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Patriotism GOP Style

Monday, November 29th, 2010

Republican Richard Luger, a foreign policy expert and one of the few rational Republicans left in the Senate, is urging his Republican colleagues to ratify the New START treaty. “Please do your duty to your country” he implores. Apparently, his colleagues led by Senator Kyl  are not listening.

As Mark Kleiman reports:

Brent Scowcroft, another solid Republican, says he can’t figure out what goal Kyl & Co. might be pursuing by their opposition to the treaty other than the goal of denying the President a foreign policy victory. (A secondary goal might be squeezing Obama for even more wasteful government spending on warheads we’ll never actually use.)

If the START treaty is not ratified the U.S. will have no means of verifying the nature of weapon systems in Russia and the Russians will have no incentive to work with us on our policy with Iran or Afghanistan.  There is no U.S. interest served by holding up this treaty.

Kleiman continues:

If patriotism means the willingness to put, in John McCain’s words, “country first,” then the party that just won the midterm elections may be the least patriotic party since … well, since the Republican isolationists almost let Hitler win World War II.

I perfectly understand why the few remaining moderate Republican politicians don’t switch parties. They’ve made their choice. What I don’t understand is the persistence of moderate Republican voters. Your party is irrevocably in the grip of a group of reckless, cynical, and largely ignorant extremists. Time to go. Noisily

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An Unexpected Hint of Contrition

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly reports on a surprising conversation with Fidel Castro:

There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).

Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. […] [D]uring the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.
This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?
I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

I guess he is a slow learner—it only took  him 50 years to figure that out.

There are some minor changes afoot  in Cuba:

Raul Castro is already loosening the state’s hold on the economy. He recently announced, in fact, that small businesses can now operate and that foreign investors could now buy Cuban real estate.

Of course we cannot invest in Cuba, or even travel there, because of our idiotic embargo which has probably done more to keep Castro in power than his minions of secret police and informants.

But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fundamental change in our relations with Cuba in the not too distant future.

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Why Are We Still in Afghanistan?

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

CIA director Leon Panetta said last week that al-Qaeda has only a few militants left in Afghanistan:

“I think at most, we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of al-Qaeda is in tribal areas of Pakistan,” he said. Panetta added that “winning” in Afghanistan means “having a country that is stable enough to ensure that there is no safe haven for al-Qaeda or for a militant Taliban that welcomes Al Qaida.”

The original reason we sent troops to Afghanistan was to eliminate al-Qaeda—a task that has been largely accomplished according to Panetta.  But we lose about 100 troops per month and spend $100 Billion per year trying to eliminate the Taliban, who unlike al-Qaeda are indigenous to Afghanistan. In this task we get very little cooperation from the locals or the Afghan government. Our chances of succeeding under those circumstances are not good.

So why are we still there if our original goal is accomplished?

Now the administration is claiming the reason we stay is to prevent al-Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Pakistan and returning to Afghanistan if and when we leave.

But on Tuesday, Obama’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter claimed there are only about 300 hundred al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan.  Here is Leiter in an interview with Newsweek’s Michal Isakoff

Leiter: I think [CIA director] Leon Panetta said on Sunday, and I agree with him, that in Afghanistan, you have a certain number, a relatively small number, 50 to 100. I think we have in Pakistan a larger number.

Q:  How many?

Leiter:  Upwards –more than 300, I would say.

As Glenn Greewald complained:

So between Afghanistan and Pakistan combined, there are a few hundred Al Qaeda members total.  All of this ongoing war and those hundreds of billions of dollars spent and those deaths and the decade of occupation, and those bombings and shootings and drone attacks and lawless prisons and habeas-stripping court precedents:  it’s all (ostensibly) for a few hundred extremists total hiding in remote tribal areas.  A few hundred.

This is a senseless policy and Obama needs to end it soon.

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