TIA Daily • November 12, 2010
David Petraeus's War
In a frantic effort to undo the damage of President Obama's rush to the exits, US officials are now declaring that our troops will still be in Afghanistan in large numbers through 2014.
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Top News Stories
- David Petraeus's War
- Playing the India Card
- Intellectual Climate Change, Part 1
- Intellectual Climate Change, Part 2
- The Unmasking of Barack Obama
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Top News Stories
Commentary by Robert Tracinski
1. David Petraeus's War
We've all been focused recently on the midterm elections, but now that they're over—and as we enjoy a brief lull before the lame duck session of Congress begins—it's time to refocus on foreign policy and the war, where there are some important new developments.
In Iraq, there is finally—seven months after the election—an agreement on how to form a new government. Former ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad accurately describes this deal-making as a kind of jockeying for influence between the US and Iran. The US has an interest in promoting the secular party of Ayad Allawi, who is able to keep the support of the Sunni tribes, while Iran wants to boost the Shiite religious parties.
The result seems to be a draw. After Obama failed in a ham-handed attempt to make a more favorable deal, the Iraqis settled on an arrangement that would give Allawi a lesser position but still allow him a degree of control over Iraq's National Security Council, which is the most important post, from our standpoint.
Overall, however, the length of time this political crisis dragged on, and its results, are a sign of the weak position President Obama has put the US in by stampeding for the exits in Iraq while appeasing Iran.
In Afghanistan, however, the midterm election may have had one of its desired effects. One of the revelations of Bob Woodward's latest book is that President Obama adopted a hard-and-fast deadline to begin withdrawal from Afghanistan, not because it was necessary to the military strategy, but in order to secure the support of the Democratic Party's far left.
Well, now that their support doesn't matter—the right now holds the balance of political power—the president is allowing the US military to get rid of the withdrawal deadline. US officials are now emphasizing, in their public statements, that our troops will still be in Afghanistan in large numbers through 2014. It is a frantic effort to undo the damage done by Obama's rush to the exits.
This is also, in part, the result of Obama's bungled firing of General McChrystal earlier this year. By bringing in Petraeus as the man who would save the Afghanistan campaign, the president gave the general the upper hand in setting policy: Obama cannot overrule Petraeus without suffering a crippling political embarrassment—and from the beginning, Petraeus's main demand has been to drop the withdrawal deadline.
Petraeus is right. Success in a counterinsurgency war depends on finding local allies who can be convinced to cooperate with US troops and with the Afghan government. But to do that, we need to show them that we can protect and reward our allies—and we can't do it while also telling them that we're going to disappear in nine months, leaving them to the mercy of a reconstituted Taliban.
"US Tweaks Message on Troops in Afghanistan," Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, November 10
The Obama administration is increasingly emphasizing the idea that the United States will have forces in Afghanistan until at least the end of 2014, a change in tone aimed at persuading the Afghans and the Taliban that there will be no significant American troop withdrawals next summer. In a move away from President Obama's deadline of July 2011 for the start of an American drawdown from Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all cited 2014 this week as the key date for handing over the defense of Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves. Implicit in their message, delivered at a security and diplomatic conference in Australia, was that the United States would be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan for at least four more years.
Administration officials said the three had made loosely coordinated comments at the conference, in Melbourne, to try to convince Afghans that the United States was not walking away next summer and to warn the Taliban that aggressive operations against them would continue. Although Mr. Obama and administration officials have repeatedly said that July 2011 would be only the start of troop withdrawals, the Taliban have successfully promoted the deadline among the Afghan populace as a large-scale exit of the 100,000 United States troops now in the country....
In Australia, Mr. Gates said the Taliban would be "very surprised come August, September, October and November, when most American forces are still there, and still coming after them."
The message shift is effectively a victory for the military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.
2. Playing the India Card
One of the big foreign-policy achievements of the Bush administration was its establishment of a new "special relationship" with India.
Twisted by socialist ideology and a bitter anti-Western reaction against colonialism, India spent the first four decades of its independence mired in socialist stagnation, leading an anti-Western "non-aligned" movement during the Cold War, and acting as a major market for Soviet military hardware—giving the lie to all of that bluster about being "non-aligned."
But the fall of the Soviet Union had a shattering effect on Indian socialism, and the country has spent the past two decades liberalizing its economy and unleashing its entrepreneurial spirit, with extraordinary results—and the country is just getting started. Increasing commercial ties with the US, combined with the influence back home of the large Indian diaspora in America, has fed a growing commercial and cultural bond between the two countries.
Bush followed up on this trend by making it clear he viewed India as an important economic and diplomatic partner—and also by replacing Russia as a supplier of military equipment. All of this has led to talk, in India, of a "special relationship" between the two powers. The strategic motive for this relationship, on our end, is simple: India is a relatively free country that could serve as a large and increasingly powerful counterbalance to China, on the one side, and the Muslim Middle East, on the other.
President Obama has been largely indifferent to India since taking office—showing more interest in appeasing China and Iran. Until now. Although conservatives have somewhat churlishly focused on the enormous cost of a visit to India by an American president and his imperial retinue, the good news is that Obama has finally picked up on Bush's India legacy.
The US relationship with India was on a sound footing—shared values, extensive commercial ties, and shared strategic interests—so it was bound to survive the neglect of a single one-term president. But it is good to see that it is not being neglected too badly.
"Obama Embraces India," Rich Lowry, National Review Online, November 9
After spending the early part of his administration kowtowing to China and neglecting India (the two weren't unrelated), Obama delivered on the first leg of his Asia trip. He forged closer ties to the robustly democratic nation of 1 billion people, partly as a hedge against the rise of a China resistant to his blandishments. Obama's speech to India's parliament was a long mash note. He called India and America "indispensable partners." He said that "the United States not only welcomes India as a rising global power, we fervently support it." He hailed its contributions to civilization, including the invention of the number zero. (How else could we denote our national debt?)
All of this was the logical follow-on to the civil nuclear accord forged between the US and India during Pres. George W. Bush's second term. That agreement signaled a new turn after decades of tensions when India headed the "nonaligned movement" during the Cold War and when the US imposed sanctions after India's 1998 nuclear-weapons tests. The embrace of India was one of Bush's most important moves on the geopolitical chessboard....
As former Bush administration ambassador to India Robert Blackwill wrote in 2007, "the alignment between India and the United States is now an enduring part of the international landscape."...
We should hope that India continues to emerge, its status as a friend now blessed by both President Bush and President Obama.
3. Intellectual Climate Change, Part 1
Watch out! With the first anniversary of Climategate approaching, the global warming propagandists are readying a new public relations campaign to push their bogus government-funded pseudo-science.
The real howler in the report below is that this campaign constitutes "a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media." Are you kidding me? You haven't been able to wedge these guys from in front of a camera for decades. What's hurting them right now is not too little media exposure, but too much.
So don't worry too much about the new campaign. They've launched wave after wave of these media blitzes over the years, but for the past few years, they've been spending a lot of time and money with little measurable result. They don't realize that Climategate has changed the intellectual climate, robbing them of their scientific credibility.
The global warming hysteria always depended on the illusion that there was a "consensus" and that there was no reputable dissent. That illusion has been permanently shattered. And the new campaign—based on an explicit declaration that "science and politics can't be divorced"—will only reinforce the public's doubts.
"Climate Scientists Plan Campaign Against Global Warming Skeptics," Neela Banerjee, Los Angeles Times, November 8
Faced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional conservatives who have threatened prominent researchers with investigations and vowed to kill regulations to rein in man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The still-evolving efforts reveal a shift among climate scientists, many of whom have traditionally stayed out of politics and avoided the news media. Many now say they are willing to go toe-to-toe with their critics, some of whom gained new power after the Republicans won control of the House in Tuesday's election....
John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate change skeptics, is also pulling together a "climate rapid response team," which includes scientists prepared to go before what they consider potentially hostile audiences on conservative talk radio and television shows.
"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.
4. Intellectual Climate Change, Part 2
Almost a year after Climategate, the global warming establishment is in disarray. With cap-and-trade virtually guaranteed to die in the next Congress, a "climate exchange" organized by global warming profiteers to engaged in the "trade" part of cap-and-trade, has collapsed, destroying millions of dollars from gullible investors.
In Britain—where Climategate was more vigorously publicized and even taken up as an old-fashioned newspaper crusade by several major papers—it has progressed farther. As a measure of how much the environmentalists have been demoralized, consider the recent British television special described below, in which a progression of greens admitted to various sins.
Note that they did not reject environmentalism or global warming as such. But they did confess to substantial evils, such as "misanthropy" in the way they advocated their views. They seem to be at much the same point as the old socialists immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union: still not ready to admit that their system was evil, but already doing a post-mortem on how they failed to achieve their utopia.
"What the Green Movement Got Wrong: Greens Come to See the Error of Their Ways ," Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, November 8
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this programme is that it was made at all. It shows how the Green monolith has cracked.... [I]t was a platform for every sinner that repenteth. Former hippy Greens, directors of Greenpeace, the chairmen of the Copenhagen Climate Council and the like, queued up to admit error....
At least three central reasons were identified.
Misanthropy. According to a veteran American Green, Stewart Brand, too many Greens believe "Nature good–humans not so good". This approach is ultimately unpersuasive, since it is human beings you are trying to persuade. A policy focused on preventing human activity is one which defies human nature....
Exaggeration. If you say that the end of the world is nigh all the time, people start to disbelieve you....
Damage. The most powerful part of the programme was that arguing that the Green obsession with banning and preventing things has done actual harm.... The banning of pesticides has led to the deaths of millions of Africans from malaria....
If the drift of this programme is correct, the consequences for politics will be large. All the main political parties have chosen to put their eggs in the frail, Fairtrade, hand-weaved basket of Greenery, imposing rising levies to develop "renewable" sources of power which cannot do the job demanded of them. The basket is starting to break. There will be a political prize, I suspect, for the first party which dares to put its eggs elsewhere.
5. The Unmasking of Barack Obama
President Obama's pretensions have been unmasked, one by one. We know that he isn't a "color-blind" leaders who is going to put racial politics to rest. We know that he isn't a charismatic global figure who is going to restore love and respect for America across the globe. We know that he isn't a "Democratic Reagan" whose personal appeal is going to win the support of independent voters for the policies of the left.
And now we know something else: he's a just plain lousy politician. In the aftermath of the election, Democratic politicians have begun grumbling about the president's slights to his political allies and his general failure at such political basics as shaking hands, doing meet-and-greets, and sitting down with people one-on-one to listen to their concerns. Follow the link below for some examples that will have you shaking your head in disbelief.
The picture that emerges is that Obama is comfortable only with the modus operandi of his 2008 campaign: receiving uncritical adulation from giant crowds at mass meetings. And he is too convinced of his own hype, too immersed in his own self-image as the charismatic leader of crowds, to change.
"Obama Isolated Ahead of 2012," Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, The Politico, November 8
President Barack Obama has...isolated himself from virtually every group that matters in American politics. Congressional Democrats consider him distant and blame him for their historic defeat on Tuesday. Democratic state party leaders scoff at what they see as an inattentive and hapless political operation. Democratic lobbyists feel maligned by his holier-than-thou take on their profession. His own Cabinet—with only a few exceptions—has been marginalized.
His relations with business leaders could hardly be worse. Obama has suggested it's a PR problem, but several Democratic officials said CEOs friendly with the president walk away feeling he's indifferent at best to their concerns. Add in his icy relations with Republicans, the media and, most important, most voters, and it's easy to understand why his own staff leaked word to POLITICO that it wants Obama to shake up his staff and change his political approach....
But many Democrats privately say they are skeptical that Obama is self-aware enough to make the sort of dramatic changes they feel are needed—in his relations with other Democrats or in his very approach to the job.
