreme Court’s expansive "right to privacy" decisions going back to Griswold v. Connecticut. And lots of people favor a tax system designed to strengthen families; many working women would love the opportunity to stay home with their children if public policy could make that more feasible. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Arizona have an option for covenant marriage and the Republic still stands.

Doubtless McDonnell’s opinions surely have changed in the past two decades, but had he elected to defend the positions he still holds and explain how his thinking had evolved on others, he would have both won support as an honest man and laid out a case for many culturally conservative views that would have persuaded a portion of the voting population as to the merits of his positions.

McDonnell is an experienced politician, and he has access to politically astute advisers so, in the short term, Strassel may be right. Cultural controversy may not sell well. There are complex ideas at stake, and there may not be enough time before the election to fully explain such ideas. So denying their relevance and talking about jobs may well be the best strategy to win this election.

There are, however, broader risks here and it may not be the best strategy to bring about a Republican renaissance. Conservatives, almost by definition, believe that what happens in the home is more important than what happens in the domestic policy arena. In fact, domestic policy is important to no small extent because of the impact such public policy has on the family. One doesn’t have to endorse any specific proposal made in McDonnell’s long-ago thesis to recognize that at 34 years old, he was wrestling with the right questions. His thesis was titled, “The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of The Decade." Who wants to stand up and say he was wrong, except to say it is the compelling domestic issue of every decade?

Discussion of how public policy can and should be used to encourage the kind of society congenial to democracy, increased prosperity, and civil behavior is inevitably going to involve thinking about the kind of society we want to have and preferring some outcomes over others. George Will used to refer to this line of thought as statecraft as soulcraft.

If conservatives running for office are unwilling to stand up for these ideas then, domestically, at least, they are left running on purely prudential economic grounds. That may work this year, but should conservatives require a recession to facilitate electoral victories?

What is it about the Burmese junta that Jim Webb just can't get enough? After traveling to Burma to meet with the junta's top brass in August, he ran over to the Burmese embassy in Washington last weekend to meet with Nyan Win, the junta's foreign minister whom Webb helped secure a visa for a jaunt to the nation's capital (the criminals that run the junta typically aren't allowed any further from the UN than Qaddafi or A'jad or other tyrants). Now we get word from Webb's office that he's jetting up to New York today to meet with the junta's Prime Minister Thein Sein. From the press release:

"I appreciate [United Nations Under-Secretary-General Ambassador Joseph Verner] Reed's initiative in arranging this meeting, and I look forward to continuing the dialogue with Prime Minister Tein Shein that was begun last month," said Webb, who similarly met with Burmese foreign minister Nyan Win last weekend to discuss U.S.-Burma relations....

You know who Webb won't be meeting with: members of Burma's democratic opposition. They aren't so enamored of Webb's work as the self-appointed junta spokesman in the United States. Webb's "efforts have been damaging to our democracy movement" wrote one opposition leader on the Post op-ed page. Another accused Webb of trying to "pressure my country's democracy movement into giving up economic sanctions--the most important tool in our struggle for freedom."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has an editorial today that does not argue against engagement, but implicitly rebukes the kind of engagement in which Webb has become so deeply engaged. Webb has been calling for Burma's opposition to participate in next year's elections and for the U.S. to ease sanctions. The editors at the Post "hope that discussions lead to tangible progress, in which case the United States might begin to consider easing sanctions," but they ask, "what if they lead to no change in the regime's behavior or in its plan to stage phony elections in 2010 that only entrench military rule?"

Webb doesn't seem to care--he wants Suu Kyi to "fully participate in that country's elections," despite the fact that they will entrench military rule. If Webb were even remotely interested in the welfare of the millions who face routine violence, rape, and murder at the hands of the junta, he would be raising the profile of Burma's democratic opposition. Instead he is conferring legitimacy on the junta with what seem now to be weekly meetings with top Burmese officials who for decades have been persona non grata in the United States. And what is Webb getting in return?

A Republican emails this morning:

Is Obama really jetting off to Copenhagen to lobby for a giant 2016 send off party in Chicago just as Iran's testing nuclear missiles? Amazing...

Personally, I don't think I'd mind as much if the beneficiaries of this lobbying campaign by the president were not his cronies in Chicago. If it were any other city that was up for the games -- if there was even the appearance that the president was using his position to the benefit of the country as a whole and not just his hometown and homestate...but then again, it's a six hour flight to Copenhagen, so maybe Obama will have the time to pick up the phone and call his hand-picked commander in Afghanistan and ask him if there's anything he needs, ask him to submit a report requesting those additional resources, and then Obama can read that report the next time he takes a long flight. You know, whenever it's convenient for him to deal with the war that U.S. troops are fighting.

Rasmussen's latest poll shows 56 percent disapprove and 41 percent approve of the health-care overhaul.

This is certainly a unique interpetation of "wartime presidency." What does it say about your Commander-in-Chief when he's spoken with David Letterman more than his key guy in Afghanistan?

The military general credited for capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq says he has only spoken to President Obama once since taking command of Afghanistan.

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

For the last eight years, Democrats criticized the Bush administration for its supposed cowboy diplomacy and mishandling of U.S. international alliances. A Democratic administration, we were told, would be filled with savvy diplomatic hands who knew how to use leverage and American smart power to further America’s objectives in the world.

The actions of the Obama administration over the last two weeks, however, make one wonder what happened to all of the smooth operators we were promised would land at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department.

First, the administration found itself preempted by a Wall Street Journal article that was going to reveal its decision to abandon plans to place missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. In an effort to inform close U.S. allies before they read about it in the press, the administration rushed to alert them but instead botched the rollout, leaving allies in Central and Eastern Europe feeling that they were left in the cold and sending a general message of incompetence.

Then, on Friday, President Obama was forced to reveal that Iran had constructed a covert uranium enrichment facility, not at a time of his own choosing, but because the Iranians themselves decided to come clean to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Once again, senior officials were left scrambling. As one administration official told the New York Times, there was “a fair amount of anger” within the administration about Iran’s disclosure. Another official told the Times that “Everybody’s been asking, ‘Where’s our leverage?’ Well, now we just got that leverage.”

Effective deployment of leverage has not been the forte of this administration thus far. Despite tough talk from the administration after North Korea’s nuclear test earlier this year, the United States has not pursued enough painful financial sanctions to force North Korea to halt its nuclear activities. On Iran, despite possessing information about the covert nuclear site prior to his inauguration and the acclaim of European leaders we were told was so important, President Obama failed to use either to bring pressure to bear on Iran prior to its June 12 presidential elections, effectively wasting six months while Iran continued to make technological progress at its previously declared enrichment facility at Natanz. On missile defense, the Obama administration managed to look like it was selling out some of America’s closest allies while getting nothing from the Russians in return.

So, perhaps we should be skeptical of the administration’s ability now to effectively use recent developments to pressure Iran. The president’s announcement of the new site on Friday combined tough rhetoric that the site was “inconsistent with a peaceful program” with surprisingly weak language about the implications of a breach of Iran’s international obligations. In other circumstances, such a revelation might have led to military action (ask Syria) or at a minimum, would have been used to call for immediate tough international sanctions. Instead, plans will now proceed for a meeting next week between members of the P5+1, including Under Secretary of State William Burns, and Iran.

The administration seems to think that their revelation about the site will lead Russia and China to support sanctions. This seems to be based on nothing more than hope. But, we shouldn’t worry. A senior administration official told the press Friday that, despite the president’s previous deadline for progress with Iran by the just concluded G-20 summit, “this stock-taking effort continues.” Hopefully the administration’s “stock taking” will take into account the fact that the initial reaction from Russia and China has been a bit underwhelming. As Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei put it when asked about whether Iran should be punished for its covert nuclear activities, “Personally, I don’t like the word punishment. I think that all issues can be solved through dialogue and negotiation.” Perhaps there is an opening for Vice Foreign Minister Yafei at Foggy Bottom or on the Obama National Security Council staff. He would fit right in.

Even if the Obama administration is successful and convinces both countries to support a tough new United Nations Security Council resolution, the sanctions that result will not be likely to force Iran to abandon its efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. This is made clear by an important new report by Senator Daniel Coats, Senator Charles Robb, and General (ret.) Charles Wald. The report, released several weeks ago by the Bipartisan Policy Center, makes clear that the Obama administration’s options are limited and that “time is running out.” The study notes that any Security Council sanctions need to be coupled with actions by “key nations – especially our European partners – to cease or significantly reduce their commercial ties to the Islamic Republic.” It also states that current legislation regarding refined gasoline products is important, but that “even tougher sanctions will ultimately be necessary.” The most revealing conclusion of the report is that the White House should begin “serious consideration of the option of a U.S.-led military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities” because an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program “would be of very short duration, less effective than a U.S. strike, would lead to larger condemnations, and…could provoke more effective Iranian reprisals against U.S. regional allies.”

Despite heeding such calls, the administration seems headed in the opposite direction. Secretary of Defense Gates routinely downplays the utility of military action against Iran, allowing the Iranians to perceive that they can get away with just about anything, even a covert facility supposedly configured to produce uranium for a nuclear weapon. As the Bipartisan Policy Center Report concludes, “Time is running out; we must meet the challenge now.”

It’s time for this administration to start employing some of that diplomatic finesse we’ve been promised. If they can’t leverage a covert nuclear site to punish Iran, they can’t leverage much of anything.

At 6pm local time, Germans found out who won today's election. With roughly 48 percent of the vote, the CDU and the FDP will form the next coalition government. But more impressive, the Free Democrats garnered an unprecedented 14.8 percent. At the FDP party hall, the crowd erupted in a deafening cheer. Nearly as loud were the cheers for the SPD who received a meager 23 percent. Forty-five minutes later the Social Democratic leadership conceded but promised to continue representing the poor. Some 67 percent of SPD supporters believed their party betrayed their principles. And so Angela Merkel will remain chancellor but the foreign minister will now be FDP leader Guido Westerwelle. And now I need a drink.

Magnanimous praise and shrewd advice from an unlikely source:

President Bush made a courageous decision in the summer of 2006 to reverse direction, but not the reversal sought by Congress (including then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden), the American public, the overwhelming majority of the press (including this newspaper), and even most of his own military advisers. Instead of cutting our losses and pulling out of Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, Bush doubled down. He invested more troops and, more important, embraced an entirely new strategy.

And Bush was right. What had happened beneath all of the politics was a small revolution in war-fighting philosophy, championed and implemented by an unlikely military leader, Gen. David Petraeus, a soldier/intellectual molded as much by the think tank as the battlefield. He calls the movement his "Counterinsurgency Nation," and it has rewritten the way America fights. It is not a completely new idea - there are few of those in the study of war - but its basic principles came into clearer and clearer focus as a new generation of military officers fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its guiding principle is simple: The prize in these countries is not territory, but people....

The Iraq war is not over, of course. It remains to be seen if Iraqis can forge a nation from its various contending factions, but there is no denying the extraordinary reversal engineered by Bush, Petraeus, and the remarkable soldiers who have risked and all too often sacrificed life and limb for the last six years. They accomplished it amid a persistent chorus of critics and doomsayers - doomed was actually the word then-Sen. Biden used to describe Petraeus' chances in April 2006....

Obama's war-fighting promise was to scale down Iraq and ramp up Afghanistan, which he argued was the necessary war. He has the strategy and the men to do just that, thanks in large part to the man who is least likely to be given credit, George W. Bush.

That's Mark Bowden writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Read the whole thing here.

Why would Colorado Public Television broadcast two 9/11 Truth propaganda videos? Good question. Colorado Public Television has enjoyed a fundraising boost after airing "9/11: Blueprint for Truth" and "9/11: Press for Truth." And they had help from 9/11 Truthers -- volunteers from a 9/11 Truther group called 911 Visibility answered phones during a fund drive that took place while the shows aired. Not surprisingly, this success has the station considering re-airing the "documentaries."

John McCormack points to this piece in the New York Times, which says that former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senator John Kerry and Senator Jack Reed are the three people outside of the administration “considered by White House aides to be most influential in” the current debate over how to proceed in Afghanistan. “All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the prospect of sending more forces to Afghanistan,” the Times says. Powell “expressed skepticism” in a meeting with President Obama earlier this month.

Where have I heard such skepticism before? Oh, that’s right -- during the debate over the surge in Iraq.

Here is CBS News on Secretary Powell’s December 2006 interview with Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation:

The United States is losing the war in Iraq but sending more troops to Baghdad is not the best way to change course, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Face The Nation. …

Powell, also a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not see the military benefit of flooding Baghdad with American troops.

"I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work," he said, adding that the Iraqi government and security forces must take over.

"It is the D.C. police force that guards Washington, D.C., not the troops that are stationed at Fort Myer," Powell said. "And in Baghdad, you need a police force to do that, and in the other cities, you need a police force to do that, and not the American troops."

Powell also doubted that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are large enough to support such an operation.

"The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform," Powell said. "We need to let both the Army and the Marine Corps grow in size, in my military judgment."

Asked directly what the U.S. should do in Iraq, Powell said:

"I think that what we should do is to work with the Iraqi government, press them on the political peace, do everything we can to provide equipment, advisers, and whatever the Iraqi armed forces need to become more competent, and to train their leaders so that those leaders realize their responsibility to the government."

Here is Senator Kerry in February 2007:

Sen. John Kerry on Saturday blamed Republicans for squelching Senate debate on the Iraq war and warned that President Bush's plan for more troops in Iraq is a mistake. …

"Another 21,000 troops sent into Iraq, with no visible end or strategy, ignores the best advice from our own generals and isn't the best way to keep faith with the courage and commitment of our soldiers," the Massachusetts Democrat said in his party's weekly radio address.

Kerry branded Bush's proposal for additional forces as "nothing more than the escalation of a misguided war."

And here is Senator Jack Reed in September 2007 saying the surge isn’t working and “it is time to change course.” Reed wanted to focus on a strategy of “counter-terrorism and training the Iraqi army,” instead of sending more American troops-–just like Kerry and Powell did at the time.

This triumvirate was wrong just a couple of years ago when it came to the Iraqi surge. But of course, so was then Senator Obama. The future president emphasized the need to provide adequate resources in Afghanistan. That hasn’t changed.

According to the Times, there are various administration insiders who share Powell, Kerry, and Reed’s “skepticism.”

But none of them are the president. The ball is one man’s hands now.

Berlin
One of the strange things about my trip to Germany has been the weather -- downright balmy and mostly blue skies. Those Central European dark clouds and rains lasting for days that have greeted me in the past are mysteriously absent. I suspect they will return next month along with the announcement of further job cuts. So remarkable has the weather has been that it came up among the many softball questions put to Angela Merkel at this afternoon’s final CDU rally in Berlin Arena. The questioner also asked Merkel how it felt to be taking on so many men. “It’s not a problem,” she said, brushing him off.

The crowd was shouting “Angie! Angie!” (though with those German accents it’s more like “En-jee! En-jee!”). They were eager to catch a glimpse of their leader one last time. Everything is on the line. And they’re chatting about the weather? (Merkel came out to the Stones song “Start Me Up” -- You make a grown man cry -- as opposed to “Angie” -- Angie, you’re beautiful, but ain’t it time we said goodbye?)

This was followed by a musical act: A tall, blonde German woman in her late 40s, clad in tight leather pants and not much else, showing both muscle and sag (trust me, she was quite a sight), who sang “Superfrau” (Superwoman).

But then Merkel took the stage again, delivered a more powerful address, and advocated for a CDU/FDP (black/yellow) coaltion. She didn’t yell -- not her style -- but she was firm when she made her case. Merkel can also switch modes and give the crowd a disarming smile. Of the three rallies I attended, this was the only one that ended with the German national anthem.

Everyone is saying this election is too close to call. But for what it’s worth, my guess is:

CDU/CSU: 33 percent
SPD: 27 percent
FDP: 14 percent
Die Linke: 14 percent
Greens: 11 percent

A black/yellow coalition would come up with 47 percent, which, at the end of the day (and additional seats are allotted in the Bundestag in a process I would rather not have to explain), may be just enough to govern.

The New York Times reports on the internal divisions in the Obama White House on Afghanistan:

While Mr. Obama is hearing from more hawkish voices, including those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, some outside advisers relied on by Mr. Obama have voiced doubts.

Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success, according to people briefed on the discussion. Mr. Powell reminded the president of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Mr. Powell is one of the three people, with Senator John F. Kerry and Senator Jack Reed, considered by White House aides to be most influential in this current debate. All have expressed varying degrees of doubt about the prospect of sending more forces to Afghanistan.

Read the latest from Fred and Kim Kagan on Afghanistan in the new issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

So what makes those Germans different from us, aside from their wearing black socks and Birkenstocks? For starters, they don’t spend as much on political races as we do. In total, all the parties spent the combined amount of 50 million euros (about $70 million). That’s it. Compare this to the Obama campaign, which spent approximately $750 million. Individual Germans can donate as much as they want to a party, though if it’s more than 10,000 euros, it has to be published. The donor can also get a tax deduction (1,650 euros is the max on the return). On the other hand, a direct donation to an individual candidate will land you a 25 percent “gift” tax on it. Companies also donate and, like in this country, tend to spread the wealth, though none of them gives to the far left party that wants to see them dead. The parties are barred from buying mailing lists, too. So what the FDP did in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, for instance, is go to an Internet company that has access to email addresses and have it send out political messages from the FDP to one million of those addresses, paying 50 cents for each one. This cost them 500,000 euros. Out of those million, maybe 100,000 respond positively—and those email addresses the FDP can keep. It all sounds strange to us but such are the laws, which are strictly enforced.

In 1994, Walter Eschweiler, a special adviser to the FDP treasurer, found in his mailbox an anonymous gift of 510 Deutsch marks (before the euro existed). Such anonymous donations exceeding 500 DM must be returned to parliament immediately. But the gift Eschweiler discovered was particularly curious-looking. The 500 in cash was sitting neatly in his box, held together by a paper clip. He stared at it for a moment but did what he had to do and returned the money to the government, as much as he regretted to. Not long after, he received a phone call from Der Spiegel magazine informing him he was the first person from any party to do this and congratulated him on it. It was Der Spiegel who placed the cash in his mailbox in the first place.

It’s strange to be sitting here in the middle of Pariser Platz, directly in front of the Brandenburg Gate, awaiting the arrival of the chancellor candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to take the stage. Thousands have gathered to support a party in danger of getting a mere 24 or 25 percent of the vote this Sunday. But as my fellow traveler Mike Shields of the NRCC noted, you can count the smiling faces on one hand. The rest are looking tense, grim, pensive. The posters they carry include such zingers as “Angie Got OutMerkeled!” “Bankers Would Vote For Merkel,” and “Asses Would Vote For Merkel.” But the opening bands are quite lively—in that German way. A cover band called Jazz Cantina, which takes rock songs and mellows them out with a jazz beat, is currently doing their rendition of Van Halen’s “Jump.” “You might as well jump,” says the singer, then does a quick hop. They follow this with a swingy version of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” But is “Highway to Hell” really a song that should precede the introduction of one's candidates?

Of course not. Which is why, when Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit, Vice Chancellor/Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and SPD chairman Franz Müntefering are introduced, the song you hear is “Beautiful Day” by U2—the same song used by John Kerry in 2004 and occasionally by Barack Obama last year. And speaking of President Obama, you can hear shades of his rhetoric when Mayor Wowereit (a future SPD chancellor candidate) utters things like, “this is not a question of ideology,” and “this is not a question of right or left….” But still there was this air of desperation. All that was missing, as Mr. Shields pointed out, was the speech recalling the great comebacks of the past, where people counted us out, but overnight we showed them!

So why does anyone like Mr. Steinmeier? On the jumbotron famous German actors and other personalities made the case. The montage was a German Cannonball Run. (I recognized Norm Birnbaum and the actor who played Josef Goebbels in Downfall.) Then there was the member of Jazz Cantina who told the crowd he supports Steinmeier “because Steinmeier has real balls!” (He used the word Eier, meaning eggs, but you get the picture.) Then Steinmeier comes out and addresses the audience in a constant yell that after a while, say five minutes, becomes fairly numbing. He went on for at least 45 minutes this way. And he raged against the threat of a CDU/FDP government, the threat of lowering taxes, and even the threat of the radical right party (NPD). He finally pleaded, "Wir brauchen Sie!" (We need you!). Steinmeier was then followed by Chairman Müntefering (sort of like having Tim Kaine follow Obama), who delivered even more red meat, but strangely only mentioned the far left party in passing. In fact, Die Linke poses the greatest threat to them and may end up with more than 11 percent of the vote—votes that the SPD believes are rightfully theirs. And those Linke supporters were also present, heckling throughout.

The rally finally ended with Müntefering reminding voters that following the first Grand Coalition government some 40 years ago, Willy Brandt of the SPD was supposed to earn a mere 15 percent of the vote. But sure enough, he came through, and in 48 hours the same can happen here! Yes, they told the comeback story.

David Brooks: The Afghan Imperative.

Because they can: interim replacement for Ted Kennedy's seat is sworn in five years after the legislature said such appointments would corrupt the democratic process.

Kasich 46, Strickland 45 in Rasmussen poll of Ohio 2010 gubernatorial race.

Club for Growth poll shows a three-way tie in New York's special congressional election.

Jonathan Adler on why legislators should read legislation before voting on it.

Ralph Peters had an ill-considered piece in yesterday's New York Post which seemed to blame American casualties in Afghanistan on 'politically correct' rules of engagement forced on the military by the Obama administration:

In Afghanistan, our leaders are complicit in the death of each soldier, Marine or Navy corpsman who falls because politically correct rules of engagement shield our enemies.

Mission-focused, but morally oblivious, Gen. Stan McChrystal conformed to the Obama Way of War by imposing rules of engagement that could have been concocted by Code Pink:

* Unless our troops in combat are absolutely certain that no civilians are present, they're denied artillery or air support.

* If any civilians appear where we meet the Taliban, our troops are to "break contact" -- to retreat.

These ROE are a cave-in to the Taliban's shameless propaganda campaign that claimed innocents were massacred every time our aircraft appeared overhead.

As far as protecting the troops goes, Peters's heart is in the right place, but the article nonetheless betrays a fairly comprehensive misunderstanding of how counterinsurgencies must be fought if they are to succeed. One can survey these principles in the relevant publications (the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which Peters unaccountably calls "disastrous", is an excellent reference) or just derive them oneself from our experiences in Iraq. The more the military focused on killing the enemy in Iraq, the less success it achieved. As soon as General Petraeus re-oriented Coalition efforts towards securing the population -- and as soon as he received the necessary resources to do so -- the situation improved dramatically.

And here is the curious paradox to counterinsurgency: as soon as the military focused less on "force protection" -- as it is known in the biz -- and more on the protection of indigenous civilians, the rate at which we were taking casualties plummeted. It does not seem logical at first: how can our troops be safer with less armor, smaller bases, and less reliance on firepower? It is certainly the case that initially, things will be harder: hence the spike in casualties which occurred during the Iraqi "surge", and the spike which is occurring now in Afghanistan. But in time the only way to defeat the enemy is to alienate them from the population, and thus gain the intelligence that allows for the discriminate and devastating application of violence, when appropriate. If you just kill everything that moves, the one who ends up alienated from the population is the counterinsurgent, with predictably negative consequences. (See: Soviet Union, Afghanistan, 1979-1989.)

There is a danger on Peters's part of stoking a populist resentment against best military practices, which have not been derived from left-wing squeamishness but instead from bloody lessons learned on the battlefield. He snidely dismisses the "'Washington player' generals" approach to battling terrorism as one in which troops are to hand out "soccer balls to worm-eaten children." The most generous response one can make to this assertion is that perhaps Peters feels that the whole "counterinsurgency" response to terrorism based in Central Asia is misguided. If so, then that is a subject for another time. But assuming that our effort in Afghanistan is one worth succeeding at, then this notion that counterinsurgency means being nice to people -- i.e., handing out soccer balls -- is completely wrongheaded. Instead, counterinsurgency is a difficult and brutal business of convincing the local population that the monopoly on violence belongs to you, the counterinsurgent, and you alone, that only you can protect them, and that it is in their interest to identify the insurgents to you. Then, based on that intelligence, the counterinsurgent kills. In situations where killing one or two insurgents risks civilian casualties or -- frankly, more importantly -- the perception of civilian casualties, then it is often in the counterinsurgent's interest to hold fire and break contact, and bide time for a better situation. This remains true even when friendly troops are at risk.

This weekend CSPAN will air Pete Hegseth's interview with Kim Kagan on her latest book, The Surge: A Military History. The hour-long interview airs Saturday at 10pm, Sunday at 9pm, and midnight on C-SPAN2 (all times Eastern).

Texas Governor Rick Perry came to Washington last week and I had a chance to hear him talk for about an hour on a wide range of issues before a small number of journalists. Perry is engaged in a tough primary battle against Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who has much of the Texas Republican establishment behind her -- including Karen Hughes -- and who may even have a slight lead in the race if the latest Rasmussen numbers are to be believed. Perry, however, said he was "still skeptical" that Hutchison would actually run -- she has declared her intention to run only to drop out at the last minute once before. Still, this time is different. Hutchison has already assembled a very capable campaign team and begun campaigning in earnest. She is not going to drop out.

One advantage Perry does seem to have in the race is his outside-the-beltway charm -- the Texas governor showed up in boots that read "Come and Take It." One Republican operative told me that Perry's strategy was simple: "He's going to out-Texas her." After an hour in the room with Perry, that strikes me as quite possible. In a town overrun by politically correct Democrats, an hour with Perry made me wistful for the better days of the Bush administration.

Perry dismissed outright any suggestion that he was interested in running for President in 2012. "I have no interest in coming to Washington," he said. But Perry did not hesitate to engage on national issues. I teed Perry up on the administration's Israel policy, inviting him to take a whack at the president. He did not disappoint. Perry started by saying "My faith requires me to support Israel." He went on to talk about how impressed he was with the IDF pilots he trained with during his time in the Air Force. And contrasting the demands Obama has made on Israel while saying relatively little about Palestinian terrorism, Perry said the Obama administration is "out of tune with America" on the question of support for Israel.

I also asked Perry about his relationship with Citgo, Venezuela's state-controlled oil firm, which Perry induced to relocate its U.S. headquarters from Oklahoma to Texas. Here, Perry stumbled a little bit. "Dictators come and dictators go," Perry said, but "Citgo will be around long after Chavez is gone." Eh... Perry has brought jobs to Texas through his courtship of Citgo, but that kind of sentiment doesn't exude the kind of fundamental antagonism for anti-democratic regimes that Republicans tend to like in their politicians. If Perry's relationship with Citgo props up Chavez for a minute longer than he might otherwise stay in power, was it worth a few thousand jobs?

Still, the most interesting moment in the session came in an exchange with the Politico's Jonathan Martin. This spring, Perry appeared at a Tea Party protest and when someone in the crowd shouted "secession," Perry responded, "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

Democrats were outraged, Republicans mostly amused. Indeed, Texas has a unique history, which Perry emphasized repeatedly in order to provide context to his remark. But the bottom line is that folks in Washington just aren't used to hearing that kind of talk. Martin pressed the governor on the issue:

JONATHAN MARTIN: Aren’t you just playing to the base of your party by doing that?

RICK PERRY: No. I don’t think that you can find brilliant constitutional lawyers that definitively can say “Can a state leave this union or not?” Are you trying to tell me that things can’t get so crappy that Maryland might say “we’ve had enough.” I hope you don’t say that. Because then you’re saying, “You know what, Maryland? We don’t give a damn what you think or what you want; you’re part of this, and you can’t get out of it.” When I get married, I said I was gonna stay with my wife until death do us part. That’s what I intend to do. I don’t know whether that’s a good analogy or not, but, uh, may be a little rocky, but in my opinion, it’s not. I mean, we joined the union, and look, again, I’ll leave it to…I’m not a lawyer. I’m an animal science major. Constitutional law probably has some differing opinions on that issue. But, again, you guys that wanna go, you know, burrow down into that rather than finding solutions to healthcare, finding solutions to energy policy, I mean, I understand it’s interesting stuff to write about, but I do think it’s a bit, um, off the path that most people are interested in discussing.

I suspect not a lot of Republicans are terribly concerned about how Obama's out of control spending looks from Bethesda or Rockville town center. Still, it was an amusing exchange, and it fits well with Perry's strategy. As the governor said, "I'm going to run against Washington until Washington changes." Or Texas secedes?

In November of 2007, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) drafted a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear program. In its publicly released “Key Judgments,” the IC concluded: “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” A footnote at the end of that sentence made it clear just what the IC thought had been “halted” (emphasis added):

For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

As many noted at the time, the language and logic of the NIE were nonsensical. There were transparent flaws in its analysis, including the arbitrary decision to set aside concerns over Iran’s overt uranium enrichment and ballistic missile development efforts –- both of which continued apace.

Now, with the Obama administration’s revelation this morning that Iran has secretly built a covert uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom, we know just how flat wrong –- and potentially willfully misleading –- that 2007 NIE was.

This morning, standing alongside UK prime minister Gordon Brown and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, President Obama announced that the three nations had discovered a secret Iranian enrichment facility. Obama noted that “the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program.”

That is, Iran has built a covert uranium enrichment facility that was intended to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. It is this type of facility that the IC considered part of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” in November 2007. At the time, the IC said that the program had been halted. But clearly the Iranians had restarted it. The question is: When?

The answer is at least months prior to when the November 2007 NIE was finalized –- and probably further back in time than that.

In a background session with reporters this afternoon, senior administration officials briefed the press on this latest revelation. One official said that the U.S. and its allies “have been looking for” a secret underground enrichment facility for years. “And not surprisingly, we found one,” the official said. This same official explained, “we have known for some time that Iran was building a second underground enrichment facility.” (The first is the Natanz facility, which was found out in 2002.)

The official added:

“…we've been aware of this facility for several years; we've been watching the construction, we've been building up a case so that we were sure that we had very strong evidence, irrefutable evidence, that the intent of this facility was as an enrichment plant.”

Later in the background session, an official reiterated, “as my colleagues have made clear, we've been aware of this facility now for several years.”

Several years? That would suggest that the IC knew about this facility long before the November 2007 NIE was written. In fact, the senior administration official made it clear that construction on the facility began prior to March 2007 and probably well beforehand.

One of the senior administration officials explained that “in a modern safeguards agreement, which the IAEA has with all countries that have a comprehensive safeguards agreement, countries are obligated to report to the agency as soon as they make a decision, as soon as they begin construction of a nuclear facility.” But in March 2007 “Iran unilaterally announced that it no longer considered itself obligated by that provision of its safeguards agreement, which obviously is -- sets off some alarm bells if you suspect that they may be trying to conceal nuclear activities.”

The IAEA determined that the Iranians were wrong to think that they could unilaterally back out of the agreement, the administration official explained. Regardless, Iran began construction of the facility prior to March 2007. “Now, no matter what interpretation you put on this [the IAEA’s safeguards agreement], Iran began construction of that facility at a time when they were legally bound to declare it,” an administration official said.

An official made the same point again later in the session: “this construction began before they attempted to withdraw.” That is, the construction began prior to March 2007, which, in turn, was months prior to the November 2007.

The officials’ comments regarding the IC's knowing about the facility for “several years,” coupled with the fact that construction on the facility began prior to Iran’s March 2007 announcement, certainly leads one to believe that the IC knew about this facility in advance of the November 2007 NIE.

And what is it, exactly, that they knew about the secret site? “I think as I indicated, from the very beginning, we had information indicating that the intent of this facility was as a covert centrifuge facility,” one official explained.

At a bare minimum then, the November 2007 NIE was simply wrong. The NIE’s authors concluded:

We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.

Wrong. Construction on a new covert enrichment facility, which the NIE’s authors themselves defined as part of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, began prior to March 2007. This is before “mid-2007.” And if the mullahs have a covert facility that both Obama and his officials say was built to produce weapons-grade uranium, then we certainly do know that “Tehran…intends to develop nuclear weapons.” Why else would they build facility for enriching weapons-grade material?

You can read the magazine's excellent appreciation here.

Politico reports on the consequences of not paying the $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance under Obamacare:

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

These are the original sponsors of the Iran sanctions bill now before the Senate:

"The discovery that Iran has been hiding a secret uranium enrichment facility adds fierce new urgency to the collective, comprehensive effort to stop Iran's nuclear breakout.

"For years, Iran has cheated and lied to the world about its nuclear activities and its nuclear ambitions. Just last week, a secret IAEA report was leaked, describing Iran’s covert nuclear weapons work. Now it has been caught red-handed once again. After today, the evidence all points to one inescapable conclusion: Iran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

"Given Iran's consistent pattern of deceit, concealment, and bad faith, the only way to force Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions is to make absolutely clear to the regime in Tehran that its current course will carry catastrophic consequences. We must leave no doubt that we are prepared to do whatever it takes to stop Iran's nuclear breakout.

"In the absence of immediate compliance by Iran with the IAEA and multiple UN Security Council resolutions, we must act swiftly and decisively to impose crippling new sanctions against Iran. In the Senate, an unprecedented bipartisan majority now supports the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act -- S. 908 -- which has attracted 76 cosponsors, including both some of the most conservative and most liberal members of this chamber. It is now urgent that our coalition move forward on this bill.

"As our former colleagues Senators Chuck Robb and Dan Coats recently urged in an important bipartisan report, President Obama must also reaffirm that -- should diplomacy fail -- all options remain on the table.

"Iran says that it has a right to peaceful civilian energy under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). But the rights accorded by the NPT come with responsibilities, which Iran has systematically and repeatedly flouted. By their own actions, Iran’s leaders have proven why the world cannot trust them to possess the nuclear fuel cycle.

"As the Senate unanimously affirmed in an amendment we offered to the National Defense Authorization Act this summer, there is now a narrow timetable by which Iran must fully comply with the IAEA and the UN Security Council. Unless it does so and comes completely clean about all its nuclear activities, there must be a presumption of bad faith against Iran -- including in its meeting with the P5+1 on October 1.

"Until Iran proves otherwise, we must assume the worst about its nuclear intentions and activities -- and act accordingly."

Excellent statement -- including that bit where they tell Obama he "must reaffirm that...all options are on the table." In any case, there seems to be real bipartisan support in both the House and Senate for Congressionally-mandated sanctions that are not held hostage to this president's naive focus on diplomatic engagement and the faith this president obviously has in his own powers of persuasion.

Wait a minute: Do 8 months of self-mortification and public pleading -- to the point of swallowing whole its bloody brutality to its own people -- on behalf of the peaceful applications of the Iranian nuclear program while in full possession of intelligence on its hidden nuclear facility not make liars of our no-more-politics-as-usual archetype-of-moral-superiority president and his finger-wagging goody-two-shoes of a secretary of state? If memory serves, withholding information for political purposes is a form of lying that sticks in the craw of lefty arbiters of morality at the Daily Dish and elsewhere, lying that at the very least must be punished by a reaming involving forestsful of newsprint and miles of cyberspace, if not by actual prosecution. And yet, on this very subject Mark Lynch takes reality and twists it into a pretzel of pro-Obamic sycophancy:

. . . the administration chose to go public as part of a calculated effort to ratchet up the credibility of the threat of tough sanctions ahead of the October 1 meeting between Iran and the P5+1 in Geneva. The public disclosure puts Iran on the back foot ahead of those talks, and appears to have encouraged Russia to more seriously consider supporting such sanctions (that, plus the missile defense decision probably). This has to change Iranian calculations -- indeed, the perception that the sanctions are now more likely is precisely what may lead the Iranians to make more concessions to avoid them.

Seriously? Russia is considering sanctions? That’s interesting. Will Lynch now twist the Russian president’s “I do not believe sanctions are the best way to achieve results. . . . I think we should continue to promote positive incentives for Iran and at the same time push it to make all its programs transparent and open” inside out to mean its opposite? (Even Andrew Sullivan isn’t sure we have the nod of the Russki.) More important, does Lynch really believe “the credibility of the threat of tough sanctions” will lead to Iranian concessions? Or is he just hoping that if only he and his Obama-worshiping confederates say it often enough it will come true? How many years of failed sanctions is it going to take to force our foreign policy establishment to admit that the mullahs and their basij murderers just don’t care? Appeasement has no credibility, as generations of imprisoned Russian and Cuban human rights activists will attest.

As for Sullivan himself, he falls, chest heaving, down the Maureen Dowd rabbit hole, trailing that old Obamic mojo along with him:

And so you see the Obama mojo again. . . . He busts Ahmadinejad in a air-tight case that focuses on active Iranian deception. All this, of course, may still not be enough. Putin's position remains opaque; and China is still not on the full wagon. But can anyone say that the isolation of Iran has weakened under Obama?

If you add to the mix the critical factor of the Green Revolution, then the West's position vis-a-vis Iran has improved immensely in the last eight months. And if you believe that Obama's Cairo speech was at least a positive factor in helping bring that about - then the promise of the Obama era in American foreign policy begins to take shape.

That’s more of a threat than a promise, really. And it's only a matter of degree, the difference between believing this stuff and wandering around the George Washington Bridge bus station in August wearing six overcoats.

Al Qaeda is stepping up its propaganda offensive to split the U.S. from its European allies. In his latest audiotape, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden offers Europe an out from Afghanistan, and threatens to attack if the countries do not leave. One interesting part of the short tape is is bin Laden's warning to Europe that the U.S. will abandon Afghanistan and leave Europe open to attack from al Qaeda:

Would that you reflect on the matter and ask wise and reasonable people, because it won’t be long until the dust of war clears in Afghanistan, at which point you won’t find a trace of any American, because they will have gone away far beyond the Atlantic, Allah permitting, and just us and you will remain, for the oppressed to retaliate from his oppressor.

Bin Laden's message is given weight by the administration's wavering on its commitment to Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's propaganda machine is quickly seizing on this weakness and making its appeal beyond the segments in Europe that are already looking for the exit in Afghanistan.

Rep. Howard Berman, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of Congress's most vocal advocates for sanctions on Iran's gasoline imports, releases a strong statement as predicted here this morning:

“The news that Iran has been secretly constructing a second uranium enrichment plant is deeply disturbing and casts a heavy shadow over the negotiations scheduled for next week. Iran's intention to build nuclear weaponry and its efforts to disguise that intention could not be clearer now -- and we have no idea what other aspects of its nuclear bomb project it may be working on in secret. There can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Iran has been lying to the international community for years about its allegedly peaceful nuclear intentions. Today’s news reinforces my determination to bring the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act before the Foreign Affairs Committee for consideration next month.”

Chas Freeman couldn't have said it any better:

The Egyptian candidate who lost a bid to head the U.N. culture and education body after a row over remarks last year that he was ready to burn Israeli books has blamed the United States and Jewish lobby for his defeat....

"The campaign against me in UNESCO was spearheaded in public by the United States, and several European states cooperated," Hosni told the Friday edition of the state-run Al-Akbar.

"There were those playing behind the scenes, and they were the Jewish organizations and lobby who lit a fire of lies against me," he added.

It's always nice when they do their critics the courtesy of proving them right.

Here's what we'll get in return for unilaterally killing European Missile Defense: Russia will "consider other options" for dealing with the Tehran. During this morning's Q & A at the University of Pittsburgh, Medvedev said:

I do not believe sanctions are the best way to achieve results. Sanctions were used on a number of occasions against Iran but we have doubts about the results. Nevertheless when all instruments have been used and failed, one can use international legal sanctions. That is common…I think we should continue to promote positive incentives for Iran and at the same time push it to make all its programs transparent and open. Should we fail in that case, we'll consider other options.

They'll also continue to occupy US ally Georgia and send 300 series SAMs to the rogue regime in Tehran, but it's not like we needed European BMD as a bargaining chip or anything. Can't wait for the START II talks! Medvedev is going to eat Obama's lunch....

The Telegraph has a disturbing story on Germans flocking to Pakistan's Taliban-controlled Waziristan tribal region and setting up their own village:

The village, in Taliban-controlled Waziristan, is run by the notorious al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which plots raids on Nato forces in Afghanistan.

A recruitment video presents life in the village as a desirable lifestyle choice with schools, hospitals, pharmacies and day care centres, all at a safe distance from the front.

In the video, the presenter, "Abu Adam", the public face of the group in Germany, points his finger and asks: "Doesn't it appeal to you? We warmly invite you to join us!"

According to German foreign ministry officials a growing number of German families, many of North African descent, have taken up the offer and travelled to Waziristan where supporters say converts make up some of the insurgents' most dedicated fighters.

The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which has a foothold in several German cities, has capitalised on growing concern over the rising profile of German forces in Afghanistan. Their role has become increasingly controversial in Germany in recent weeks after dozens of civilians were killed in an air strike ordered by German officers.

The German link to al Qaeda has come to the fore of late, with two videos released by Bekkay Harrach, alias Al Hafidh Abu Talha al Almani. The German is a member of al Qaeda's external operations branch, the unit assigned to conduct attacks against the United States and the West. In one of the tapes, Harrack threatens to strike inside Germany if the government does not pull troops from Afghanistan. With a village of Germans in Afghanistan, Harrach has the recruits to make good on such a threat.

Via the Corner, Major Garrett tweets from a briefing by a senior administration official: + deets: Iran facility NOT operational, had abt 3K centrifuges & cld produce 1 or 2 warheads if run to produce highly enriched uranium.

Significant. It takes several thousand centrifuges running for approximately a year to produce enough enriched uranium for a single bomb. On August 23, the IAEA reported that Iran was forced to retire a signficant stockpile of their P-1 gas centrifuges due to disrepair. Gas centrifuges used in the enrichment process are highly sensitive to seismic events, if an earthquake or signficant vibration occurs during the gas separation process, the P-1 model breaks easily. Iran -- which lies on several active fault areas -- has been working on a new model of centrifuge that's quicker and provides for a greater resistance to cavitation.

Though this morning's revelation was certainly bad news indicating that non-proliferation efforts are going nowhere, I'm somewhat hopeful that Iran's P-1 centrifuges have been breaking due to a rash of major seismic events over the past decade. This is all tea-leaf reading, but that would explain why Iran built a new model of centrifuge and a brand new underground facility (one that's also further from a likely Israeli ingress route over the northern Saudi desert).

I've been waiting for this, and I like it. Bob McDonnell's daughter Jeanine pushes back on the notion that her father has some sort of retrograde attitude toward women because of a thesis he wrote decades ago. Since then, he's raised three daughters. Jeanine was a platoon leader in Iraq. Hard to argue he doesn't want women to make their own way, when his own daughter chose one of the most honorable and tough paths a woman (or any young person) can choose, and clearly with his blessing (not that she needs it!):

Here's the Huffington Post take on left-wing protests in Pittsburgh yesterday, which erupted in violence, as globalization protests always do:

Protesters have taken to the streets of Pittsburgh in opposition to the Group of 20 summit taking place Thursday and Friday. The protests have turned violent, the AP reports, with demonstrators rolling trash bins towards police, and officers firing tear gas back. Read more here.

Check out this slideshow of protesters and vote on the most intense image.

And are you going to any G-20 protests? Send us your photos! We will publish the best ones of the HuffPost.

Why, HuffPo, you have of late, but wherefore I know not, found all your mirth when it comes to violent protests. Remember my tally of "violent" acts for the entire month of August town halls?

That's the full list of documented violence from the August meetings. In more than 400 events: one slap, one shove, three punches, two signs grabbed, one self-inflicted vandalism incident by a liberal, one unsolved vandalism incident, and one serious assault. Despite the left's insistence on the essentially barbaric nature of Obamacare critics, the video, photographic, and police report evidence is fairly clear in showing that 7 of the 10 incidents were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics. If you add a phoned death threat to Democrat representative Brad Miller of N.C., from an Obama-care critic, the tally is 7 of 11.

And if you extend the census into September, you can add the most severe injury of all, which happened during a fight at a September 2 rally backing Obamacare in Thousand Oaks, Calif., hosted by the left-wing activist group MoveOn.org. Police have not determined who started the fight, but it ended when one of the Obamacare supporters "bit off the left pinky" of counterdemonstrator William Rice after Rice threw a punch, according to police.

Via Caleb Howe, here's how the HuffPo (as a symbol for left-leaning media and pundits, alike) treated the Tea Party protesters, who perpetrated barely three acts of documented violence in August and zero documented acts of violence, property damage, or arrests on 9/12, despite a gathering of hundreds of thousands of protesters in the capital.

Wherefore the wringing of hands and overwrought newscasts about the future of our very nation? Guess it'll take more than a measly 66 arrests, some damaged businesses, barrels and rocks thrown at law enforcement, setting fire to posters, and parading around like anarchists before the media starts worrying. If only there had been someone there with a rude sign about Obama...

In 2005, Karl Rove told an audience in New York that "In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11 liberals believed it was time to submit a petition." He went on, "I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what MoveOn.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be to 'use moderation and restraint in responding to the terrorist attacks against the United States.' "

MoveOn called Rove a liar, but he wasn't lying. As Byron York noted at the time, there was a petition and it did in fact call on the U.S. government to use any means other than military force:

We implore the powers that be to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction. Furthermore, we assert that the government of a nation must be presumed separate and distinct from any terrorist group that may operate within its borders, and therefore cannot be held unduly accountable for the latter's crimes. . .

So not terribly surprised at Greg Sargent's report that MoveOn is asking its members to write the White House and "tell them we need a clear exit strategy—not tens of thousands more US troops stuck in a quagmire.” The email says "Pro-war advocates both inside and outside the admistration — including John McCain and Joe Lieberman — are calling for a big escalation," but the group refrains from criticizing Obama for the big escalation he already approved earlier this year -- wouldn't want to let pacifist principles interfere with partisan loyalties.

So what will be MoveOn's 'General Betray Us' equivalent for General McChrystal?

In light of this morning’s revelation about a secret Iranian uranium enrichment plant, it is worth recalling Iran’s mocking response to the Obama administration’s request for negotiations. The Iranians said that they wanted to talk about:

Promoting the universality of NPT [the Non-Proliferation Treaty] mobilizing global resolve and putting into action real and fundamental programs toward complete disarmament and preventing development and proliferation of nuclear, chemical and microbial weapons.

Of course, covertly building a uranium enrichment plant that President Obama says “is inconsistent with a peaceful program” belies Iran’s claim of wanting to work towards preventing further nuclear proliferation. The reality is, as UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said this morning: “Iran's nuclear program is the most urgent proliferation challenge that the world faces today.”

The Iranians did not say they wanted to enter into serious talks about their nuclear program. Instead, they wanted to talk about everything else, from the global economy, to promoting “democracy” and justice (as if they have an interest in either), and even their rights in outer space.

But the mullahs did have this helpful suggestion about what should be included in the talks:

Promoting a rule-based and equitable oversight function of the IAEA and creating the required mechanisms for use of clean nuclear energy in agriculture, industry, and medicine and power generation.

In other words, the Iranians want a larger say in how the IAEA goes about its work. That work will now undoubtedly include an investigation into Iran’s formerly secret facility, which was built to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs. That is, this newly-revealed facility was not about using “nuclear energy” for “agriculture, industry, and medicine and power generation.” It was all about nukes.

Iran mocked the Obama administration in its last response. According to President Obama this morning, however, the ball is in Iran’s court once again. If the mullahs want to avoid additional sanctions, then they will have to come clean. “We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran to address the nuclear issue through…negotiations,” President Obama said.

The Iranians clearly are not.

1) Iran has a covert, underground nuclear enrichment facility, yet knowing this -- as the United States apparently has for years -- Obama has continued to insist that Iran might have a legitimate need for nuclear power ("Without going into specifics," Obama said this summer, "what I do believe is that Iran has legitimate energy concerns, legitimate aspirations.").

2) Iran discovered we were monitoring the facility on Obama's watch. How did this happen?

3) Obama's staff notes “They have cheated three times...And they have now been caught three times.” They are so enthralled by their own purported omniscience that they can't appreciate the fact that Iran is no doubt breaking the rules and not getting caught at least some of the time.

I wonder when we will get a new NIE on Iran, given that some (though not all) elements of the administration cling to its conclusions as if they were based on the latest and greatest intelligence on Iran. The report is more than two years old, but if you ask Dennis Blair whether Iran has a nuclear weapons program he will point to that document and say that the IC consensus is no.

4) NBC also reports that "the site is 30 kilometers outside of Qum, Iran’s holy city." Jennifer Rubin quotes an aide on the Hill: “Apparently, the Iranians forced their hand with the letter earlier in the week to the IAEA--but if Obama knew this for months and did not act with urgency, this is a major debacle.” Of course it's obvious Obama hasn't acted with urgency, which is why members of Congress are going to be compelled to push even harder for sanctions.

The statement from Cantor:

"Iran is a real-time security threat to the United States, Israel, and our allies around the world. A nuclear Iran is closer than many thought it was yesterday, and the problem is getting worse by the day, not better.

"The existence of a second uranium enrichment facility not only undercuts the Administration’s policy toward Iran, but leaves little doubt that terrorist nations are not to be trusted or negotiated with diplomatically. Congress should act immediately to give the President the tools he needs to implement sanctions on Iran by passing the bipartisan Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act."

And another from Mark Kirk:

The U.S., France and Britain announced today that Iran lied again, this time concealing the construction of an underground uranium enrichment facility outside Qum.

“It is time for the House to move the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (H.R. 2194) to the floor next week. I introduced this sanctions plan four years ago because Iran depends on imported gasoline for up to 40 percent of its needs. A gasoline quarantine is the sanction that will actually work."

You have to think leading Dems like Lieberman and Berman will be out with pretty strong statements later today.

The GOP whip joins theStart Over Caucus.

Senator Cornyn proposed an amendment this evening that would require any amendment voted on in the Senate Finance Committee to be scored first by the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Tax Committee with the estimates made publicly available on the web 24 hours before the vote. The amendment was withdrawn and has little chance of passing when it is re-offered -- it is a transparent effort to delay the committee's work. And the committee needs to be delayed. Cornyn was prompted to offer the amendment after he learned that the CBO had made a $600 million mistake in scoring an amendment put forward by Senator Stabenow and passed by voice vote earlier today.

The Stabenow amendment had to do with foster kids, and she was quick to trot out that fact in the amendment's defense. But it doesn't really matter, the amendments are coming fast and furious, the bill is undergoing major changes, and no one has any idea what the thing is going to cost. The Democrats are pushing this thing through so quickly and for what? The bill won't go into effect until 2013.

The new New York Times/CBS poll leads with the fact that the public is unhappy with Obama's handling of the war and "confused and anxious about the proposed health care overhaul." The CBO is confused -- how could the public not be? The Democrats are right to worry that any serious scrutiny of the bill could scuttle the whole project. Every provision that has received real scrutiny -- the "end of life counseling," courtesy of Sarah Palin, and the loop holes for illegal immigrants, courtesy of Joe Wilson -- has been quickly dumped. The public option will probably be dumped tomorrow. Would co-ops survive a real public debate? Not likely.

Update: The amendment has been re-offered and is being debated now (11:20 am). It reads:

Description of Amendment: Requires that all amendments accepted or ruled out-of-order during the Finance Committee’s consideration of the America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 be re-scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) for accuracy before the Committee can vote to report the bill. If an initial score is found to be inaccurate or an amendment is found to have been incorrectly ruled out-of-order, the Committee shall debate and reconsider the amendment.

This morning at the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, the leaders of the United States, France, and the United Kingdom issued statements on the news that Iran has secretly built a site to enrich uranium near the city of Qom.

Obama said:

It is time for Iran to act immediately to restore the confidence of the international community by fulfilling its international obligations. We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran to address the nuclear issue through the P5-plus-1 negotiations. Through this dialogue, we are committed to demonstrating that international law is not an empty promise; that obligations must be kept; and that treaties will be enforced.

And that's why there's a sense of urgency about the upcoming meeting on October 1st between Iran, the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Germany. At that meeting, Iran must be prepared to cooperate fully and comprehensively with the IAEA to take concrete steps to create confidence and transparency in its nuclear program and to demonstrate that it is committed to establishing its peaceful intentions through meaningful dialogue and concrete actions.

Sarkozy painted a more dire picture, saying: "We were already in a very severe confidence crisis. We are now faced with a challenge, a challenge made to the entire international communities. The six will meet with the Iranian representatives in Geneva. Everything -- everything must be put on the table now."

Read the full transcript after the jump...

Obama is going to keep the prison at Gitmo open at least a little while longer:

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress....

The White House has faltered in part because of the legal, political and diplomatic complexities involved in determining what to do with more than 200 terrorism suspects incarcerated at the prison. But senior advisers privately acknowledge failing to devise a concrete plan for where to move the detainees and mishandling Congress.

To address these setbacks, the administration has shifted its leadership team on the issue. White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

You have to read the whole piece to appreciate just how much humble pie the administration is eating on this one. Craig dutifully throws himself under the bus and, per the Post, will be rewarded with a plum diplomatic assignment in the very near future. Meanwhile, the real blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Republicans in Congress, as Craig points out, the Bush administration, the international community, and the American people -- all of whom have let Obama down.

Apparently the Bush administration didn't keep tidy enough files -- they "had been left in disarray." And this made it impossible for the administration to know just what kind of animals were locked up down there before "boldly" setting a one-year deadline to close the facility. One anonymous government lawyer tells the Post ,"The entire civil service counseled him [Craig] not to set a deadline." Craig may have been wrong on this point, too.

The administration also blames the international community for being so uncooperative in the terrorist resettlement program. But then that one is also kind of Craig's fault. "They essentially snuck them in, and we were furious," a senior British official tells the Post in regard to the al Qaeda trained Uighurs now working at a Bermuda golf course. Our allies were inexplicably less cooperative after all that.

And then there's the American people, whose opposition to the administration's plans to for resettling detainees in suburban America oddly spiked as the spring wore on -- and as Dick Cheney pummeled the administration. "Senior adviser David Axelrod and deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer were brought in to craft a more effective message around detainee policy," the Post reports. That happened in May -- no indication of whether it came before or after the decision to send Obama out for a head to head match up with the former vice president. Remember that speech? May 21, 2009, Obama at the National Archives and Dick Cheney at AEI going one after the other? At the time the press couldn't get enough of the mismatch storyline -- the popular new president against the loathed former VP.

The Post's report concludes with this: "In coming weeks, officials say, they expect to complete the initial review of all the files of those held at Guantanamo." They haven't even reviewed all the files yet! Marc Ambinder offers this delightful spin on twitter: "GTMO was messy, but it's gonna close, nearly on time. Obama thinks Craig did yoeman's work on GTMO. If there's a problem, it's not that." Right. Gitmo is going to close real soon -- and at no risk to national security -- just after Obama brings peace to the Middle East, adds 40 million uninsured to the system for not a penny more than you're paying today, talks the North Koreans and Iranians into abandoning the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and wins the war in Afghanistan after tying General McChrystal's hands behind his back.

Do not miss Charles Krauthammer's appreciation of Irving Kristol in his syndicated column today.

Obama is giving $400,000 in cash (your cash) to the Qaddafi family. Really.

Administration officials to Politico: we've got the Israelis and Palestinians right where we want them.

Scientists have "lost" all the data that no on has ever seen and which proves global warming is real.

Hannah Giles has set up a defense fund.

And Andrew Breitbart strikes again.

Via Chris Beam, a late addition: Joe Biden photobombs.

Today, the American Principles Project sent a coalition letter, asking questions about the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, to the House and Senate committees on foreign relations and Homeland Security.

The letter asks, "What was the U.S. administration told about the planned release? What efforts, if any, did President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and other U.S. officials make to prevent this outrageous injustice?"

It continues: "If President Obama and other administration officials made a strenuous effort to prevent the release of a mass murderer of Americans, transparency will reward them. We will be first in line in praising them and thanking them for their efforts. If the President and other officials did not make a strenuous effort, we the people have a right to know."

According to a statement from the American Principles Project, "Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI #11), chairman of the Republican policy committee has also initiated a 'Dear Colleague letter which will be circulated on the Hill today."

The Cable points to a report in Roll Call quoting the new ranking Republican on HASC, Buck McKeon:

House Armed Services ranking member Howard McKeon (R-Calif.) said Wednesday that Gates told him on a July trip to Afghanistan that Obama “wasn’t inclined to send troops over there.”

McKeon said Gates also told him that, in light of Gen. David Petraeus and McChrystal being asked to submit assessments to the president on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively, Obama had “given instructions” to them to “scrub everything, to make sure they didn’t ask for more than they needed.”

That conversation prompted McKeon to ask McChrystal if the directive sent “a chilling message” that the U.S. and NATO commander should ask for less troops than he needed. “He said, ‘No, I’m honor-bound to ask for what I need,’” McKeon said.

This would explain why Jim Jones was running all over Afghanistan telling commanders that any further troop requests would prompt a "whiskey tango foxtrot" moment at the White House. Jones wasn't speaking out of school, he was just carrying the president's message forward in the most inapporpriate and and impolitic manner (much as Clinton took the president's private demand for a settlement freeze and broadcast it live on Al Jazeera). Of course, McChrystal is asking for troops anyway, because they are necessary, and I suspect he will get them.

At this point, there are two factions engaged on the issue of additional U.S. forces for the war in Afghanistan. One faction is led by General McChrystal, who has the support of CENTCOM commander General Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen as well as the entire Republican establishment. On the other side...Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Nancy Pelosi, and John Murtha.

Barack Obama is a weak and naive president, but he can't possibly imagine that the generals who brought security and stability to Iraq are wrong while the politicians who would have abandoned Iraq at the height of the violence there -- and who insisted that the surge could never work -- are right about military strategy in Afghanistan. But, with this president, obviously anything is possible.

It's been a rumor since the 2008 presidential campaign that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote or co-wrote Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from my Father. The story seems to be on fire again, though, because a new Obama-friendly book by best-selling author Chris Anderson, perhaps without realizing it, seems to confirm the rumor. Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has been investigating whether Ayers co-wrote the memoir for a while and recently picked up on key excerpts from Anderson's book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

Cashill notes that as the deadline for Obama's memoir quickly approached, Michelle Obama recommended that her husband reach out to "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." Cashill goes on, "To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped
interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, 'These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.' Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, 'Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.' Andersen continues, 'In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing.'"

Bibi's speech today at the UN was unapologetic in tone and uncompromising in its substance. The Israeli PM questioned the legitimacy of a United Nations that says and does nothing in the face of terrorism against Israel but passes resolutions and launches inquiries at the mere prospect of an Israeli response. My favorite line: "By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice." Unfortunately those same twisted standards seem to guide the thinking of the American left, which would have the terrorists at Gitmo released while the Bush administration officials who sent them there, and the CIA officers who interrogated them, are investigated and prosecuted. What a perversion of justice.

Some highlights from the speech and the full text after the jump...on Iran:

his Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times.

Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated. The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization.

It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope.

On the UN and the international community:

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging. Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks. We heard nothing - absolutely nothing - from the UN Human Rights Council, a misnamed institution if there ever was one.

The full speech after the jump...

In my last post on Burma, I reported the second meeting in as many months between Senator Jim Webb and Nyan Win, the foreign minister for the Burmese junta. This time the meeting was in Washington, which required that Win be granted a visa waiver (he, like the rest of the junta's senior figures, is on a prohibited list). The ostensible reason for his trip was to visit the Burmese embassy to check on needed repairs. But that excuse is absurd on its face, and no sooner had Nyan Win arrived then Senator Jim Webb appeared at the embassy to discuss steps to improve U.S.-junta relations. Nyan Win then took off for a special tour of the White House and Washington monuments -- because what war criminal wouldn't want to thumb his nose at the international community by getting the red carpet treatment at the White House. Webb denies that he facilitated the State Department waiver needed for Win's trip to Washington, but I stand by my reporting -- and in any event, Webb's eagerness to meet with his new friend is not in dispute.

Which is why it's worth taking a closer look at just who Nyan Win really is.

Foreign Minister Nyan Win is actually Major General Nyan Win in the Burmese Army. Before heading up the Foreign Ministry where he became the point man for explaining away the butchery his regime visits on the Burmese people, he was deputy chief of military training for the country's military.

According to Human Rights Watch in their definitive report “My Gun Was As Tall as Me” detailing the role of child soldiers in the Burmese Army, they estimated there could be as many as 70,000 in a force of roughly 300,000-400,000. Training for these child soldiers is brutal. They are beaten, starved, and, because they are conscripted (as in swept up from schools, walking down the street, or pryed from their homes) cut off from all contact with their families.

These child soldiers are then deployed as cannon fodder in the regime’s wars against ethnic groups in the country. One child soldier -- a 13-year-old -- told his debriefer after defecting to the Thai-Burma border that he "was stolen at a bus stop by men in a miltiary truck…We were trained to hate ethnic groups and they must be killed. They said our families no longer exist and the military is our new family.” He also stated that he met a child as young as nine who had also been conscripted. A 9-year-old.

Nyan Win supervised -- as in planed, ordered, and directed -- the taking of children off Burma’s streets, stripping them of their family, and essentially brainwashing and dehumanizing them into doing the regime’s killing. In the junta's ongoing wars against various ethnic groups, thousands of these children have been killed. They have also committed henious human rights abuses in the name of their new masters -- raping and killing come as second nature once all values other than loyalty to the regime are stripped away. “If we killed, we were given food” the child told the debriefer.

The HRW report documents testimony from a child soldier (page 93) who witnessed others in his unit massacre women and children. “After the mothers were killed they killed the babies . . . they swung them by their legs and smashed them against a rock.” A follow-up 2007 report titled “Sold to Be Soldiers: The Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers in Burma," stated “The government’s senior generals tolerate the blatant recruitment of children and fail to punish perpetrators . . . In this environment, army recruiters traffic children at will.”

Such are the soldiers in Nyan Win’s army. As foreing minister, Nyan Win sits on a “Central Board” of senior officials. Let me quote from two Articles that serve as the junta’s operating charter:

Article 7

"The Cabinet is authorized to pass an order, as may be necessary,
restricting any fundamental right of any person suspected of having
committed or believed to be about to commit, any act which endangers
the sovereignty and security of the state or public peace and
tranquility."

Article 8

"For the implementation of the authorization mentioned under Article
7, the Cabinet may form a Central Board on its behalf, chaired by the
Minister of Home and Religious Affairs. The Minister of Defense and
the Minister of Foreign Affairs shall be members of the Central
Board."

The junta detains political opponents under Article 7 -- a catchall provision -- and Nyan Win sits on the Central Board that order’s the arrests. For example, U Tin Oo is held under the state protection act. He is one of the father's of Burma's democracy movement and a member of the National League for Democracy’s senior leadership. He is in his 80s and sits in solitary confinement for the crime of believing in freedom and democracy. Many others have been charged under the state protection act as well.

Most know what happens in a Burmese prison but for those that need a refresher, this is drawn from the State Department Human Rights Report issued in February:

“In 2005 the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners released a report on the "brutal and systematic" torture that the government inflicted on political prisoners. Based on the testimony of 35 former political prisoners, the report gave details of the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse the government employed on dissidents, and it identified by name many of the perpetrators. The report detailed the kinds of torture the government used, including severe beatings, often resulting in loss of consciousness and sometimes death; repeated electric shocks to all parts of the body, including genitals; rubbing iron rods on shins until the flesh comes off; burning with cigarettes and lighters; prolonged restriction of movement for up to several months using rope and shackles around the neck and ankles; repeatedly striking the same area of a person's body for several hours; forcing prisoners to walk or crawl on an aggregate of sharp stones, metal, and glass; using dogs to rape male prisoners; and threatening female prisoners with rape. Authorities used prolonged solitary confinement to punish prisoners.”

Nyan Win was a central player involved in rejecting international humanitarian assistance in the months following 2008's Cyclone Nargis that killed more than 150,000 Burmese and created more than a million refugees. As American, French, and English ships floated offshore with water, medicine, and food, tens of thousands of Burmese died. Why? Because the regime believed saving lives might weaken their rule. It was nothing less than organized murder on a mass scale.

Nyan Win is not simply an official of the Burmese regime -- he has blood on his hands. So why was the red carpet rolled out for this butcher at the White House? And Senator Webb, was it a good handshake?

Yesterday the Obama administration held a conference call in which a "senior administration official" assured the participants that the Obama administration would not allow the Goldstone Report, a work product of the UN's Human Rights Council that indicts Israel for war crimes in Operation Cast Lead, to reach the UN Security Council or the International Criminal Court. The Goldstone Report has been almost unanimously condemned as biased against Israel (the only group that didn't condemn the report was, of course, J Street). And this rare moment of support for Israel from the Obama administration drew praise from unlikely quarters. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that "it has rightly made it clear that it will not allow the report to reach the level of the Security Council, much less the International Criminal Court."

But apparently this support for Israel was not intentional but a result of some...miscommunication. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor, a true friend to the Jewish people (a righteous gentile, if you will), was asked to deliver the bad news:

The White House says an official "misspoke" when he said the Obama administration would not allow the Goldstone report recommendations on Israel's conduct in the Gaza war to reach the International Criminal Court.

A top White House official told Jewish organizational leaders in an off-the-record phone call Wednesday that the U.S. strategy was to "quickly" bring the report -- commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council and carried out by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone -- to its "natural conclusion" within the Human Rights Council and not to allow it to go further, Jewish participants in the call told JTA.

Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, called JTA later to say the official "misspoke" and that administration policy on the Goldstone report remains as articulated last week by Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador.

Perhaps the administration views the prospect of international war crimes charges against Israeli troops and commanders as convenient leverage in negotiations with Netanyahu, or perhaps this administration simply wants to see Israelis charged with war crimes for exercising their inalienable right to self-defense.

It is looking more and more like Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant recently arrested on terrorism-related charges, had intended to unleash a July 7-style attack in New York. Today, the Justice Department announced that Zazi has been indicted on charges alleging he was:

“committed to detonating an explosive device up until the date of his arrest, as exemplified by among other things, traveling overseas to receive bomb-making instructions, conducting extensive research on the internet regarding components of explosive devices, purchasing -- on multiple occasions -- the components necessary to produce TATP [Triacetone Triperoxide] and other explosive devices, and traveling to New York City on September 10, 2009 in furtherance of the criminal plan.”

Here are just four of the similarities to al Qaeda’s July 7, 2005, bombings in London, as well as other al Qaeda plots:

1. Zazi traveled to Northern Pakistan to receive al Qaeda’s training on how to make improvised explosive devices. The 7/7 plotters did as well, and so did at least some of the men responsible for follow-on plot that failed on 7/21/2005.

2. Zazi allegedly cased New York’s transit systems, and commuter trains were one of his possible targets. The 7/7 plotters, of course, targeted London’s transit system – as did the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombers.

3. Zazi allegedly researched ways to produce TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide). A similar, if not the same, explosive was used by the 7/7 bombers and the 7/21 al Qaeda plotters. Richard Reid also reportedly used a TATP-style explosive in his attempt to bring down an airliner using a shoe bomb.

4. Based on news reports, Zazi had accumulated a significant number of backpacks to allegedly carry the explosives. Again, this was the modus operandi of both the 7/7 bombers, the 7/21 plotters, as well as the 3/11 bombers.

Reading through press accounts and the Justice Department’s release, I can’t help but remember that at least some of the 7/7 bombers and 7/21 plotters wore New York-related t-shirts and hats during their missions and reconnaissance trips. London’s extensive surveillance system caught them on tape wearing the New York gear. Was it just a way for them to commemorate al Qaeda’s most devastating day of terror (9/11)? Or was it something more – a signal that they could do the same thing here?

And, have authorities figured out who all of Zazi’s alleged stateside co-conspirators are yet?

"Are we not friends of the persecuted Coptic Christian in Egypt? Are we not friends of the North Koreans enslaved in the gulag? Are we not friends of the repressed Cuban or Iranian democracy activist?" Those were the questions asked by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) on the floor of the House yesterday.

But we are not, and we cannot possibly be. Obama said so at the UN:

"No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

We are equidistant arbiters between Coptic Christians and the Mubarak regime, between gulag prisoners and the Kim regime, between Cubans and Castro, between democracy activists and Ahamadinejad.

Why is Wolf still clinging to antiquated concepts such as America's "friends"? Do we want to be, as Obama put it yesterday, "remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st"?

Bibi kills at the UN.

Is there a totalitarian regime on the planet that the President hasn't yet coddled, emboldened, or outright supported? How about... China?

Goldfarb notes that the Obama Administration is looking to develop a partnership, if not an "alliance" with the Chinese Communist government. Step back and soak that one in for a minute -- alliances are traditionally military ventures, yet the Chinese have made it clear that their ambitions for the western Pacific transcend Taiwan, instead resembling some sort of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere a la the early 1940s. Once again, we're in the way.

Japan matured into a fully capable global military power in the early 20th century with their defeat of the Russian Navy in the Russo-Japanese War. A scant few decades earlier, Japan was considered a backwards, hermit nation with an archaic military. Just like Japan, China emerged from a similar dark epoch and, just like Japan, China is now aggressively modernizing their armed forces. Both eyeballed Far East hegemony as their long term goal and both sought alliances with Western Powers to help bring their armies up to Western standards.

China has made no secret of their desire to knock us out of their rightful sphere of influence. Read this outstanding article by Dan Blumenthal -- China's staggering boost in military hardware and technology isn't gear that's limited to a cross-channel attack on Taiwan. It's strategic stuff, all of which has the potential to combine for a devastating surprise attack on US forces in the Pacific. Only this time, unlike Japan, technology would grant the Chinese the legs to reach the continental United States. An alliance -- specifically one that forces interaction between the PLA and PACOM -- benefits China and China alone. They're still a decade behind us militarily, but that gap is shrinking quickly. It will shrink even faster if we rush into a partnership with the Chinese that allows them to peek at our superior war machines.

Once China achieves military parity with the United States (thanks to Obama's defense cuts, this is now likely a matter of "when" and not "if"), the potential for a quick and dirty Pacific War explodes. No one wants war with the Chinese, and one hopes that cooler heads on the other side of the ocean feel the same. However, an unholy alliance between two nations with completely different interests is precisely the wrong way to avoid a Far East conflict.

After Speaker Nancy Pelosi's press conference this morning, I asked her if she supports a measure to put the final health-care bill online for 72 hours before the House votes on it. "Absolutely," she replied. "Without question."

Yesterday, Pelosi's Senate Finance Committee Democratic colleagues voted down an amendment to put the bill online for 72 hours before a final vote.

Update: Here's a transcript of the exchange:

TWS: Madam Speaker, do you support the measure to put the final House bill online for 72 hours before it's voted on at the very end?

PELOSI: Absolutely. Without question.

Well, let's give him some credit. Sen. Max Baucus, author of the middling, middle-ground health-care bill currently satisfying no one and confusing everyone, at least gives the opposition credit for having valid points.

It is a step up from the Obama administration's and Democrats' summer efforts to discredit anyone who criticized the big-government vision of Obamacare. But while Baucus believes your thoughts are interesting, they just don't matter:

Sen. Max Baucus, who chairs the Finance Committee, and is anxious to pass a bill on to the Senate floor as soon as possible so that Democrats can enact health reform this year, cut off Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz, the number two Republican in the Senate, accusing him of delaying and called for a vote on an amendment – one of more than 500 that have been offered to the bill - after 45 minutes of debate.

"I am not delaying. I am making an extremely important point," Kyl shot back.

"I don’t dispute that it is a good point, but it’s also delaying," said Baucus.

This went on for another fifteen minutes until the amendment was defeated on a party line vote.

Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee rejected an amendment put forth by Sen. Jim Bunning (R—KY.) and supported by the moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe (R—Maine), which would have required full Congressional Budget Office scoring of the bill before it was voted out of committee. Liberals deemed this an unconscionable delay despite the fact that the CBO has been a more consistent and reliable source of good information about health-care bills than the President, Congress, or any of the bill's allies.

Hey, the CBO might have good points, but they're also delaying, what with all that scientific analysis of the proposed overhaul of the entire health-care system.

Instead, the committee agreed to wait for preliminary CBO scores before voting. Well, thanks for that, guys.

In other My-God-They-Need-an-Amendment-for-That?!? News, the Finance Committee also rejected an amendment that would have required them to have final language for the massive bill in hand before voting it out of committee:

It may sound strange to the rest of America: The Finance Committee has not seen the legislative language of the $900 billion health care reform bill.

No, they use “conceptual” language, which is far easier to read than the arcane legi-speak of most bills. After the committee votes, the staff translates the mark into legislative language.

But Republicans, who have been hot on the idea this year that lawmakers should know what they are voting on, are pressing for the committee to adopt an amendment Wednesday requiring that the legislative language and a cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office to be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before voting.

“This probably sounds a little crazy to some people that we are voting on something before we have seen legislative language,” said Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), who introduced the amendment. “The way legislative language is written, you can have a large impact on the way the policies are implemented.”

Baucus' defense: Hey, they'll have another two weeks before we vote on it in the full Senate. No biggie. They'll get the language eventually.

And, John Kerry lends credence to our skepticism of government in his own, very special way: "Let’s be honest about it, most people don’t read the legislative language.”

After all, we wouldn't want to delay the bill's passage with any unnecessary knowledge of the bill's contents.

Update: Why does Nancy Pelosi insist on delaying this process?!?

The new video Drudge has up is a truly disgusting example of today's gutter politics.

Listen closely to how these kids are "supporting" our president "Mmm-mmm-mmm, Barack Hussein Obama!"

It's sad that we live in a time when even schoolchildren are taught to smear the president.

Update: The public school where this was filmed releases a statement. The "activity took place during Black History Month in 2009," and the video's release was unauthorized -- so there's really nothing to worry about here.

Anyone who's been following this story should have noted by now the major difference between Manuel Zelaya, the ousted former president, and Roberto Micheletti, the current president. It isn't that Zelaya is a communist and Micheletti a liberal democrat (though that much seems clear). No, the real difference seems to be that Zelaya is a delusional megalomaniac -- with the full support of the Obama administration. The Miami Herald gets the interview and Zelaya uses it to accuse Israeli mercenaries of trying to kill him with toxic gas and radiation:

It's been 89 days since Manuel Zelaya was booted from power. He's sleeping on chairs, and he claims his throat is sore from toxic gases and "Israeli mercenaries'' are torturing him with high-frequency radiation.

"We are being threatened with death,'' he said in an interview with The Miami Herald, adding that mercenaries were likely to storm the embassy where he has been holed up since Monday and assassinate him.

"I prefer to march on my feet than to live on my knees before a military dictatorship,'' Zelaya said in a series of back-to-back interviews.

Zelaya was deposed at gunpoint on June 28 and slipped back into his country on Monday, just two days before he was scheduled to speak before the United Nations. He sought refuge at the Brazilian Embassy, where Zelaya said he is being subjected to toxic gases and radiation that alter his physical and mental state.

So how long until J Street puts out a statement condemning the Israeli government for meddling in Honduras?

Yesterday Sarah Palin delivered a major speech with what Rogin says "included some of the most critical statements about the Chinese Communist Party by a American political leader in years." She talked bluntly about China's massive military build-up and the threat it poses to America's allies and she alluded to Chinese abuses in Tibet and East Turkestan.

Today we will likely hear a very different message from Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg. Steinberg is speaking at the Center for a New American Security shortly before noon on "China's Arrival: The Long March to Global Power." Though it's not clear how far Steinberg will go in his speech, which comes just 24 hours before he departs for an official visit to China, an authoritative source tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the Obama administration is considering a major reorientation of U.S. policy toward China.

According to this source, the Obama administration views China as "a partner, if not an ally," and plans to open a new era of cooperation rather than competition with the ChiComs. Our source points to Hillary Clinton's July 15 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations as the "foundational document" for this new approach. In her "smart power speech," Clinton said,

“We will also put special emphasis on encouraging major and emerging global powers – China, India, Russia and Brazil, as well as Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa – to be full partners in tackling the global agenda. I want to underscore the importance of this task, and my personal commitment to it. These states are vital to achieving solutions to the shared problems and advancing our priorities – nonproliferation, counterterrorism, economic growth, climate change, among others. With these states, we will stand firm on our principles even as we seek common ground.”

In the case of China, however, it is not at all clear that the administration plans to stand firm on our principles. The president has already refused a meeting with the Dalai Lama (while welcoming the foreign minister of the Burmese junta to the White House), there has been no movement on arms sales to Taiwan despite a very real looming deadline on both sides of the deal, and India is being put back in the AfPak box rather than elevated as a balancing power.

So what's next? The most immediate effect may be a rollback on the defense cooperation initiatives with India and Japan that began during the Bush administration. "Balance of power considerations are a thing of the past," this source said, summing up the view inside the administration. Therefore such initiatives, which sought closer cooperation with the region's two democratic powers in an attempt to balance the growing threat from China, will no longer be necessary -- and will in fact be counterproductive to achieving harmonious cooperation between the United States and China in "tackling the global agenda" (read: climate change, Iran, and North Korea).

But what's to stop the Obama administration at removing minor irritants like stepped up defense cooperation with our allies in the Pacific? If China is a partner -- or even an ally -- then it will be necessary to treat them as an ally. The 2000 National Defense Authorization Act put serious restrictions on military to military cooperation between the United States and China. Will the administration push to rollback certain of those provisions?

Perhaps Obama will go further -- in for a dime, in for a dollar. Stopping arms sales to the "splittists" on Taiwan would be the least we could do for our new friends on the mainland. Ending the EU arms embargo, which remains in place only because of the strong pressure brought to bear by the Bush administration, would be the logical next step. After all, what really defines an alliance is the transfer of defense technology, and if the Obama administration goes down this road, arms deals between Washington and Beijing -- as ridiculous as that sounds -- can't be ruled out.

The foreign policy portion of Palin's speech can be found below. Important excerpts here and here.

"It may sound strange to the rest of America." Yes. Yes, it does.

Surprise: Media distorted D.C. Fire Department's crowd estimates for 9/12. 60K was a preliminary estimate for LaFayette Park, alone.

The AP searches in vain for the grand conspiracy and big money behind the ACORN videos.

Gee, why were conservatives so worried about possible indoctrination of kids after Obama school speech? That kind of thing never happens.

Video: Obama's health care plan in 4 seconds.

Hollywood mocks the greed of grossly overpaid...insurance companies? Self-awareness now!

Republicans continue all-important Twitter domination of Congress.

Who knew the Germans loved their parties? Whereas most Americans tend to choose between Republicans and Democrats, in Germany there are five parties that could plausibly share power. The five are the Christian Democrats and Bavarian partner Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Free Democrats (FDP), the Greens, and The Left (die Linke). But on the ballot there will be many more from which to choose (some would say “waste a vote on”), such as the Grays (senior citizens), the Marxist-Leninists (even further to the left than The Left!), another party that supports Lyndon LaRouche's wife for chancellor, and the Pirate party. The latter has nothing to do with Jack Sparrow but everything to do with Internet piracy. The Pirates are from Sweden (where they earned a surprising number of votes) and are demanding a free Internet and a transparent state—data protection. One online poll indicated the Pirates could win 19 percent of the vote on Sunday. (Of course the poll was taken by studiVZ, a German version of Facebook. Speaking of which, one German tells me his fellow Facebook users have yet to be as open as American users. You won’t see them sharing all of their likes and dislikes. “It’s pretty bare,” said the German. “Maybe you’ll see marital status and it’s probably listed as ‘complicated.’”)

But the coalition-forming process has become problematic. No longer does the electoral landscape consist of CDU/CSU and FDP on one side and SPD and Greens on the other. At the moment there is a grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD—imagine an administration run by Democrats and Republicans. There’s talk of a traffic light coalition (based on the official colors of the SPD (red), FDP (yellow), Greens) as well as a “Jamaica” coalition (CDU [black], FDP, Greens). And maybe even an SPD-die Linke-Green government. Of course the Greens say they have no desire to govern on the federal level with the Christian and Free Democrats. The SPD is not yet willing to join the far left. At least for now.

Who can keep track of the possibilities? Are you even interested in the possibilities? As Claus Gramckow, the U.S. representative of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, put it, “You get three Germans together and they’ll form four clubs.”

John Noonan notes this line from President Obama’s speech today: “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” Over at Power Line, Paul Mirengoff excerpted a few more lines surrounding that sentence:

“In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War.”

Like Mirengoff, I thought the “nations of the south and north” locution was both curious and nonsensical. While I’m sure this phrase has currency in some corridors, it is curious to me because the last time I remember reading those words was in Iran’s mocking response to the Obama administration’s request for negotiations released earlier this month. The mullahs said they wanted to discuss:

“Capacity-building for promotion of public welfare, global poverty alleviation, reducing social gaps and bridging the gap between the South and the North.”

Come to think of it, the Iranian response is eerily similar to Obama’s speech in that they both project a large degree of Kumbaya naiveté. There is a sense in both texts that everything would be right with the world if we could all just come together to settle our economic, political, and cultural differences. Never mind that there are many actors on the world stage that have no real interest in forming new “coalitions of different faiths and creeds; of north and south, east, west, black, white, and brown,” as the president put it.

That includes Iran, despite what it said in its response to Obama’s overtures.

The Iranian response also contemplated “creating a world filled with spirituality, friendship, prosperity, wellness and security” that required “creating an opportunity for broad and collective participation in the management of the world.” And in both the Iranian response and the text of the president’s speech, the United Nations is the appropriate venue to make this utopian vision come about.

In Iran’s case, this rhetoric is somewhat understandable. The mullah’s response was a transparent attempt to appeal to the multicultural and transnational impulses of the Obama administration at the expense of discussing the real issues at hand, including Iran’s: nuclear program, sponsorship of terrorism around the globe, proxy war against Israel, and “lethal aid” to America’s foes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

However, in President Obama’s case, there is no tactical explanation. The speech represents, in Paul Mirengoff’s words, the president’s “sophomorically utopian” view of the world.

Politico reports that ACORN is suing undercover journalists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles in Maryland for taping two ACORN employees advising O'Keefe and Giles on how to avoid paying taxes on a brothel staffed by 13 to 15 year-old prostitutes. Just yesterday, Barney Frank called for a federal investigation of O'Keefe and Giles's activities, asking the Congressional Research Service to examine "the federal and state laws that could apply to such videotaping and distribution of conversations without the consent of all parties."

Next thing you know, the sexual predators caught on MSNBC's To Catch a Predator will turn around and sue the journalists who exposed them. On the other hand, the sexual predators may have more shame than ACORN.

Be sure to drop by the Mercedes-Benz Museum. It’s like the Fortress of Solitude operated by Disney. The elevators look like something out of Minority Report. The actual design is a double-helix and the lifts are meant to symbolize time machines complete with motor sound effects. There’s a Boeing turbine engine on the ceiling used to clear out smoke. And the V-2 launch pad is really nifty. I joke about the latter but the structure and the tour is very German. Clean lines, Ordnung. I have never seen floors more gleaming. And then there are the cars.

From the 1902 Mercedes Simplex 40PS to the current S-class, car enthusiasts can easily spend a few hours marveling at the (mostly) authentic models on display. And yes, they don’t skip over, say, the period between 1933 and 1945. The folks at Mercedes fully own up to their participation in the war effort and even display slave-labor worksheets. Our well-versed guide, however, did not dwell on the dark days, commenting that a 1937 Mercedes-Benz 770 “Tourenwagen” was “popular with certain politicians.” Which ones? The Social Democrats? They also showcased Mercedes that were owned by the rich and famous. Bizarrely, a Mercedes belonging to Ringo Starr was seen here. (It was a 4 cylinder and the engine sounded a bit nasally.)

And now a brief note about politics. My Free Democrat friends are a bit anxious about the Sunday vote. Although one very prominent FDP politician assured me over the summer that Chancellor Merkel expressly prefers a government of her fellow Christian Democrats (CDU) and the FDP, the rumors now swirling (including from Spiegel) is that Merkel would actually prefer a continuation of the Grand Coalition. She would remain above the fray, an alliance with the Social Democrats (SPD) would inoculate her from labor union attacks, and her policies on Afghanistan would not come under more intense assault. And if the last available polls from this past Sunday are accurate, while the FDP would earn 14 percent, the CDU (and her Bavarian sister party CSU, or Christian Social Union) would now only garner 33 or 34 percent. This would leave them, at best, with 48 percent, barely enough to govern. There are still a good number of undecided voters as well.

One industry insider tells me that no matter the result, there is a general feeling that the election will be followed by a series of cutbacks and layoffs. Then what will the government do? One sign that the recession continues: Last year in Germany, Mercedes-Benz subsidiary Maybach sold a grand total of 50 cars. Thank God Usher bought one.

A friend emails:

According to the new memorandum issued by Attorney General Holder, the Obama Administration will use the long-established "state secrets privilege" to dismiss lawsuits "only when doing so is necessary to protect against the risk of significant harm to national security."

In other words, it's okay for terrorists and radical left-wing groups to use the courts to "harm" national security -- they just can't do it to "significantly" harm national security.

And, of course, it's up to President Obama and AG Holder to determine when "harm" becomes "significant." I can't say that I find that fact to be very reassuring.

Quoth the Great Orator: No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.

Fair enough -- the UN was designed to be the great level playing field for all nations and it's failed spectacularly. Impotent, corrupt, and a diplomatic forum for anti-Semitism, the United Nations has succeeded only at providing a bully-pulpit for the world's thugs and gangsters. Yet Obama continues to indulge in the great liberal fantasy, that if only we could equalize all nations and governments -- a utopian world awaits. We're constantly told that our western values aren't so great, and that the Irans and North Koreas of the world aren't so bad. This is their grand vision -- that all nations be forced into the same prison of mediocrity, where Burma commands the same respect as Canada, Syria the same as France or Great Britain.

Yet in these strange times, conservatives are derided for holding the world to a higher standard, and ridiculed for the belief that dictatorships and juntas and kleptocracies should join the free world -- instead of the free world joining them.

The most transparent Congress ever:

Senate Finance Committee Democrats have rejected a GOP amendment that would have required a health overhaul bill to be available online for 72 hours before the committee votes.

Via The Hill:

"The original Obama administration position seemed to suggest the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East was the Israeli policy of building on territory [believed to be Palestinian]," Lieberman told MSNBC [on Wednesday]. "The real threat to peace in the Middle East is Iran."

"If you look at our policy, which is a global policy, to stop the Iranians from building nuclear weapons, everything we have done thus far has failed," Lieberman added, noting that he was preparing a bill that would levy new economic sanctions on the country. "I think the only way we're going to stop this development... is for us to make it clear to the Iranians that if they don't stop, they'll suffer."

President Obama said during his speech today: "For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months."

So the goodness of America is found in the Obama administration?

In May, Hillary Clinton gave an interview with al Jazeera in which she laid out the administration's position on Israeli settlements. "We want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth -- any kind of settlement activity," Clinton said. By all accounts, that position accurately reflected the president's views, but such a position had never before been publicly articulated. Did the White House want to publicly demand that the Israelis halt all settlement activity -- and on al Jazeera? Probably not, but once Clinton put it out there, the White House decided to stick with it.

The result was pure ecstasy on the anti-Israel left, where the administration's demand for a settlement freeze was seen as evidence that this president would not hesitate to bring the full weight of his office to bear in extracting concessions from Israel. M.J. Rosenberg, formerly of the left-wing Israel Policy Forum and now at the partisan media watch-dog group Media Matters, went so far as to say that Obama's demand for a settlement freeze was not a "precondition" for peace talks. "Stopping the settlements is not a precondition," Rosenberg said in an opinion piece for al Jazeera back in May, "because their increase makes an agreement impossible...It is comparable only to the cessation of terror."

Yet the Palestinians interpreted the Obama administration's demand for a freeze as a reasonable precondition for talks and adopted it as their own. At the same time, the Obama administration had made no comparable demand of the Palestinians. Abbas had the Obama administration right where he wanted them -- out front and enforcing his precondition for talks while asking nothing in return.

Suddenly all that has changed. In that same piece last May, Rosenberg wrote,

Today, the Israeli government simply says that stopping settlements is impossible because doing so would bring down the Netanyahu government -- which is hardly America's problem. If the Obama administration believes that opposing settlements is a matter of principle, it must insist upon it without exception and without regard to Netanyahu's political situation.

And there's the rub. In May it seemed plausible that any serious breach in relations between Obama and Bibi could bring down the new Israeli government. Less than six months later, the Israeli political spectrum is united behind Bibi's tough approach in negotiations with Washington. This is because Obama is horrendously unpopular in Israel, with just 4 percent of Israelis under the impression that Obama is "pro-Israel." Obama's hard-line approach to Israel was in such stark contrast to his coddling of the Iranians and the Palestinians that he lost all credibility with the Israeli people.

So now Bibi has rejected Obama's very public demand for a settlement freeze and is negotiating for some compromise that will be very much tilted in his favor -- six to nine months in duration, an exception for East Jerusalem, exceptions for construction already authorized, and a written guarantee from Washington that new construction will resume if the talks break down.

Obama is rolling over -- what else can he do? -- but the Palestinians dug in their heels last week. If Obama couldn't deliver a settlement freeze as he'd demanded, then they wouldn't meet with the Israelis. And Obama hasn't delivered. So how did Obama get the Palestinians to drop this precondition -- also the administration's own precondition -- and show up for yesterday's photo-op? Ben Smith pressed this issue yesterday and here's the response he got:

Obama told the Palestinian delegation to stop insisting on a full settlement freeze as a preconditon for peace talks, a source close to the delegation told POLITICO. The source said Obama committed to provide "terms of reference" next week on future negotiations, and to continue trying to work on the settlement issue with the Israelis.

"Terms of reference"? I have a rather limited diplomatic vocabulary, but I understand that this term basically means the framework for any negotiations -- who will participate, what the agenda will be, where the talks will be held, etc. It doesn't make any sense in this context unless the administration has promised some concession in the back and forth over the terms of reference.

So what was the concession? Of course, none this really matters. Obama is talking about having talks, and when talks do get underway -- whether it is sooner or later -- Hamas won't be at the table, and the PA will not be able to speak on their behalf. Abbas can make no deals and offer no concessions without confronting Hamas first, and the Israelis can make no concessions without forcing some kind of confrontation with Iran first (Israel cannot end the occupation of the West Bank or the tight control of Gaza's borders so long as Iran stands ready to fill the vacuum). Speculating on the peace talks is a fun parlor game, but the talks themselves are, like the Obama administration, completely severed from reality.

There continue to be many gracious and heartfelt remembrances penned in memory of Irving Kristol. Here are some additional reminiscences that have appeared since I posted my last round-up Sunday evening.

Be sure to read AEI's Christopher DeMuth on Irving's practical liberalism.

In the Telegraph of London, Irwin Stelzer remembers his friend and touches on the trans-Atlantic dimension to Irving's thought.

David Brooks devoted yesterday's column to an examination of Kristol's "detached attachment."

Leslie Lenkowsky writes on Kristol's substantial contributions to conservative philanthropy.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg discussed Irving Kristol's clear-thinking, and situated his legacy in the context of other notable conservative intellectuals.

Ron Radosh looked at Kristol and anti-communism.

And Herbert London and Jim Prevor both wrote touching recollections.

And if you are interested in exploring Kristol's thought further, don't miss The Neoconservative Imagination, a collection of essays written by (among others) Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, and Michael Novak on the occasion of Kristol's seventy-fifth birthday.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised the most “honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history." Shouldn’t an institution committed to those lofty ideals give its members the chance to read legislation before voting on it?

We might find out the answer soon.

A bipartisan effort is underway to force a vote on a resolution (H.Res. 554) requiring the House to give members 72-hours to review legislation before casting a final vote. Speaker Pelosi has not allowed the measure to come to the floor and a bipartisan group of lawmakers (Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Brian Baird, D-Wash.), are trying to get enough signatures on a discharge petition to force and up or down vote on the measure.

When Congress acts without reading legislation, surprises often turn up later. House Republican Leader John Boehner said this today about the 72-hour bill:

The American people are angry that Speaker Pelosi didn’t allow the public and their elected representatives to read the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ bill or the national energy tax before they were rammed through the House. They have every right to be angry. Look at the results. We’ve lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the ‘stimulus’ bill passed, and yet after the fact we found that it included nearly a million dollars for Rep. Murtha’s ‘airport for no one.’ Months after House Democrats passed Speaker Pelosi’s national energy tax, we learned of a secret Obama Administration analysis showing such a ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme will raise costs for American families by an average of $1,700 a year.

“Congress can, and must, do better. That’s why I’m proud to support this bipartisan effort to bring greater accountability and transparency to how Congress spends the taxpayers’ hard-earned money. I urge my colleagues, on both sides of the aisle to do the same by signing the discharge petition.”

Discharging a committee is rare. Doing so requires gathering 218 congressional signatures. And signing such a petition is considered a hostile act against the majority party leadership. So the prospects for H.Res. 554 –- the read before you vote measure –- are bleak.

Too bad. Seems like the most open and ethical Congress in history might want to do something this historic.

I can’t really tell what Qaddafi is saying to scattered applause from members of the U.N. General Assembly right now because his interpreter is speaking a dialect of Arablish I don’t recognize. But I’m hoping against hope he beats Fidel Castro’s 1960 record of four-and-a-half-hours, and heads explode all around.

Update: Alas, it's over, and at a disappointing two hours, far, far too short. They did get a new interpreter toward the end, one who actually spoke English, and yet I still couldn't understand a word. It was a performance worthy of Monty Python.

ABC's Jake Tapper, from the United Nations:

so far, people more polite than @CongJoeWilson during POTUS speech: Chavez, Qadaffi, Mugabe. Kudos. gents!

Regular readers of this space know that Michigan Senator Carl Levin is one of the smartest and least intellectually honest members of Congress. (See here, here, here, and here.)

His favorite trick is simply to leave out inconvenient arguments, embrace what he likes and completely change the meaning of the language in question.

His statement from Monday, September 21, on the report by General Stanley McChrystal gives us another example.

In his statement, Levin opens his second paragraph by writing:

Perhaps the most important judgment General McChrystal has made – one with which I wholeheartedly agree – is that “focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely.”

Reading just Levin's account of the McChrystal report one might conclude that McChrystal believes that force and resource requirements are unimportant. Here's the entire sentence from the McChrystal report: "Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely."

In fact, McChrystal's report makes precisely the opposite point: without such additional forces and resources the war is lost. As the Washington Post's Bob Woodward wrote, McChrystal "repeatedly warns that without more forces and the rapid implementation of a genuine counterinsurgency strategy, defeat is likely." The headline over Woodward's piece captured its essence. "McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure.'"

McChrystal believes that a focus on forces and resources misses the point because it is a given that additional resources are required. The war is not winnable without them.

We've come to expect this kind of intellectual dishonesty from Levin. So it's not at all surprising that he is blocking a request from Republican senators on the Armed Services Committee to invite McChrystal to the Hill for a hearing. Republicans on the committee sent Levin a letter yesterday, following up on a September 18 letter from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman. Yesterday's letter, was signed by John McCain, Lindsey Graham, James Inhofe, Jeff Sessions, Saxby Chambliss, John Thune, Roger Wicker, Richard Burr and David Vitter

We feel that it is essential that the Congress and the American people, who are understandably weary after nearly eight years of war, understand why the future of Afghanistan is linked to our own safety and prosperity at home. it is equally important that they understand the comprehensive strategy and commitment of resources that our military commanders believe necessary to win this crucial fight.

Levin responded to the McCain/Lieberman/Graham yesterday, September 22, calling such public testimony "premature." Why?

At the present time, while General McChrystal has submitted his assessment of the situation on the ground and his recommendations concerning the strategy for Afghanistan up through the chain of command, he has not yet submitted his recommendation as to the resources that he believes would be needed to implement the strategy.

Got that? On September 21, Levin argued that the issue of resource requirements was beside the point. On September 22, he argued that it was so important that he couldn't possibly invite McChrystal to the Hill until such questions were resolved.

Okay, maybe Levin isn't one of the smartest members of Congress after all.

With the eyes of the world focused on President Obama’s handshakes at the UN, that crafty, secretive cabal of neocons gathered in Washington in a dark basement at the W Hotel, where the Foreign Policy Initiative held its 2009 forum on "Advancing and Defending Democracy.”

You can check out the blow-by-blow at FPI's Twitter page. Here are some highlights:

Sen. John McCain on Obama’s hesitance to approve Gen. McChrystal’s request for additional troops: The senator has “never seen a disconnect like this” between the military and administration on an issue.” He also noted, “Every day that goes by if you are not pursuing a strategy for success and implementing it as quickly as possible it puts young Americans lives in more danger."

Gov. Mitt Romney on the same: "This is not the time for Hamlet in the White House. . . How in the world can he at this stage be saying what he is saying?"

And on American decline: “I do not subscribe to the idea that America is in decline, or has to be in decline . . . The chattering class has proclaimed [America’s decline], but the American people have said, ‘no bleeping way.’”

Reuel Marc Gerecht on Obama’s Iran policy: “Engagement is toast.”

Former Obama State Department advisor (and former engagement advocate), Ray Takeyh: There was a “perceptible deflation of hope’ within the administration after the “cataclysmic moment” of Iran’s June 12 election.

Sen. Jon Kyl on missile defense and Central and Eastern Europe : “We did everything wrong if we wanted to send a signal that they shouldn’t even think about extending influence over our NATO allies… We blew it!”

Michael O’Hanlon defended Obama on Afghanistan “at least for a few weeks of deliberation and indecision. If he is still in November where he is today, I will not be defending him. But I think where he is at this moment is understandable."

A panel discussion moderated by Jeff Gedmin of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with dissidents Ali Afshari of Iran and Saad Eddin Ibrahim of Egypt.

According to Reuters, Burmese Foreign Minister Nyan Win "has arrived in New York after being granted permission to visit the Burmese embassy in Washington, a US official said yesterday." The unnamed source quoted by Reuters stated that Nyan Win "made a side trip" to the embassy in Washington, but did not meet with any members of the US government."

The Burmese embassy has so far refused to comment but Burma-watchers in Washington believe he is still there.

All senior members of Burma's military junta are banned from visiting Washington except for very specific international meetings. Nayan Win would certainly fall into the category of a senior official. The visa ban went into effect under President Clinton, who implemented the restrictions in October 1996 against the so-called Law and Order Restoration Council -- an Orwellian term the junta decided to drop in favor of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997.

On October 1, 2007, President Bush announced that because of ongoing repression he was adding more than three dozen military officials, political leaders of the Union Solidarity Development Association (the junta's paramilitary thugs), and their families to the visa-ban list.

Granting a waiver for Nyan Win to visit Washington is a diplomatic coup for a regime that is continuing, as this is being written, a military offensive against ethnic groups that has already resulted in more than one million internally displaced refugees and tens of thousands more pouring over the border into China, Thailand, India and Bangladesh; more than 3,200 villages burned, and most heinous -- the use of rape as an instrument of war against women. The regime is actively engaged in war crimes. This is in addition to the oppression of Burma's democratic freedom fighters and the everyday killings and murders that are standard regime fare. If a Burmese official of comparable rank has visited Washington in the last 20 years, no one I talked to can remember it.

Clearly, Nyan Win is a guy that has blood on his hands. He is a Major General in the Burmese Army. He has participated in meetings where junta plans were discussed and approved -- including those dealing with suppression of democratic rights and the plotting of violence against ethnic groups the regime considers hostile. He designed the diplomatic blueprint for convincing the international community to swallow the regime's campaign of terror. He is Burma's von Ribbentrop.

So why, after more than a decade of policy rooted in a Democratic administration and continued and expanded under a Republican administration has State allowed Nyan Win to visit? Who specifically allowed the visit during such a sensitive time -- a decision that could only have been made by a top State Department official? Was the NSC informed? Has Nyan Win been removed from the waiver list? What is he doing here and with whom is he meeting?

Look to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) for the answer to those questions.

On September 15 I reported on a closed-door meeting between Senator Webb and Secretary Clinton. Burma watchers raised eyebrows and speculated that Webb was making a last-ditch attempt at influencing the Burma policy review that State Department officials say should be released tomorrow by Clinton in New York City. Webb has been in the forefront of pressing the administration to engage with the regime and drop U.S. sanctions as part of a bizarre effort to check Chinese influence in that shattered country. Sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that Webb enlisted Clinton's help in obtaining a visa for Nyan Win during their meeting last week.

The carefully worded State disclaimer that Nyan Win "did not meet with any government official," would not apply to Webb. In fact, Nyan Win had barely dropped his bags at the Burmese embassy when Webb was banging on the door to meet over the weekend. Webb spent considerable time with Nyan Win during his August tour of Burma -- a visit that will be most remembered for the blunt criticism it prompted from those fighting for freedom in Burma.

Webb has now handed the junta yet another diplomatic victory and delivered a blow to that country's democratic opposition by facilitating Nyan Win's trip to Washington. With the regime's horrific record of abuse and military cooperation with North Korea that could very well involve missile and nuclear proliferation--what is driving Webb to provide moral and political support to the vicious thugs running Burma? Why his highhanded treatment of a democracy movement that continues a battle that should be an inspiration for everyone living in freedom?

One final thought: the Obama administration is issuing visas for members of the Burmese junta while revoking visas for members of the democratic government in Honduras. I challenge any Democrat to defend that double standard.

Update: Let the record show that we scooped the Washington Post on this story by a full seven minutes, though the Post does add one detail I did not get -- Nyan Win visited the White House over the weekend. I should have just assumed as much.

Merkel. Steinmeier. The Grand Coalition. Schwarz-Gelb. The Traffic Light Coalition. The Free Democrats. The Far Left Party. The Greens. Rising unemployment. Opel. Afghanistan. Immigration. That's right—it's election time in Germany and beginning tomorrow I will be reporting from Stuttgart and Berlin, courtesy of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (an affiliate of the FDP), on what looks to be a tightening race full of chills, thrills, and spills. The future of the European Union is at stake. The future of the Middle East is at stake. Whatever those crazy Germans will decide on Sunday will forever alter the course of history.

Oh who am I kidding? Analysts at home and abroad are calling this the most boring election of all time. Germans cared more about the 2008 U.S. presidential election than their own. Polls show a staggering level of voter apathy. And experts are saying that chances are no matter what happens, the policies will remain the same. But if my editors knew that, I'd have a serious problem justifying my time away from the office. So instead I promise to deliver heart-stopping reports from the German campaign trail, blog items with mixed metaphors that will sizzle with shoe-leather reporting. And if nothing is happening, there's always something to say about the beer. In fact, to quote one German political activist, "No matter what the result on election night, I can guarantee you one thing. I will be very drunk."

Prost!

Hey, he's been working this thing for eight months and he wants to see some results:

President Obama's central message to the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York today was simple, a U.S. official said: He's running out of patience.

"The President of the United States is impatient," said the senior U.S. official. "That's what he told them."

"There’s a limited window of opportunity here, and he's determined, but he’s also impatient and we need to get going," the official said.

Obama is an eloquent and talented politician, but he hasn't really been able to translate soaring rhetoric into results so far. Obama has seemingly promised more than any president before him. And now that he has nothing to show for his bold diplomatic outreach on all fronts over the last eight months -- well, he's getting impatient. You know what, so are we.

Reuters reports on a "gag order" against Humana:

Republicans, health insurers and others blasted the U.S. Medicare agency on Tuesday for what they called political interference over companies that want to directly contact customers about the impact of pending healthcare reform legislation.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled as well as privately run Medicare alternatives, on Monday said it was investigating a letter Humana Inc sent enrollees about efforts to overhaul the nation's healthcare system.

Humana's letter, sent in an envelope citing important plan information, told customers that Democrats' bills could hurt 'millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage health plans so valuable,' according to CMS.

The agency also warned other insurers against sending potentially misleading health reform mailings to customers.

'It looks likes CMS is engaged in government intimidation, pure and simple,' Rep. Dave Camp, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement.

Privately run Medicare plans, also known as Medicare Advantage, make up more than 20 percent of Medicare coverage, with more than 10 million elderly or disabled Americans choosing them over government-run fee-for-service plans.

America's Health Insurance Plans, the lobbying group for Humana and other health insurance companies, called the CMS action a 'gag order.'

Critics pointed to the direct intervention of Sen. Max Baucus, who urged CMS to get involved and said he welcomed the investigation of what he called 'scare tactics' by Humana. CMS announced its Humana probe before Baucus's committee began work on his health reform bill on Tuesday.

This afternoon in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and Lamar Alexander ripped Baucus and CMS (see a transcript after the jump).

The McChrystal Report on Iran’s hand in Afghanistan (emphasis added):

Iran plays an ambiguous role in Afghanistan, providing developmental assistance and political support to [Government of Afghanistan] while the Iranian Qods Force is reportedly training fighters for certain Taliban groups and providing other forms of military assistance to insurgents. Iran's current policies and actions do not pose a short-term threat to the mission, but Iran has the capability to threaten the mission in the future. Pakistan may see Iranian economic and political initiatives as threats to their strategic interests, and may continue to address these issues in ways that are counterproductive to the ISAF effort.

This is only the latest instance in which the U.S. military has publicly stated that Iran is arming and training Taliban fighters. It is worth remembering that Iran and the Taliban regime were on the verge of hostilities in 1998 after the Taliban slaughtered Shiites, including Iranian diplomats, in Mazar-e-Sharif. But that hasn't stopped the two from cooperating against their common enemy: America.

McChrystal says that Iran’s role in Afghanistan is “ambiguous,” by which he clearly means “capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways.” Outwardly, the Iranians provide some nominal assistance with respect to building roads and other “developmental” projects. The Iranians are going to try to win influence however they can. But at the same time, they help the Taliban kill Americans because Americans inside Afghanistan are simply not acceptable to the mullahs.

As Steve Hayes noted, Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, made this clear in February of this year. Blair’s declassified written responses to questions from the Senate Select Intelligence Committee included these comments (emphasis added):

"Iran has both long-term strategic and short-term tactical interests in Afghanistan and is not content with merely maintaining the status quo. In the short term, Iran is primarily concerned with preserving its national security and undermining Western influence in Afghanistan, which provides Iran's rationale for providing select Afghan insurgents with lethal aid. ...

Iran has not altered its activities in Afghanistan over the past year as various Iranian officials describe the Western presence as an occupation and Iran maintains a hostile relationship with the West. Iran's policy calculation in Afghanistan currently emphasizes lethal support to the Taliban, even though revelation of this activity could threaten its future relationship with the Afghan government and its historic allies within Afghanistan.

Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government. Shipments typically include small arms, mines, rocket propelled grenades (RPGs), rockets, mortars, and plastic explosives. Taliban commanders have publicly credited Iranian support for their successful operations against Coalition forces."

The McChrystal Report says that Iran’s training and arming of the Taliban does not currently jeopardize the mission. However, according to McChrystal, Iran does a pose a threat to the future of Afghanistan. “A number of risks outside of ISAF's control could undermine the mission, to include … actions of external actors such as Pakistan and Iran.”

And, in the meantime, Iran’s “lethal” support means more dead Americans and other coalition members.

At the Atlantic, D.B. Grady offers a really smart take on the current state of play now that the McChrystal report has leaked. First off, Grady is dubious that the administration is having trouble deciphering the assessment:

The Obama administration is still "reviewing the document," according to The Washington Post, as though Kremlinologists are required to catch the general's nuance. At two pages a day, they should have an idea early next week. This is on top of ten months of daily intelligence briefings, and eight years of reported successes and failures. The administration is, by all appearances, stalling.

Grady tries to game out what the defeat McChrystal warns of would look like a year from now and what success might look should McChrystal be given the resources he needs and deliver as promised. Ultimately, he concludes that "This is President Obama's FDR moment." Very much worth reading in full.

A senior administration official points the finger at McChrystal. A Pentagon spokesman says Gates doesn't believe that's true. Spencer Ackerman suspects Admiral Mullen, but is dissuaded by one of his sources. Ben Smith offers a fanatastic scenario in which an Obama loyalist leaked the document "to damage McChrystal’s position by inducing White House anger at the general."

(For what it's worth, my money is on someone at CENTCOM -- one of Petraeus's acolytes who took pity on General McChrystal and his bad luck in having a commander in chief without the strength of character to offer clear and unflinching support for his own commanders and troops on the ground. The CIA could also be responsible -- they have motive in spades. And I have zero evidence to support either of those theories, which puts me in pretty good company for this guessing game.)

Regardless of who leaked the document, the effect is the same. The assessment has aggravated the divisions within the administration and between the administration and Congress over how best to proceed in Afghanistan. These divisions have sprung up in the absence of any sustained effort by the president to make his case for why victory in the war in Afghanistan is imperative. Obama has made the case for the stimulus, for health care reform, for engagement with Iran, for a two-state solution in Israel, and for a dozen other priorities, all with varying degrees of success. But this president does not talk about Afghanistan unless prompted to do so by the press. He does not give speeches, or build support, or visit the troops to praise their efforts.

So somebody got fed up with the administration's internal dithering and the president's very public indecision. After nine months in office and nearly a year after his election, the Obama administration says it wants more time to figure out "first principles" for the war in Afghanistan. Sorry, but first principles are for the first day, maybe the first 100 days. We're way beyond that now. Obama has to make a tough decision and soon -- and he can't pass the buck on this one to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid or Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs. The commander in chief can't vote 'present' on matters of war.

At First Read, Luke Russert reports:

In his weekly pen-and-pad session with Capitol Hill reporters, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) echoed the recent demands of Republican leaders that Afghanistan Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, testify before the House and Senate on the current strategy in the war-torn nation.

NBC News asked: "Last week, Mr. Boehner said Gen. McChrystal should come to the Congress to testify about Afghanistan, in wake of yesterdays leaked report that Mr. Woodward published in the Washington Post, John McCain also called for Gen. McChrystal to come testify before Congress immediately, do you think Gen. McChrystal should come here sooner rather than later to talk about what the Afghanistan policy and what the main objective is?"

Hoyer replied: "You know, I think the answer to that is yes.

This is how one of the world's most odious regimes treats students who challenge its authority:

RFE/RL: When did the rape take place?

Sharifi: The fourth day, when they said they were going to execute me -- it was a mock execution they subjected us to. I protested and said: "What is this? If you want to execute me, just do it. Why do you play these games?" Someone kicked me in the stomach and I fell on the ground. He kept kicking me in the stomach. Then he told someone: "Go and make [him] pregnant." He kept kicking me. I was throwing up blood and my stomach was injured. He pulled me to another room and tied my hands to the wall.

RFE/RL: You've said that you are not sure whether you were raped by the guard or whether he used an object.

Sharifi: I think that a person did it, but I can't be sure whether it was done by that individual or whether he used something. Judge Mohammadi [of the judiciary] asked me: "Why didn't you tell him to stop?" I said that I wasn't capable of thinking or saying anything.

Of course the civil liberties fanatics on the left will compare this treatment to what the Bush administration doled out to detainees in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These are the same people who accuse conservatives of seeing the world in black and white and failing to appreciate nuance -- the many shades of gray. But these same people cannot distinguish between a democratic government's rough treatment of terrorists and a terrorist government's rough treatment of democratic activists. The Iranian regime is sick and degenerate and ought to be forcefully condemned. Instead the left cheers Obama's engagement with Iran -- even though it looks utterly hopeless -- and demands investigations of the Bush administration's treatment of detainees. This is the moral "clarity" of the post-American left.

Just one day after General Stanley McChrystal's report on the way forward in Afghanistan was leaked to the press, the Obama administration is floating the idea of expanding the U.S. air campaign in Pakistan to defeat al Qaeda instead of ramping up forces in neighboring Afghanistan. From the Associated Press:

The White House is considering expanding counterterror operations in Pakistan to refocus on eliminating al-Qaida instead of mounting a major military escalation in Afghanistan.

Two senior administration officials said Monday that the renewed fight against the terrorist organization could lead to more missile attacks on Pakistan terrorist havens by unmanned U.S. spy planes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made. ...

The two senior administration officials said Monday that one option would be to step up the use of missile-armed unmanned spy drones over Pakistan that have killed scores of militants over the last year.

The armed drones could contain al-Qaida in a smaller, if more remote area, and keep its leaders from retreating back into Afghanistan, one of the officials said.

Most U.S. military officials have preferred a classic counterinsurgency mission to keep al-Qaida out of Afghanistan by defeating the Taliban and securing the local population.

However, one senior White House official said it's not clear that the Taliban would welcome al-Qaida back into Afghanistan. The official noted that it was only after the 9/11 attacks that the United States invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban in pursuit of al-Qaida.

There are two very, very big problems with this idea. First, the U.S. air campaign in Pakistan has been effective; over the past two months alone, three senior al Qaeda leaders and a senior Taliban leader are thought to have been killed during the strikes. But, despite chest-thumping reports from senior U.S. officials, al Qaeda has not be reduced to a handful of leaders seeking shelter in the caves of Pakistan's tribal agencies. The attacks have been effective in forcing al Qaeda to deal with leadership issues and focus efforts on force protection, but the attacks themselves will not defeat al Qaeda.

Second, the unnamed U.S. officials are assuming that the Afghan Taliban have little to do with al Qaeda. But if you listen to what senior Taliban leaders say, the groups are closely integrated. Here is what Mullah Sangeen Zadran, one of the most senior military commanders of the Haqqani Network and the shadow governor of Paktika province, had to say during an interview with As Sahab, which, by the way, is al Qaeda's propaganda arm. Sangeen is the Taliban leader that has custody Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who left his post at the end of June.

As-Sahab: How is your relation with your brothers in Al-Qaeda and what is the level of cooperation between you?

Mawlawi Sangeen: All praise is for Allah, Al-Qaeda and Taliban all are Muslims and we are united by the brotherhood of Islam. We do not see any difference between Taliban and Al- Qaeda, for we all belong to the religion of Islam. Sheikh Usama has pledged allegiance to Amir Al-Mumineen (Mulla Muhammad Umar) and has reassured his leadership again and again. There is no difference between us, for we are united by Islam and the Sharia governs us. Just as the infidels are one people, so are the Muslims, and they will never succeed in disuniting the Mujahideen, saying that there is Al- Qaeda and Taliban, and that Al-Qaeda are terrorists and extremists. They use many such words, but by the Grace of Allah, it will not affect our brotherly relationship. Now they are also trying to disunite the Taliban, saying that there are two wings, one extremist and another moderate. However, the truth is that we are all one and are united by Islam.

The use of Predator strikes is a tactic to help defeat al Qaeda. Focusing efforts on al Qaeda alone in Pakistan at the expense of ignoring groups like the Haqqani Network is a losing strategy.

There are at least three aspects of the ongoing investigation into suspected al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in Colorado and New York that are especially troubling.

First, Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant at the heart of the case, has reportedly admitted that he was trained in an al Qaeda training camp in Northern Pakistan as recently as last year. This is especially important because even though some counterterrorism analysts believe that the Internet alone is sufficient for conspirators to get together to execute a terrorist attack, it is clear that Northern Pakistan has been the hub for the most serious terrorist plots in recent years.

Just ask British authorities. Al Qaeda’s July 7, 2005, bombings in London, a follow-on plot scheduled for later that same month, as well as the summer 2006 plot against as many as ten airliners can all be traced back to northern Pakistan. While most of the terrorists involved had been “westernized” to a large extent, they still needed to connect with their al Qaeda brethren to make their plots go. This was apparently true of Zazi as well. He certainly has transplanted roots on American soil, but in order to acquire vital bomb-making skills and other operational tradecraft he found it necessary to travel to Northern Pakistan.

Second, it is clear that law enforcement authorities still don’t know much about the putative plot(s) Zazi was involved in, even though they are convinced it was major. Three men have been taken into custody, but federal authorities have told the press that perhaps as many as a dozen suspects were involved. The LA Times relays this troubling revelation:

“Authorities said that they did not know the exact number of potential suspects or many of their identities, but that they had been connected through electronic intercepts, surveillance, seized evidence and interviews.”

Now, the FBI and other law enforcement officials have a significant amount of pocket litter, computer hardware, and surveillance reports in their possession. But they are still not sure who Zazi was working with or how various personalities related to each other. This reveals a key aspect of intelligence collection and analysis. Oftentimes, hard evidence is incredibly important, but it can be difficult for authorities to piece together how the various names and telephone numbers that are discovered relate to one another. This is why getting detainees to provide information is crucially important.

Fred and Kim Kagan have produced a report arguing for an additional 40,000 to 45,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010. You can read their report here.

Fred Kagan explains in a press release: "The report illustrates where U.S., NATO, and Afghan forces are now and where additional forces are needed to accomplish the mission. It links the U.S. force requirements to the growth of the Afghan National Security Forces on an accelerated timeline. It explains the methodology for assessing the adequacy of a proposed force-level. This product, and our recommendations and assessments, are entirely our own—they do not necessarily reflect the views of General McChrystal or anyone else."

"Every time you resist Democratic health-care legislation, you make James Madison cry in heaven."

The Wall Street Journal on Obama's nontax tax.

Robert J. Samuelson on Obama's tire tariff.

Ross Douthat on George W. Bush's self-correcting presidency.

Goldfarb does Bloggingheads.

Obama calls New York Gov. Paterson a "wonderful man" (who should drop out of the campaign).

Not all of the Bush quotes in a former speechwriter's tell-all make the president look bad. "If I'm ever eighty-two years old and acting like that have someone put me away " -- Bush on Jimmy Carter.

In an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Jeb Bush criticizes the "national party" (meaning the National Republican Senatorial Committee) for throwing its support behind Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate primary:

Bush said national party leaders should not be trying to push Crist as aggressively as they have. He said Rubio deserved a fair shot against Crist in a primary.

"I think he should be given a chance. I think that the idea that the national party would pick a winner a year and a half before an election is the wrong way to go."

This isn't the game-changing formal endorsement Rubio may need (at some point) to beat Crist, but Rubio's campaign is highlighting this helpful statement that may show Bush's allegiance lies with his conservative protege Rubio rather than his moderate successor Crist.

In other Crist v. Rubio primary news, will the ACORN scandal trip up Crist? The governor has teamed up with the embattled group in the past, and now Marco Rubio is calling on Crist to launch an investigation of the organization.

Disturbing report, from The Guardian

Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Those options include:

• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

Unilaterally cutting your own strategic arsenal isn't just naive, it's downright dangerous. Consider the implications here -- Obama has just signaled to the Russians and Chinese that we'll drastically reduce our nuclear forces without a quid pro quo. That means that both nations are free continue the aggressive upgrades to their strategic nuclear forces (particularly so in Putin's Russia), without having to worry about what the U.S. or international community thinks.

The START Treaty, a valuable agreement that downsized the US and Russia's deployed nukes in a pragmatic, safe way, is set to expire in December. Thanks to Obama's baffling impatience with diplomatic process, he's now completely compromised our two most important bargaining chips -- the European Missile Shield and our nuclear inventory -- without even sitting down to the table. And when it does come time to negotiate a new arms reduction treaty, we will have absolutely zero leverage.

Did the President not study the most successful disarmament model, in the treaties signed during the Reagan years? Does he not understand stabilization through the balance of power, projection of strength, and goal-orientated (not ideologically orientated) foreign policy -- otherwise known as freshman grade realpolitik? During the short history of nuclear arms, there has never been a more dangerous epoch than the early 21st century, where non-proliferation efforts have widely failed. By surrendering the only two negotiating tools with muscle behind them, Obama has just flashed a green light to every aspiring nuclear power and every potential strategic competitor: build your bombs. There's nothing we will -or can- do about it.

Aside: "the president's weapons?" Seriously?

The New York Times reports:

As President Obama welcomes world leaders to the United States this week, he has gone a long way toward meeting his goal of restoring the country’s international standing. Foreign counterparts flock to meet with him, and polls show that people in many countries feel much better about the United States.

But eight months after his inauguration, all that good will so far has translated into limited tangible policy benefits for Mr. Obama. As much as they may prefer to deal with Mr. Obama instead of his predecessor, George W. Bush, foreign leaders have not gone out of their way to give him what he has sought.

The Times then ticks off Obama’s lack of accomplishments in key areas:

European allies still refuse to send significantly more troops to Afghanistan. The Saudis basically ignored Mr. Obama’s request for concessions to Israel, while Israel rebuffed his demand to stop settlement expansion. North Korea defied him by testing a nuclear weapon. Japan elected a party less friendly to the United States. Cuba has done little to liberalize in response to modest relaxation of sanctions. India and China are resisting a climate change deal. And Russia rejected new sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program even as Mr. Obama heads into talks with Tehran.

Over and over again we’ve heard from the left about how that “cowboy” Bush tarnished America’s image to the point that it was hurting America’s interests. It is now dawning on some that perhaps other nations don’t do what we want them to do because, well, they don’t want to.

As Steve Hayes documents this week, Obama has done everything in his power to “reset” our relations with Iran. Where has that gotten us? Thus far, that effort has gone nowhere. By the estimate of Obama’s own handpicked intelligence officials, and our military, Iran continues to sponsor attacks against Americans in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair has even told Congress that Iran gives “lethal” support to the Taliban.

North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, fired long-range missiles, and kidnapped two Americans journalists. Obama sends President Clinton over there to appease a bloody tyrant, and he and his surrogates ramble on about the importance of six-party talks. Yes, they are going to work – any day now.

Obama capitulated to Russia on missile defense. Do you think the Russians will help us with tough sanctions intended to counter Iran’s nuclear program? Don’t bet on it.

The New York Times account excerpted above says that Obama’s advisers are trumpeting the cooperation they’ve received from Pakistan. It is one of the few examples they provide. But the same Times account says that the Pakistani population’s opinion of America remains “largely unmoved.” So, if there was an increase in Pakistani cooperation since Obama came into office it had nothing to do with an improvement in America’s image. Moreover, it is doubtful that there has been much of an uptick in Pakistan’s cooperation. Obama’s policies thus far have been largely the same as Bush’s (e.g. Predator strikes in northern Pakistan).

Josh Rogin sat down with Senator Jim Webb last week and tried to get some answers on Burma. According to Webb, everything that's been written about his botched Burma diplomacy is wrong, a lie, a distortion, or a misunderstanding. But there is one incontrovertible fact: Webb's meddling has gotten him at odds with Burma's democratic opposition, including the imprisoned leader of Burma's democracy movement, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

As we reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, after Webb met with Suu Kyi last month, he surprised Burma-watchers around the world when he declared that Suu Kyi was on board with his plan to coddle Burma's repressive regime by dropping U.S. sanctions. It was Webb's "clear impression from [Suu Kyi] that she is not opposed to lifting some sanctions," he said at a press conference. Such a sentiment would have marked a major shift for Suu Kyi and Webb's comments rattled her supporters. Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer and one of only two people allowed access to Suu Kyi under the terms of her house arrest, was asked to clarify whether this was, in fact, Suu Kyi's new position. According to Nyan Win, Suu Kyi "replied that she had not discussed the issue [sanctions] with anyone recently."

Yet Webb still stands by his "impression" and tells Rogin, "Only the people who were in the meeting know what was said." Imagine if South Africa's apartheid regime had granted segregationist Senator James Eastland access to an imprisoned Nelson Mandela only to have Eastland emerge and declare that Mandela was a strong advocate for closer relations between their two countries. Webb is shilling for the junta (and some of his friends in the business community) and trying to leverage Suu Kyi's moral authority to get sanctions dropped. Suu Kyi has made clear -- at the risk of further antagonizing her captors -- that Webb is misrepresenting her position, but Webb is undeterred.

From the Burmese dissidents who have fled the junta and can thus freely speak to the media, the response to Webb's bungling has been severe. An op-ed in the Washington Post by Suu Kyi's colleague in the National League for Democracy party said Webb's "efforts have been damaging to our democracy movement." Another former political prisoner of the Burmese junta, U Pyinya Zawta, accused Webb of trying to "pressure my country's democracy movement into giving up economic sanctions--the most important tool in our struggle for freedom."

Webb also continues to support the elections being held by Burma's junta next year, telling Rogin that "if we develop relationships, we can improve the environment under which the elections are held." Those elections are overwhelmingly opposed by Burma's democratic opposition and will be held under a constitution that enshrines military rule. They are a complete sham designed to do nothing more than bolster the junta's legitimacy -- a goal Webb already furthered when he became the first U.S. official ever to meet with General Than Shwe, the junta's top general, last month.

As for Webb's furious denial that he never placed a hold on Kurt Campbell 's nomination (the most important nomination under his jurisdiction) as we first reported -- Webb insists that the months-long delay in scheduling that hearing "was due to the need to thoroughly examine Campbell's business dealings related to StratAsia, the consulting firm he founded with Bush administration NSC Asia director Michael J. Green." Two sources tell THE WEEKLY STANDARD that Webb's inquiries went far beyond Campbell's business dealings.

Whatever Webb was fishing for, it had nothing to do with StratAsia. If these sources are wrong, there is a simple way for Webb to clear all this up: release every communication he had with the executive branch -- State, DoD, and the White House -- as it relates to Kurt Campbell's nomination. There is no need for us to see the return traffic as that might compromise confidential or classified information, but if Webb is telling the truth about this then there is no harm done in the release of his correspondence related to the confirmation process. Unlike the truth about his meeting with Suu Kyi, solving this mystery doesn't depend on the good will and generosity of the Burmese junta.

Obama Missile Decision May Smooth U.S.-Russia Arms Talks, says the Washington Post.

Preemptively removing contentious issues from a debate will make any diplomatic summit easier, but that's not really the point of negotiations, is it? Doesn't it make more sense for diplomacy to be focused on goals instead of processes?

Consider these alternative futures for Afghanistan in the year 2014.

In one future, the United States and NATO are beginning to draw down troops from the levels they reached in 2010. That was a bloody year, as were the two that followed it, but the level of violence has been dropping steadily since then as the sense of order and stability improves. As happened in Iraq, Coalition forces have come to be respected as the best guarantor of stability and security in most of the country. In some regions this is because the legitimacy of the Afghan government is fully accepted, and in others it is due to bilateral arrangements made by Coalition troops with local tribes. Terrorist attacks are still a regular occurrence, and a low level of cross border violence from Pakistan-based militants--who are harassed but not significantly hampered by the government in Islamabad--seems to be irreducible. But in general the widespread violence which spiked in the later part of the last decade is fading into memory, and the "safe-havens" within Afghanistan where the Taliban and al Qaeda could trade poppy, train, and operate, are eliminated. There are still such places in Pakistan, but our robust presence along the Afghan border gives us options for dealing with them, and leverage over the Pakistani government.

Perhaps most importantly, the legitimacy of the United States and NATO as international guarantors of security who are true to their word, and who do not abandon whole nations due to political exigency, has been maintained.

Now consider the alternative. It is 2014, and in places like Helmand province most people have not seen a Coalition serviceman in years. When they do come, they come at night, break down someone's door and take away someone's father or brother, who is usually never seen again. This is, however, a much less common occurrence than the sudden descent of incredible destruction from the sky. Again, this usually happens at night, and in the morning the news spreads of how many women and children were killed, how there were no militants in the area, et cetera. The national government fell in 2013, and what was left of the Afghan army retreated to the north, where it achieved some level of dominance and where the situation has come to resemble the pre-9/11 struggle between the Northern Alliance and the Pashto-dominated Taliban. In the south and the east, a loose confederation of militant groups under the aegis of the Taliban vie for control, and a pre-modern theocratic totalitarianism is the daily situation in most villages and cities: beheadings, stonings, and other manifestations of divine justice are conducted regularly and in public to maintain what order there can be. As foreigners from America and Europe withdrew, foreigners from places like the Caucuses, Arabia, and North Africa have come in increasing numbers, and locals hear rumors of training camps located in remote areas. The most significant consequence of the Coalition's draw-down in 2010 actually has little to do with Afghanistan at all: the Pakistani government is now about to fall, having been fully destabilized by attacks based across the Afghan border. In the highest militant circles, liaisons are being sought with the Pakistani intelligence service to discuss the future of that country's nuclear arsenal.

These alternatives are the very likely consequences of the two courses of action being considered by policy makers at the present moment. (A third possible course of action--to continue with the present counterinsurgency strategy while failing to provide a decisive level of troops--leads just as clearly to the second possible future.) What is frustrating about the debate between the “counterinsurgency option” versus the “off-shore option” is that we have tried both courses of action before.

Counterinsurgency is what we finally learned how to do in Iraq and, with all the necessary caveats understood, it is working. "Off-shore" reliance on special forces and air strikes was the course pursued by the Clinton administration through the 1990s and initially continued by the Bush administration. It led to 9/11. You would think that would be enough said.

This highly disturbing video of Yousef al-Khattab preaching jihad on the streets of New York City just days ago comes courtesy of Jarret Brachman. It serves as a reminder of the radicalism that exists here in the United States. From Brachman's website:

Here is a video from 4 September 09 of Yousef ‘preaching’ a ‘Ramadan’ message in NYC. This is radicalization in its rawest form. You’ll see people sitting down on the stairs across listening, then one will get up and grab a CD that has recorded lectures from Abdullah Faisal (RM.com’s spiritual advisor – and a firebreathing cleric in the UK who was amain inspiration of Jermaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 bombers).

Watch how quickly the jars fill with cash. Watch how many men congregate at the step across from Yousef.

General Stanley McChrystal's classified assessment of the situation in Afghanistan has been obtained by the Washington Post. According to the Post's report, McChrystal warns that without the deployment of additional U.S. forces, the war "will likely result in failure." McChrystal has already put together a detailed troop request, but the administration has asked that he delay in submitting that request for fear of complicating Obama's health care push on the Hill. The Times speculates that McChrystal will ask for anywhere from 10,000 to 45,000 additional troops. I've heard rumors the number could be as many as 60,000 additional troops at the high end.

It's probably not a coincidence that the McChrystal report leaked just as Obama looked like he was going wobbly on his commitment to the war effort. Democrats on the Hill are already threatening to obstruct funding for additional U.S. forces -- Pelosi, Levin, and Murtha among them -- and Obama was skeptical of the need for more U.S. forces on the Sunday shows yesterday. "I don't want to put the resource question before the strategy question," Obama told CNN's John King. "Because there is a natural inclination to say, if I get more, then I can do more. But right now, the question is, the first question is, are we doing the right thing? Are we pursuing the right strategy?"

Obama may be trying to appease the left wing of his own party with a very public show of reluctance to add additional forces to the fight, but the administration has already deployed at least 22,000 additional U.S. troops since his inauguration. The previous commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan had requested 20,000 to 30,000 additional forces before Obama was even sworn-in. Obama sent 17,000 more troops in the spring, keeping a campaign promise but setting himself up for what Senator McCain said at the time would be "a Lyndon Johnson style of incrementalism." Indeed, Obama sent 4,000 more troops in June. Now McChrystal is set to request yet more forces in order to fulfill a need that was long ago identified by General McKiernan.

According to the McChrystal assessment, "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." Yet Obama is slow-walking the troop increase for political reasons, even as it seems likely that he will, in the end, do the right thing and send the necessary reinforcements.

The assessment also says that "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable." Obama's hand-picked commander has laid out a strategy for defeating al Qaeda and the Taliban. During the campaign Obama had promised to give the war in Afghanistan the attention and resources necessary to do just that -- in explicit contrast to the Bush administration whom he alleged had diverted the resources and attention of the military from the real threat of al Qaeda and their Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

McChrystal leaves no doubt about what must be done if Obama is to keep his word -- more troops and very soon. The president cannot delay that decision any more -- not for the sake of his health care initiative or anything else. And in any case, as a matter of politics the best thing for Obama and the Democrats is to win the war. Yesterday Obama immodestly compared himself to some of the great presidents of American history. “Maybe you hear what people had to say about Abraham Lincoln, or what they had to say about FDR, or what they had to say about Ronald Reagan when he first came in and was trying to change our approach to government." That answer came in response to a question from George Stephanopoulos about the health care town halls during the August recess. But it wasn't legislative accomplishments that made those men great presidents. It was their decision to commit fully to the major conflicts of the day -- and to win decisively.

Health care reform won't make or break Obama's presidency. The way he conducts the war in Afghanistan will.

There have been plenty of generous, heartfelt, and insightful reminiscences of Irving Kristol published since Friday. I've collected the ones that I thought might interest you the most, along with links to some of Kristol's uncollected writing online. Together you can develop your own sense of his life and work. (And don't forget to read the books!)

Let's start with with some of the commentary.

The New York Times and Washington Post obituaries were comprehensive and well written.

On the Manhattan Institute website, Myron Magnet remembers his friend Irving.

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, James Q. Wilson reflects on how Irving Kristol changed his life.

Here's the Wall Street Journal's editorial board on the "man who put 'neo' into conservatism."

On her website, the author Diana West recalls working for Irving at The Public Interest.

At Forbes, Steven Menashi focuses on Irving Kristol's moral criticism.

AEI collected toasts and remarks from Irving Kristol's seventy-fifth birthday in 1995.

Now on to some of Kristol's writing. Here are links to the full archives of his work in The Public Interest and Commentary.

On the AEI website, Charles Murray recommended that people read Kristol's 1991 lecture on "The Capitalist Future."

In Saturday's paper, the Journal published a selection of highlights from Kristol's columns.

And the American Spectator has made available this interesting interview with The Alternative from 1969.

Put together, these links make for an excellent reading list on the foundations of the neoconservative persuasion.

A transcript of the president's appearance on Meet the Press:

DAVID GREGORY: Let me ask you about another important issue facing you and your administration, and that is Afghanistan. We've now been in Afghanistan for eight years. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan after ten years. Are we committed to this war for an indefinite period of time? Or do you think, in your mind, is there a deadline for withdrawal?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I don't have a deadline for withdrawal. But I'm certainly not somebody who believes in indefinite occupations of other countries. Keep in mind what happened when I came in. We had been adrift, I think, when it came to our Afghanistan strategy. And what I said was that we are going to do a top to bottom review of what's taking place there.

Not just a one time review, but we're gonna do a review before the election in Afghanistan, and then we're gonna do another review after the election. And we are gonna see how this is fitting what, I think, is our core goal. Which is to go after the folks who killed the 3,000 Americans during 9/11, and who are still plotting to kill us, al Qaeda. How do we dismantle them, disrupt them, destroy them?

Now, getting our strategy right in Afghanistan and in Pakistan are both important elements of that. But that's our goal. And I want to stay focused on that. And— and so, right now, what's happened is that we've had an election in Afghanistan. It did not go as smoothly as I think we would have hoped. And there are some serious issues in terms of how that— how the election was conducted in some parts of the country. But we've had that election. We now finally have the 21,000 troops in place that I had already ordered to go.

DAVID GREGORY: Are you skeptical about more troops? About sending more troops?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, can I just say this? I am— I have to exercise skepticism anytime I send a single young man or woman in uniform into harm's way. Because I'm the one who's answerable to their parents if they don't come home. So I have to ask some very hard questions anytime I send our troops in.

The question that I'm asking right now is to our military, to General McChrystal, to General Petraeus, to all our national security apparatus, is— whether it's troops who are already there, or any troop request in the future, how does this advance America's national security interests? How does it make sure that al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot attack the United States homeland, our allies, our troops who are based in Europe?

That's the question that I'm constantly asking because that's the primary threat that we went there to deal with. And if— if supporting the Afghan national government, and building capacity for their army, and securing certain provinces advances that strategy, then we'll move forward.

But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or, in some way— you know, sending a message that America— is here for— for the duration. I think it's important that we match strategy to resources.

What I'm not also gonna do, though, is put the resource question before the strategy question. Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy I'm not gonna be sending some young man or woman over there- beyond what we already have.

In 2007, the Bush administration held a conference in Annapolis that brought together the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. This was the first time all sides were able to agree on a two state solution as the path toward a lasting peace deal between Israel and Palestinians. Nearly two years later, Obama has managed to get the two parties back into the same room, but only after dropping his own preconditions for the talks -- a complete Israeli freeze on all settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The White House announces:

On Tuesday, September 22, President Obama will host a trilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The trilateral meeting will be immediately preceded by bilateral meetings between President Obama and the two leaders. These meetings will continue the efforts of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell to lay the groundwork for the relaunch of negotiations, and to create a positive context for those negotiations so that they can succeed.

"It is another sign of the President's deep commitment to comprehensive peace that he wants to personally engage at this juncture, as we continue our efforts to encourage all sides to take responsibility for peace and to create a positive context for the resumption of negotiations," said Special Envoy Mitchell.

Obama could have put the same meeting together six months ago -- without squandering his credibility with the Israeli public -- if he'd simply called for unconditional talks between the two sides. Obama has not set preconditions for talks with any of the rogue states he is now courting, but for Israel, there was a demand that all settlement construction cease, indefinitely, before the peace process could move forward. The Palestinians adopted this as their own precondition for talks, further complicating matters (in fairness, as Hillary Clinton concedes in her interview with the Washington Post, her public call for a freeze may have unintentionally locked the administration into a policy to which it was not fully committed).

In the event, construction will continue on some 2,500 units and Netanyahu has authorized new construction on some 450 units. The Israelis have dismissed outright demands for a freeze in East Jerusalem and are negotiating the terms of a temporary freeze in the West Bank on the condition that any freeze come with a written guarantee from the Obama administration that if peace talks break down, the freeze will come to an end.

Obama has managed to get the two parties to the table to talk about having talks. Good for him, but this is a far less impressive achievement than the Annapolis conference, which was widely mocked on the left as an unserious attempt at peace and indicative of Bush's lack of engagement with the issue. At this pace, Obama may need a third term just to get this process back to where Bill Clinton had it in 1993.

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don't read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites -- the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America’s worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren’t just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

Contrary to Brezinski's half-hearted disclaimer that no one wishes for such an outcome, there are plenty on the left who would delight in a pitched battle between the United States and Israel. Democrats in Congress routinely support resolutions affirming Israel's right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to assure its own national defense. And Obama has at least paid lip service to the concept. But hostility to Israel among the rank and file is very real on the left -- and among "realists."

So conjure the image -- the Obama administration sending U.S. aircraft up to protect Iran's airspace and it's nuclear installations from an attack by a democracy that is one of America's closest allies. Unfortunately, this may not be so hard to imagine in Israel, where the number of people who believe Obama is pro-Israel is at just 4 percent -- and falling. And given Obama's (literally) submissive posture to the Saudis, his indulgence of the Iranians, and his simultaneously hard-line approach to Israel, it seems even some of Obama's supporters can savor the possibility of a "reverse Liberty."

Earlier, I wondered what intelligence the Obama administration was relying upon to justify its decision to cancel the deployment of land-based missile defense systems in Eastern Europe. The press has sniffed out a partial answer. The Obama administration is relying upon a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) drafted in May of this year that differed from a previous intelligence assessment, which was current less than two years ago.

According to Reuters:

Behind the change, officials said on condition of anonymity, was a May 2009 National Intelligence Estimate which deemed Iran unlikely to have intercontinental missiles capable of striking the United States and all of Europe until 2015 to 2020.

A previous intelligence estimate, which former President George W. Bush cited publicly in October 2007, concluded that Iran could develop that long-range capability by 2015.

Three quick observations:

First, note that the Obama administration, in its fact sheet on missile defense, does not currently intend to deploy a missile defense system capable of intercepting Iran’s long-range missiles until 2020. Phase Four of Obama’s plan, which is “in the 2020 timeframe,” reads (emphasis added): “After development and testing are complete, deploy the SM-3 Block IIB to help better cope with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and the potential future ICBM threat to the United States.” All three of the previous phases deal with short to intermediate-range interceptors.

That is, Obama’s plan does not envision the deployment of a missile defense capable of countering Iran’s long-range missiles until the tail end of the current estimate of when the mullahs will have that capability. The current estimate is that Iran will have an ICBM capability between 2015 and 2020. Obama is therefore assuming the best-case scenario (for us) with respect to long-range missiles within that range. So, the current plan does not envision deploying long-range interceptors in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, or 2019, which are all possibilities in the current estimate. The Obama plan says things may change, of course, but for now they’ve assumed the best-case scenario from the West’s perspective.

Second, as I discussed earlier, it is still very likely that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) does not really have a firm grasp on when Iran will deploy ICBM’s. Just as with the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, the IC has once again modified its views within a relatively short period of time. The previous estimate said that the mullahs “could” have a long-range missile capability by 2015. This estimate was cited as recently as President Obama’s inauguration day, January 20 of this year. 2015 is still apparently a possibility, but the IC has now pushed back the tail-end of its range of possibilities. This means that it could be in 2015, or in 2020, some time in between, or whenever.

Of course, Iran continues apace with its satellite program (e.g. Iran launched its first satellite into space in February 2009), which can be used to push along its development of ICBM’s. So, it is not clear why the IC now thinks, on average, it will take longer than previously anticipated for Iran to develop a long-range missile capability.

Third, the timing of the news of this revised NIE is certainly inauspicious. An IAEA document reportedly showing that Iran has the capability to make a nuclear bomb and is developing a missile system capable of carrying it has been leaked to the Associated Press. The IAEA responded by issuing a statement saying it “has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon program in Iran.” This is transparently false as the AP’s account makes it clear that the IAEA’s document says Iran has mostly likely worked on both the ability to detonate a nuclear weapon as well as the capability to deliver it.

Thus, at the precise moment the Obama administration is telling us there is less to worry about with respect to Iran’s long-range missiles, a leaked IAEA document is telling us that there is more to worry about with respect to Iran’s nuclear program in general. The Obama administration’s entire rationale for its missile defense plan rests on the assumption that Iran will not be able to deliver such a weapon with a long-range missile for ten more years.

We can only hope that the administration is right, but even then having a missile defense shield already in place would be wise.

Our Secretary of State gives a lengthy interview to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler that includes some remarkable exchanges. The bizarre contradiction in this administration's approach to authoritarian Iran on the one hand and democratic Honduras on the other is offered by Clinton without any evidence that she herself is aware of inexplicable double standard. Clinton says of the administration's commitment to reaching out the Iranian regime, despite the crackdown after this summer's rigged elections,

...there's a lot of ongoing instability and jockeying for power. But that's up to the Iranians, so what we are doing is dealing with the people who hold the power now.

And then Kessler asks about Honduras, where the administration has refused to engage with the current government that came to power with the consent of the country's highest court and its legislature in order to prevent a power grab by the former president:

I mean, I think a lot of people were surprised that we took a stand for democracy and constitutional order.

Yes, Madam Secretary, people were surprised, since this was the only instance in eight months in which the Obama administration took a stand for democracy and constitutional order. And yet that stand is in direct conflict with the views of the Supreme Court in Honduras, which both authorized Zelaya's detention and ruled that his attempt to change the country's consititution to gain a third term was...unconstitutional.

The lesson here: the Obama administration will deal with the people in power now -- so long as those people are anti-American autocrats. And this administration will not deal with the people who seek to -- or succeed in -- overthrowing them.

The New York Post reports on the victims of a false rape allegation at Hofstra:

"My name is forever tarnished," said 19-year-old Stalin Felipe.

Via JWF.

With democracies from Israel to Eastern Europe to Honduras scratching their heads about U.S. foreign policy it's probably not the worst time in the world to hold a conference on democracy and American policy.

On Monday September 21 through Tuesday September 22, FPI is hosting their 2009 Forum,"Advancing and Defending Democracy," at the W Hotel in Washington. Featured speakers include Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. There will also be panel discussions focusing on Russia, Iran, and the war in Afghanistan. Sen. Kyl will also speak on Monday morning on missile defense. To register go to the FPI website.

Irving Kristol, 1952, writing about Leo Strauss in the pages of Commentary:

No doubt, there will be scholars who will respectfully dispute Professor Strauss on just about every point. They will find, as many already know, that he is a most formidable opponent. And if in time the victory goes to Professor Strauss, he will have accomplished nothing less than a revolution in intellectual history, and most of us will—figuratively, at least—have to go back to school to learn the wisdom of the past that we thought we knew. It is fortunate for us that the lessons will be rather more exciting, and more daring in their implications, than we remember them. And it is a consolation of sorts to know in advance that, for those of us who fail to learn this art of reading, provision has been made.

Of course Irving could not know at the age of 32 that he was in fact describing in advance his own future achievement—a revolution in intellectual history—but that’s just what he was doing.

Robert Kagan writes at the Washington Post on the passing of Irving Kristol:

He was a truly great man, a great intellectual, and a great, patriotic servant to his country. He was also a unique inspiration, to me personally, and to untold thousands of other young people for whom he provided a model of the intellectual life well-lived. He was a deep and fierce thinker, who nevertheless delivered his thoughts in the most amiable fashion, without animus or bile. He was curious and invited others to be curious, to engage in serious dialogue on the important issues of the day.

He was also a creator of communities and institutions. He occupied a unique space between the world of the mind and the world of action. Networks of thinkers, policy-makers, and politicians revolved around him -- and not because he thrust himself into their midst but because his mind and character attracted them to him. To go to work for him, as I did fresh out of college almost 30 years ago, was to enter a rich and exciting intellectual universe, filled with learning and integrity and a commitment to the well-being of society. I fear such a universe may no longer exist. But the memory of what Irving Kristol created is enough to warm the soul for a lifetime.

An excerpt of what John Podhoretz writes at Commentary:

The intellectual and political life of the United States over the past 60 years was affected in so many important and enduring ways by Irving Kristol that it is difficult to capture in words the extent of his powerful and positive influence. Irving, who died today at the age of 89, was the rarest of creatures—a thoroughgoing intellectual who was also a man of action. He was a maker of things, a builder of institutions, a harvester and disseminator and progenitor of ideas and the means whereby those ideas were made flesh.

The clarity of his thinking and the surety of his purpose were one and the same; they were immeasurably enhanced by a powerful curiosity for the way things worked and the ways in which things could be made to work better. His was a resteless intelligence, always on the move; there was not an idea he didn’t want to play with, and there wasn’t a new idea for a think tank or a magazine or a center for the study of something-or-other that didn’t excite him. He was a conservative by temperament and conviction, but he was an innovator to the depths of his being.

This is a bipartisan group, including Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet, John Deutch, Jim Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger. As they note at the beginning of the letter, these men have served presidents in that role for more than 35 years, and they "respectfully urge [Obama] to exercise your authority to reverse Attorney General Holder's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigations of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11."

And indeed those ivnestigations were investigated and closed "four years ago by career prosecutors." The questions that were raised have been asked and answered. The only obvious reason to re-open those investigations and devote precious resources to this witch hunt are political. The investigating US Attorney determined that prosecution was warranted in the case of one CIA contractor and he prosecuted that case, getting a conviction. "If criminal investigations closed by career prosecutors during one administration can so easily be reopened at the direction of political appointees in the next, declinations of prosecution will be rendered meaningless."

More than that, the former CIA chiefs see an obvious potential for this to undermine US national security -- a potential which the Obama administration and the ACLU seem to be blind to."Not only will some members of the intelligence community be subjected to costly financial and other burdens from what amounts to endless criminal investigations, but this approach will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country. In our judgment such risk-taking is vital to success in the long and difficult fight against the terrorists who continue to threaten us."

The former directors also worry that these individuals will be "subjected to costly financial and other burdens" as a result of Holder's investigation. Spencer Ackerman points to the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act and declares that this statement is factually incorrect as the "taxpayer foots the bill for any government employee under investigation for detainee abuse." But that isn't clear at all. As Jennifer Rubin wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD not long ago,

Former Justice Department officials suggest that the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) might cover agents' legal expenses. But that is problematic. One attorney explains that DTA protects agents if "the interrogations at issue were 'officially authorized and determined to be lawful at the time they were conducted.' " But, he notes, there is a "fair argument" here that the DTA does not afford legal protection to "interrogations that went beyond techniques approved by the Justice Department, which is what Holder claims to be focused upon."

The letter closes with this admonition:

We support your stated commitment, Mr. President, to look to the future regarding these important issues. In our judgment the only way that is possible is if the criminal investigation of these interrogations that Attorney General Holder has re-opened is now re-closed.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this letter is that these officials are calling on Obama to rein in Holder using the executive power inherent in his office, though Obama seems determined to pretend no such power exists. Obama has tried to stay above the fray, insisting that the decision to prosecute will be Holder's and Holder's alone, and has even tried to claim some deniability for Holder's actions --