Totally Confused

++I will admit I am totally confused over what I think about the recent aerial attacks on Syria and the ultimate stakes of the game. 

++Michael Tomasky advises us that Obama's war is not like George W. Bush's for a variety of reasons. His primary focus is on the fact that the reasons for President Obama's actions are rather self-evident and not based on lies or mistruths such as WMD or Saddam's non-connection to 9-11.

++Tomasky believes Obama's coalition is more consequential than W's because of the array of Sunni nations actually involved and flying fighter jets. Andrew Sullivan quarrels with this saying that George H.W. Bush's coalition was more substantial during the Gulf War.

++But Andrew raises the question so many people have raised--the legal justification of the aerial attacks and the potential--or likelihood--of producing more terrorism and actual threats to the United States.

++Ross Douhat has actually been writing sane articles in the New York Times suggesting that a goal of degrading and containing is plausible but beyond that there are no players on the ground who can fill the political and military vacuum.

++President Obama has eschewed the rhetoric about freedom and democracy and has basically asserted the priority of a stable region. Chris Dickey in the Daily Beat has been very skeptical of this saying that the status quo is gone and can't be fixed.

++One theme that comes up, which perplexes me. Writers are saying that the aerial bombing of Syria will strengthen Assad's regime and the Syrian rebels whom we support are against the strikes. How can Assad be stronger? If you have lost over half your country and the other half is in exile,how do you become stronger--and over what? This is like saying Hitler in the Bunker could hunker down and wait out the onslaught. The problem is that the United States sort of wants--really--wants Assad gone but needs him around to tolerate the airstrikes. But what happens afterwards.

++It is quite clear that the United States is coordinating their attacks with Iran and informing the Syrian foreign ministry of all impending strikes. The U.S. weird dance with Tehran has Israel upset. Bibi Netanyahu met with President Obama to express concerns that he will go wobbly on the nuclear talks and loosen the sanctions because of Iran's cooperation in both Iraq and now in Syria.

++The veteran reporter Walter Pincus has shown his chops recently in the Washington Post in his articles outlining how and what President Obama's strategy is. His articles are actually very appreciative of how President Obama has assembled his international coalition and exactly what its goals are.

++President Obama made his annual presentation to the United Nations today and talked about ISIS as being the incarnation of evil whom the entire global community must resist.

++Russia informed the United States that the coalition wasn't a private club and they would participate even if not asked. 

++Charlie Rangel, Democrat from New York,raised issues near to my heart. Charlie wants to re-instate the draft and adopt a war tax. Funding for this adventure has not been discussed by the debt-conscious Congress.

++Leon Panetta appeared on Meet the Press and said that he had favored keeping troops in Iraq. He didn't mention that the Iraqis didn't want us there any longer and their parliament passed a law eating a date for our exit. He also said that he was for arming the Syrian "moderates" as were the entire NSC. this sounds damning of President Obama but as John Kerry tells it the United States could not make any effective moves until al-Malicki was removed in Iraq. 

++General Hugh Shelton appeared on C-Span and mentioned that our troops on the ground were the 250,000 some Iraqis trained by American forces and if they could not resist ISIS the region had more problems than we can handle. He also mentioned something that is dear to my heart--"What possesses our political leaders to say publicly what we will or will not do." This goes for W and it goes for Obama. Sometimes the optics are that the President is less clear than he actually is.

++Oh, by the way, Hillary Clinton says she agrees with President Obama's strategy. Marine General Conway says it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.

++So far,my original complaint that there are too many moving parts that have to work right holds. I also don't see how this unfolds over time. The true "Unknown Unknowns". 

++But if this is too confusing, you might get outraged that President Obama saluting his Marine President Guards while holding a latte. If you are outraged,the RNC says you can donate to the Republican candidate of your choice.

++ISIS has been a bonanza for Republican candidates. All of the Senate candidates like Brown in New Hampshire claim they know who the enemy is and they are better than their opponent at fighting them. Polls do show a wide margin in favor of the GOP in fighting terrorism and in foreign policy,both issues the Democrats had the edge from 2008 until today. So watch this space,national security could become the GOP trump card, even though they aren't in session.So you have to take them on trust.

++Dana Millbank makes the overall point that on issue such as fighting ISIS, immigration reform,and healthcare, President Obama has outflanked the Left. If President George W. Bush had done the recent acts in Iraq and now Syria,the Left would be storming in the street. I don't know. But I think I agree with Rachel Maddow that President Obama has signed onto perpetual war.

Happy Norooz!

Happy Iranian New Year to everyone. Hopefully, spring will bring good things for the Iranian people.

Meanwhile back in Stoogeland, I headed to the House today and on the way back got stuck in traffic as the President's motorcade went pass. Besides the Batmobile, he has several SUVs, a bomb disposal truck and an ambulance as well as a phalanx of police motorcycles. He had been up to the House to speak to members on the Health Reform Bill.

Since it's the Year of the Tiger, we should expect good news but things are still tight. Dennis the Menace did the manly thing and endorsed the bill. A few of the Stupak gang also have signed on. Yet, the remaining Democrats are facing a blitz of corporate ads in their home district. The Chamber of Commerce announced in addition to their $25 million this week, they will devote $55 million for the mid-year elections and target those wafflers who vote for the bill in the end.

Tea Baggers expressed disgust with Dick Armey's effort yesterday and thought he had more resources to bear on the final health care event. Oh, I'm sure he did but it's for himself.

Conservatives are now threatening to take the health care bill to the Supreme Court. That is very intriguing. We know the corporations own the majority of the court--let's not pretend anymore. But the constitutional issue would center around mandates to buy health insurance. Progressives have criticized President Obama for omitting a public option. If the present bill passes, it is a type of TARP bailout for an industry that is currently operating on a failed business model. So the industry would be faced with the new regulations, but then if the Court ruled mandates were unconstitutional they would essentially go bankrupt and enter into a financial meltdown mood. It would be interesting to see where the insurance industry actually came down on such a court case. Currently, they are playing high-price chicken over the bill but at the end of the day they stand to gain over 30 million new customers. Do they want to lose them?

The right-wing radios keep telling people the bill doesn't take effect until 2014. But here's a list of things that start immediately:
*35% immediate tax break for small businesses who provide insurance for employees;
*Prohibit dropping people from coverage when they get sick in all plans;
*Lowers senior prescription drug prices;
*Eliminates lifetime limits and restrictive annual limits on benefits on all plans;!!!!
*Requires plans to cover dependent children until the age 26;
*Requires new plans to cover preventive services and immunizations without cost-sharing;
*Provides immediate access to insurance for uninsured Americans because of pre-existing conditions;
*Ensures consumers have access to an internal and external appeals process to appeal insurance plan decisions;
Requires premium rebates to enrolees from insurers with high administrative expenditures and requires public disclosure of the percent of premiums applied to overhead costs.

The Democrats also created a website at the House where one can see the benefits of the bill for each congressional district. It actually works great.

The Republicans are miffed that if the bill passes they aren't being invited to participate in the signing ceremonies at the White House. They hope they can get the simulus effect--voting no but showing up with the stimulus check for the project in their districts.

As of late afternoon today, the Senate has already drafted their bill, which accepts the House changes. This was a confidence-building measure for House Democrats, who were afraid the Senate would renege on their promises. The draft copy of this reads well and improves everything rather dramatically.

After seeing about a dozen representatives today performing their functions on other issues, I have severe doubts any of them would understand anything about the health care bill. It was a sorry bipartisan bunch. If you deal alot with young democracies, you forget that the first generation produces the best, most finely-tuned talent available. Thereafter the gene pool starts getting diluted.

The Senate actually passed an anemic $18 billion jobs bill with some Republican support. The bill is almost entirely tax cuts. What the Senate is really excited about is increasing the threshold for estate taxes to $10 million, instead of the Bush $7 million. Here we have alot of energetic Senators.

If the Health Bill passes, it will only provide a temporary halt to the slide of health care in the United States. For instance, Arizona, facing critical budget shortfalls and run by a neanderthal, will cut 42,000 children from the SCHIP program and another 376,000 from the health insurance rolls. The devastation of the current economy is blowing holes through almost every state's budget resulting both in health care cuts but also the wholesale closings of schools.

Apparently, the President is continuing his healthcare fight in the hustings. He's appearing a few miles away on Friday to fire people up.

On another military front, Leon Panetta testified that the Obama campaign against Al Qaeda has forced the organization deeper underground and that the group no longer has any systemic command and control. Intercepted communications had lesser Al Qaeda officials pleading with Bin Laden to show some leadership as the group has been devastated. Panetta indicated a drone killed Hussein al-Yemeni, the Al Qaeda operative thought responsible for the attack on the CIA outpost. He also served as their explosives expert for all the affiliate organizations. Panetta claimed that Al Qaeda no longer could plan large sophisticated operations against the United States. Instead, they were looking for recruits who had no arrest records or ties with terrorist organizations and who did not fit the traditional Muslim profile.

In another hearing, General Petraeus claimed that recent Israeli actions have been exploited to recruit new people to Al Qaeda. This was a bombshell on the Hill because most members were attacking the administration for the misunderstanding with Israel. He also went further and said that continued Israeli-Palestinian tensions also gave Iran greater influence in the Middle East through their relationships with Hamas and Hizbullah. He further said that the conflict fueled anti-American sentiments because of perceived favoritism and has acted to limit the degree to which the United States could form partnerships with the Arab world and build relationships with moderate countries. In a later blog I'll try and reconstruct the briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that went further in-depth on this issue. But, with a strong caveat, the biggest client of Centcom right now are Arab states so the discussion obviously tilted in the direction of Arab national interests, which are not ours.

It will be interesting to see what General Petraeus has to say when he receives AEI's Irving Kristol Award. He is supposed to give a lecture that accompanies the presentation of the award. This was all decided before Petraeus came out for a repeal of DADT, criticized Israel and said today that the Iran nuclear project has gotten sidelined for a while.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton was scheduled to talk to Mr. Sunshine, Bibi. The quick reactions by AIPAC and others in Washington has been undercut as more and more career people like Petraeus who have strong Republican support are continuing to speak out on this issue and elaborating in full detail some of the deeper issues. Here, I believe the Pentagon is pushing their own agenda, which is too favorable to Arab states. But once Bibi decided to play with fire, expect this debate to start opening up in ways it never has in Washington before. And, frankly, I am very sorry that it has.

The Week That Was

I have been inundated with materials concerning the DOJ release of the Yoo memos and the various arguments for a Truth Commission and the prosecution of Bush officials. Kudos go to Harpers 'Scott Horton for his piece " George W. Bush's Disposable Constitution". Matthew Rothschild in "We Came an Inch from Martial Law, Bush Justice Department Memos Reveal" in The Progressive is worth a read. Long-time Bush-basher Robert Parry writes in consortiumnews.com "How Close the Bush Bullet". The most worrisome news came from an anonymous Bush Administration official who said,"the worst is yet to come."

John Yoo is fighting back through the pages of the Wall Street Journal in his ope-ed,"Yes, We Did Plan for Mumbai-style attacks in the U.S." to justify his position on suspending the Fourth Amendment.

While the prominent papers gave due notice of the revelations contained in the released DOJ memos, the odds are slim to none that there will be prosecutions or even a Truth Commission. Leon Panetta this week reassured CIA agents involved in "enhanced interrogations" that they would not face prosecution. The Obama Administration would love to have this issue disappear since the prospect of proscution and investigations have produced a backlash in the national security community. It's enough in their mind to "move forward" and try to change strategy and behavior.

The real issue is that a full-scale assault on our democratic system can not be revealed to the public. If the full picture were really known such as the FEMA plans for concentration camps and the dictatorial powers of the Presidency, then the myth of America would be shattered. We had a similar situation during the Watergate Days, when the ambitious plans of Richard Nixon to reorganize the entire federal bureaucracy were conventiently left out of the investigation and debate. The same applies to the Clinton impeachment proceedings, which serious proponents argued should have been based on the extent of the White House's dealing with Mainland China and its agents. In that case, presentations by Bill Cohen and Madeliene Albright to former OSS man Henry Hyde killed that line of inquiry.

In the case of George W. Bush, Pat Leahy also voiced the intention to uncover the role of Democrats in enabling warrantless wiretaps and the suspension of basic liberties. As Dick Cheney hinted in his exit interviews, key Democratic leaders were briefed and OK's everything from warrantless wiretaps to torture. It's a classic case of greymail.

The American people have always given a sitting President a wide lattitude in conducting wars. As Bush supporters point out, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and FDR interned Japanese Americans. After the Civil War, the American Congress passed laws forbidding any of Lincoln's violations in the future and a large consensus has emerged in America that the internment of Japanese Americans was a blot on our history.

But these exceptions, to my mind, do not entail an Administration's own lawyers writing legal opinions that would justify a presidential dictatorship. What is curious about the DOJ memos so far is that their are no counter-arguments or hesitations registered in these memos--no admonitions that some of these positions should not be taken. There is no indication that other lawyers had inputs that may have reflected real constitutional thought and not the blathering of John Yoo and his compatriots.

Remember Congress gave George W. Bush permission to wage the war against terror with all means necessary. The Bush Administration took that literally and without any hesitation. While Democrats thought the war meant to eliminate Al Qaeda, the Bush Administration security types thought it meant all islamic terrorists. And another subset felt it meant to wage war on all organizations that might lend material or intellectual support to people engaged in terrorism. The latter gets you the Sierra Club on the terrorist list because its enviromental positions might encourage eco-terrrorists in the Pacific Northwest, even though there is no direct link. If the actual foe is not defined, this becomes a recipe for a totalitarian system.

Bits and pieces of this policy are all over the landscape and ,frankly, no one in public office wants to put it all together. Homeland Security providing evidence against anti-war activists in nearby Maryland to justify their surveillance is just a small example. No matter the justification of such policies and such loony things such as the Patriot Act, it is always useful to remember that such policies are always implemented at the lowest common denominator. Sheer force will always dominate over subtlety or a graduated response.

The conservatives are now in high dungeon on the prospects of investigations or prosecutions to avoid any blunt reflection on the vast extent of the Bush Administration's constitutional over-reach. One only had to witness the reaction by the right to Justice Kennedy's Supreme Court decisions months ago concerning the habeas corpus rights of Gitmo detainees. In fact, alot of the posturing now, including the frequent media appearances of Karl Rove and other Bush officials, is meant to be prophylactic against legal prosecutions. Expect more John Yoo op-eds.

Thursday Morning Coffee--Mocha Java

The Obama Administration is trying to do the Bush people a favor--and they are getting no thanks. The new Solicitor General claims that we can hold "terrorists" for a sustained period of time without bringing charges because we are "at war". The Administration uses the state secrets defense in the trial brought by ACLU on behalf of those people who had been renditioned. Democrats are bringing a bill on the House floor to prevent civil litigation on these activities. The force-feeding of Gitmo detainees is upheld by a federal judge. And Leon Panetta says he will not prosecute CIA agents who engaged in the waterboarding and retention programs.

For reasons that escape me, conservatives who want desparately to defend Gitmo refuse to see how the Obama Administration just wants to move on and is actually protecting Bush operatives. Instead, Senators Inhofe and others are conducting political tours of Gitmo to try and save the facility.

Senator Leahy's suggestion of forming a bipartisan Truth Commission has met resistance from Republicans. But there are other reasons to oppose such a Commission. As Jonathan Turley of George Washington University argued on television, truth commissions are used in developing democracies that have a weak legal structure and are meant more to establish an historical record. The problem with creating one in the United States is that you are in fact arguing the Bush case that these episodes are unique and separate and that the United States can and will violate its treaty commitments. He has been the most forceful in arguing that if there is no legal investigation or prosecution then the Obama Administration owns the crimes. A ironic note on that is that the force feeding case in Miami became v.the Obama Administration, instead of the Bush Administration which did the deed.

Yesterday,Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada said he did not intend to raise the Omar Khadr case with Barack Obama next week. Canada's three opposition leaders called for Khadr's immediate release from detention in Gitmo. Khadr was wounded and captured by American soldiers in a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. The opposition has maintained that Khadr was unlawfully recruited and used as child soldier. The Canadian authorities have planned a rather elaborate repatriation project that would include placing him in a foster home since his parents were close to bin Laden.

The Mohammed case even gets murkier. The Janitor, who was renditioned on the basis of satirical article on how to build an H-Bomb, has ,according to official documents, had his genitals sliced by a scalpel and subjected to more than waterboarding. What's strange is that the U.S. dropped all claims he was a terrorist last year and continue to hold him.

These cases will proliferate as bilateral issues in the months ahead. They are not only embarassing but it is rather doubtful the Obama Administration can avoid the onslaught of legal cases. One of the key issues of the Torture Convention, which we ratified under Ronald Reagan,was the responsibility of other countries to bring violators to justice. With the U.N. Special Rapporteur Mr. Nowak on record saying he had the documents on file approved by Donald Rumsfeld authorizing torture, I can't see a European prosecutor or government avoiding the opportunity to pursue this.