Bad Paper (November 20)

Are British reporters better at covering foreign news than their American counterparts? John Judis thinks so. Blogging at the New Republic, Judis confesses that he “never been fascinated with the world outside of the United States,” and thus needs some explanatory help from the writer when he reads dispatches from overseas. But American newspapers aren’t all that good at providing this assistance. Judis uses coverage of President Obama’s recent trip to South Korea as an example. The New York Times and Washington Post focused “not on South Korea per se, but on Obama’s taking a ‘stern tone’ toward North Korea in his discussions with the South Koreans.” The Post goes further, suggesting “that the two sides have agreed to a ‘new approach,’ which will reject ‘endless, inconclusive disarmament negotiations’ with the North.” Judis rightfully points out that this isn’t exactly new information, and asks “haven’t I read this story about forty-two times since 1995 or so”? After reading the Times and Post articles, he has come away with “exactly nothing.”

But this isn’t the case with the Financial Times, which also covered President Obama’s South Korean jaunt. In a story about “one-third the size of the other pieces,” the reporters manage to convey important insights about “the balance of power in Asia and the world.” Instead of focusing on Obama’s “stern tone” with North Korea, the FT wrote about how America is increasingly less important to a South Korea that has established economic links with China. This is certainly a lot more interesting than coverage of diplomatic processes—and more important for an American public that needs to be better informed about the administration’s foreign-policy agenda.

Well, the FT’s angle may be more interesting, writes Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum. But there’s a reason why the British paper’s coverage outclasses the Times and the Post:

First, the FT writes for a more sophisticated audience that's been following this story for a while and is actually interested in learning more about it. Second, and related, the FT doesn't have to pretend that the only news that matters is whatever happens to be the current hot button in the United States.

Generally, American audiences only read foreign-related news items to find out “how it affect [sic] the United States”—the foible to which Judis admitted at the beginning of his post. Because other countries really don’t matter to most Americans, our media’s foreign coverage suffers as a result: “Even most highly educated Americans just don’t care much about the rest of the world except to the extent that it affects us.”

Elsewhere, the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb has an update on a story we brought to your attention last week. Earlier this month, the Washington Times’s Eli Lake reported on the shady dealings of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and its head, Iranian national Trita Parsi. Goldfarb writes that the group attempted to intimidate the Times to prevent publication of Lake’s story. Now the Council is sending threatening emails to Voice of America in a bid to change its coverage of the group, as NIAC considers it too negative. Goldfarb is incredulous that there isn’t a greater outcry about the organization’s rather thuggish approach: “The left often gripes about imagined efforts by the ‘Israel Lobby’ to silence its critics. Here we have the Iran Lobby literally threatening media outlets with legal action if they continue to give voice to a NIAC critic.”

Location, Location, Location (November 19)

While President Obama continues to postpone a decision on American troop levels in Afghanistan, the debate in Washington is still raging over whether sending more soldiers is actually a good idea. Matthew Yglesias directs our attention to a report by Carnegie Endowment scholar (and TNI Online author) Gilles Dorronsoro, which argues that where we deploy our troops is just as important as how many we send. According to Yglesias, Dorronsoro suggests that we

adopt a more defensive posture in the South—securing main cities where the Taliban is disliked—and focus our attention on winning what he regards as the more winnable struggles in the North and East where the Taliban is making gains but isn’t deeply intertwined with local communities.

In other words, we should largely abandon the south and focus on winning the northern parts of Afghanistan, where the Taliban doesn’t have a lot of local appeal. Although Yglesias admits that he “can’t really assess how true this analysis is,” he thinks Dorronsoro “certainly seems to make a strong case.” Its conclusions line up with a gut feeling of Yglesias’s, namely that “the best case for staying in Afghanistan isn’t really scare stories about al-Qaeda but simply the fact that we have something of a moral obligation to help anti-Taliban Afghans defend themselves.” As such, it’d be a good idea to only focus our efforts in areas that want our help.

In other Afghan-related news, the New Republic’s Michael Crowley notes that Russia is angry with Richard Holbrooke over his shift on drug policy in Afghanistan. As you might recall, the special envoy grandly revised our approach to narcotics in June, shifting our focus from a counterproductive eradication effort to one that encouraged Afghan farmers to grow alternative crops. This was a great idea for us, but the Russians are quite upset with the change in strategy. Much of the opium grown in Afghanistan becomes heroin that is consumed in Russia, and the Kremlin wants to cut down on the drug’s supply. Given our objections and the fact that we have a massive armed force in Afghanistan, it’s highly unlikely that Moscow will get its way. In any case, it’s clear that America and Russia’s interests aren’t in alignment on this issue—which might not bode well for Obama’s attempts to “reset” relations with the country.

The Blog Index is being very South Asia-centric today, so let’s venture a little farther west to Iran, on which the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has a dispatch. Unfortunately, it appears the rogue state is up to its usual shenanigans. In what Goldberg calls the “Enormous Surprise of the Day,” Tehran has decided that it will not, after all, ship its uranium to be enriched abroad. Oops. That whole negotiations thing isn’t turning out so hot. Let’s hope—after he figures out what he’s going to do on Afghanistan—that Obama has a plan B.

Collateral Damage (November 18)

Although war is savage in any time, the wars of the twentieth century were particularly atrocious and involved the deaths of millions of civilians. Over at Duck of Minerva, Charli Carpenter wonders if this awful trend is continuing in the twenty-first century. She notes that how we measure the number of dead civilians is just as important as raw numbers at measuring how brutal a conflict is: “in legal terms, targeting civilians is a war crime. Accidentally killing or maiming them in the pursuit of legitimate military objectives is, well, just too bad. So in judging government’s records of compliance with the law, one needs to measure the difference.” For example, a government might not make a conscious effort to kill civilians, but could also be complacent in their deaths—e.g., not bothering to change an attack pattern even if lots of civilians happen to be in the way.

As such, it might be possible that most civilian deaths are now classified as “collateral damage,” for which governments receive no legal sanction. If so, Carpenter thinks “this would suggest that the laws of war are woefully outdated - that even if fully implemented they do not, in fact, do enough to protect civilians. In that case, humanitarian organizations really should be in an uproar.” She suggests compiling data on how different states categorize the deaths of their innocents as a good start.

Meanwhile, Dan Drezner, blogging at Foreign Policy, notes that Carpenter wrote a follow-up post with her findings, stating:

This analysis suggests that collateral damage rather than war crimes now constitute the majority of civilian deaths in international wars worldwide, and that the total number of collateral damage deaths is 20 times higher than at the turn of the last century.

Hmmm. Drezner isn’t so sure about Carpenter’s conclusions, and thinks they are “surprising” for two reasons. The number of “interstate wars” has actually declined over the last thirty years, so “an increase in the absolute numbers of civilian collateral damage would not be expected.” In addition, the alleged “bump in collateral damage also took place during a revolution in precision-guided munitions—which, in theory, was supposed to reduce the likelihood of collateral damage.” And there’s a bit of a silver lining to this rather depressing subject: “one could argue that the good news portion of this is that the intentional killing of civilians is trending downward.”

Meanwhile, Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin brings a new poll to our attention, showing more bad news for the Obama administration. According to Quinnipiac University, the American people are growing increasingly unhappy with the president’s indecisiveness (or careful thinking, depending on your point of view) on the war in Afghanistan. 62 percent of voters think that “eliminating the threat of terrorists operating from Afghanistan” is a “worthwhile” goal, and a plurality support General Stanley McChrystal’s plan to send more troops. Despite these seemingly healthy numbers, Americans are getting impatient with the war. Rubin writes that Obama’s “dithering has arguably done two things. First, it has allowed Americans’ natural and understandable aversion to long-term military commitments to build. . . . and has likely eroded confidence in the president.” After months of inaction, the real question is “once he makes a decision, can the president convince Americans and our enemies that he is serious about carrying it out?”

Scolding Beijing (November 17)

President Obama continued his Asian jaunt yesterday with a tour of Beijing and meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Chris Good, blogging at the Atlantic, writes that Obama broached a taboo topic with the Chinese: human rights. Speaking with students at a town-hall gathering in Shanghai, Obama stated:

America will always speak out for these core principles around the world...These freedoms of expression and worship -- of access to information and political participation -- we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities -- whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation.

While Good observes that “uttered anywhere else in the world, an almost passing reference to religious equality could me taken as milquetoast repetition of a general American ideal,” he thinks the fact that Obama made this statement in oppressive China “it’s worth noting.” In what has become standard operating procedure for him, Obama included references to America’s own failings, noting that we haven’t done a very good job of protecting human rights in the past (slavery, not allowing women to vote, etc.). Good helpfully provides the full text of Obama’s statement; check it out here.

But at the Weekly Standard, Kelley Currie disagrees with Good’s rosy analysis of Obama’s human-rights talk. Pointing out that the president had some choice words for the Burmese junta at Sunday’s ASEAN summit, she wonders why he couldn’t have done the same to the Chinese. Despite being given a huge opening by a Chinese official, who bizarrely claimed that Obama should understand the occupation of Tibet because he is black (in Chinese minds there is a connection between their subjugation of Tibetans and Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves), the president said nothing about Lhasa or the Dalai Llama. Instead, he gave the boilerplate statement Good quoted, and partially used the Civil War to illustrate America’s moral problems. Unfortunately, unlike a certain Cambridge police sergeant, notes Currie, “There was no teachable moment for China’s future leaders.”

At that other bastion of Rightworld, National Review’s Mark Steyn relays a new revelation about Fort Hood shooter Nadal Hasan: that he psychologically abused U.S. soldiers. In his work as a therapist, Hasan was supposed to help American troops readjust to civilian life. Instead, according to ABC News, he violated doctor-patient confidentiality and recommended that some of them be prosecuted for war crimes. “Imagine you’re back from a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Steyn writes. “The Army assigns you a shrink who tries to convert you to Islam, and looks on his ‘counseling’ sessions as war-crimes interrogations.” Since Army officials didn’t do anything about Hasan’s disregard for medical procedure, Steyn thinks “The US military appears awfully close to having colluded in Major Hasan’s abuse of his patients.” Snidely, he notes that “But that’s okay, it’s not like they’re Gitmo detainees or anything . . .”

Elsewhere, Steve Clemons of the Washington Note happily reports that Republican Senator Richard Lugar and Democratic Representative Howard Berman have joined forces to end the ban on traveling to Cuba. The duo wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald making their case, emphasizing that exposing Cubans to the outside world will help bring down the autocratic Castro regime. And our tourist dollars could help strengthen “the underground economy and the small self-employed sector permitted by the state.” Indeed. Your servant is looking forward to the cigars and mojitos.

Try Them (November 16)

The Obama administration’s Friday announcement that self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) will face trial in New York in a civilian court has driven right-wingers a little batty. John Yoo and Andy McCarthy both have both put out responses to the decision (Yoo’s is here, McCarthy’s here) pointing out that civilian trials will force government intelligence to become public, thus negating its usefulness. And over at Frum Forum, Elise Cooper worries that the trial will become a circus, focusing on the alleged “abuses” of the U.S. government in general and the Bush administration in particular, instead of KSM and his jihad.

Matthew Yglesias, however, is quite skeptical of these claims. He identifies one of the Right’s talking points throughout the KSM affair: that a law-enforcement approach to terrorism doesn’t work. Better to put the country on a war footing and treat the terrorists as enemy combatants, with all the trappings such a classification brings: the ability to deal with suspects without the constraints of a civilian court, and try them in secret military tribunals when necessary.

Besides being “nonsensical,” Yglesias thinks this narrative is self-defeating. While it appears to be tough on terrorism, it actually grants terrorists an unwarranted seriousness and legitimacy. Dealing with them as enemy combatants and claiming the nation is at war partakes “of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war.” What we really should be doing is stating “that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.” Treating terrorists as soldiers in a global war against the United States overstates their importance and lends them an undue amount of perverse glory. Washington should try to “drain anti-American violence” of this aura, “and that means by-and-large treating its perpetrators like criminals.”

Meanwhile, Noah Pollack, blogging at Contentions, writes that Richard Goldstone (the South African jurist who authored an eponymously titled report for the UN) is making public statements that are discrediting his findings—specifically as they pertain to Israel and war crimes. Pollack notes that Goldstone told Forward that “If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven,” meaning that allegations of war crimes against Israel are quite shaky. And now he has made a statement to Haaretz arguing that the United Nations should focus more on identifying abuses in all countries, and less on obsessively analyzing Israel’s human-rights record. As such, Pollack wonders when Goldstone’s “campaign of inquisition against other democracies begin? Someone should ask him.”

Finally, the New Republic’s Michael Crowley has an interesting tidbit on the Afghan war. Crowley links to an otherwise unremarkable New York Times story on the monetary costs of the conflict—except it contains a paragraph illustrating the declining support for the war in the Democratic congressional caucus. Representative John Murtha, who chairs a subcommittee on appropriations, said “he thought a majority of the 258 Democrats in the House would vote against any bill to pay for more troops.” Crowley believes “would be remarkable to see Obama lose the House Dems on such a crucial foreign policy vote so early in his presidency.” But this seems to be what Murtha is suggesting. Your servant realizes the Afghanistan-as-Vietnam analogy is horribly clichéd at this point, but will the two conflicts have similar domestic consequences as well? I.e. a fractured Democratic Party splintered by bitter infighting over foreign-policy? To come full circle on the cliché meme, time will tell.

Rough Justice (November 13)

In a victory of sorts for the Obama administration, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is set to be put on civilian trial in the Southern District Court of New York. The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer is pretty happy with the decision. “The eyes of the world will be on this trial,” he writes, “and anything less than a full and fair proceeding will undermine the legitimacy of the ultimate result.” Serwer pooh-poohs the concerns of Republicans (and some Democrats) the proceedings will be more trouble than they are worth—namely that they will force the government to divulge state secrets and other important counterterrorism information, as required by due process. Citing this issue, a bipartisan group of senators—including Lindsey Graham, Jim Webb, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor and Joe Lieberman—tried to stop the Obama administration with an appropriations-bill amendment prohibiting the trial of terror suspects in criminal courts. Serwer doesn’t seem to care about the possible loss of intelligence, and instead thinks Graham et al. are afraid of civilian courts for another reason:

In a public proceeding, the information about the torture of KSM and others is bound to be a part of the process. I suspect that's the real reason Graham and others would prefer KSM be tried by military commission. KSM was waterboarded 183 times while in American custody.

Maybe. But the revelation of potentially valuable intelligence is a serious concern that shouldn’t be ignored. Far more skilled scribes than your servant have made note of this; check out an October Wall Street Journal op-ed by former–Attorney General Michael Mukasey for a good summary of the other side’s approach.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, writing at the Corner, confines his thoughts on the Mohammed-civilian trials matter to a mere sentence: “KSM thought he’d get a lawyer and a civilian trial and at the end of the day he was right.” Indeed.

Elsewhere, Jennifer Rubin is in a tizzy at Contentions over a new Eli Lake dispatch in today’s Washington Times. According to Lake’s story, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) is skirting lobbying rules by acting as an advocacy organization in matters it isn’t supposed to have a hand in. The group, for example, tried to sabotage the nomination of Dennis Ross to oversee the administration’s Iran policy, out of fear he would be too tough on Tehran. NIAC is also against slapping harsh economic sanctions on the Iranian regime, and its leader, Trita Parsi, has a rather dubious reputation. Rubin notes that he occasionally seems like an apologist for the mullahs, and that both he and NIAC “have done their best to insulate the Iranian regime from criticism and to oppose any military or economic action against it.” For more evidence of Parsi’s pro-Iran leanings, Rubin suggests looking at a Jeffrey Goldberg post on a recent J Street panel on Iran. At the meeting, Parsi was part of a consensus alleging that, according to Goldberg, “Iran doesn’t think about Israel, doesn’t care about Israel, and certainly doesn’t want to obliterate Israel.” This is a view that is, in all likelihood, not very plausible—and would give supporters of Israel reason to worry if Parsi is influencing the Obama administration’s Mideast policy.

The Voiceless (November 12)

With President Obama’s request for his national-security team to provide him with more planning options for Afghanistan, the war has suddenly been catapulted back into the headlines. Right on cue, there’s also an important revelation about the Taliban in today’s Washington Post: apparently the fundamentalist group is seeking to distance itself from al-Qaeda. Spencer Ackerman is “dubious about the al-Qaeda/Taliban divergence precisely because [he] want[s] to believe it.” Instead, he points to an Australian op-ed by Leah Farrall, a former al-Qaeda expert for the Australian Federal Police. Farrall argues that the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan. Ackerman is enamored with her analysis, because she focuses on what Ackerman calls “supply-side security analysis,” i.e. looking at groups like al-Qaeda and trying to discern their goals and prospects, instead of “demand-side security analysis,” which examines, among other things, how to mitigate popular support for terrorist organizations. It’s a nifty dichotomy. Ackerman also believes that as an outsider, Farrall is able to cut through some of the shibboleths of the Afghan policy debate. For instance, “there is no constituency within the Obama administration’s internal debate for drawing down or withdrawing from Afghanistan,” so that side of the argument isn’t heard all that much in Washington. As such, Farrall’s opinions are valuable for an American audience.

Or maybe not. Although Ackerman gives Farrall rather glowing reviews, claiming that “her blog, All Things Counterterrorism, is attracting ever-more attention in U.S. defense circles,” The National Interest has had its own experience with the Australian blogger that would suggest otherwise. In September, Ms. Farrall assailed an article on Afghanistan by TNI Contributing Editor Bruce Hoffman, alleging that it was factually inaccurate. The piece, of course, was not, and Professor Hoffman demolished Farrall’s claims in a reply to her blog post. For whatever reason, Hoffman’s rebuttal prompted Farrall to write a flurry of responses. Go here and here and here and here and here and here (whew!) to check them out. If you are able to persevere through all six of them, you will hope that Ms. Farrall is not “attracting ever-more attention in U.S. defense circles”—and woe betide us if she is.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesisas thinks this whole discussion is moot. Farrell won’t attract any attention in Washington because “she thinks we should withdraw from Afghanistan.” As Ackerman noted, there’s not a sizeable group of politicians in the United States who think we should pack up and get out of Kabul. “Instead,” Yglesias writes,

the debate among civilians runs from ‘we should stick with the increase in troop levels that Obama has already executed’ to ‘we should engage in large additional increases in troop levels.’ And within the uniformed military it seems that everyone wants large additional increases.

Good point. Further, as long as our armed forces are trained to win wars (as they should be), issues of military victory and defeat “will predominate.” The situation would be very different, Yglesias argues, “if military planners were expected to come up with deficit neutral proposals capable of attracting 60 votes in the Senate—that would end the war in the blink of an eye.”

The Dispensable Nation (November 11)

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall has put the blogosphere in a nostalgic mood, as bloggers compare our current problems to those we faced two decades ago, before the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union. Over at the Washington Note, Ben Katcher points out that during the Cold War, it was a good time to be a friend of the United States—because Washington “guaranteed its allies security from the Soviet Union.” But today, “this question-- which seems so basic-- is difficult to answer.” Although we’re still the world’s preeminent military power and can offer protection for “international commerce as well as for baseline, worst-case scenario security guarantees,” this type of protection is not very useful when trying to convince other states to hew to our line. For example,

the United States cannot easily threaten to withhold a portion of its security guarantee or its protection of international waterways if (say) Turkey chooses not to support the United States' policy toward (say) Iran. Compounding the problem is that the worst-case scenarios in which American military power would be necessary are more difficult to imagine today.

In short, everyone is living off of our largesse and doing precious little for us in return. We can’t exactly punish a recalcitrant ally (like France circa 2003) by withdrawing our navy from the high seas and telling international commerce that it is on its own. As such, Katcher thinks that “it is not so much the lack of American power that is the problem (it still has plenty), but rather the fact that its bargaining position is paradoxically undermined by its extraordinary role.”

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin thinks America has quite a lot to offer the world—namely the arrogance of our president, Barack Obama. Rubin draws our attention to a Michael Gerson column in today’s Washington Post, with which she unsurprisingly agrees. Gerson’s subject is the president’s alleged narcissism in his foreign policy, namely that America contributed few positive things to the world before his election last November. Gerson argues that Obama’s “no drama” persona is rather bizarre, especially when confronted with a horrible event: “In a tragedy—such as the Fort Hood shootings—his public reactions can be oddly muted and medicinal. What makes Obama outraged? For what would he willingly sacrifice his popularity, his pride, his presidency?”

Rubin concurs. Americans are now seeing “what was inviting or alluring during a campaign (He doesn’t get rattled!) is startlingly inappropriate for governance (What’s wrong with him?).” The end of America’s love affair with President Obama is also because he doesn’t act, well, very presidential: “He attacks a news network. He dawdles on war-planning. He seems to cheerlead less for America than for ‘multilateralism.’ He doesn’t put forth his own legislation but defers to the left wing of his own party.” At least we know where Ms. Rubin stands.

As if the right-wing couldn’t be anymore upset with the president, Paul Mirengoff of Powerline takes Obama to task for what Mirengoff sees as his weakness in dealing with Russia and China. Instead of refusing to put up with Beijing’s shenanigans and Moscow’s general bellicosity, Obama is accommodating and seeks to assuage both countries’ deep inferiority complexes and animus toward the West. Although “Obama may proclaim that the era of great-power competiton [sic] is over and that, in his words, the pursuit of power ‘must no longer be seen as a zero sum game.’ But India, Japan and (I suspect) virtually every other nation in world understands that this is nonsense.” Kowtowing to hostile states and leaving allies hanging out to dry is no way to run a foreign policy.

Double Standards (November 10)

Amid news reports that Fort Hood shooter Nadal Hasan communicated with an extremist anti-American imam, the blogosphere is still abuzz with discussion of the massacre. Jeffrey Goldberg, blogging at the Atlantic, shifts his attention from the attack itself to the media’s coverage of it. Although this consensus is beginning to change, many in the press adopted a narrative about Hasan that Goldberg sums up with a quote from the Atlantic Wire: “A 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, he appears to have not been motivated by his Muslim religion, his Palestinian heritage (he is American by nationality), or any related political causes.”

But Goldberg doesn’t think this interpretation is the whole story. Why is nothing being made of Hasan’s religion, which could lend a sort of “broader meaning” to the tragedy? Goldberg astutely notes that “This is the second time this year American soldiers on American soil have been gunned down by a Muslim who was reportedly unhappy with America’s wars in the Middle East (the first took place in Arkansas, to modest levels of notice).” As such, it’d be appropriate to talk about Hasan’s Muslim faith when talking about his decision to murder American soldiers.

Although Goldberg isn’t arguing “American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America” he does find it odd that the media are trying their best “to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims.” To get his point across, Goldberg suggests a thought experiment:

If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course.

Since “elite opinion makers” make little to no effort “try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism,” why do Muslims get special treatment? Goldberg thinks it “would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.”

Matthew Yglesias disagrees. He doesn’t “recall George Tiller’s killing—or Eric Rudolf’s before him—as having touched-off some kind of widespread social or intellectual attack on American Christianity.” That’s mostly true. But one could argue that the low-level sniping that the commentariat constantly engages in against evangelical Christians—the charges of backwardness constantly leveled against pro-life politicians, for example—classifies as a “widespread social or intellectual attack on American Christianity”; one that probably wouldn’t be acceptable if it was conducted against another faith (i.e. Islam). As Yglesias cleverly puts it, however, “it is what it is. After all, what are you really supposed to say about religion.” Hasan’s despicable acts don’t take away from the fact that “fortunately the vast majority of people professing every faith, along with the vast majority of those professing no faith, are rejecting violence and not killing people.”

Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, meanwhile, links to articles from the Washington Post and New York Times detailing Hasan’s immersion in radical Islam. Drum wonders if these revelations “make the ‘terrorist’ theory more or less likely than before,” but isn’t ready to draw any conclusions. At the very least, however, it means that Islamic extremism “had been on his mind for quite a while.”

Homegrown Terror (November 9)

New Republic editor Marty Peretz is not one to mince words, and he certainly doesn’t in a blog post on last week’s massacre at Fort Hood. “This Was An Act Of Jihad,” Peretz says. He realizes that “Nidal Malik Hasan was also crazy,” which is the initial reason many in the press gave (and some are still giving) for Hasan’s killing spree—namely that he had deep psychological problems and didn’t want to fight overseas, so he snapped. But Peretz thinks this reasoning is a bit silly. “Which suicide bomber,” he asks, “even one inspired by what the president continues to call the ‘Holy Koran,’ as if that nomenclature would moderate the hatred of America in the world of Islam, is not crazy?” Good question. And there are going to be plenty more questions to follow. Like how could Hasan “be permitted to serve as a psychiatrist among men and women who, like he himself, were about to be sent to war . . . or were returning from war?” And “if you had just returned from duty in Afghanistan or Iraq and having troubles readjusting to home, wouldn’t you be a little freaked out that your decommissioning shrink was wearing native Arab dress as Hasan often did at Fort Hood?” These are all valid queries that need to be answered in any investigation of Hasan. This process is probably going to be immensely difficult, because it deals with one of the thorniest issues in modern-day America: diversity. Peretz says that “ours is a culture very edgy about discussing such matters lest someone in the room be offended or that our conclusions turn out to be, well, very uncomfortable.” And our conclusions probably will be quite uncomfortable.

Andrew Sullivan agrees with Peretz’s main premise that Hasan’s attack was an act of jihad. According to the Daily Telegraph (London) Hasan had made a number of statements in front of military colleagues voicing support for jihadism and even “once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers [i.e., non-Muslims] should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.” These statements would clearly make “religious fanaticism” one of the root causes of the shootings. “To have an army psychiatrist giving talks on Jihad in a military context and not have anyone call him on it,” Sullivan writes, “or take measures to monitor him, or challenge him is ... mind-blowing. It’s p.c. at its most lethal.” As an update to his original post, Sullivan notes that NPR picked up on this aspect of the story, but their report reveals another troubling aspect of the case: at the lecture, Hasan was challenged for his beliefs, “and yet no one monitored him or disciplined him for this. He may not have been in any way connected to al Qaeda. But the point is: he didn’t have to be. This kind of Jihad requires no sleeper cell—just a murderous, fundamentalist psyche.”

In a rare occurrence that probably won’t happen for another harvest moon, someone writing at National Review’s the Corner concurs with Andrew Sullivan. The blogger in question, Roger Clegg, picks up on the elements of political correctness in the treatment of Hasan that annoyed both Peretz and Sullivan. He notes that army General George Casey stated that “A diverse Army gives us strength,” in response to questions regarding the fact that Hasan is a Muslim. Clegg thinks we need to have a reality check. Although there’s “nothing wrong” with diversity in general, its advantages “are greatly exaggerated.” As such, “if the Army becomes somewhat less diverse in order to keep our soldiers from being killed,” it won’t be the end of the world. In fact, ‘a diverse Army gives us strength’ only if it is non-diverse when it comes to things like loyalty and reliability.” This isn’t to say that “Muslim soldiers are inherently disloyal or unreliable,” which is obviously “not true.” But it should mean “that the scrutiny of soldiers’ loyalty and reliability ought not be discouraged because it has, horrors!, a politically incorrect ‘disparate impact’ on some demographic groups.”

Repeating Soviet Mistakes (November 6)

Hamid Karzai’s dubious reelection as Afghan president has sparked a lot of discussion among the commentariat about the purpose of our presence in Afghanistan. David Ignatius thinks Karzai should either clean up his act or face an American withdrawal. The New York Times’ editorial board had a similar argument. And Charles Krauthammer wrote that President Obama needs to stop blaming George W. Bush for all his Afghanistan-related problems.

Today, over at the Washington Note, Steve Clemons lends his voice to the debate. He believes that “that the US has lost site [sic] of its al Qaeda-rationalized strategic objectives in Afghanistan and stumbled into a civil war.” When we initially invaded Afghanistan, it was to overthrow the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. Now our mission has transformed into an amorphous blob. Are we still trying to defeat al-Qaeda? Do we want to defeat the Taliban too? And why are we spending tons of money on nation building? Add to this that we haven’t yet achieved any of these objectives, despite being in the country for eight years. Clemons worries that:

The Afghanistan quagmire is also an ongoing global embarrassment of American impotence in failing to redirect and rewire one of the poorest nations of the world. The cost can't be measured just in terms of troops and dollars but also fueling Iran's ambitions and those of other would-be foes and the costs of doubt in US abilities among allies.

As such, Clemons believes we need to look to a new diplomatic approach—a “Bonn Conference II”—to draw together “various power players across the board in Afghanistan.” This would help to settle Afghanistan’s civil war, which is the true problem we face in the country. Unfortunately, “that kind of political compact may be undermined rather than moved along by a surge of more US hard power into Afghanistan.” Which, of course, is exactly what General McChrystal has asked for.

Peter Worthington, writing at Frum Forum, disagrees. McChrystal’s strategy is the right approach to take—and Obama should be chastised for his “indecision or procrastination or whatever it is.” Worthington notes that some members of the administration want to adopt a “secure the cities” approach to Afghanistan, and leave the countryside to the Taliban. History, Worthington argues, should give Obama pause before he enacts such a strategy. In their own invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviets bulked up in the cities and left the countryside to the mujahideen. Their war effort was a total failure. In another Communist operation, the Angolan MPLA “used Soviet and Cuban troops to secure the cities, and left the countryside to the ever-expanding pro-West UNITA forces of Jonas Savimbi.” Savimbi won. The list goes on: “In Malaya, communists were beaten in the countryside, not the cities. Mao Zedong won China in the countryside, not the cities.”

In short, such a compromise measure is not a good idea. “The only chance for success, if not outright victory,” writes Worthington, “is sufficient boots on the ground to protect villages and rural areas from Taliban insurgents. This assumes that locals don’t want a return of the Taliban. Evidence is overwhelming that they don’t.” Obama needs to bite the bullet and deploy more troops to Afghanistan. What is really frustrating is that the president seemed to realize this back in March, when he intoned that the war in Afghanistan was absolutely necessary to prevent al-Qaeda from regaining a foothold in the country. “Nothing has changed” since then, says Worthington—“only Obama.”

Obama’s Mideast Failure (November 5)

The Obama administration’s Arab-Israeli policy has been mighty confusing lately, as Hillary Clinton seemed to walk back Obama’s demand for an Israeli settlement freeze earlier this week, only to recant and state that it still remained the White House’s goal. Yahya Mahmassani, ambassador of the Arab League, voiced the organization’s frustrations with Obama: “He is a good man and his intentions are good, but we are back to square one.” Oddly enough, Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin agrees. Well, at least on Mahmassani’s statement that the peace process hasn’t really gone anywhere under Obama’s watch. Rubin thinks the president’s “key error was in adopting the Palestinian bargaining gambit as our own—namely, insisting on an unattainable absolute freeze on settlements. This of course encouraged Palestinian intransigence and Israeli mistrust.” And it didn’t bode well for bringing both sides to the table. As the months have dragged on without any progress, the Israelis and Palestinians have only grown more upset with Washington, meaning that Obama’s quest to stop the settlements achieved nothing, save “ultimately alienating both sides.”

Rubin places the blame for the diplomatic failure on the shoulders of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama political guru David Axelrod, both of whom supposedly “egged Obama on” to adopt the settlements strategy “and figured they might outfox Bibi Netanyahu or, better yet, orchestrate his downfall.” In another administration, the promoters of bad policy might get fired. But in Obamaland, this isn’t the case, says Rubin. “Emanuel and Axelrod have moved on to running the Afghanistan war, Clinton is ‘reasserting herself,’ George Mitchell is racking up the frequent-flyer miles, and James Jones is doing whatever it is James Jones does.”

In other Israel-related matters, Powerline’s Scott Johnson notes that the Israeli navy has intercepted an Iranian-owned ship filled with weapons destined for either Syria or Hezbollah. Despite this rather blatant evidence of foul play, the Obama administration is still determined to negotiate with the rogue state. In the face of protests yesterday in Tehran—with some in the crowd even chanting “Obama, Obama—either you’re with them or you’re with us,”—the White House released a statement claiming that “We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power.” Johnson is appalled: “Addressed to the world’s leading supporter of terrorism and enemy of the United States, this statement really is an astonishing embarrassment.”

Elsewhere in the region, Matthew Yglesias informs us that there’s even more bad news emanating from Pakistan. Apparently the Pakistani Army is growing weary of Washington’s insistence on moving beyond its historically close ties to the military in favor of “a broader relationship with Pakistan aimed at improving ordinary Pakistanis’ view of the United States and bolstering civilian governance.” To this end, Yglesias relays a Boston Globe dispatch reporting that Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, “hasn’t been home in eight months because he’s afraid of being targeted by physical violence aimed at charging him with being too pro-American.” The Globe story also quotes an analyst for the International Crisis Group as saying that the attacks are part of an intentional military campaign to weaken the civilian government—possibly in preparation for a coup. Yglesias writes that if he “were the Pakistani military I would, official statements to the contrary aside, be skeptical that American policymakers would actually follow through on threats to seriously oppose a coup.” All in all, not a very good news day.

Grading Obama (November 4)

The Democrats suffered a big loss last night, as voters in Virginia and New Jersey rejected the party’s candidates for governor. Although it’s probably premature to draw too many conclusions from yesterday’s polls, some pundits think that they should serve as a warning to President Obama that his revival of left-wing economic policies isn’t proving very popular. If Americans are tiring of the president’s domestic agenda, are they having similar feelings about his foreign policy? Dan Drezner, blogging at Foreign Policy, observes that “a year after Barack Obama’s election,” he’s “seeing a lot of post-mortems on his administration’s first year in foreign policy.” Using a Ben Smith Politico story as a springboard for his thoughts, Drezner doesn’t really agree with those rushing to label Obama’s foreign-policy a failure. Although administration officials would be very happy if their diplomatic prowess were such that it could convince recalcitrant states to do what we wanted them to, they aren’t “stupid people” and Drezner is “pretty sure that they know the limits of diplomatic goodwill and reasoned discourse.”

In addition, it’s always wise to grade new presidents “on a curve” in comparison to their predecessors. How does Obama stack up? Drezner thinks pretty well, especially considering that “most incoming administrations screw up plenty in their first year in office.” Clinton had “lip-flopping over Haiti, dithering over Bosnia, screw-ups over Japan, etc”; George W. had “a lack of consultation with allies over treaty withdrawals, a dramatic policy shift on North Korea that badly embarrassed South Korea’s leadership and eventually had to be walked back, and that whole failure-to-prevent 9/11 problem”; and even George H.W. ordered “a strategic review of the Soviet Union that was overtaken by events the moment it was finished.” So Obama isn’t the first president to have early problems with his foreign policy. Drezner thinks he might have to change course on Israel and Afghanistan, but otherwise he is “shooting par for the course.”

Meanwhile, the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen has a dispatch from the Republican fever swamps. Apparently Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina claimed earlier this week that Americans have “more to fear” from healthcare reform than they do “from any terrorist right now in any country.” Umm . . . OK. Unfortunately, Benen notes that this healthcare > terror theme is becoming rather popular among the House GOP, with other members making similar comparisons. “Far be it for me to give reform opponents advice,” writes Benen, “but my hunch is this isn’t going to sway people—equating health care reform and terrorism tends to appear insane to casual observers” and it’s unclear how exactly such spacey rhetoric would intimidate the Democrats.

Before we go, Ben Katcher has an interesting post at the Washington Note on Turkey’s new foreign policy. Ankara’s shift away from the West toward its Muslim brethren in the Middle East has been a popular topic as of late, with both Foreign Affairs and the Economist weighing in on the matter. Instead of just being an internal decision inspired by the Islamist tinge of the ruling Justice and Development Party, Katcher thinks Turkey has been forced eastward by the policies of—wait for it—the Bush administration. When Bush wanted to shake things up in the Middle East by encouraging democratic governance and invading Iraq, Ankara panicked and began to distance itself from Washington. Unlike America, Turkey has to deal with instability in the region, as the Arab countries lie right in its own backyard. Stability and the status quo are of interest to the Turks, not revolutionary democracy promotion. This realpolitik explains the unfortunate drift of our erstwhile ally.

Tortured Logic (November 3)

Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator, became a hero of the Left earlier this year when he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times questioning the efficacy of torture. Unfortunately, one of the claims he made in the article—namely, that he extracted actionable intelligence from former al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah without using enhanced interrogation—was inaccurate. In July, former Bush administration official Marc Thiessen wrote a post for National Review’s the Corner in which he used a Washington Post story to document discrepancies between Soufan’s timeline the Zubaydah interrogation and what actually occurred.

Over the weekend, a new chapter was opened in the Soufan saga when the ACLU re-released the Department of Justice inspector general’s report on torture, updated with some recently declassified information. Returning to the Corner, Thiessen states that the updated report simply confirms what he initially suspected: Soufan’s NYT op-ed was stretching the truth. Soufan had initially claimed that he got Zubaydah to confess information about Jose Padila, the infamous “dirty bomber,” without using torture. But the Justice Department documents reveal that Soufan only questioned Zubaydah after enhanced interrogation had been used. Thus, his claims to have gleaned information from him without torture are misleading.

In addition, the inspector general’s report states that the CIA, not the FBI (and hence, not Soufan) found out about Jose Padila from Zubaydah in the first place. And, alas, the IG’s source for this information is none other than “Soufan’s own partner, Agent Gibson.” So, “in other words,” writes Thiessen, “Soufan’s claims that a) he got the information on Jose Padilla, and b) he did so before enhanced interrogation techniques were applied, are both lies.”

For all intents and purposes, it looks as if this is true. But there’s more to the story. Adam Serwer, blogging at Tapped, notes that the CIA didn’t allow the DOJ inspector general to interview Zubaydah, and that the excuse it gave for doing so “is pretty flimsy.” Why would Langley do this? Serwer isn’t sure. In any case, Zubydah’s not being interviewed doesn’t have much of an impact on Thiessen’s musings, as the aforementioned Agent Gibson is more likely to tell the truth than a terrorist detainee. But the whole affair goes to show how little has actually been revealed about the seedy underbelly of the war on terror—and new controversies that could be uncovered in the future.

Unsettling (November 2)

After a period of relative quiet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has come roaring back in a big way, as she tours the Middle East to promote President Obama’s overseas agenda. Jennifer Rubin, blogging at Contentions, thinks Clinton’s bid to enhance her stature within the administration is an “interesting decision,” given that her tenure at State began ten months ago. Further, Hillary’s “coming-out party isn’t going so well.” Her swing through Pakistan, Israel and the Gulf states has been complicated by some of her boss’s positions—especially on the need for Israel to cease construction of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

In addition, Rubin thinks that Clinton’s time at the State Department has been marked by “a run of embarrassing and potentially harmful errors,” including “yanking the rug out from under our Eastern European allies, emboldening the Russians, letting the Iranian regime off the hook for Qom, big-footing Honduras, and moving two steps back in the Middle East.” So maybe, if she’s interested in preserving her own reputation (or future career prospects), Clinton’s “obscurity wasn’t so bad after all.”

Spencer Ackerman is also worried about Mrs. Clinton’s performance, choosing to focus on a joint press conference the secretary gave with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on her aforementioned trip to Israel. As you probably know, the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has been a big headache for the Obama administration. Initially, the president insisted that Israel had to agree to a general freeze on construction as a precondition for new peace talks with the Palestinians. But after looking at Hillary’s statement on the matter from her press conference, Ackerman isn’t so sure the White House holds that view any more. He “can’t figure out” if the secretary offered “an actual climb-down from the settlement freeze, but it certainly sounds like Clinton (and, through her, Obama) doesn’t have the heart to keep to the precondition.”

If so, this position shift would be very bad for Mahmoud Abbas, who has staked his reputation on getting Israel to halt settlement construction. Ackerman elaborates: “Some very smart and very moderate Palestinians—people who want peace, two states and nonviolence—recently explained to me that they get their legs cut out under them if they negotiate while Israel expands the settlements.” So if Abbas’s political future is destroyed, who will be the next Palestinian interlocutor? Marwan Barghouti, a former terrorist who now resides in an Israeli prison? Or an Islamist radical from Hamas? The prospects are not good for Israel and the West if Palestinian moderates are discredited. Ackerman hopes Obama will realize what is happening before its too late. If you’d like to learn more about the internal dynamics of Palestinian political life and the link between Israeli settlements and the broader peace process, please go here to read Khalil Shikaki’s article on the subject from the November/December National Interest.

Over at Think Progress, Matthew Yglesias agrees with Ackerman. Benjamin Netanyahu, Yglesias insists, likes the predicament Abbas and Obama find themselves in, as he “doesn’t want to freeze settlements, he doesn’t want to remove settlements, and he doesn’t want a comprehensive peace agreement.” But as he doesn’t want to explicitly say these things, Yglesias thinks Bibi’s “best hope is either that a humiliated Fatah leadership loses to Hamas, or else that Fatah leaders need to move so far to the right to forestall that from happening that there’s nothing to negotiate over.” Either way, this would be “a disaster for peace and ultimately for Israel.”

Other Articles by The National Interest:

11.20.09

Trying KSM

Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s trial in a New York civilian court is already a farce.

11.20.09

Foreign Policy Advisory Index

The chief of the CIA makes a trip to Pakistan; Karzai makes Clinton happy; the administration takes on nuclear proliferators.

11.19.09

TNI Interview with Andranik Migranyan

09.09.09

TNI Interview with Ken Pollack

Ken Pollack, in an interview with TNI, discusses whether we would’ve been better off with Saddam Hussein, if the American military is on the brink of being kicked out of Baghdad and what the Iraq War was about in the first place. Click here to see the video.

07.27.09

TNI Interview with David Keene

David Keene discusses the future of the Republican Party and whether (and how) the GOP can be resuscitated. Click here to see the video.

07.16.09

Bruce Riedel on Pakistan's Implosion

Bruce Riedel discusses just how close Islamabad is to collapse and why we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking the situation is getting better there. Click here to see the video.