It is hard for me, as a political junkie, to admit it, but I really do like the new President. I believe that I have lost whatever semblance of objectivity I might normally have when it comes to Mr. Obama. Part of it is that I invested, both financially and emotionally, in his candidacy in a way that I hadn't in any other election. I was completely taken in by his manner, his ability to articulate his positions, and what he professed to believe in. It wasn't that I agreed with him on everything, but I found that the areas where we disagreed, I could at least understand his argument and believed that his position to be a principled one. After eight years of the condescending bullshit 43 and his team shoveled out, Obama was the perfect antidote.
The other part, which Denise and I were talking about last night, is that there is a conspicuous lack of "Corporate" to the tone Obama has set in his first 100 days. He was criticized less than 10 days into office by the minions of the Occupant for his very informality, which frankly made Obama that much more appealing. He admitted mistakes, on the teevee no less. All these things, quite apart from the policy direction and actions he has taken, made this president different. He is, in short, my president in a way that is completely different from any other in my lifetime.
I was listening to Obama's news conference on the radio on the way home last night and heard him say something really familiar when he was responding to a question about the legality of waterboarding. He mentioned having "read recently" about how, during "The Blitz", Churchill had refused to allow the torture of captured spies. Obama was struck by how a leader, faced with the terror that accompanied the bombing of England by the Luftwaffe for 7 months (including a stretch of 57 consecutive nights) managed.
In listening to Obama retell the story, I could tell instantly that I had also read that article, published on Andrew Sullivan's blog, several days ago and had been struck by Churchill's essential humanity - I won't torture because 1) it is an ineffective and unreliable tool and 2) I will become the barbarism that I'm fighting. Here are his actual comments:
"I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.
And then the reason was that Churchill understood — you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s — what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.
And — and so I strongly believed that the steps that we’ve taken to prevent these kinds of enhanced interrogation techniques will make us stronger over the long term and make us safer over the long term because it will put us in a — in a position where we can still get information.
In some cases, it may be harder, but part of what makes us, I think, still a beacon to the world is that we are willing to hold true to our ideals even when it’s hard, not just when it’s easy.
At the same time, it takes away a critical recruitment tool that al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations have used to try to demonize the United States and justify the killing of civilians.
And it makes us — it puts us in a much stronger position to work with our allies in the kind of international, coordinated intelligence activity that can shut down these networks."
Anyway, I can't really express how gratifying it was to know that a few days ago, my president and I happened to stumble across the same article and had similar thoughts. I found that amazingly reassuring.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
The Act of Diplomacy
So my efforts at finding a new non-political interest isn't going as well as I hoped. I think I've blogged about Kaplan before and I'm not sure that I found him as thoughtful previously... not sure if that's because I'm more inclined toward the current administration, but I'd concede the point. That said, the alarmist rhetoric of the right following Obama's trip to the Summit of the Americas has particularly difficult to not comment on, and Kaplan articulated my sentiments with far more knowledgeable eloquence than I could. So, I will yield the floor to Mr. Kaplan to gently remind the reader of what diplomacy actually is.
NOTE: As is always the case, I recommend the original at Slate as it is annotated.
Handshake Diplomacy
What Obama's grip and grin with Hugo Chávez says about his foreign policy.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 5:19 PM ET
It's been so long since we've had a president disposed to diplomacy that many observers don't know what to think when they see one.
Take President Barack Obama's recent trip to the Summit of the Americas. At his April 19 press conference at Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he delivered—spontaneously, in response to a question—an eloquent summary of what an "Obama doctrine" might be, a succinct appraisal of the nature of power and foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.
And yet the media for the most part ignored this display of strategic acumen and focused on a moment, two days earlier, at the summit's opening ceremony, when Obama, approached by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, smiled and shook his hand.
One Republican senator gasped that it was "irresponsible" for the president to be "laughing and joking" with "one of the most anti-American leaders in the entire world." Former Vice President Dick Cheney grumbled on Fox News that the handshake "was not helpful" and could lead America's foes to "think they're dealing with a weak president." NBC's Andrea Mitchell likened the cordial greeting to John F. Kennedy's Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961, when the Soviet premier sized up the young president as a lightweight and, as a result, sent missiles to Cuba, sparking the gravest crisis of the nuclear era.
To which one can only respond: Are these people serious?
It might be a good thing for politicians and reporters to read a little history before indulging in historical analogies.
At the Vienna summit, Khrushchev warned Kennedy that if the West didn't give up its access rights to West Berlin by the end of the year, he would declare war and grab the city by force. At the time, the Soviet Union had 3 million troops occupying Eastern Europe, backed by an arsenal of nuclear weapons (though not as many as the United States thought), the two superpowers were locked in global ideological conflict, and the free enclave of West Berlin was landlocked 100 miles inside East German territory. Kennedy came away thinking he might face the prospect of war in a matter of months.
At the Americas summit, Chávez came up to Obama at a reception while cameras were whirring and handed him a book. Venezuela is a tiny country with one large oil company, a military budget barely 1 percent that of the United States, and no ability to project power beyond its borders.
When asked about this tête-à-tête at his press conference, Obama—properly—laughed off the criticism. He acknowledged Chávez's "inflammatory" anti-American rhetoric and their "great differences" on economic and foreign policy. However, he added:
It's unlikely that, as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chávez, that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, I would add, must be a little bit crazy.
The shockwaves over the handshake might best be explained as a hangover from the long years of George W. Bush's presidency, when dealings with those who disliked us were expressly forbidden, out of a vague fear that such contact might debilitate us or legitimize them. This fear is what was "not helpful." It tended to elevate the standing of a pipsqueak like Chávez; it made him seem more ominous than he was, and it made America seem like a he-man who's frightened by a mouse. By contrast, Obama's insouciant civility, far from appearing weak, strikes a chord of sense and self-confidence.
But our current president's approach isn't merely about polishing America's image; it also stands to serve America's tangible interests. And this is where his remarks on an "Obama doctrine" come into play.
NBC's Chuck Todd posed the question at the summit's-end press conference: "After observing you on the world stage the last three weeks, what are the pillars of 'the Obama doctrine'?"
Obama poked fun at the loftiness of the phrase, but then said, "There are a couple of principles that I've tried to apply across the board."
First, he said, the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, but today's problems can't be solved by just one country. So we have to "listen and not just talk," recognizing "that other countries have good ideas, too, and we want to hear them."
Second, the United States "at our best" represents "a set of universal values and ideals"—democracy, freedom of speech, the idea of a civil society. But since other countries have different cultures, perspectives, and histories, "we do our best to promote our ideals and our values" not by imposing them or by lecturing but rather "by our example." Therefore, Obama went on,
if we are practicing what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand; that allows us to speak with greater moral force and clarity around these issues.
Many of Obama's critics seriously underestimate this issue; they don't detect the great relief of our allies, or the discomfort of our enemies, when—after eight years of insufferable self-righteousness—an American president acknowledges mortal flaws and misjudgments; as long as it's not accompanied by self-flagellation, this is the exact opposite of "weakness."
Then Obama came to the point. Merely talking and listening won't transform international politics, he acknowledged. "Countries are going to have interests," he said; sometimes their interests will diverge from ours, and a more diplomatic approach to foreign policy won't make those differences disappear, won't make other countries alter their interests. However, he continued:
What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we're pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem.
And so, we're still going to have very tough negotiations on a whole host of issues. … That's not going to change because I'm popular … or leaders think that I've been respectful towards them. On the other hand, by having established those better relations, it means that … there's more confidence that working with the United States is beneficial, and they are going to try to do more than they might otherwise have done.
One result of the summit, he continued, is that it's now easier for friends, like Mexico or Colombia, to work with the United States "because their neighbors and their populations see us as a force for good or at least not a force for ill."
As for less-friendly countries like Venezuela, though Obama did not say so, an unthreatening picture of America at the very least takes the wind out of Chávez, who has built power, at home and in some quarters abroad, by waving his fist at America and likening George Bush to "el diablo." And, who knows, it might maneuver Chávez more into our lane, too. "Even within this imaginative crowd," Obama said to the press corps, "I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of … having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela."
And so, Obama's talk of building alliances and listening to others is not a celebration of multilateralism for its own sake. It's a hard-headed formula for advancing U.S. interests in a world where we have less leverage than we did during Cold War times to impose our will on a whim. There isn't quite yet an "Obama doctrine," as he would no doubt acknowledge. More time and a couple of crises will be needed to see how he translates his ideas into action. But for the moment, his words—and, yes, his handshakes—reflect a realism, in the best sense of the word, as opposed to the crackpot-realist daydreams of an obsessive ex-vice president and the historical cluelessness of certain newscasters.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. His book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2216610/
NOTE: As is always the case, I recommend the original at Slate as it is annotated.
Handshake Diplomacy
What Obama's grip and grin with Hugo Chávez says about his foreign policy.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 5:19 PM ET
It's been so long since we've had a president disposed to diplomacy that many observers don't know what to think when they see one.
Take President Barack Obama's recent trip to the Summit of the Americas. At his April 19 press conference at Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, he delivered—spontaneously, in response to a question—an eloquent summary of what an "Obama doctrine" might be, a succinct appraisal of the nature of power and foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.
And yet the media for the most part ignored this display of strategic acumen and focused on a moment, two days earlier, at the summit's opening ceremony, when Obama, approached by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, smiled and shook his hand.
One Republican senator gasped that it was "irresponsible" for the president to be "laughing and joking" with "one of the most anti-American leaders in the entire world." Former Vice President Dick Cheney grumbled on Fox News that the handshake "was not helpful" and could lead America's foes to "think they're dealing with a weak president." NBC's Andrea Mitchell likened the cordial greeting to John F. Kennedy's Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961, when the Soviet premier sized up the young president as a lightweight and, as a result, sent missiles to Cuba, sparking the gravest crisis of the nuclear era.
To which one can only respond: Are these people serious?
It might be a good thing for politicians and reporters to read a little history before indulging in historical analogies.
At the Vienna summit, Khrushchev warned Kennedy that if the West didn't give up its access rights to West Berlin by the end of the year, he would declare war and grab the city by force. At the time, the Soviet Union had 3 million troops occupying Eastern Europe, backed by an arsenal of nuclear weapons (though not as many as the United States thought), the two superpowers were locked in global ideological conflict, and the free enclave of West Berlin was landlocked 100 miles inside East German territory. Kennedy came away thinking he might face the prospect of war in a matter of months.
At the Americas summit, Chávez came up to Obama at a reception while cameras were whirring and handed him a book. Venezuela is a tiny country with one large oil company, a military budget barely 1 percent that of the United States, and no ability to project power beyond its borders.
When asked about this tête-à-tête at his press conference, Obama—properly—laughed off the criticism. He acknowledged Chávez's "inflammatory" anti-American rhetoric and their "great differences" on economic and foreign policy. However, he added:
It's unlikely that, as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chávez, that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, I would add, must be a little bit crazy.
The shockwaves over the handshake might best be explained as a hangover from the long years of George W. Bush's presidency, when dealings with those who disliked us were expressly forbidden, out of a vague fear that such contact might debilitate us or legitimize them. This fear is what was "not helpful." It tended to elevate the standing of a pipsqueak like Chávez; it made him seem more ominous than he was, and it made America seem like a he-man who's frightened by a mouse. By contrast, Obama's insouciant civility, far from appearing weak, strikes a chord of sense and self-confidence.
But our current president's approach isn't merely about polishing America's image; it also stands to serve America's tangible interests. And this is where his remarks on an "Obama doctrine" come into play.
NBC's Chuck Todd posed the question at the summit's-end press conference: "After observing you on the world stage the last three weeks, what are the pillars of 'the Obama doctrine'?"
Obama poked fun at the loftiness of the phrase, but then said, "There are a couple of principles that I've tried to apply across the board."
First, he said, the United States is the most powerful nation on earth, but today's problems can't be solved by just one country. So we have to "listen and not just talk," recognizing "that other countries have good ideas, too, and we want to hear them."
Second, the United States "at our best" represents "a set of universal values and ideals"—democracy, freedom of speech, the idea of a civil society. But since other countries have different cultures, perspectives, and histories, "we do our best to promote our ideals and our values" not by imposing them or by lecturing but rather "by our example." Therefore, Obama went on,
if we are practicing what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand; that allows us to speak with greater moral force and clarity around these issues.
Many of Obama's critics seriously underestimate this issue; they don't detect the great relief of our allies, or the discomfort of our enemies, when—after eight years of insufferable self-righteousness—an American president acknowledges mortal flaws and misjudgments; as long as it's not accompanied by self-flagellation, this is the exact opposite of "weakness."
Then Obama came to the point. Merely talking and listening won't transform international politics, he acknowledged. "Countries are going to have interests," he said; sometimes their interests will diverge from ours, and a more diplomatic approach to foreign policy won't make those differences disappear, won't make other countries alter their interests. However, he continued:
What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we're pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem.
And so, we're still going to have very tough negotiations on a whole host of issues. … That's not going to change because I'm popular … or leaders think that I've been respectful towards them. On the other hand, by having established those better relations, it means that … there's more confidence that working with the United States is beneficial, and they are going to try to do more than they might otherwise have done.
One result of the summit, he continued, is that it's now easier for friends, like Mexico or Colombia, to work with the United States "because their neighbors and their populations see us as a force for good or at least not a force for ill."
As for less-friendly countries like Venezuela, though Obama did not say so, an unthreatening picture of America at the very least takes the wind out of Chávez, who has built power, at home and in some quarters abroad, by waving his fist at America and likening George Bush to "el diablo." And, who knows, it might maneuver Chávez more into our lane, too. "Even within this imaginative crowd," Obama said to the press corps, "I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of … having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela."
And so, Obama's talk of building alliances and listening to others is not a celebration of multilateralism for its own sake. It's a hard-headed formula for advancing U.S. interests in a world where we have less leverage than we did during Cold War times to impose our will on a whim. There isn't quite yet an "Obama doctrine," as he would no doubt acknowledge. More time and a couple of crises will be needed to see how he translates his ideas into action. But for the moment, his words—and, yes, his handshakes—reflect a realism, in the best sense of the word, as opposed to the crackpot-realist daydreams of an obsessive ex-vice president and the historical cluelessness of certain newscasters.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. His book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, is now out in paperback. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2216610/
"Some things in life need to be mysterious..."
As only Jon Stewart can...
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| We Don't Torture | ||||
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Thursday, April 09, 2009
Thursday morning Video For Today
In my quest for subject matter, I often get distracted by various syndicated sources that bring me into contact with music - and I love music.
Today, the nod goes to Juke, who posted a different video from Playing For Change. These guys have a great job!
Today, the nod goes to Juke, who posted a different video from Playing For Change. These guys have a great job!
Friday, April 03, 2009
Looking for a new muse...
So it has been a while since my last post. Part of the reason is that Facebook has become my defacto social networking medium (updated largely via Twitter @stoneddragon). But the bigger reason is that after a long, and I do mean long, political season (pretty much since I started blogging) I'm a bit tired of looking at the world through the political lens.
Soooooooooo, what to write about now....
The funniest thing that happened to me on my last trip to Athens occurred in a cab ride from the hotel on morning. The cab driver, a boisterous, smiling brute of an Athenian with an over-the-top love for dance club music, made me a bet. If I could name the statue of the American president we pass on our route, he'd only charge us half for the cab ride. He was momentarily flabbergasted when I glanced at the statue as we were driving by and said, "Harry Truman".
"A hundred times I ask Americans who and you the first to get it right!" he said, slapping my knee and yelling out the window, "Harry Truman". According to our cabbie, Truman is immortalized in stone because "he sent a big ship full of money to Greece after the war so we could rebuild." I tried to tell him about George Marshall and the ERP, but our cabbie wasn't as good a listener than he was a talker. Of course, I learned later that the big ship of money was not the source of the Truman statue but rather an anti-communism memorial paid for by a Greek-American. Huh, go figure.
Soooooooooo, what to write about now....
The funniest thing that happened to me on my last trip to Athens occurred in a cab ride from the hotel on morning. The cab driver, a boisterous, smiling brute of an Athenian with an over-the-top love for dance club music, made me a bet. If I could name the statue of the American president we pass on our route, he'd only charge us half for the cab ride. He was momentarily flabbergasted when I glanced at the statue as we were driving by and said, "Harry Truman".
"A hundred times I ask Americans who and you the first to get it right!" he said, slapping my knee and yelling out the window, "Harry Truman". According to our cabbie, Truman is immortalized in stone because "he sent a big ship full of money to Greece after the war so we could rebuild." I tried to tell him about George Marshall and the ERP, but our cabbie wasn't as good a listener than he was a talker. Of course, I learned later that the big ship of money was not the source of the Truman statue but rather an anti-communism memorial paid for by a Greek-American. Huh, go figure.
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