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Monday, December 1, 2008
Palin concludes Georgia sweep
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sarah Palin is reportedly drawing decent but not great crowds in her sweep through Georgia on behalf of Saxby Chambliss. The turnout is certainly a lot better than any other political figure this side of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could attract.
“The Saxby Chambliss signs are plentiful, but it’s clear even before you walk in that this is a Sarah Palin for President event, four years ahead of its time,” reports Jim Galloway from the Gwinnett Center.
The enthusiasm and turnout reflect Palin’s appeal to the party base and should be helpful to Chambliss in his re-election effort. But polls say that the same traits that endear Palin to the hard-core GOP are turnoffs to independents and moderates.
“Palin’s image, being the way it is for independents, puts her at a distinct disadvantage from a general election standpoint,” Tony Fabrizio, a veteran GOP strategist, told Politico. “But it wouldn’t be the first time the hard-core base ran off the cliff.”
I wonder: Does that candor put Fabrizio on Redstate’s “leper list?”
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Time for Pakistan to fix itself
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai continue to have repercussions in India, where a second top government official has resigned in disgrace. Indian officials had apparently been warned that a terrorist attack was imminent and would be launched from the sea, but were still unable to prevent it.
However, the real repercussions should be felt in Pakistan. The Associated Press reports that “according to security officials, the sole surviving attacker has told investigators that his group trained for about six months at camps in Pakistan operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan banned the group six years ago after the U.S. and Britain listed it as a terrorist group.”
There is no evidence of involvement in the plot by Pakistan’s government. However, Osama bin Laden is believed to be in Pakistan, which has become a launching point for Taliban and al Qaida attacks into neighboring Afghanistan. Commandos trained in Pakistan have also launched previous attacks against India, culminating in last week’s horror.
That is intolerable. It’s time for the international community to force Pakistan to get serious about ending its status as a source of terrorism. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among others, seems intent on making that point.
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions myself on this, but I do think that this is a time for complete, absolute, total transparency and cooperation and that is what we expect (from Pakistan),” Rice told reporters earlier today.
Outside military force against Pakistan isn’t feasible and wouldn’t accomplish much except to weaken Pakistan’s central government, which would be counterproductive. But continued military and economic aid as well as trade relations should be made conditional on Pakistani authorities taking strong, effective and sustained action against terror.
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The blowback on torture
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Writing in The Washington Post, the leader of the U.S. interrogation team that helped track down and kill terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi talks about the use of torture and abuse by other American officials in Iraq, and its deadly consequences for U.S. soldiers:
“I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.
It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.”
Experts in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency stress the importance of what they call “the say-do gap,” the gap between what we say and what we actually do. The larger that gap, the easier it is to recruit terrorists against us. The testimony of the anonymous interrogator in his Post piece suggests that the use of torture created a massive “say-do gap” that probably contributed to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers.
In his just-concluded remarks introducing his national security team, President-elect Obama tried to address that issue directly:
“We will show the world once more that America is relentless in defense of our people, steady in advancing our interests, and committed to the ideals that shine as a beacon to the world: democracy and justice; opportunity and unyielding hope - because American values are America’s greatest export to the world.”
He has the “say” part down. Come Jan. 20, we and the rest of the world can begin to judge the “do” part as well.
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Obama’s national security team reassuring
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The national security team scheduled to be announced today by President-elect Barack Obama is a serious, pragmatic group of people, and for that reason alone it provides a welcome contrast to the neoconservative radicals brought into power by President Bush.
Hillary Clinton at the State Department; Jim Jones, a retired four-star Marine general, as national security adviser; Robert Gates, a longtime mainstream Republican, remaining at the Department of Defense —- they are also a far cry from the Marxist, pacifist, naive radicals that Republicans claimed would come into power with Obama.
Gates, Clinton and Jones come from very different professional backgrounds, but they share an understanding with the president-elect that diplomacy must be our primary means of engaging with the world, with military power held in reserve and used only as needed.
The wisdom and necessity of that approach were confirmed last week with a new report by the National Intelligence Council, “Global Trends 2025.” The report, compiled by analysts from throughout the U.S. intelligence community, does not attempt to predict the future but to spot the trends likely to drive that future.
The coming world it describes is much more complicated, with many more moving pieces that the United States can perhaps influence but cannot hope to control.
“The United States will remain the single most powerful country but will be less dominant,” the analysts report. “Shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the U.S. into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities.”
Overall, “the multiplicity of influential actors and distrust of vast power means less room for the U.S. to call shots without the support of strong partnerships.”
As the report points out, recent years have seen a historic and unprecedented transfer of wealth from the West to the East, a phenomenon it predicts will continue. That too cannot help but have national-security implications, in no small part because our military dominance is founded on an economic dominance that no longer exists.
Although the report doesn’t go into such details, among those trade-offs may be cancellation of expensive projects such as the Army’s high-tech Future Combat Systems and the Air Force’s F-22 jet fighter, assembled in Marietta. Gates has already expressed doubt about both programs, and his reappointment as defense secretary bodes poorly for their future.
While most conflict in the post-World War II era has been ideological in nature, the report suggests that has changed. The prime driver of conflict in the years to come is likely to be access to energy resources, and “descending into a world of resource nationalism increases the risk of great-power confrontation.”
That strengthens the case for investment in energy efficiency and alternative energy sources, which in reality are investments in our national security.
Since the end of the post-Cold War era, we have been groping our way through challenges without a real concept of the international role we want to play, and without thinking through hard issues such as matching our ambitions with our resources. We invaded Iraq, for example, without understanding the drain it would place on our manpower, economic and diplomatic power, all of which are finite.
As the report acknowledges, history takes its own unpredictable course. But it offers three important lessons of the past century:
— Economic volatility creates political volatility, which raises the risk of war.
— Geopolitical rivalries, more so than technological change, have been “significant causes of the multiple wars, collapse of empires and rise of new powers.”
— “Leaders and their ideas matter … As demonstrated by the impacts of Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman, leadership is key.”
For that and other reasons, including evidence of good judgment, the leadership team assembled by Obama is reassuring.
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