Global Paradigms

Woodward’s Post-Electoral Prophecy by Leon Hadar October 26, 2006 When people are gossiping in the real world out there, they usually tend to exchange some juicy buzz about the rich and the famous, like the latest love affair of this Hollywood star or that famous athlete. Mix a little bit of sex with money, drugs and a few revealing pics and the new issue of People magazine is on its way to the newsstand. But in the capital of the world’s only remaining superpower, tongue wagging can be quite a bit more consequential, and the gossip contained in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, delivers an implicit prophecy of post-electoral Washington. In the run-up to the elections, there is much speculation about the future power balance on the Hill. Amid this speculation is a clear augury of relative importance, if one interprets the message of Woodward’s sources. In Washington we get titillated by a different kind of gossip. After all, can you imagine The Globe or Hello! Magazine revealin...

Please read my recent piece: The conventional wisdom in Washington is that the North Korean nuclear test is just the latest demonstration of the Bush Doctrine being challenged by an aggressive international player intent on defying the dictates of the current global hegemon. Hence, if after the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Kennedy could say that the U.S. and the Soviet Union stood eyeball to eyeball and the other fellow blinked, this time it was George W. Bush and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il who stood eyeball to eyeball and… Mr. Bush blinked.( more ) Also re The Iraq Study Group headed by Jim Baker. You get the feeling that these guys coming up with cure for cancer. According to leaks, some of their recommendations include dividing Iraq into three mini-states and getting a "strongman" to lead Iraq. Well, they could have saved a lot of money if they have read my commentary from October 31, 2003 : To lower public expectations about Iraq would require the White House to acc...

“I will not withdraw, even if Laura and George W. are the only ones supporting me,” Bob Woodward quotes Barney as saying. Woodward's new book, Barney at War:Searching for Fire Hydrant , is the third of the Barney-at-War Trilogy. The first book was Barney at War: Winning, Doggy-Style followed by Barney at War: Wolfie is a Bitch.

No, it's your humble servant or some other "original thinker" who is making that prediction. It's Establihsment Man Richard Haas in the FT on Tuesday. COMMENT & ANALYSIS CommentCloseA troubling Middle East era dawns By Richard Haass Published: October 16 2006 18:31 | Last updated: October 16 2006 18:31 It is just more than two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of a modern Middle East; but now – some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism and less than 20 years after the end of the cold war – the American era in the region has ended. Visions of a new Europe-like Middle East that is peaceful, prosperous and democratic will not be realised. Much more likely is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great harm to itself and the world. The American era was one in which, after the Soviet Union’s demise, the US enjoyed unprece-dented influence and freedom to act. What brought it to ...

My George Winston Bush? is now available online.

The Nation and The National Interest hosted on Thursday a foreign policy discussion in Washington titled, "Beyond Neo-Cons and Neo-Libs: Can Realism Bridge Left and Right." It sounded very interesting. But I couldn't attend. So...read Dr. Strauss' very, very interesting report on the event First Date: Progressives And Realists Hold Hands. I personally like the idea of the meeting but I don't think that much will come out of it in terms of future cooperation between "realist" progressives and conservatives.

Now... that's Mission Accomplished And this is Toilet Paper... And this is my comments: Business Times - 11 Oct 2006 Cool heads needed to defuse crisis There is not much the US can do, short of invading N Korea and sparking a war, to prevent Pyongyang from going nuclear By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT NORTH Korea has now forced itself into the global nuclear-weapons club by conducting a nuclear test over the weekend. And even US President George W Bush, who fancies himself as the chairman of this exclusive club and its unofficial bouncer, finds himself in the same position that his predecessor president Bill Clinton had been when India and Pakistan conducted underground nuclear tests in 1998 and asserted their status as nuclear powers. Mr Bush can try to mobilise America's allies and the international community against the new kid in the nuclear bloc, but there is not much that Washington can do - short of invading North Korea and sparking a bloody regional war - to prev...

The Right Web, an interesting webzine that monitors the the complex neoconservative "Comintern" and its many sub-groups and to which I contribute has just published my A New Kind of Neocon? which focuses on the rise of a "neoconservatism with a smiling Democratic face."

I totally agree with Justin Raimondo that the Baker Commission is unlikely to salvage the disaster in Iraq. Baker and the guys who run this operation are the proponents of what I call the "Empire lite" project and are responsible for this mess (I believe that one day historians will be discussing the Gulf War s which started when the Bush-Baker and not Bush-Cheney attacked Iraq. But...if you read Dr. Strauss and David Sanger it's becoming clear that the grown-ups or The Man is returning to set some order in the place. If you're into conspiracy theories, it means that the cabal of CFR/Davos,etc. is going to replace the neocon cabal. Basically it seems that in the struggle for power in the bureaucracy, institutions, interest groups, etc. the neocons are losing. Now... what all of this will mean in practicaly terms, I'm not sure. Probably most of the efforts of Baker and his colleagues is to find a way that would allow Bush to "safe face" as the U.S. t...

I've received several emails about the alleged efforts to silence Tony Judt whose latest book on post-WWII Europe(see above) I'm reading now. According to the emails and several posts on the blogs, Tony Judt has circulated the following note about an incident that as one of my correspondents was "almost too bizarre to be true." I [Tony Judt] was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGO, academics, etc, from the US and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan I just received a call from the President of Network 20/20. The talk was cancelled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League. Serial phone-calls from ADL President Abe Foxman warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt. If they persisted, he warned, he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Isra...

The new issue of CATO Policy Report (September/October 2006) includes an summary of the Book Forum held on July 27 to mark the publication of my book, Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Read in pdf or in html.

One of the very small number of scoops in Bob Woodward's new book has to do with Dr. K's influence Bush's Iraq policy. I was particularly intrigued by his use of metaphors: In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory. "The president can't be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece," Kissinger said. "You may want to reduce troops," but troop reduction should not be the objective. "This is not where you put the emphasis." To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969. "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded, "he wrote. The Salted Peanuts Model of...

The new issue of The American Conservative (October 23, 2006) includes my article, "George Winston Bush? Invocations of Munich and a parade of new Hitlers won't be enough to convince Americans that this is a good war." Click on the images below (and print them) to read the article which is not yet available online:

The president of Kazakhstan came to town yesterday, and a massive press scrum fought for toeholds outside the country's embassy, where a grand new statue symbolizing Kazakh independence -- a warrior holding a falcon standing on the back of a fierce winged cat -- had just been unveiled. But, no, of course that's not why we were there. That's not why any of the 50 or so journalists were there. We were there for Borat . Or rather, Sacha Baron Cohen , the British comic who performs in the gonzo, deadpan, taking-the-joke-almost-too-far tradition of Andy Kaufman and Peter Sellers . He plays many made-up characters on his HBO series "Da Ali G Show," but few that have struck a nerve like that of Borat Sagdiyev -- an anti-Semitic, oversexed Kazakh journalist who spins tales about the national sport of killing dogs and the practice of keeping women in cages -- much to the continuing dismay of the Kazakh government. In a brilliant stunt to promote his movie "Borat...

Sorry. That's probably not going to happen even if the Democrats control Capitol Hill after November. So we'll have to wait two more years for the nightmare to end (and things COULD get worse). But it's not too early to start thinking about the Post-Bush Era and especially as it will affect foreign policy. My favorite foreign policy magazine The National Interest held an interesting debate on the subject today between anti-neocon Republican Stefan Halper and pro-neocon Democrat Will Marshall. It's quite depressing if you consider that Halper is not going to have any influence on Republican President John McCain's foreign policy while Will Marshall and his Democratic Leadership Council and cadre of "liberal hawks" are going to play a major role in the administration of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Apropos National Interest magazine. At a time when the foreign policy "consensus" (from neoconism to neocon-lite)dominates the media, think tanks, et...

Well, I've read the earlier press leaks and the declassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate. Here is some of the points I've made in a recent column: IN recent speeches, including several addresses marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, US President George W Bush has argued that Iraq has become the central front in the war on terrorism. 'The security of the civilised world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq,' Mr Bush said in one speech on Aug 31. Indeed, with opinion polls showing Mr Bush's Republican Party possibly losing control of both houses of Congress in the coming mid-term elections, in large part due to public unhappiness over the war in Iraq, the president and his political allies have argued that demands for a US troop withdrawal from the country by the Democrats underscored why the centre-left party should not be trusted with the nation's secu...

In my Two Peoples, Two States: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only one solution which was published a while ago I challenged the idea of establishing a bi-national state aka "one state solution" in the geographical area that includes Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. I haven't changed my mind about the issue and I find it weird that in the aftermath of the violent disintgeration of Yugoslavia and the peaceful divorce of Czechoslovakia as well as continuing talk about ethnic/linguistic divisions in Canada, Belgium and even Great Britain that any serious thinker assumes that Israeli-Jews and Palestinian-Arabs are going to live together happily ever after in a unitary state in the Middle East where similar arrangements (Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria)ended in civil wars. But according to reports from Israel there is now less public support for continuing withdrawal from the West Bank and renewed buildup of Jewish settlements there. This suggests that taking into conside...

In case you've missed on recent column on Iran, US-Iran Shootout is Inevitable : Would US President George W Bush and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad run into each other by chance during their opening session of the United Nations General Assembly this week? That seemed to be the major concern occupying US officials. It seems White House aides were doing their best to avoid a run-in between Mr. Bush and Mr. Ahmadinejad in the hallways of the UN building in Manhattan; for example, the Iranian leader "ambushing" Mr. Bush as he tries to enter the lavatory, igniting a Clash of Civilizations in front of the Men's Room. (read the rest) And with all the recent buzz about the Paks, please check-out some of my the stuff I've written on the topic which seems to be relevant now more than ever: Pakistan in America’s War against Terrorism: Strategic Ally or Unreliable Client, Outsourcing the Hunt for Bin Laden, The Real War on Terrorism Is in Pakistan, Not Iraq, and...

Well... This is kind of reassuring: Make no mistake: boring as it was, the president's speech to the UN today was one of the most important of his presidency. It marks the final fizzling out of his Iran policy of the past three years. Since 2003, the Bush administration has pursued a diplomatic track against the emerging Iranian nuclear program. The tough talk of the "axis of evil" speech of 2002 faded into the background. Instead, the US would await the investigations of the International Atomic Energy Authority. While waiting, it deputed its allies Britain, France, and Germany to negotiate directly with Iran to discover whether any package of incentives might persuade the mullahs to reconsider their determination to acquire nuclear weapons. Both those policies have reached their dead end. Iran has repeatedly deceived and rebuffed the IAEA. The direct negotiations have likewise failed, victims of Iranian intransigence and duplicity. Now the whole matter has been referred...

The following are the comments that I made during a debate on Responding to Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: Has the United States Been Effective Since 9/11?, sponsored by The Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation , which took place in New York City on September 12, 2006. Thanks to Antiwar.com for the great (!) above title above. I remember landing in New York City for the first time about thirty years ago, and then driving into Manhattan and gazing at the majestic beauty of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers. For me they were symbols of New York and what it represented: The energy and excitement of its people, commerce and culture. In 1977, when I got to New York, there was a lot of excitement in the city. On Broadway, the hit, A Chorus Line was playing. There was Studio 54 and the launching of a new television show, Saturday Night Live. John Travolta was doing the disco on Saturday Night Fever and everyone was wearing polyester suits. And ther...